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Skin shaders, with slight modifications, work well with hair.
Example skin shader applied to hair.
Playing devil's advocate-because you're right that photorealism may be hard to postwork...
Have y'all heard about all the bro-haha in the media about whether somebody's body, hair or eyes has been photoshoped? I've seen shopped images that you absolutely can't tell were worked on, and yet they were. That's the whole point of developing those skills.
Photography is an art. On the other hand, these days any fool can shoot a selfie, and does.
Art is planning, execution, thinking a lot, pacing around and cussing while you wrestle with an artistic problem--like how to get this character's dress to look wet and her skin to look wet while she's standing in a lake with a magic sword. THAT project ate my entire weekend and looked around for more. GOD, what a pain. And I'm about to start on a writing project which will also involve pacing around and cussing, because that's what art is.
That's as opposed to putting my cell phone on a stick and shooting a picture of myself standing in front of the Grand Canyon.
If you're curious, here's a VERY rough draft.
Along with a finished cover that's a collaboration between me and a girl who specializes in cover production. The book should be out by late summer, I think. Maybe.
The Lady of the Lake is a rough to show my partner what I'm thinking of doing, and I'm not all that happy with it. But I want to get her input before I render something huge and time consuming. Kind of happy with the glowing sword, not so much so with the water, which was a bitch to get right. It wanted to be completely clear, which drove me nuts because the refracted image of her body and the reflections of her body just created all kinds of weird artifacts. It took me two days to figure out how to get the water the way I wanted, and I still didn't get the intersection with the shore the way I wanted it. I had in mind a cliff. Maybe if she posts in some breaking waves, or I render something, or something.
As to the cover--I did the pic of the guy as a png, no background, sent it to her, and she did a hell of a lot of postwork to add magic, etc.
It takes a bunch of work, but you can get good results out of transmapped hair, not to mention stuff like LAMH/Garibaldi.
This is Xylia hair.
Also, a lot of folks complaining about Iray rendering speed... toward the end of my use of 3Delight, I was trying stuff with Uberenvironment and Meshlights.
Let me tell you, pushing toward more realism with 3delight, I was seeing veeeery long render times.
I thought DAZ3D was in talks with NVIDIA to make this community some good deal offers for mid / high range cards to get their iRay working better? I wonder if that idea went *poof* .... I've been patiently waiting to hear about anything about that.... but nothing....
nvidia may not feel the same urgency some of us do. Or they may want to wait till Iray is out of beta so that the whole user base is aware of the "need".
I don't know... "strike while the fire is hot" in this industry is smarter in my humble opinion! lol
Skin shaders, with slight modifications, work well with hair.
Example skin shader applied to hair.
Thanks for the suggestion. I copied the shader settings from her skin to the hair, keeping everything except for the translucency colour and the transmitted colour, which I changed to dark grey (96-96-96), and it was a clear improvement. The hair is Goldtassel Char hair, but the only things remaining from the original is the mesh and the opacity maps, everything else is new.
Which leads us to the next problem: how do I get black eyebrows on a fair-skinned girl? The eyebrows are black in the texture but come out brown in all renders, since they use the same translucency colour etc as the skin.
(The girl is an own character with heavily modified textures from the toolbox, pieced together from what I already had).
You can create a translucency map.
Right now its just a match light.. I think the real fire is yet to come.
You can create a translucency map.
OK. Will do. I have all the textures saved as layered files, with a separate layer for the eyebrows, so it would be no problem to add that to whatever translucency maps already exist, or create a new one.
Thanks for all the help.
Edit: I created a translucency map that is all white except for the black eyebrows, and it worked perfectly, as can be seen from the quick partial test render below. I also gave her new eyebrows, but I think I'll change the shape of them.
(I'm not new to 3d-modelling or rendering, but I'm new to DAZ Studio and modelling human beings, so there's a lot to learn.)
Ahem. Not necessarily, not anymore.
Make it "3Delight-as-limited-to-preexisting-DS-shaders" - then, yes.
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Now, I'm sorry if this has been discussed before, but I just noticed there are two modes to "Fit to" now: could anyone please point me towards some explanation of how they are different?
Something is not right with the surface settings. I think the Iray Optimized GF2 materials are carefully designed and should work for the big mayority of skin textures(without desaturating or gamma (de)adjusting anything in PS, Gimp, etc). Leaving you to play with a few settings, Translucency and Glossiness(and MAYBE volumen scattering).
With only 5 changes you can get decent results.
The above image lacks translucency maps, but you already have them installed with DAZ Studio.
Something is not right with the surface settings. I think the Iray Optimized GF2 materials are carefully designed and should work for the big mayority of skin textures(without desaturating or gamma (de)adjusting anything in PS, Gimp, etc). Leaving you to play with a few settings, Translucency and Glossiness(and MAYBE volumen scattering).
With only 5 changes you can get decent results.
The above image lacks translucency maps, but you already have them installed with DAZ Studio.
