Show Us Your Iray Renders. Part III
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The OpenCL in Reality was cool and render fast when I checked it long time ago ..
This is so true...Daniel!...i totally agree and understand your frustration...even though its true that Iray produces outstanding realism...this comes at a very high price for the average user who does not have basic knowledge of 3D applications...on the other hand those people who have been using programs like Reality Luxrender and Octane or 3Dsmax for years...for those people Iray is practically a walk in the park...
those are the cold hard facts.
...never used 3DS or Octane (both way out of my budget). Worked a bit with Reality/Lux until I became frustrated with material and camera issues in Reality4. That is the extent of my PBR experience. As I mentioned in another thread Iray felt a lot more intuitive to me in comparison. I think since Iray's introduction into Daz, I've rendered maybe two scenes in 3D and none in Lux..
...I take it you were using the GPU mode, correct? In CPU mode I'd still have a tonne of noise even after 10 - 11 hours.
Yes GPU
...I take it you were using the GPU mode, correct? In CPU mode I'd still have a tonne of noise even after 10 - 11 hours.
Thats really awesome Timmins. I will have to mess around with that. I wonder if i can use a water texture displacement map above the lighted area to get the illusion of the water caustics....hrm. You have given me a good starting place thanks man.
Shaders and all new files are up in your Account under Product Library.. I don't see it in the I Manager
I think this is the one they mean: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewreply/817055/
Yes, that's it. Thank you, Melanie. :)
I'm used to copy the important posts and save them in a textfile format just in case the forum will be inaccessible the time I need the info.
About the choice of either "Glass - Thin - Clear" or "Water - Thin" shader preset, when altering the value for "Refraction Index" anyways, it's really irrelevant which one you choose since the only difference between them is their Refraction Index.
Thin Glass or Thin Water don't have volume so it is like soup air bubble and the refraction value means nothing , Window Glass or real Water have volume so that make it different .
But the construction of Genesis eye is horrible so Thin Water will be your better choice if you going to use it without modification
and if you are handy forget about the cornea and create one from the eye refection surface by selecting poly for the cornea using geometry editor and create new material surface, the transition between cornea and the rest will be much smoother than it is in the original setup and without black edge ring or other funky stuff .. and you can use real values then .. unfortunately you can't share it
I love all your products! What is the name of the hair on your Unshaven 2 promo Image? Thank you!
Thank you , that are my custom made hair , geometry based each hair no trans mapped .... unfortunately not in my store
Ok, this is the first time in my webcomic that I feel like an Artist...
Warning, blood:
http://thefarshoals.webcomic.ws/comics/24
Also, you might want to look up 'third of may'... hint hint.
There are a few ways to get the reflection on the eyes and not on the glass, just depends on which hack you want to use. Here are a few I came up with.
1. Render the scene twice once with the eye reflection light on, once with it off. Take the two renders into an image editor to combine the two renders.
2. Use canvases and LPE's to separate your lighting into different layers. You can render the scene lights to different layers and edit the eye reflection light to only effect the eyes. The iray blog has an article about this called Compositing with Light Path Expressions.
3. You can put a very small point light in front of each eye with the '"Render Emittor" set to false. I've attached some renders using this method with a screen shot of the setup. Please ignore the scene setup it was just thrown together really quickly, I was focused on the highlight, not the reset of the scene other than having a reflective surface behind the figure. The close up was not fully resolved as I only cared about the highlight resolving.
In all three cases though the eye material setup is essential. There have been previous post on that. In this scene I used the same setup as I recommend earlier but I did turn volume on the cornea and eye reflection surface.
Taking a break from what I was doing...
This eye advice looks good, but is a lot of work for us amateurs. Here's hoping that someone has a collection of Iray Eyes in their production line? I have a feeling it would sell.
The easy road is use default Iray skin optimization and remember to set cornea shaping to 1 (if you have the morph, I forget which pack has it, but I think there are free ones available)
It might not be perfect, but it's good enough for most.
...as I am not into portraits or extreme close ups (except for character proofing), I find spending a great deal of time on getting that "perfect" eye reflection to be more than needed as usually characters in my scenes are more distant from the camera and the effect has a minimal impact at best..
There have been many discussions and suggestions regarding Iray settings for eyes here, with the main difference between them being whether to use the Thin Water shader or the Thin Glass shader for the cornea and tear, there have also been claims that setting the Caustic Sampler to on would improve the finished result. So I decided to test it. The top two renders in the composite image below use the DAZ Iray Thin Water "Uber shader" on the cornea and tear, and the bottom two the DAZ Iray Thin Glass "Uber shader". And the render to the left in each pair was made with the caustic sampler on, while the render to the right in each pair was made with the caustic shader set to off.
As can be seen, by me at least, is that using the Thin Water shader gives a more life like result, with clearer eyes, than using the Thin Glass shader, the test also shows that setting the caustic sampler to on makes no visible difference for the eyes.
Based on suggestions earlier in this forum I have been using the Thin Water shader with caustics on for the past few weeks, and will continue to use that shader, but I will no longer have the caustic sampler on as my default, since the around 40% longer render times the caustic sampler causes in a closeup like these doesn't result in any visible improvement in the finished result.
(If you're looking at the images on a laptop or other small screen you might not be able to see any difference at all between the four renders, but if you look at them on a 27" or larger screen with high resolution and good contrast it's easy to see the difference between the upper and the lower pair of images, while the two images in each pair are virtually identical even on a large monitor.)
Edit: after further close inspection I modified my conclusion regarding the caustic sampler, it makes no visible difference for the Thin Glass shader either...
What I'm finding is that the real problem is the iris.
