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Turns out the bump settings for the MATs were high because the maps are very low intensity. Here's a newer shot with 100% displacements at -2/2 min/max levels. I've also made some changes to some surface which i forgot to convert correctly. Most of the concrete hare a very rough diffuse. I also turned on Trace Displacements for the surfaces that have displacements enabled.
Is it photo realistic? Probably not, but I can live with just being close to plausible and having extra fast render times.
Now that is much more like it. The thing is, it doesn't need to be photo realistic. You put a character in there and some kind of action and that will be the focus. I mean, nobody is really going to do that many renders of an empty street with nothing happening, it's a little boring. It's the setting for the story, but it's not the story.
CHEERS!
Looks at least as real as most TV show sets from the 60s through the 80s...
And it's 'wrong' for other reasons...like if it were really that clean/quiet it would probably be early morning...and the lighting screams 'midday'. The 'blur' on the backdrop is much more than the DoF, so it too looks a little out of place.
But for a test render...yeah,
It's definitely a starting point.
This is awesome =) You have found the helper scripts for copying maps between channels, right?
You know, I think I'll leave them as they are. In case there are users out there who will want the full range but who have issues fiddling with the limits in the parameters tab. I will make sure to mention it in the docs that generally, one would want subtle changes there.
But don't forget that the advantage of my open-source distribution is that you can edit the shader builder .dzs source and set every default to your own personal liking =)
Turns out the bump settings for the MATs were high because the maps are very low intensity. Here's a newer shot with 100% displacements at -2/2 min/max levels. I've also made some changes to some surface which i forgot to convert correctly. Most of the concrete hare a very rough diffuse. I also turned on Trace Displacements for the surfaces that have displacements enabled.
Is it photo realistic? Probably not, but I can live with just being close to plausible and having extra fast render times.
That looks good, definitely a lot closer. The foreground and everything closer to the camera looks especially good, like the texture of the street and the red brick wall.
I didn't use yours. I just loaded the textures manually.
But don't forget that the advantage of my open-source distribution is that you can edit the shader builder .dzs source and set every default to your own personal liking =)
I know. The offsets sliders for hue, saturation and lightness for SSS is best left at your limits. But the diffuse ones tend to 'jump' by a lot with those limits. Just add a note saying to use smaller increments when fiddling with those.
Also, for fIne tuning the specular, it's best to view or lit a model from grazing angles first. That way, even with strength maps, uses can determine the max specular reflectivity they want. With my lights, I ended up using very low strength of 12% combined with a double IOR value for the shine spec compared to the skin spec IOR.
So, in most cases, specular strength can be limited to 1 or 100%, even accounting for really dim specular maps.
The only thing I didn't like was the separate scatter/absorb dials.Probably because I'm so used to omnifreaker's shaders.
That sounds more like the 'nudge' amount should be changed. Making it a lower value (I usually like 0.1) slows the slider action down, too.
That's what I though so too at first. Having a smaller nudge does help, but you can still end up moving the slider way too much with the default limits. Although from a technical stand point it is good to have a full range of options, offsets are generally done for fine tuning so smaller scales are advisable. If you want more range, that should be done through the color channels or strength dials anyway.
It can be left to the users, but it's probably a good idea to put that into the documentation.
Edit:
Oh yes, some typos like the SSS DIffuse Color and Diffuse Colour should be corrected.
Darius texture with Radium shaders. Second one is with bump pushed really high.
The other, the one with the physically based metals, RadiumFabric? There is no SSS in it, so I don't really see the point in that? But I will do it, if you're interested.
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No, I meant the shader that Wowie tested with that Amy render. That's the main one I'm interested in. I want to see what the author can do with it as it will mainly be your settings I'll be following.
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Oops. As I always type my values manually, I didn't give the sliders much thought outside of setting limits.
The default nudge for floats is 0.01; I don't know if there is a way to control it from the .dzs (I have an idea I will test, though).