Thanks. I found them and am adding them now, with the modified eyebrows.
I don't have a Nvidia card and am unlikely to be able to afford one any time soon or not, especially one that cost hundreds of pounds with lots of memory which seems to be what you are going to need if you want more than 1 figure and props in the scene. My machine is not all that powerful but personally I don't think the hardware should dictate whether or not I can produce good art or not. I often have to render in layers for large scenes this takes long enough in 3delight in Iray it would take forever.
I have light sets don't often use them out of the box, personally I don't like Lantios lights at all. Inaneglory's yes I use those a lot and I have been using Ubersurface 2 since it came out - I think you missed the point of my posts completely I don't have problems with 3delight and getting the effect I like especially as I really don't care about Photorealistic images its just not my thing. All I'm trying to say is 3Delight has it worth and not all of us are as keen on Iray as an end to a means and think its the solution to the Make Art Button.
I buy from other stores and don't usually have problems with things some things at other stores are Poser only things like Poser dynamics will not work at all in DS you need to read the info properly the only place you will find dynamics that work in DS is hear at the Daz Store, some Poser mats etc won't look the same in DS and need tweaking; you need to understand how to install products correctly and how to point DS to see the installed products, Poser products show up under the Poser runtime.
Buying from other stores is fine as long as you understand how things work differently in each program, perhaps until you do it would be best to just buy products that are created for the render engine of you choice; I also understand how some people just don't want to do any work on textures etc and just want a one click solution.
I read your post as a complaint about the render speed and thought you weren't clear on why it was slower.
LOL damnit :shut: You'd be surprised the opposite sexed names I've ran across over the years.
True, Iray is more of a "make everyone's art look exactly the same" button. ;)
It's not that it isn't extremely impressive, but photorealism is very hard to postwork into anything less-than-realistic and if you put all the amazing car renders we've already seen in one folder, you wouldn't be able to tell who rendered what. It's great that many people will be able to get nice results, but I personally don't find it all that 'artistic'. That's just me though, and I still enjoy looking at what other people are rendering with it.
...umm,,..based on subject material, think you can say who did what. Like who else but be does pics of Leela?
(and if they did I need to have a word with them).
...that's the Titan-X. Supposedly the MAxwell 980 will not be out until late summer at the earliest.
The 6GB Titan Black retailed for more than the Titan-X does.
First, hundreds of pounds is incorrect. http://www.amazon.co.uk/EVGA-NVIDIA-Graphics-DVI-I-DVI-D/dp/B00KO22F6Q/ref=sr_1_24?s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1431948241&sr=1-24
Second, you don't need any graphics card at all. The presence of a CUDA capable graphics card does not change how a render appears when it is done. The only difference a graphics card makes is speed. With 3Delight if you want more speed you have to replace the CPU and RAM and if you really want speed you have to spend more than the most expensive NVIDIA GeForce Graphics card on the market. (8 core 4+ghz CPU's with 32GB+ of RAM systems don't come cheap and that isn't even the fastest you can go.) With 3Delight, just because you have a dual core i5 running at 2.5ghz instead of a pair of 12 core Xenon Processors running at 3.2ghz does that mean you can't produce art? No, it means you will wait longer than the person with the dual 12 core Xenon Processors. (Note that is a computer that costs more than 4 TitanX Cards.) With Iray the hardware is both cheaper and easier to replace if you want more speed, unless you are using a laptop.
....my point exactly, you just phrased it better.
..or for that fact, even when using 3DL:
Fig 1, raw 3DL render
Fig 2. Postworked image
...same here, which is why before Iray I would use AoA's advanced lights instaead of UE.
My longest render time with Iray in CPU mode: 6h 10m, My longest (completed) render time with UE:16hr 30 min. Longest estimated render time with UE: 25hrs.
Daz_Spooky thank you for the link to the card, I haven't been able to find one under £100 and then only a 2GB one, now I need to figure out if it will fit my machine and if my son will stop growing (he's out grown his shoes 3 times in 3 months) and eating so much, I might be able to start saving up for one.
The nice thing about it is if you have a Motherboard that will handle an additional card, you can use that one to drive your monitors and a better card, once you can afford it, for doing the Iray calculations later.
The real funny one was using AoA's atmospheric camera for godrays, which blew out render time to 16+ hours.
Amusingly, doing the SSS thing in Iray for god rays is _faster_.
Hi,
First time I have looked at iray, so still early experimenting.
Looking at the "Firefly Filter" > "Nominal Luminance", it appears to only work for the first 39 iterations of the render. At 40 iterations, that control is lost from render output.
Is that a known issue?
Note they both look great under those circumstances, but time wise? LOL.
Hi Spooky,
No.
Here is an example.
To show problem better, I have disabled tone mapping (to give raw / linear output).
1. iterations at 39. Up until then render output going as expected.
2. iterations at 40. “Firefly Filter” > “Nominal Luminance” no longer controlling output
3. Due to no control of luminance level, render being washed out.