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Exported the hair I'm working on to an OBJ. Render with the Garibaldi hair (111)was around 5 minutes. With the exported OBJ made from the same hair (122), render time was pretty much the same. Same US2 preset on both. Got a very different look though with the export though. Probably cause the export was way too dense.
So i did a re-export of the first layer (the long hair) and import that back. This time, I lowered the opacity to 33%. Closer to the one with the actual Garibaldi hair, though more saturated. Render time is quite longer. I think it was more than 12 minutes.
Looks cool =)
I wish Garibaldi could export not just an OBJ but a fibermesh-styled OBJ.
...tried that and all I get is a nice render of the .obj's with no textures.
When you render to RIB, there is a Collect and Localize option that needs to be enabled. The you will have a RIB file and a folder with named myRIB_collected. In THAT folder is a SECOND RIB file. The second RIB is the one to render...that is the one with the shader/texture referrences to the files in the myRIB_collected folder as opposed to Studio temp folder (the RIB outside the _collected folder referrences the temp folder).
What I really like is to have something like Maya Hair and Fur :D
Fur being what is generally done by LAMH and Garibaldi - put splines on top of a polygon. Hair would be something like this: http://www.thundercloud-studio.com/shops/gmh2/
Basically, hair is (instanced) splines that's parallel to a polygon. So we can basically turned all hair props (and to some extent, cloth) to spline based mesh.
I was positively surprised, how well light/environment setup works in 3Delight Daz Studio of the scene from
http://www.daz3d.com/dm-s-cave-of-secrets
Just to mention, that Wowie's http://www.daz3d.com/lumina-materials-library
was an instant buy for me. Now I am reading the manual for it first, as suggested by Mustakettu.
Anyhow, below is the 3Delight render of Cave of Secrets by Danie and Marforno using light setup included with the set.
If you have any questions, just ask.
That looks awesome!.. Well, maybe Alessandro and Kendall will be able to do something like that one day. Right now I'm waiting for LAMH 2 that should feature gravity which would make styling "normal" long hair so much easier.
Now that I have a working 64 bit with Iray, I can do things like this...
Now...which renderer and what shader (no Luxrender, Octane or Cycles in this one...
)
And all the 3DL ones are rendered using Kettu's scripted render/Kettuworld.
And now that I have a real pro 3D app, I can use pretty much use any top notch renderer out there.
http://www.cgchannel.com/2016/04/houdini-indie-to-get-support-for-third-party-renderers/
Of course, 3delight is there too.
The features and potential with Houdini are mind boggling. Just dipping my toes with the free apprentice version.
Thanks for posting this info, wowie.
- Greg
Would it mean that the non-commercial free PLE will also have external renderer support?
Unfortunately. No. The free Apprentice version don't have any external renderer support. Still, you get three good renderers - Houdini's own Mantra (REYES and ray/path tracing), 3delight 9 (uncertain of the version numbering) and Renderman 19/20 (RIS).
I'm seriously thinking about getting the Indie version though (US$ 199 annually), particularly for the Arnold, Vray and Redshift support. A word of caution , it's really a complex app. I mean, like a really steep learning curve. I can use Maya and Max right off the bat (import files, apply textures etc), but Houdini got me stumped for about a day on how to import files and assign materials. Forget about OBJ, you need to import things in FBX or Alembic. There's Collada support too, but FBX seems to be the preferred method. Those three seems to be the only ones that Houdini will read material/surface groups info.
Been fiddling with G2F imported with Mantra - pretty fast. I think ray traced SSS took about 3 minutes at full quality.
But of course, that's not all there is to it. Houdini is so much, much more. The node approach to everything isn't always the easiest to use, but it allows robust flexibility for just about anything. It isn't just applied to materials and shaders, but the whole scene (objects, modifiers, simulations etc).
