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Anyone know how reflection blur works in AoA SSS shader?
Theres reflection color and strength, and stuff about blur samples, reflection bias, etc, but I'd like a blurry reflections and I can't seem to DO that.
AoA's only does raytraced reflections, so first of all make sure you have something to reflect, like a skydome/interior.
Then, you may want to first set the IoR to a "metallic" value, like 100, so that you could clearly gauge reflection blur (and turn off specular so that it wouldn't get in the way). The 1.3...1.5 IoR is the correct one for organics/dielectrics - the Fresnel attenuation will be heavy, and reflection on surfaces you see heads-on will be dim.
Then you increase the "blur angle" slightly.
Check out renders with two IoR values: 100 and 1.5, at three blur angle values: 0, 0.05 and 0.1.
Well, from the 'Perspective View' and a spot-render, looks OK.
I'm not sure what I'm looking at yet, renders rather quickly without the cam.
It also looks OK with a copy of the 'Default cam moved to another angle, and from a basic menu camera as well.
Yea, I tossed in the polished floor and color cube to see what impact the floor would have, and get an idea of the light levels. I am scratching my head as to why the menu camera is NOT sticking to the render size/ratio settings in the render tab?
Zarcon, did you do a copy&paste pose from my cams to a new one? Mine are all set with their own render dimensions. If you copy from them, the "local dimensions" get copied, too.
Soooo what are your render times through the IDL camera? The reflective floor may add fireflies...
Sorry for the delay, been dragged down in 'Tedious' stuff. The render times was not that bad, and no I did not take notes of that it was a quick look around. As for the cameras, I did copy them and move the copy around (I didn't know daz did that size thing for specific cameras, that's cool). I thought the IDL camera was for caustics or something like that. I'll need to actually load that back up to get times...
If only I had a second computer
... Will Daz Studio run on an Odroid XU4 
lol.
(5 of 8 cores, FX8350 stock 4.0GHz base clock.)
Default Cam, FP-time less then 30 seconds. Total Rendering Time: 1 minutes 12.47 seconds.
Ah, coffee is ready, BRB.
Face Cam, FP-time about 21 seconds. Total Rendering Time: 1 minutes 7.85 seconds
CamIDLPM, FP-time about 4m1s. Total Rendering Time: 10 minutes 12.16 seconds
FYI, that 5-core thing is how I often end up running most of the time. 3DL will saturate every core to the point drivers start flaking out, so core '0' at least is removed form daz to keep the monitor from flickering like strobe lights, lol. The other two is for smooth youtube video, and doing other stuff (solitaire, minesweeper, etc. lol.) while I'm waiting on renders to do something. Also, I suspect five cores of a real CPU is about on par with many 'affordable' 4-core 8-thread intel chips floating around... IF you can afford that ten-core 20-thread i-007 chip, chances are your in Iray on a couple of Titan-X's any way, lol.
(EDIT) I just looked at Kettu's times again, is that actually a 4-core i-007 CPU? Or is 'Q' starting to slack off in the later movies? lol. 2.5GHz, that's a slower clock then I thought intel was at (and no Hyper threading), it is a more reasonable priced $$$ proc then some of there stuff, hmmm.
Maybe late to the party, but I'm having a grand old time using raytrace Reflection to capture some of the effect of bouncelight without, you know, trying to do bouncelight.
I found that for snow, about 20% reflection on a very light blue 192 value bumpy surface looks REALLY good, particularly with a colorful sky.
I'm also experimenting with dropping specular from a lot of skins and trying to capture the effect with reflection. Having mixed results -- I like the better control of reflection US has (particularly 'blur'), but there are a lot of superior elements to AoA SSS (for skin)
It's what is usually called "indirect specular" - it's an important part of the complete bounce light picture, but it won't light up a whole room diffusely from that sunbeam through the window. But if you're using some sort of IBL for environment light, adding only the indirect spec might work very well =)
US2 may well have the best of both worlds, so to speak. Outside of maybe specular noise. Do you use specular noise in AoA SSS?
There is a separate camera brick for caustics. I don't think you can reliably get both IDL and caustics in vanilla shader mixer =(
Quite cool for 5 cores =)
That's the office PC, its CPU may well be over ten years old, I don't know =) Computers at a Russian state-funded university are usually cobbled together from spare parts that "still work" (like, you know, a motherboard exploded but something was salvaged LOL). And yeah, we run scientific simulations on those.
I've been using reflection with AoA SSS. The lack of an easy reflection blur is annoying, but then I had the bright idea of plopping Anagenessis' noise map into the Normal whenever the Bump channel is too smooth.
AoA SSS Normal has a strength, so it lets me add a very natural roughness to spread out reflections.
All of this requires good PBR approaches, like having complete surrounding environments, but I like doing that anyway and using Iray got me in the habit.
Is that noise map for figures only, or is it some sort of universal tile?
It's just a tile, can use it on anything. I think I used it on some boots in one experiment.
Basically, lacking a blur, which is fake, it affords me the ability to plug in 'real' blur (IE: microbumps). Mind you, given the vagaries of 3DL, I can't adjust the tiling in most cases, but I have yet to find that a significant problem.
I'm also debating taking other stuff and incorporating them into 3dl surfaces, like Mec4d's PBS v1, which has some 'microsurface' bump stuff. Again, lack of tiling of channels individually might be a minor hurdle, but we'll see (and I do have one or two shaders that DO let you tile independently that might work, though I hazily recall at least one of them doesn't play nice with AoA lights)
AoA SSS is a shader mixer network, so you can add in a tiler brick just about anywhere you want.
