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Mjc, well said!
I wonder if Aghiles and Co are thinking about GPU acceleration. And yeah, their new behind-the-scenes code for all those shading models is awesomely optimised.
Dinopt, thanks for sharing the story! It explains why DAZ pays for ads in mags like 3D World, if "big name guys" are also using DS.
I wouldn't put it past them...I'd love to sit in on some of their dev meetings...they seem to be the sort of group that would discuss that kind of stuff down at the local pub...should be fun.
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.
I think that opinion is just among hobbyists
I think that opinion is just among hobbyists
Yes...specifically these forums and the majority here. They definitely fall under the 'hobbyist' tag.
You joining in the alpha? I'll PM you the link, then.
Happy to! Thanks!
CHEERS!
I'm not using anything, should I be!?
CHEERS!
I too read Dinopt's post with interest. It's interesting you mention 3DWorld, right up till Genesis came out, they would have articles on and give away Daz content. Now though, they don't at all, they only cater for Maya, 3DS MAX and all the programs one would consider high end. DS Creative is the only mag that features Daz now. This is a shame as 3DWorld gave me my 'in' into the whold Daz world. Where folk get that from now is anyone's guess. Do you have to know someone in the VFX industry to be in the know now!?
Where do you see Daz stuff advertised!?
CHEERS!
I haven't read any "real" mag in years, but I clearly remember page-size ads for DS4 from a few years ago. I need to check my Zinio library to figure out the exact dates.
As for tonemapping software, well if you aren't rendering to a high dynamic range format, then you don't need it, of course =) But I have become fond of it since I got my copy of Vue 9 Esprit years ago... and then LuxRender (although it has a built-on tonemapper), and now I prefer to render "serious" images to EXR in 3Delight, too, and then tonemap artistically. There is a script for EXR export in my kit ;)
I like Picturenaut, but I'd like to have something like the "film" preset curves in Lux's tonemapper.
Okay, here's a render. My presets for Teen Jayden (they aren't in the alpha because I got lazy... they will be there in the end) and an HDR IBL via DelightGI plus a spec-only distant light. IIRC, I used this HDRI: http://www.openfootage.net/?p=619
When using my scripts, envlight and the helper scene with a sphere, it's easy to make a spec-only light to match IBL shadows.
Most of materials are my shaders: RadiumSolidVariS (skin, sclera, vest & pants fabrics, stone), RadiumFabric (metals - the "artistically physical" mode, hair, Celtic bracelet cloth), RadiumCornea for corneas. DS Default for irises =)
Render time on my laptop was approx.36 mins at 8x8 pixel samples.
Render time wasn't going to be low - the hair is transmapped and it's included into GI, so it's the last thing to come out of the renderer - but.
I suspect it could have been less: I went for a 256x256 bucket size to see if it will crash (no, on a 64bit with 8 GB RAM), but it appears to me that a bucket size too large will cause swapping and this will slow the render down. I suspect it's swapping because of disk usage intermittently going up with CPU usage going down to one core only (while renderdl should simply engage all my four cores at 100% without pause).
So. This render shows that you can get nice shadows from an HDRI only.
Oh yeah, and Jayden's also using some HD morphs (M6 body details and vascularity).
Perhaps I should have said "Where do you see Daz advertised nowadays?",
I got Vue8 Esprit on a coverdisc, upgraded to Vue9 and then upgraded again to Vue10, each without ever actually using it. I still haven't actually. I might try it one day...
CHEERS!
I too read Dinopt's post with interest. It's interesting you mention 3DWorld, right up till Genesis came out, they would have articles on and give away Daz content. Now though, they don't at all, they only cater for Maya, 3DS MAX and all the programs one would consider high end. DS Creative is the only mag that features Daz now. This is a shame as 3DWorld gave me my 'in' into the whold Daz world. Where folk get that from now is anyone's guess. Do you have to know someone in the VFX industry to be in the know now!?
Where do you see Daz stuff advertised!?
CHEERS!
@Rogerbee
I haven't read a print magazine in years. I see banner ads for DAZ all over the internet, but that's an interesting question and I think I see what your driving at:
A company advertises to it's target market, so if we identify where a company is advertising, logically speaking, we also identify the target market the company is marketing too. In this case, the pro market, the hobbyist market, or both?