Thanks for catching that! I guess I just didn't notice some are still using the US spelling. They must be remnants of the default parameter names Shader Builder provides.
The author isn't necessarily the best artist actually.
Whatever, I just want to see something so I can see what I'll be doing soon. Make sure you say what lighting you use as that'll be important too.
CHEERS!
I've found setting a roughness of around 20 to 40% on both specular (narrow and wide) works best with your shader. That's with equal specular strength settings and then I just fiddle with the respective IOR until there's enough highlights when viewed head on, but not too much at grazing angles. I do wish there was an adjustable fresnel strength or offset so I didn't have to use crazy IOR numbers to get the fresnel strength I wanted.
Well, at least for skin anyway. I haven't tried it for anything else.
I really like how the specular strength is ramped though. With my lights, the strength setting is almost dead on - I think without maps the strength was something like 0.02 or 2%, which is very, very close to actual physical values. Even with very dim specular maps, you only need to raise that to something like 12% and still get correct response. That's one thing that's difficult to have with US2 specular.
Of course, having specular maps that works well out of the box would help a lot in those situations.
What else? One I can think of that would somewhat ease the transition from DS default material or other widespread DS shaders is to simply assign a single diffuse/specular map slot that is linked to both diffuse/SSS diffuse texture slots and 1st/2nd specular map slots. Then you wouldn't need to worry about correctly loading textures into the right slots, manually or with automated scripts.
If you want to retain the way things are, just do two versions of the shader.
It would be extra cool to have a mappable diffuse roughness too, I think? But maybe that's for something further down the road.
Oh yeah. Some performance stats. It's slightly slower than US2, even with the precompute pass. I think on the same shot, it was about 1 min slower, probably do to doing raytraced SSS but I think that's not a big deal. You get complete freedom from SSS group IDs, shading rate and of course, you can adjust SSS settings on the fly with IPR.
This is with roughness values pushed a little bit - 15 and 50%. No specular maps.
I didn't want to fiddle with the offsets on both SSS and diffuse, so I played around with the scatter/absorption values instead to push saturation. SSS is at 30%.and diffuse is at 85% (added, not mixed). Both colors are set to a neutral 160,160,160 so most of the colors are from the SSS scatter/absorption.
This shader preset generally works across a variety of textures very nicely, even accounting for different skin shades.
Another thing - edge strength is 0. It causes problems when enabled for the nostrils, so it's probably shouldn't be enabled for such surfaces.
That does look good, it seems this shader is going to be a groundbreaker, and for free too! What's not to like!?
CHEERS!
No, not really a ground breaker...just bringing Studio into the 'modern' era when it comes to 3DL shaders. The groundbreaker is the OTHER shader...the metal one. Now there is some fun stuff...it has features that most of the shaders for 3DL for Maya don't have, yet. There's only a few production shaders that have those features...right now.
Hmm, this looks interesting. It's probably quite similar to what I suggested in the old thread.
http://www.binaryalchemy.de/develop/lightdome/index.htm
Well, to me, what Kettu is doing is way beyond anything else I've seen. Those renders by Wowie don't even look like DS renders, particularly those ones of Darius. This is the shot in the arm that 3DL needs now it's competing with Iray for the main DS render engine. I still don't know how well Iray will be supported in the store. There are promos creeping in, but, not much yet that is specifically for it other than some lights DZFire has coming out.
CHEERS!
Unfortunately, that's not true. Iray is the default render engine for DS 4.8 build (and probably newer). 3Delight is still built in, of course. So, I think it's safe to say, iray will get the lion share of DAZ focus and attention.
We'll see, there is still a heck of a back catalogue of 3DL content with more emerging each week. I'm sure there will still be vendors that will still do content solely for 3DL. It is likely that Gen7 figures will all come with presets for Iray and how far off they are remains to be seen.....
