3Delight Laboratory Thread: tips, questions, experiments

Mustakettu85 · February 2016

Linwelly said:

Here is a question to you about a certain shader I found a hint to in the german thread. It said that there is a "glow" shader supposedly to be found within the shader builder. In the popup dialoge within a rubrique called renderman. But if I open the shader builder tab there is no rubrique with the title renderman. The information I found was on DS 4.8 (and 3DL) and I use 4.8 as well. So what am I missing, does it still exist and if you know about it, can you direct me towards that? on another note opening that shader builder thingy and looking into it spooked the living daylights out of me, but made me grasps grasp quite some more of the things you are talking about. To be able to really use that one day would be awesome.

Sure, here's is a screenshot showing how to find it. And overlayed are two renders of that dragon scene with two "attenuation" values: the default 2 on the left, and 10 on the right.
The opacity slider in this shader controls the shadow opacity, not the surface one (the surface opacity is controlled by attenuation only). When it's 1, you can see the dragon still casts a full shadow. But unless you edit the code a little, you cannot get a "ghostly" shadow with this shader, it will still be "solid" just more "transparent".

mjc1016 · February 2016

Mustakettu85 said:

Linwelly said:

Here is a question to you about a certain shader I found a hint to in the german thread. It said that there is a "glow" shader supposedly to be found within the shader builder. In the popup dialoge within a rubrique called renderman. But if I open the shader builder tab there is no rubrique with the title renderman. The information I found was on DS 4.8 (and 3DL) and I use 4.8 as well. So what am I missing, does it still exist and if you know about it, can you direct me towards that? on another note opening that shader builder thingy and looking into it spooked the living daylights out of me, but made me grasps grasp quite some more of the things you are talking about. To be able to really use that one day would be awesome.

Sure, here's is a screenshot showing how to find it. And overlayed are two renders of that dragon scene with two "attenuation" values: the default 2 on the left, and 10 on the right.
The opacity slider in this shader controls the shadow opacity, not the surface one (the surface opacity is controlled by attenuation only). When it's 1, you can see the dragon still casts a full shadow. But unless you edit the code a little, you cannot get a "ghostly" shadow with this shader, it will still be "solid" just more "transparent".

I'm jealous...your ShaderBuilder is so much neater and more organized than mine...

Brave soul, showing the 'secret' lair to the public like that...

Since you did this, I guess I won't be needing to do those renders, now...or try and clean up my mess (or at least not let all the mess show).

Linwelly...

That glow shader is really a very basic shader...but you can get some very interesting effects from it by creating at least one Geoshell and applying it to both the original and the shell.

Mustakettu85 · February 2016

mjc1016 said:

I'm jealous...your ShaderBuilder is so much neater and more organized than mine...

My mess has long been swept under the rug into the "Archive" folder =D

Linwelly · February 2016

mjc1016 said:

Mustakettu85 said:

Linwelly said:

Here is a question to you about a certain shader I found a hint to in the german thread. It said that there is a "glow" shader supposedly to be found within the shader builder. In the popup dialoge within a rubrique called renderman. But if I open the shader builder tab there is no rubrique with the title renderman. The information I found was on DS 4.8 (and 3DL) and I use 4.8 as well. So what am I missing, does it still exist and if you know about it, can you direct me towards that? on another note opening that shader builder thingy and looking into it spooked the living daylights out of me, but made me grasps grasp quite some more of the things you are talking about. To be able to really use that one day would be awesome.

Sure, here's is a screenshot showing how to find it. And overlayed are two renders of that dragon scene with two "attenuation" values: the default 2 on the left, and 10 on the right.
The opacity slider in this shader controls the shadow opacity, not the surface one (the surface opacity is controlled by attenuation only). When it's 1, you can see the dragon still casts a full shadow. But unless you edit the code a little, you cannot get a "ghostly" shadow with this shader, it will still be "solid" just more "transparent".

I'm jealous...your ShaderBuilder is so much neater and more organized than mine...

Brave soul, showing the 'secret' lair to the public like that...

Since you did this, I guess I won't be needing to do those renders, now...or try and clean up my mess (or at least not let all the mess show).

Linwelly...

That glow shader is really a very basic shader...but you can get some very interesting effects from it by creating at least one Geoshell and applying it to both the original and the shell.

well my idea was to put it on a geoshell around an area light disc, and yes maybe even add a second shell

mjc1016 · February 2016

Linwelly said:

well my idea was to put it on a geoshell around an area light disc, and yes maybe even add a second shell

What works better for that...create a sphere, then use the Geometry editor to hide the top half (if you want the 'glow' to be coming down) and stick the sphere up to the disk...apply the shader to the sphere. Also, you need to turn cast shadows off in the sphere's parameters.

Linwelly · February 2016

mjc1016 said:

Linwelly said:

well my idea was to put it on a geoshell around an area light disc, and yes maybe even add a second shell

What works better for that...create a sphere, then use the Geometry editor to hide the top half (if you want the 'glow' to be coming down) and stick the sphere up to the disk...apply the shader to the sphere. Also, you need to turn cast shadows off in the sphere's parameters.

