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Thanks Wowie! Lookin really nice! And the render times with the Arealights, quite a surprise!
Meshlights in 3Delight - any sort of them - aren't that slow on today's hardware. The trick for efficiency is to use simple poly planes. They don't have to be visible to camera or reflections (the visibility switches are useful here).
Transmapped hair will slow down the render, of course. But then it's what it does.
I can't wait to buy Parris' new effort, Kettu. It promises to fix the problem with transmapped hair.
Opacity transmapped mapped surfaces or alpha blend surfaces/sprites are a problem with any raytracing/path tracing renderer. Be it Vray, Redshift, Mantra, Renderman etc. I know Redshift can be 4x slower due to using your typical DAZ figure hairs. To be honest though, using texture maps to get opacity for hair is really the 'wrong' way to do it.
Mostly because it is not physically based. Physical hair are not hair cards.
Most definitely, not infinitely thin ones.
In Maya and Houdini, you can actually use a script to turn hair cards into guide hairs. Something like that would really solve most of the problems of getting realistic hair with DS. More so, if your chosen renderer can render curves without having to convert them back to geometry.
The soft look of hair is due to translucency and scattering, not opacity. Pretty much like the glass issue, opacity should be set to 1 then use translucency or SSS, be it single or multiscatter to get the soft, glow look with light color hair.
...wow a .lot of stuff to cram in the brain here.
As I mentioned elsewhere, never bought any of the Uber content (save for a couple IBL sets) as when it came out I was still working on a 4 GB 32 bit duo core system, and using UE, Uber Area lights, Uber shaders, and Elite shaders, wold often trigger render crashes because of the heavy system resource demand they required. When the AoA lights were released it was like a prayer answered. as I could get better looking results than with the standard 3DL lights without as much demand on my hardware.
So I opened up the 3DL version of the test scene I used for comparing Iray to 3DL.and began adjusting things. Currently working with Gamma Correction and Gamma settings which seem to help eliminate the "Poser 4" look but it also causes other issues like glass not looking as good and highly transmapped hair for 3DL appearing wispy and thin (like it does in Iray without increasing the opacity above 100%). Sometimes I feel messing with Iray for the last two years, has caused me to fall out of touch with 3DL and miss a lot of development that has occurred here in this thread. I feel almost like I need to "go back to school" again.
Just that I am currently rendering a simple scene in Iray with only two figures a back drop and phot studio light set and it has taken an hour and 50 minutes to reach 97% whereas the test renders I have been doing in 3DL with the scene above (which is far more complex) are clocking in around 15 min after the initial optimisation pass.
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ETA
...just noticed that IBL master ws released tonight One question I have, whe workig in 3DL, does it only work with HDRI environments or can the IBL light be used with geometry and a skydome? Most HDRI sky and scenery sets for 3DL also involve UE and Uber lights which render painfully slow.
Hi everyone,
Just touching base to thank all of you who replied. I’ve had some technical problems with card driver (memory leak?) & moving DS since out of space on “C” -- a little maintenance before wrapping up 2017
@Wowie
Still impressed you would steer me away from your own product! You’re planning another release at store, or renders are research for something like Renderman or 3Delight itself? (Lot of syntax in their user guide, but helps with concepts.)
Anyway, I ask because get the feeling I’m trying to re-invent the wheel here. ; ) “Lumina” might save me some time & give >= number of convenient presets as comes with IRay and might learn from them.
Obsolete though?
@Kyoto Kid
Don’t think we’ve ‘met’ as it were, but from another topic, have you to thank for help with my novice mistake-- anything reflective needs an environment!
Interesting nugget about IBL Master. On wish list, but will wait to see what the experts think. : )
So back to lurking for now...
Happy new years!
--Bruce
After seeing that area lights work without a problem and performance penalty, it became a lot of easier to figure out specular/reflection intensities with specular maps. Plus a rough approximation for those who prefer spot/point lights.
Update on the shader - It looks like edge bevel is going to be postponed. I've figured out how to do it, but it does require some behind the scenes trickery that needs further exploration. At least, the way I want to do it. So, it might be in later builds, but don't count on it. In doing that, I've added trace sets and trace group memberships. Works pretty much like light linking via light categories/groups, but for reflections and refractions.
Here's a peek of the user interface and all the bells and whistles.
It's a big shader.
Not final though.
...my question was answered on the other thread so went to the cart and clicked Checkout. Crikey at 50% off for me (thanks to the Loyalty Reward) excellent for such a useful utility.
It will also be very helpful with the IBL Skies bundle for Iray I recently purchased as I have an older system with a 1 GB GPU card that doesn't like running in Iray View mode.and it is a waste of time to run render tests to position the sky/sun where I want it. This will make using HDRs a lot simpler
...umm, looks like the cockpit of a 747.
WIll there be a manual"?
May also possibly need a third display.
As I wrote on this thread, the shader will be available for free. There will be a commercial pack with extra stuff like presets and light sets. And maybe something extra.
My primary goal with the shader is a selfish one.
Learn shader writing, learn RSL and OSL, and hopefully end up with a shader I can use in other apps. Houdini being my go to app for the moment. Unfortunately, Houdini's renderer, Mantra, doesn't support RSL or OSL. It uses it's own language, but the syntax is similar. Renderman and 3delight is available though, as is other renderers (Redshift!! 
). In Blender, you can use Cycles OSL (though not GPU accelerated) and Renderman (thanks to Brian Savery's port of Matt Ebb's 3delight exporter for Blender). Renderman is going GPU, so that's a very welcome feature.