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I would be surprised and disappointed if DAZ3D abandoned 3delight. Iray is a solution for many kinds of renders, but 'photoreal' and physically based renders are not always what is wanted. Consider the 'rock shader' product and you can see that Iray is not always the right tool for the job.
I don't think they ever will, though, considering Iray is an 'unbiased' render engine, you'd be hard pushed to think the users of the beta were when you read the 4.8 threads. Although there are improvements made to 3Delight, there hasn't been much emphasis placed on what they are and just how well they work. Considering the user base and the amount of store products that still use it, this is something of a poor show.
We won't let 3Delight fade away and neither should anyone else, it remains a fundamental part of DS and should always do so in order to preserve the user base which still work with legacy content
CHEERS!
And not just for the sake of existing userbase, but for new users too: 3Delight is still a viable production renderer, so learning it and its brand of RSL is beneficial for everyone who's looking to get a job in the VFX industry one day. And when it comes to integration/RIB exporting, DAZ Studio is the only free option non-registered students have (unless someone updates the Blender plugin).
True,
I should be ready to render again by Wednesday at the latest. How are you coming with the shader as that would be as good a place for me to start as any.
CHEERS!
Yes it is slower for closeups. Beats US2 for long shots with GI, though, when US2 wants precise shading rates that take ages to prepass. RT SSS is sample-operated, so the farther away the figure & the smaller the area it takes in the render, the fewer samples you can use (and it will generally adapt well and be fast).
Certainly it shouldn't. It's a cheat, and of limited use. The docs will emphasise it.
You joining in the alpha? I'll PM you the link, then.
Okay, this is a tangentially related question... Tonemapping software?
I'm currently using Picturenaut, and what about you folks?
And not just for the sake of existing userbase, but for new users too: 3Delight is still a viable production renderer, so learning it and its brand of RSL is beneficial for everyone who's looking to get a job in the VFX industry one day. And when it comes to integration/RIB exporting, DAZ Studio is the only free option non-registered students have (unless someone updates the Blender plugin).
The funny thing...and in many ways it's understood in the wider 3d world, to some degree...proper materials set up isn't really tied to a specific renderer. Linear workflow should allow easy use of textures in just about any one. The problem is correcting for years of 'bad habits' and half baked workarounds that came about partially because of laziness and partially because of the lack of understanding the true power of what was already here.
Yes, there are some things that need to be setup/tweaked when going from one to the other...generally displacement is a huge area where 3Delight and Iray have problems 'speaking the same language'. (In the one Iray thread, someone admitted that 3DL does displacement better...) A lot of the rest boils down to shaders...the old 3DL shaders are very basic, by today's standards. And from what I can tell, the default shaders aren't even on the same page. The default surface models are different...and they don't have to be. The surface/reflectance models are built into Iray itself; 3DL does the same thing too. Both have access to most of the same models (maybe not the same implementations, but the basic math involved/calculations done are close enough not to matter). The key thing is to have the shaders set to actually USE them. The default Studio surface model is NOT one of the more modern/realistic/plausible ones...the Iray one IS.
Now, something odd I noticed...even when NOT using the raytrace hider, but using the more modern/plausible shaders, 3DL rendering is FASTER. It probably has a lot to do with the more modern code is much more optimized/refined.
Oh, yeah...and a little secret...sort of...but the difference between Iray and 3DL isn't really that one is biased and the other isn't. It's that one is capable of GPU rendering and the other isn't. I'm pretty sure that if you were able, somehow, to throw a 3DL render (with a core unlocked version) at a similar number of CPU cores to GPU cores in a mid to hi end Nvidia GPU, you would see similar (or even faster) render acceleration. The big difference there...cost. You can get a GPU with a couple of thousand cores for a few hundred dollars (or less). But that many CPU cores would be in the hundreds of thousands or more dollars.
When using the raytrace hider (at it's heart Iray IS a raytracer...) 3DL is a lot closer to Iray than one would think than by looking around the forums here...especially when using modern shaders. No, not all raytracers are unbiased, but all (that I can think of) unbiased ones are raytracers.