With that in mind I went to Animation World Network and did a search for Daz. Several articles did come up, most of them were old, the most recent article from 2011.
http://www.awn.com/search?search_api_views_fulltext=Daz+studio
Also, it looks as if most of the articles are Press Releases issued to AWN by Daz3D.
So it seems as if Daz has stopped issuing press releases to AWN.
That's not really enough information to draw any solid conclusions about anything, but I'm pretty sure Daz makes most of their money from the regular consumer market as opposed to the pro/prosumer market.
Remember that 3delight most advanced users are VFX studios and production houses. They process really, REALLY LARGE amounts of data that is simply not feasible to fit on a GPU, even with out of core rendering. Until the industry comes up with a useable, truly unified memory between GPUs and CPUs, that's just not going to happen. Pushing large amounts of data through the PCI Express back and forth is still horribly slow compared to hops between CPU sockets. But things might change next year. :)
The other problem is standards. CUDA is and always will be a closed, proprietary standard. Most GPU renderers are shifting away from it and to a more open platform like OpenCL. Octane have announced they're going OpenCL. Thea have already done an OpenCL implementation for Presto. Cycles have reap benefits from transitioning to a micro kernel approach. Even the team behind Corona is starting a fork with Fire Render, a new GPU based renderer that works with Corona lights and materials. OpenCL is maturing and devs are noticing that.
Hell, just look at TheaRender 1.4, it supports ARM. :)
That said, I would really, really love it if 3delight implemented a built in GPU path tracer, preferabley one that isn;t tied to a particular hardware like iray. :) But of course, if they did that, DAZ needs to work out how to use it.
Most of materials are my shaders: RadiumSolidVariS (skin, sclera, vest & pants fabrics, stone), RadiumFabric (metals - the "artistically physical" mode, hair, Celtic bracelet cloth), RadiumCornea for corneas. DS Default for irises =)
I think the skin came out way too translucent. Most of the subtle skin details are lost.
Here's a very, very nice example of details. That's a realtime render too. :) From Uncharted 4. View more here:
http://www.gamespot.com/articles/uncharted-4-dev-flaunts-new-milestone-in-face-anim/1100-6427293/
My personal favorite skin for realtime shading:
http://www.iryoku.com/next-generation-life
Here's some data. :)
http://theapresto.com/benchmark.html
Contrary to what people think, GPUs are not 100 times faster or even 20 times faster. More like 1.5 to 2 times faster. The big difference is that you can easily put several GPU per host machine than several CPUs and the licensing isn't limited to the number of GPUs.
Sort of...I've noticed that for DS scenes it CAN be 20x or more faster...but it's probably more do to better lighting/shader/material setup than anything else. And that part of the equation seems to be forgotten in all the hype. It's just like setting up UE2 properly will cut render times immensely.
And there is the simple fact that something like dual-core CPU and a midrange video card are not even competing in the same league.
So yes, in 'real' terms, the speed up while significant, is not really 'earth shattering'. But in apparent speed up terms, for the user base of this software, it is...but then again, most of those folks haven't unlocked the true power of the 426 Hemi they already own.
vascular detail on his hands looks great :)
I guess they must, perhaps they figured their target market was online. The mags I mentioned switched from coverdiscs to downloads so maybe Daz just decided that they'd keep the online stuff for themselves, who knows, but, you don't get any articles or reviews of it. There may have been one for Carrara and maybe Mimic but none for DS that I can remember having seen for a while.
Still, they are on FB now and that will draw people in
CHEERS!
You're right. You may have noticed there's a clear pattern of preference in my case =) The images you linked to are awesome, but I just don't want that level of 'gritty realistic' in my work. It's... personal.
I prefer 'geometric' (for lack of a better word) detailing, of the sort displacement and HD morphs give. Wrinkles and veins. But 'perfect', 'ethereal' skin overall.
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Thank you very much. I guess the HDR is a large part of the result.
Sometimes I want gritty, sometimes I want ... 'artistic'? Depends. ;)
"Gritty" and other degrees of "real world" looks can be achieved if you use not just SSS (the way I do), but also diffuse (exact recipes will vary - you can add, mix, multiply, with or without strength maps, etc; in my shaders, I have mix and add modes, with possible strength maps). Then you get your texture as-is, without "smudging" from the scattering, and that diffuse layer will also tune down the translucent "porcelain-like" effect.
