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Interesting!
wow where did you get that one, I want a shader like that!.. I want all the nice stuff you are playing around, but I have a hard time to understand (currently on page 5 with green pea soup and a phyiscal sun programmed into 3dl..). Did you start somewhere more basic or did you already know all those background infos, and if so is there a good read to start with?
I have a lot of posts to ketch up on here. That 'bug' looks realy good with that shader by the way. And thanks for the direction for that Glass stuff (I must have missed out on that offer back then).
I have an odd one, looking at some rather simple stuff (Forget that it is a very complex bracelet for a second). It almost looks like the 'surface zone' mapping is very independent of the geometry? Until I started making a map for the border, I never noticed how the Polys and the zones tend to go there own ways when SubD is applied to something, only that things tend to wander a bit.
Implication. It appears after seeing this test (I was trying to adjust lines to keep them in place), that it may be possible to set up surface zones with edges that are not exclusively on polygon edges deliberately.
No SubD "Base" left, SubD "High Resolution" right. Same diffuse map on both.
Reworked dieletrics.
Still need to work on some leftovers and fine tune metals. The specular for everything is closer to GGX now, except for the hair, leaves and fabric. Mostly, because those things tend to use opacity maps and mixing reflections and ambient occlusion with opacity maps can be really slow. Roughness pretty much dictates the look now, with different type of materials having variations in strength/reflectivity.
Dang...wowie...WOW!
Like 'opacity edge detection' or lines drawn at material zone boundaries (toggable). Maybe I am not seeing it quite properly, but it seems that if you, say, have an outfit with 'short sleeves' due to transmapping, the sleeves aren't outlined.
Can't be done with the way things are usually done. The algorithms are looking for actual edges and an opacity map isn't going to provide that.
They are working with the geometry, not the image maps (and really whats a transparency map...an image to control the alpha channel.
What can be done and will work with current shaders, to get a line on an edge that is made by a transparency map...make a corresponding 'edge' on the displacement map. That will raise the geometry slightly and the shader should pick it up. Plus it also creates a little thickness, that transmapped 'alterations; usually lack. Most of the ones I've been playing with handle displacement quite nicely, adding all sorts of lines for wrinkles and other details.
Good point. I've definitely noticed displacements drive a lot of very nice detail. I love removing all the diffuse color and maps and getting a b&w sketch driven heavily by outlines and displacement.
Trying to drive an edge detector with an opacity map would, if it is even possible, make for a rather slow shader, too...
(I'm trying to think of a way to make it work...but not coming up with anything...)
Hehehe. Thanks. Yeah, I've gotten great feedback and inspiration. Since that render, I've added some blur to the reflective materials. Not a lot, just between 2.5 and 5% so it doesn't look like a mirror. I think the materials are very close to the Disney Principle BRDF shader. Well, as close as I can make them using UberSurface2.
very realistic looking stuff there wowie
. Constructive criticism only, the boulders look rather dark and 'wet' in some areas. Without them being in a flowing river, it is just enough to break the effect of it being a photo.
Yep, that is intentional. They're using a reflective preset for stone. Basically, there's rough, glossy and reflective presets made from a primary base preset.
IORs are what the renderer supports "automagically"... a custom Fresnel curve would need custom coding, and so would be more expensive to calculate. On the other hand, that function could be made into a DLL and that would mean much faster code execution. But I never tried 3Delight DLL extensions with DS, so I don't know if they work.
Awesome!! And I love the wettish look on the rocks. Not that easy to achieve in any program.
Yes I believe it can and will happen... you could try switching to wireframe in the viewport, try different Sub-D algos and see how they affect the meshing. Those types of Sub-D aren't just "adding more polys within the borders of existing polys". They are sort of "intelligent" algorithms that the model needs to be built for.
I don't really know of a feasible way to do it inside a shader either, but the 3Delight outliner tool can do it. You can test it with the "Outline" example that comes with DS (the "Scripted 3Delight" dropdown).
It will render three files into your render library, one of them ends in "Color_ID" and will give you a result something like the attached image (inverted and put on a background because it renders white lines over transparency).
It's just a fox photo from the internet stuck upon a primitive plane in the opacity channel.
It says "Color_ID" in the filename, but I believe it's the Oi outline result. You can get the 3DL documentation in PDF here: https://3delight.atlassian.net/wiki/display/3DSP/Resources
The PDF is sorely outdated in a lot of parts, but the inker has been there for quite a while. It's described on page 155, chapter 7.11.
The fox uses 8 pixel samples and the gaussian filter with the width of 3 (like in the 3DL outline example that comes with the standalone install) to decrease aliasing. I haven't yet figured out how to get rid of colour noise, but it should be doable.
Oh cool, I'll have to play with that.
I've been using Daz for only a little over a year, and I've learned a LOT -- I happily went from 3DL to Iray due to a number of frustrations, but the entire process of trying both has taught me a LOT.
Now I'm embracing 3DL again and diving into a lot of these neat tools and really enjoying them -- I still love the way intricate light and materials work in Iray, but also have the skills to make use of the amazing tools of 3DL.