The other major area that will have differences and be difficult to learn the nuances of, is lighting...but it is the same thing when comparing ANY renderers. Each and everyone has its own way of doing lighting (even those in the same family) and lighting is NOT directly, except at the most basic levels, translatable between ANY of them. A simple geometric area light needs a different shader code for 3DL, Luxrender (and the really stupid thing..Reality and Luxus can't use each other's lights...even though they use the same renderer), Octane, Iray, etc...the geometry can stay the same for all of them, just the actual light code needs to change. But when you get into lights without geometry, things get really complicated...(a good analogy...each renderer want's it's lights in a specific language...3DL/English, Lux/Latin(Reality/Italian), Octane/French, Iray/Russian...and can't translate any of the other languages directly). In terms of Studio, you could probably accomplish a 'universal' light...but at what cost (bloat would be a serious consideration)?
I haven't done much with the latest beta, but the wrapping the light code together and using the renderer specific code depending on which renderer is active seems to me that it 'bloats' things, or can with lots of lights in the scene. Of course IBL does remove the need for a lot of that...but good IBL is dependent on good images (yes, you can have great, realistic shadow out 3DL IBL with the right images...and properly set coordinate systems). That then moves other lights from being the main scene lighting to accent/fill roles...and then makes the actual set up of them the same (placement in the scene, not 'under the hood'/shader code) for any renderer.
And not just for the sake of existing userbase, but for new users too: 3Delight is still a viable production renderer, so learning it and its brand of RSL is beneficial for everyone who's looking to get a job in the VFX industry one day. And when it comes to integration/RIB exporting, DAZ Studio is the only free option non-registered students have (unless someone updates the Blender plugin).
Not only that but there are Post-Houses that require job candidates to be familiar with Daz and 3Delight along with the usual programs like Maya and Max.
I like Iray a lot actually, but I like 3Delight just as much, and it's kind of strange to see some people acting like 3Delight is some throw away program for hobbyists.
Before I started coming to the Daz Forums regularly, I had no idea that there was some "hobbyist" stigma attached to it. I knew Blender kind of had that, but not Daz.
A few years ago I was doing some titles for a tv commercial for a local jewelry store that had a limited budget. I only worked with After Effects at the time and relied on outside help for 3D assets. The clock was ticking and there were no available vendors to create the assets needed for this spot. A friend of mine is a VFX artist at one of the larger post-houses and he pointed me to Daz so that I could throw together what I needed in time.
My point being, a VFX artist at a major studio post-house introduced me to Daz as a legitimate tool.
Then about a year ago I was checking the job bulletins for freelance MoGraph/Design work and I saw a posting for a job opening at Fantasy II.
The notice stated which software they required candidates to be familiar with and that included Max, Maya, Nuke, Photoshop, Mari, Daz Studio and 3Delight. They mentioned other render engines as well but I can't recall which ones.
Let me hang a bell on that for clarity, Fantasy II, a VFX House behind films like Terminator and T2, have Daz Studio in their software pipeline.
What I'm getting it is I don't think Daz will abandon 3Delight. If they did it would be baffling.
Daz's largest customer base may or may not be hobbyists, but regardless it is used in professional workplaces, and when there's a budget involved, the clocks ticking, and your boss is breathing over your shoulder, you're going to reach for the software that gets the job done efficiently.
When efficiency is taken into account, different situations will call for different programs(solutions), Iray isnt going to change that, at least it shouldn't.
It seems like 3Delight may end up having the reputation of being a hobbyist render engine by some (not all) within the hobbyist community(ironically) but I can't ever see that happening anywhere else.
It's literally an industry standard software that's heavily integrated into the professional work space.
What most folks that hang around here don't realize is that the 3Delight they take for granted/complain about is really a 426 Hemi...not some 4-banger rice burner.