Whenever I see renders of game characters, I always think that the bump maps and normal maps are set to too high a level, as is evident on that Nathan Drake render. I think that faces look more realistic if the details are more subtle. What do you think?
CHEERS!
Depends on the person depicted actually. And on your vision =) I'm myopic, it partly explains why I gravitate towards the "airbrushed" look (everyone's so much prettier when I'm not wearing glasses LOL). But I've seen faces for which high bump wouldn't be that far off the mark. People, males over thirty in particular, who do a lot of manual labor or outdoor sports and don't use moisturisers or stuff like that. Wind and sun will often create a Martian landscape out of a human face.
I guess game characters are "action men", so it fits.
In terms of making them look photo real, too harsh on those details will result in the uncanny valley. If you look at the elderly Benjamin Button, his facial details are present but subtle and they look very naturalistic. Hyper real always looks a bit artificial to me.
CHEERS!
Maybe, so but those shots are heavily composited, probably with hundreds of layers in NUKE.
http://www.fxguide.com/featured/the_curious_case_of_aging_visual_effects/
So, the shots you see are not 'pure' out of the box 3D renders. The one done by Naughty Dog and the Activision R&D team have much less post process done since they're targeting interactive (30 fps) frame rates..
As a matter of characters suited for the game engine (like Unity), Character Physically-Based Shaders
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/33606
looks pretty good to me. I especially like the possible face expressions, that their example model have.
Btw, I'm seeing build 4.8.0.55 available through DIM (still labeled beta). That build seems like the latest, further up the changelog.
The light changes looks pretty neat though - the available light/shadow options now adjusts to what renderer you're using. And most of the photometric options are only available when you enable them. Hopefully, the render emitter option behave the way it should now (at least with iray)
As for 3delight, I've noticed progressive rendering is now enabled by default. Gamma correction and gamma settings is still off and set to 1.0, of course. The post process script support is intriguing though.
Looks really good to me too, if a 3Delight shader had those capabilities, well.....
CHEERS!
All very interesting,
When I can quieten my noisy case fan and actually concentrate, I'll see what I can do with Kettu's shader.
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Progressive enabled by default, hmm, that means we're stuck with the box filter set at 1 when we render. It'd be nice if we could have progressive rendering but be able to choose the filter.
CHEERS!
Progressive enabled by default, hmm, that means we're stuck with the box filter set at 1 when we render. It'd be nice if we could have progressive rendering but be able to choose the filter.
CHEERS!
I was doing a bunch of renders last night...making small changes to a morph I'm working on, so I started dumping them to RIB. I had Progressive 'On'. That way I could keep working instead of waiting for the render to finish. I noticed that when rendering in the standalone, not only was it 5x faster (5-6 mins instead of 25-30 mins), it went through a lot more iterations. And that the next to last one was 'finer' than the same in the included 3DL.
Now on to the point...
I haven't updated my standalone to beyond .124 yet....but the more recent builds of 4.8 are beyond 11.0.124...and beyond the 4.7 included version. It's quite probable, that even at 'box' the improvements are well worth using Progressive as the default mode...even beyond the fact that it does enable the raytrace hider. I was running those renders with stats enabled and it was interesting to see how much time was spent doing the various parts.
I may update to the latest standalone and see if there's any differences...
****Edit****
I went ahead and updated. It's odd...the render time increase to about 6-7 minutes but the number of rays went way up from 5.4something e+07 to 6.45888e+07 and I made no changes to the RIB (rendered the same RIB before and after the update...), but the benefit...nicer occlusion and shadows at the same sample settings...the more rays was like bumping up the shadow/occlusion samples. So, an acceptable trade off, if what I'm seeing isn't a fluke or something. Because I can imagine that it would be possible to drop the sample settings and pick up the speed again...will test shortly.
Tested...yep. The speed picked up again. The more rays/slower render was 'better', but the lower sample (164) vs older higher sample (124) renders were virtually identical...overlaying them in GIMP and setting the mix/blend to difference resulted in very few areas that weren't black (showing any differences), and they were pretty small. And I imagine that looking for more exact ratios would probably eliminate those entirely...but it's not worth it. I guess you can say you get a quality boost at what ever your settings...with only a moderate increase in time.
Sounds good, at least you're talking about 4.8 in the context of 3Delight rather than Iray which nobody can shut up about in other threads. When I can hear myself think I'll do some renders of my own.
CHEERS!