Thanks a lot! thats pretty much what I found out to do just now, as I want the glow to go up from my disk I used a torus as a primitive to produce the glowy effect I want, I'll probably try with a half sphere as well if that's even closer to what I want. this is so great. Its a whole new playground!

dracorn · February 2016

REFLECTED LIGHT IN A SHADOW

Back when I was doing watercolor, I learned that shadows will have reflected light from the object that is casting the shadow. How do I do this in 3Delight?

mjc1016 · February 2016

To do it in 3DL...you'll need a slightly reflective surface (not just 'glossy') and a 'bounce' light shader (UberEnvironment has a bounce mode). And some sort of 'global' lighting.

wowie · February 2016

mjc1016 said:

What works better for that...create a sphere, then use the Geometry editor to hide the top half (if you want the 'glow' to be coming down) and stick the sphere up to the disk...apply the shader to the sphere. Also, you need to turn cast shadows off in the sphere's parameters.

And in case any one didn't know - mesh with UberArea lights can be instanced. So, if you have a room with a lot of the same type of lights (ceiling lights), you can just use one area light and make as many instances as you like. Any change to the main light will be applied automatically to the instances.

You can even scale the instances (but keep the main prop unscaled).

Works almost like light groups. Just need flagging, which it doesn't support. I forgot though if Kettu's area lights have flagging features. If it doesn't, it might be a good feature to add.

mjc1016 · February 2016

No, Kettu's don't (they are really presets for omUberArea lights).

But the DzAreaLight in ShaderBuilder DOES...it just doesn't seem to have any shadows.

wowie · February 2016

mjc1016 said:

No, Kettu's don't (they are really presets for omUberArea lights).

But the DzAreaLight in ShaderBuilder DOES...it just doesn't seem to have any shadows.

Didn't Kettu discuss that bit a while back? Enabling shadows on the standard DAZ shader lights? Or maybe it was just for the delta DzShaderLights (point/spot/distant).

mjc1016 · February 2016

wowie said:

mjc1016 said:

No, Kettu's don't (they are really presets for omUberArea lights).

But the DzAreaLight in ShaderBuilder DOES...it just doesn't seem to have any shadows.

Didn't Kettu discuss that bit a while back? Enabling shadows on the standard DAZ shader lights? Or maybe it was just for the delta DzShaderLights (point/spot/distant).

It's just for the deltas...there is no code/UI for the shadows for the arealight. So no way to 'fix' it...

Mustakettu85 · February 2016

mjc1016 said:

It's just for the deltas...there is no code/UI for the shadows for the arealight. So no way to 'fix' it...

I posted an arealight once back with shadows and photon casting: http://www.mediafire.com/download/hgk16789m5frp12/AreaK_PPs.dzs

But the second alpha you and Wowie should have, it includes two completely new Radium arealight shaders (and Szark-style preset cameras-with-planes): one "oldschool" for all those DS surface shaders out there; another path-traced which only works with my shaders (or yours if you have written them with trace() for diffuse and specular). They both have category support (and photon casting).
They are installed with the render scripts, though, not as shader builder files - because I dislike the scripts that shader builder generates for area lights, they lose the light shader when the scene is reloaded from disk!! So use the icons in the content folder to apply the lights to your meshes. These will load Radium arealights paired with Omnifreaker's SimpleSurface for the surface controls.

Mustakettu85 · February 2016

wowie said:

And in case any one didn't know - mesh with UberArea lights can be instanced. So, if you have a room with a lot of the same type of lights (ceiling lights), you can just use one area light and make as many instances as you like. Any change to the main light will be applied automatically to the instances.

You can even scale the instances (but keep the main prop unscaled).

That's an amazingly great idea, thanks a lot for posting this trick =)

BTW I'm thinking just how exactly useful implementing this option would be:

11.0.154 - 2015-03-29

Added Attribute "light" "integer normalize" [ n ] to enable area light intensity normalization by area.

mjc1016 · February 2016

Mustakettu85 said:

mjc1016 said:

It's just for the deltas...there is no code/UI for the shadows for the arealight. So no way to 'fix' it...

I posted an arealight once back with shadows and photon casting: http://www.mediafire.com/download/hgk16789m5frp12/AreaK_PPs.dzs

But the second alpha you and Wowie should have, it includes two completely new Radium arealight shaders (and Szark-style preset cameras-with-planes): one "oldschool" for all those DS surface shaders out there; another path-traced which only works with my shaders (or yours if you have written them with trace() for diffuse and specular). They both have category support (and photon casting).
They are installed with the render scripts, though, not as shader builder files - because I dislike the scripts that shader builder generates for area lights, they lose the light shader when the scene is reloaded from disk!! So use the icons in the content folder to apply the lights to your meshes. These will load Radium arealights paired with Omnifreaker's SimpleSurface for the surface controls.

Now to find them...I thought I installed the second alpha, but now I'm not sure.