Slightly out of topic, I'm stoked that Brian Savery is now in charge of AMD's Prorender. Progress with the plugin is very good, though it's still not production ready.
Pretty much. For reasons I've laid out in my post.
Of course. It will come with a basic manual explaining the features. The commercial pack will come with a more comprehensive how-tos.
I actually did have a second display. But you can always use the navigation tree to pick sections to tweak. Or my favorite one - use the search field to filter parameters with a certain name ie 'spec' will only list parameters with 'spec'.
With Parris' specific IBL as compared to, say, UE2; not in general. As Wowie says, this slowdown is "a feature, not a bug". I'm currently thinking of a way to handle this with pathtraced area lights. It's not a trivial task each time - exactly because it's a cheat to counter a cheat.
You can speed things up using existing shaders if you use an "on/off" transparency map - so that bottom layers will get culled better and not trigger additional sorts of computations. Most transmaps out there have very soft greyscale gradients - it's pretty but inefficient.
With curves, you can get awesome-looking stuff and fast-rendering stuff even if curves are not transparent (because IRL your hair is not, y'know =D).
Converting existing transmaps to be "on/off" is a bit hit-or-miss. If I have enough time on holidays I'll try to whip up a "universal" sort of "fiber map" that should be easy enough to combine with the black part of existing transmap and get an optimised custom one.
Trace sets FTW!
And look, if I get it right, this DS-to-Blender exporter can convert transmapped hair to Blender particle systems...
http://diffeomorphic.blogspot.ru/p/hair.html
Yup. It's pretty self explanatory. Of course, that's in Blender.
Been there done that.
It's built into my shader, one of the few optimizations to handle those kind of scenarios.
Yup, that's a pretty impressive array of parameters
. Driver's licence required?
On a sidenote... how do you make use of the custom bricks in shader mixer?
Depends.
Experimenting with a poseable emitter figure. Made of three quads so it shouldn't induce performance hits when used as mesh/area lights.
For example?
Kendall once said something about having some code lying around that can do something to Cycles curves... can't for the life of me remember if he meant exporting them from LAMH or importing into it. The latter coupled with this add-on could mean a small revolution.
I do remember that, but what about those people who still swear by oldschool shaders? They deserve a bit of love, too. And a chance to practice image editing. You know me =P
Lol, I have no idea what you can do with them or how to use them. So it's kind of hard to give an example.
Something like Millighost brick? https://sites.google.com/site/millighostmix/home/maptrace-brick
Or do you mean importing Shader Builder code/nodes into Shader Mixer? I did try importing a Shader Builder node into Shader Mixer. The import works, just not the node.
Others may know though.
Until I just bought Parris's IBL Master, and was totally amazed with what it could do for my 3delight renders, I had no idea so much was going on behind the scenes. I have been caught up in the love affair with Iray, and believed the hype that 3delight was almost dead, until I found this thread.
I must say Wowie, your shader looks complex in its entirety, but now seeing how far 3delight has progressed, I'm excited for when you have this ready for release, and I will certainly be buying any of your supporting products.
Reading through these forum pages it's very clear to me that we have some very talented people beavering away to make 3d art production exciting for us artists, for which I am extremely grateful. I now need to put my enthusiasm back into learning more about 3delight, so I can confidently use both Daz Studio render engines, with acceptable (to me) results.
Thanks Wowie! So much to learn, think I have got a (very) basic understanding of shadermixer now so guess I have to start digging into shaderbuilder next. I'll try to get that custombrick into shadermixer just so I know I can do it;) Fingers crossed
I agree, amazing stuff going on all of a sudden
Actually, thanks to mustakettu's debugging, the shader is finished.
I did catch another bug, but that's also fixed now.
Just need to update presets, make a whole lot of promos and write the documentation.
Great news, @wowie! When will I be able to buy it an get my hands on it? The complexity doesn't scare me (actually excites me), and I'd love to see how good 3DL renders will look using your shader in conjunction with @Parris's new IBL product - it's already looking pretty good:
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/3187961/#Comment_3187961
Cheers, and Happy New Year!
- Greg
Very exciting stuff going on on the 3Delight side right now....
Soon.
Amazing what you can do with mapped anisotropy direction.
SWEET!
...nice.
Actually for those who want stuff to play with right.now (tm) - if you have pwSurface2, its indirect light mode ain't too bad.
A thing to note: it traces diffuse colour. Never ambient.
NO ENVIRONMENT LIGHT needed.
It does not attenuate specular, so just ditch that and use blurred reflection instead. Use area lights (UberAreas work fine) and enable a high ambient on them so that they are reflected properly.
"Soft" oversampling on the shader isn't required anymore (it slows things down, a LOT, without visible improvement) when rendering with a decent pixel samples number. Just progressive mode is okay.
Less than six mins for the figure shot, over 15 mins for the closeup with hair, since there are no hacks or optimisations in vanilla DS.
The environment is the iray DS default HDRI on a sphere /diffuse channel for IDL, ambient for reflection/. Diffuse and ambient colours dialled down to avoid overblowing.
Basically, here's the scene, take it apart. You need: Arabella 7, Vigilante clothes and Krayon hair. It may throw an error because I added one custom pose dial for lip scaling (compare the closeups - the bald one is the final scaling and it's an unfinished render). Shouldn't be that much of an issue. If anyone wants the dial, I'll share it as well.
Hit Ctrl+L to disable "preview lights", or the viewport will be dark.
You can see there's something off about transparency and reflection on the hair - that's the biggest problem.
The pants are most likely too reflective =D