I believe djigneo is working with this short of stuff:
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/996461/#Comment_996461
- Greg
I feel compelled to add that there are very few things Iray can do but 3Delight cannot. "Spherical Iray and 3DL in a vacuum", of course (as we say in Russia), because to do anything with a renderer via a given program, you need program-specific integration, including materials (Iray) and shaders (3DL). Imagine the only material you had for Iray in DS was that asphalt example =)
So your frustrations could not be 3Delight's intrinsic fault (unless what you really wanted was the Nvidia acceleration, though =))
Gotta be the same 3DL outliner at work, just set up in a smarter way than the example script. Especially if it does intelligent compositing, of course, but judging from that thread I'm not sure it does (or if it can be done outside of writing an AI system like yours - which isn't really feasible with DAZ Script, I believe =))... The thing with the three inking methods (opacity, depth, normals) is that there are details for which one or another works better.
The problem I ran into was realistic lighting, with bounce and so forth. You CAN do it in 3DL, I was using meshlights and so on.
Except it's about as slow, if not slower, than Iray, and the results were generally not as good.
Oh, another thing that would be useful is the ability to set lines to be scaled, so that, for example, the line width is the same regardless of where the figure is. Sometimes you want this... sometimes you don't.
It's exactly the DS integration thing. It does not give you the GI speedup option by default; it doesn't come with the shader that uses built-in fast bounce, etc. See, I'm anything but a good artist, and I've only really gotten the hang of meaningfully setting up "physically based" materials for optimal results both look- and quality-wise very very recently, but with the shaders and "scripted renderer" scripts I made I'm getting results like linked below, and that in noticeably less time that I would be getting in Iray on CPU.
For rendering, I'm using a 2014 laptop with a quadcore i7 which is not the fastest one (could look up the GHz count when I'm back home), and 8 GB RAM.
These were made a few months ago which means they have flaws in material setup, but I haven't had time for non-test rendering in a while.
http://mustakettu85.deviantart.com/art/Jayden-a-better-study-in-Radium-not-Iray-536382446 - 36 minutes, but most of that is hair (there is only HDRI with GI here plus specular, so I didn't exclude hair from GI or limit the bounces on it)
http://mustakettu85.deviantart.com/art/Clarice-Goth-550332289 - 18 mins
http://mustakettu85.deviantart.com/art/Toni-a-yet-another-study-520224930 - 17 mins.
If none of these look good enough for you, the problem is still not 3Delight but my lack of skills.
I mean... the Chappie movie?
They look very good, and I hope to evolve to grasp 3DL better.
My next shopping list will be AoA Lights (bundle), some of those Shades of Life (for good projection mapping)... any other 3DL tools I should be looking at?
I am familiar with the sluggishness of UE2, though I'm finding that so long as I avoid the raytracing, it's not so bad as an easy way of broadly bringing up the light level.
Thank you =)
Out of the store products I used, I'd primarily recommend UberSurface2, if only because Wowie is making those awesome presets for it (just look at his renders in this thread!!).
I know there are people who still swear by AoA's lights, and they are quality shaders (real new shaders, to boot, independent of "shader mixer", so they should work in any new version of DS), but they aren't really "realism"-oriented. The Advanced Ambient one only does ambient occlusion, not GI. But on the other hand, it does it well, unless you do need image-based lighting (which it does't support).
AoA also has the Atmospheric Cameras product, and while a lot of it is unfortunately shader mixer-based (meaning some things are broken in the newest DS versions, as far as I can tell), it includes the independent EZFog camera which is my favourite shader for volumetrics (it supports light categories, so you can be very selective about which lights contribute to the costly volume calculations).
I actually have the Atmospheric Camera product, it was one of the last 3DL things I bought before Iray in my attempt to get more and more realism. ;) But I found the fog thing ... incredibly slow. At this point I think I'd rather do it in post or something. But I DO find the depth camera that comes with it very useful for post work (even with Iray -- I'd do 3dl depth renders and then use that for masking).
Would you say http://www.daz3d.com/uber-shader-pack is worth getting (it includes UberSurface2)?
Which version of DS were you trying the EZFog in and did you remember to include directional lights only (no AO-casting lights like UE)? Volumetrics get faster with each 3DL update, plus the proper selection of lights makes a great impact on render times.
That pack? For that price? Nope. Half of those are obsolete, really.
Good to know! I appreciate the info. As for UberSurface 2, this product, or did I miss something? http://www.daz3d.com/ubersurface2-layered-shader-for-daz-studio
I was doing Atmospheric Camera in 4.7, I think. This took almost 9 hours:
https://scontent-sjc2-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xtf1/t31.0-8/11026074_10204882153067550_7326425235188274171_o.jpg
Edit: Actually, that may have been Iray? I'm not 100% sure. Hrm.
Poking at it some more, I think my mistake was using the volume camera and not the Easy camera. Duh.
The rare occasions it goes on sale...still not worth it. The only thing in that that you would really want is UE2. The other items that aren't presets aren't worth it or are part of other things...like the EliteHumanSurface is included in Steph 4 (which has gone on sale very cheap).
You're welcome =) Yup, it's this one.
There was indeed a significant speed increase for volumetrics after the 3DL version that was bundled with 4.7. And yeah, the volume camera isn't as useful as the EZ one.
The image is cool =) Could've been even better if the angel's tunic/robe was dynamic... pity there is no way to 'clothify' arbitrary meshes in DS.
Elite Human Surface Shader (EHSS or HSS) is bundled with DS right? An that's UE version 1, while the bundled one with Studio now is UE2. I think the only one worth buying is US2, well, until there's a better shader around.
I think it largely depends on what you're targeting. If you want to get as close as possible to real world (ie arch viz), custom curves is the way to go.