Mustakettu85 · February 2016

mjc1016 said:

Now to find them...I thought I installed the second alpha, but now I'm not sure.

Should be something like this in your content lib: Lights\Mustakettu85\RadiumArea

The next version will move everything to a "3Delight Raytracer Kit" folder because it seems to me that hunting around in those separate "lights" and "shaders" folders is crazy annoying, and there will be other presets too... Render presets etc. So one parent folder in the content lib seems more logical.

mjc1016 · February 2016

That's the problem...it seems that things aren't there that should be, so either I didn't install them or I've got them where they aren't supposed to be.

mjc1016 · February 2016

I've been trying to move things around and get rid of a bunch of old backups and generally tidy up my hard drives (hopefully in anticipation of migrating...)

But I found an old Marschner hair shader that someone did and I imported...

wowie · February 2016

Mustakettu85 said:

That's an amazingly great idea, thanks a lot for posting this trick =)

You're welcome.

Mustakettu85 said:

BTW I'm thinking just how exactly useful implementing this option would be:

11.0.154 - 2015-03-29

Added Attribute "light" "integer normalize" [ n ] to enable area light intensity normalization by area.

If I'm right, normalizing area light intensity means you get the same light intensity regardless of scale, although shadows will obviously be different. Pretty good feature to have, since now you can fiddle with one less parameter. And thanks for clarifiying your area lights does have support for category support. I did some test with them awhile back, guess I missed that.

Linwelly · February 2016

wowie said:

Mustakettu85 said:

That's an amazingly great idea, thanks a lot for posting this trick =)

You're welcome.

Mustakettu85 said:

BTW I'm thinking just how exactly useful implementing this option would be:

11.0.154 - 2015-03-29

Added Attribute "light" "integer normalize" [ n ] to enable area light intensity normalization by area.

If I'm right, normalizing area light intensity means you get the same light intensity regardless of scale, although shadows will obviously be different. Pretty good feature to have, since now you can fiddle with one less parameter. And thanks for clarifiying your area lights does have support for category support. I did some test with them awhile back, guess I missed that.

Question about the area light intensity, it was stated somehere that the intensity is relative to the size, but in which scale? I'm trying to use a really large area light and while I can see a nice light shedding from the same thing in smaller, the large one seems not too different from just an amient glow of a normal primitive. So if i double the size, by what do I need to inrease the intensity?

Mustakettu85 · February 2016

Linwelly said:

Question about the area light intensity, it was stated somehere that the intensity is relative to the size, but in which scale? I'm trying to use a really large area light and while I can see a nice light shedding from the same thing in smaller, the large one seems not too different from just an amient glow of a normal primitive. So if i double the size, by what do I need to inrease the intensity?

Generally intensity should be proportionate to the area.

Mustakettu85 · February 2016

wowie said:

If I'm right, normalizing area light intensity means you get the same light intensity regardless of scale, although shadows will obviously be different. Pretty good feature to have, since now you can fiddle with one less parameter. And thanks for clarifiying your area lights does have support for category support. I did some test with them awhile back, guess I missed that.

I will add it then.

Oh BTW: I read it in the beta thread that the beta is always updated to the same release as the general one, so it's possible to update the beta only and it will be equal to running two different builds of DS4 side by side. I'm mentioning this in case there are newer features in my shaders (mostly the glass one) that were not supported by the 3Delight built-in to the version you're running.

mjc1016 · February 2016

And now that I've got Kettu's real Arealights, a quick render with a nice BB-8 that's up on Blendswap...

Not completely happy with the surfaces, but the base setup is good enough for now. This is just one of the arealights, with a UE2 in bounce mode.

Oso3D · February 2016

Where is kettu's area light?

wowie · February 2016

timmins.william said:

Where is kettu's area light?

Still in development, along with the shaders and the GI/bounce light.

Mustakettu85 · February 2016

timmins.william said:

Where is kettu's area light?

If you want, you can join as an alpha tester. But if you do, I'd rather you waited for the third alpha which should be the better organised one. A realistic timeframe for the "private release" of it would be a few weeks.

Meanwhile you can play with the .dzs area light I posted a few posts back... http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/1012625/#Comment_1012625

On a Windows machine, it goes into your Users/[USERNAME]/AppData/Roaming/DAZ 3D/Studio4/ShaderBuilder/Shaders/Src/Light folder. Then you compile it in the shader builder, which generates integration scripts, and then you go to the "Shader Presets - Shader Builder" content folder and apply it from there (because shader builder doesn't support applying area lights right from its pane somehow).

But the downside is that without custom integration scripts, DS will lose the light shader part from the mesh when the scene's reopened. So using the .dzs as-is is unfeasible for longterm production.

Oso3D · February 2016

Ah, ok, I thought this was some thing out there that I had somehow missed. Good luck with it, then!

mjc1016 · February 2016

Mustakettu85 said:

But the downside is that without custom integration scripts, DS will lose the light shader part from the mesh when the scene's reopened. So using the .dzs as-is is unfeasible for longterm production.

Basically, you need to redo or make new ones, instead of being able to reuse them.