Oh good point. If I start finding it lacking, I'll give that a tweak.
So far, the one time I've run into a problem is that a lot of ears have very low bump detail, so can look super shiny with reflection.
Yes, ears tend to be problematic in that aspect, too =(
Another thing I'm trying is just skipping the SSS. At least so far, many times skin looks just fine without it and renders faster. And getting sss to work right is a real pain.
Instead, going to use a little translucence and proper maps so ears and whatnot show most, and see where that gets me.
That goes back to what I mentioned about SSS being 'baked in' for photo resources. It's very hard to avoid getting the interaction between light and skin to NOT have it when taking photos. The only skins I've seen that have more than a token attempt at minimizing that 'baked in' SSS are those done for academic projects with 3D scanning...like the Digital Emily. And when you add in foundation, blush, concealers and other makeup (even when attempting to look like no makeup is being worn), that changes the whole equation.
Amusing:
The render I was attempting was taking FOREVER and getting hung up on the face. Almost two hours, still hung, ARGH STUPID 3DL AND STUPID SKIN SKIN AAARGH!
Yeah, turned out it had absolutely nothing to do with the figure at all and was entirely due to the hat I was using.
Megafacepalm
Yea, that's why I use Gloss instead of ray-trace reflection on many things. Reflection looks good, it just takes bloody ages when it is a slow-to-render item in the reflection. Forget about having G3F HD AoA subsurface in a reflection, continental drift moves faster, lol.
What I've been experimenting with is using UberSurface with NO sss, but use some spec mapped translucency and reflection.
It renders decently fast and looks pretty realistic, imo
The "translucency" in Ubers and most likely AoA as well isn't going to work with "actual" meshes (not one-sided polys), unless you use lights that don't cast shadows. That "translucency" is just a diffuse channel with the normal reversed, useful for hair/cloth/leaves and other one-sided stuff, where that "bad" normal is actually lit.
The only prebuilt shader that had a more useful sort of translucency was pwSurface2.
If you want to "fake" SSS in Ubers, your best bet is a few percent of ambient actually.
DS default and shader mixer also have a fake "skin" with falloff: it has "sheen" - a tint for grazing angles, to simulate some Fresnel that takes place in SSS as well; and "scatter" - a tint for heads-on viewing. The default colours are a bit too strong, especially the "scatter", but they're easy enough to play with.
The weirdest issue I keep running into are specular maps where the nose and lips are very dark and the ears are bright.
I mean, what?
Well not always in just in those locations tho agreed. Some have the spec maps so dark it practically dose nothing at all for darker figures, how am I supposed to make that look good without making my own maps from scratch, lol. There not all bad, just the rare figure that has you exclaiming "What the expletive", lol.
I hear ya, guys.
Let's just say specular maps are a constant source of wonder in the DAZ-land.
Yeah. Again, I had a dark skinned figure, the specular is bright white on the inside of the ear, light gray on cheeks... and dark gray/black on the nose.
... whose nose is that dry??
Looks like you are not the only one working on skin, some body in (I think?) the old lab thread also is attempting to do the same. I'm looking at the Iray skin settings referenced to, and some of it is incomprehensible to me. Like the 0.00 to 1.00 color boxes, what is that in sRGB (24-bit numbers)? And what is the difference between Translucency and Transmitted colors, I'm guessing Transmitted is something like velvet as the other is the same thing that it is in 3DL Uber and AoA shaders?
I think I'm going to just drop the numbers in to the daz default (without conversion) and see what happens, lol.
Refraction strength 40%, Refraction color 100r 31g 23b,
Gloss strength 55%, Gloss color 30r 30b 30g, etc lol.
Ah, an experiment to do to some one, where is beaker, lol.
(Disclaimer) I am not actually trying to duplicate an appearance of the settings in Iray, I'm just morbidly curious of what would happen if the exact numbers were plugged directly into 3DL without any conversion at all (aside from removing the decimal point from the numbers).
Well, looks like the numbers are close enough for my random curiosity, and clearly the colors are NOT the same, lol.
Transmitted is what color shifts to after a certain distance.
Like, if you have fog, and blue transmitted, the fog goes from white to blue over the distance. Good for getting a sense of depth and color shifting through a volume.
Ah, OK. So it is not something like velvet or subsurface. That is an interesting setting I guess with some unique possibilities for some cloud like stuff.
As for trying to get good skin tone color depth with gamma correction without post processing the hell out of renders, I am not the one to be helping the other fellow.
http://maddieman.wordpress.com/2009/06/23/gamma-correction-and-linear-colour-space-simplified/
I don't use gamma correction in Daz Studio 3dl for many many many reasons, not to say it is a hell of a lot more work then I'm willing to torment myself with, I'm staying out of that one, lol.
Ya know, that is not that bad looking (I like), I should have done the fingernails as well.
I sort of expected the altered FW Eve one on the left to be a bit more 'Transparent' then that, no pun intended, lol. I wonder if that Translucency is doing anything at all with as dark as it is, hmm.
It's often used with subsurface, because it interacts with volume effects. So with skin, transmitted affects the look of the skin because it gives skin a 'deep' color.
If you look at any of the standard store Iray skins, or the default skin converter, you'll see transmitted color for this.
Nifty, I was thinking the other way tho that works. So it would work well for something like fruit juice or plastics, tho may not work for a surface of a star decreasing density and temperature of gasses with distance from the star effects.
Well, I'm really starting to like the altered skin settings. It's almost like a Dark matter or Dark energy version of Trance
.
I'm just not sure if I got the fingernails, to dark.