A lot of eye stuff ends up with the irises looking goofy weird. My current approach has been to put the diffuse map into the gloss map, set the diffuse map darker, and handle it that way. Otherwise... weirdness.
All I see are colorful pancakes with a pin hole , a donuts would be so much better lol
btw I am almost done with my Iray eyes product so you will love it , I promise !
In the renders above I used the settings suggested by DAZcjones (see link one page back in this thread), and the cornea bulge set to 1.5 instead of 1.0 as previously suggested here. As for irises looking goofy, most iris textures for DS that I have seen look goofy no matter how you tweak the settings in the surface tab. So I might make my own one day, or at least make some improvements to existing maps, just like I've done with most other textures/maps I use.
This is a quick and dirty side by side with Iray (LEFT)and OctaneRender(RIGHT)...Iray took around 30 minutes....Octane took 15 to achieve the same resolution. It's not a fair comparison because the lighting setups are different...but I think Iray compares favorably with Octane. Iray has less setup time and translates materials better than Octane. Look around the eyes of the Octane render...I would normally have to do post work on that eyelash flap and eye reflection. Another variable is that I have more experience with Octane. I just picked up Iray and started to use it. Considering the price....Iray is a real breakthrough for hobbyists. I suppose the Octane render is more photorealistic...but the Iray render is more dramatic..IMHO.
Just a quickie post... I seem to have lost my sub notifications ... again! *sigh*
For example, here is my flow for a close-up figure in Iray. (If it's not a close-up, I can skip almost all of this, because it won't be visible)
Figure: Genesis 2 Male
Skin: Benjamin (yep, Genesis 1 skin, what the heck)
Clicked on iray male skin optimized, to convert to good starting place.
Changed translucency weight to .2. Darker skin is, well, less translucent. You might want to keep this high for certain dark/ruddy skin tones, like some Indian and other groups.
Refraction of skin to 1.41, refraction weight .12. This adds a nice softness to the entire skin.
Changed Top coat to Fresnel, IOR 1.34 (sweat, probably)
Eye Surface Cornea shape changed to 1.0 (part of one of the morph packages and also can be found free, I think, to round out the cornea)
Changed skin/lips to PBR Specular/Glossiness.
Generally I like Gloss to be around .2-.3, and then Top Coat Glossiness to be .7-.8, and then tweak weight accordingly -- my logic is that the gloss handles the normal lighting of the skin itself, then the top coat adds the effect of skin oil or other moisture (IE: if the figure is wet, increase top coat glossiness and weight)
Pupil: Glossiness weight to 0. Pupils are holes.
Cornea/eye reflection/tears: Meh, I've jumped through all sorts of hoops. At this point, I think you can just leave them as is.
Iris: I like to reduce the Glossy color a little, to Val 192 (.54 .54 .54), but that's an issue of taste. I've found very dark irises (like default Benjamin) look kind of bad, and I was better served starting with a lighter map and then adding color to shift to what I wanted.
In the renders above I used the settings suggested by DAZcjones (see link one page back in this thread), and the cornea bulge set to 1.5 instead of 1.0 as previously suggested here. As for irises looking goofy, most iris textures for DS that I have seen look goofy no matter how you tweak the settings in the surface tab. So I might make my own one day, or at least make some improvements to existing maps, just like I've done with most other textures/maps I use. They look good to me. I don't see any "pancakes", bit I'm not sure what that means other than flat, and they don't look flat to me.
How bout other gen characters? Why optimizers only for gen2?
The Iray Content update is still waiting release. Maybe there will be some there?
The only one I found was the one in the public beta (which is also available via manual d/l) so I downloaded them, I guess we will see when the official one is up. Will there be a notification of any kind when it is?
Here again we have Star, my dyslectic dragon bait girl, close up, with two changes. First, yes, I do have the corona bulge morph. The slider is standard grey, so it likely comes with the basic G2F morph package. I agree, not perfect, but quite good enough. (At least until Mec4d delivers on her promise! ;) )
The other change? Well, by far most of my stuff uses female characters so I thought I would skip Mec4d’s Unshaven 2 package. I flipped through it in the store anyway, just because I liked drooling over the renders. Then I got to the last two images and discovered you can apply the beard color shaders to most any decent transmapped hair.
So much for skipping Unshaven. The following is U2 Golden Blonde on Zea Hair unmodified. The scene’s light is the basic default sky dome. In direct sunlight it might be a little too translucent. The problem may be that the Zea Hair braids are hollow, making them render as less substantial than one would expect. I’ll be playing a bit. Of course I’ll be playing a bit. This is Iray!
As an aside, a friend of mine, disappointed with Reaper Miniature’s decision to switch to plastic 28 mm fantasy role playing miniatures, started his own company that is continuing to work in metal… Dragonbait Miniatures. I thought the name funny.
Star is not amused.
What colours did you use for translucency and glossiness? Dark brown or black skin needs blueish grey colours for that, not the colours used for fair/white skin. I use a darker blueish grey for translucency and a lighter blueish grey for gloss.
The composite (censored) image below shows two renders of dark skin that I've made, with blueish translucency and glossiness colour. I also use customized specular maps etc to get the "healthy shine" in the skin, which is important if you want renders of dark skin to look good.
I don't have access to the exact settings right now since that computer is currently doing other things, but I'll post them later in this thread.
Image removed
I used default pink that the iray skin provides. Theoretically pure red is 'right,' but... eh, the results look good to me.
I find for most dark skin it's actually fine, assuming you drop translucency a little. For really deep black skin, yeah, bluish gray would be a good idea.
As for glossy color, I stick to grays anyway. I used the default Benjamin glossy 'color' map (which is a shade map of the skin, which works well enough).