I had the free version installed for a while last year. It's really great with its procedural approach and the quality and versatility of all those simulations, though I kept setting something up wrong in Mantra and it kept crashing. It surely can be "the" software to use as the "flagship" for a serious 3D artist, especially now with the renderer support in the indie version. I wish I had the reasons to justify investing time and money into mastering it.
...I understnad Houdini is a real bugger to learn though.
Mantra is nice, but the main reason I want to use it are those third party renderers - mostly Redshift. Version 2.0 is almost ready and along with it comes their PBR shader plus dispersion. After that,fully raytraced SSS and OpenCL support.
https://www.redshift3d.com/blog/3dartist-issue-93-faster-than-light-redshift-feature
Houdini's features are just icing on the cake - hair, cloth, fluids and finite solver, procedurals (geo and materials/textures), material layers, object/surface modifiers etc. And I haven't even touched the modeler/rigging tools.
Redshift with its extra speed gotta be really helpful if you do a lot of animation.
Not just in animation. Interior renderings are fast.
In the Spaceball notion - it's LUDICROUS speed!!
Out of topic, but I'm in awe of how easy it is to work with hair in Houdini.
Growing hair directly on the surface and having a mirrored workflow just makes working with hair a breeze.
Back to 3delight and DS.
Tinkering with a new hair preset. I think I've found a sweet spot combo for anisotropic specular highlights with fresnel enabled. Pure shader plus opacity maps only. No bump or displacement (yet). Looks fairly consistent between different hair models, even with the OBJ export of Garibaldi hair.
The colored hair versions uses the same preset, just with different color values. Still need to figure out shades of blond though.
Something I've found for shades of blond...it's nearly impossible to do a convincing blond without a diffuse map...of at leas a gradient, preferably more. If not it almost always looks like a 'botte blond".
These all look fantastic, wowie!
- Greg
Yeah, probably.
Probably needs a diffuse strength gradient map. But the base preset looks pretty decent overall. I'll try boosting the saturation a bit later on.
Thanks.
The other colors ARE pretty good...but having kids with blond hair...wife, too...a single shade just doesn't cut it. Even very pale blonds have all sorts of subtle variations in color and they tend to show more than the darker hair colors.
You can still use textures on top of that. But yes, it will probably still won't look good.
Lovely materials, Wowie. Even that braid looks nice.
"Bottle blonde" is quite common here in Moscow, unlike natural blonde (I mean real blonde, like in Wowie's render, not the darker "beige" shades - those are very common but mostly on dudes because almost all females start using dyes in their teens).
Thanks Kettu. Partly inspired by Brian Karis (Senior Graphics Programmer for Epic Games) behind the scenes discussion on Paragon's shading. The hair shading used in that upcoming game was primarily inspired by / based of Weta's work, but adapted for real time engines. I think I understand Marchsner model more clearly thanks to him.
Edit:
Here's the link to the Youtube video:
Thanks for the video! I'll watch it later when I have recovered from a cold better...
Testing out DelightGIHDRI (with no HDRI).
I like how DelightGIHDRI can basically turn any object with enough ambient color & strength into an area light. You can see this clearly on the first render. There is no other light in the scene. All the lighting comes from the fixtures above. I disable everything but the ambient settings and turned it way, way up. It is very noisy though, even at 512 samples with max distance of 1000..
So i turned off the fixtures (built into the model) and place area lights in their place. Only one area light is used, but it's instanced about 16 times.I set falloffs and decays to what I generally used with my linear point lights but adjusted since I'm using decay of 2. DelightGI HDRI was using max distance of 250 with samples set to 128. On both renders, I set max diffuse/specular bounces to 1 in Kettu's script.
For the last one, I set DelightGI HDRI back to a max distance of 1000 and set samples to 2048. I also raised max diffuse/specular bounces to 12.
Judging by the render times and noise levels, I think using area/delta lights as the main light in your scene is more practical at this point. WIth quite small max distances (and small samples), the DelightGIHDRI only added about two minutes to the render. Didn't test with the standalone though.