SBH = Garibaldi2.0?
Sven Dullah
Posts: 7,621
in The Commons
DAZ bought GB, they say...updated and improved, they say...no wait, it looks and behaves exactly like Garibaldi, even has the Garibaldi shader (for use with 3DL). So what's so new and exciting, why is it so much better? More control? No! Proper UV mapping? No! Simply looks better? No!
Guys, please enlighten me!
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Comments
The ability to use ot with iRay?
PAs can make it dforceable
Keep your old Garibaldi too, they work independently. The original one we purchased has .obj export.
Tks for the input, yeah what I thought. The "hype" was obviously about making it work with IRay. And yup, GB Express was the first plugin I installed after upgrading to Mac Monterey /DS 4.20. The GB editor of course is upside down and DS shuts down to desktop when I even think about changing the tip color, otherwise works just as well as the SBH editor:))
So the SBH kinda looks like a downgrade to me, but happy that IRay users now can utilize it.
I think D/S always had some issues with the GB shader. I tend to apply a regular shader preset to the hair as soon as I'm finished with the plugin. Then it worked fine.
Yes it was always buggy:) The flipside of your method, though, is that then you wouldn't use the dedicated 3Delight hair specular BRDF , that has built in volumetric effects like translucency and SSS;)
SBH (i.e., garibaldi 2.0) is basically the best and only option you have in Daz Studio.
Having recently started to use Blender's hair systems, i now realise that SBH was actually pretty good in terms of ease of use and styling, albeit slower to iterate and takes longer at rendering.
In terms of your critique about the shaders and UVs. Um, just change the shader... Daz has a free dual lobe hair shader built into Daz Studio, and there are SBH shaders on the Daz Store. I use this one: https://www.daz3d.com/real-hair-shaders-for-dforce-and-strand-based-hairs ;
I'm sorry but is there a better hair or fur system in Daz Studio? No there isn't. If you dont use SBH editor then you only have the (mostly) ugly 2D-looking hair they sell on the Daz Store.
well the hype was about it being free and basically the only option besides like LAMH or whatever.
Also wasnt SBH Editor added as part of Daz Studio like years ago, youre only now complaining about it?
I think you are stating the obvious here, but tks anyway! And switching to IRay just for the sake of rendering SBH is not a viable option for me.
Since you ask, been using GB Express for many years. Recently upgraded my hardware and was forced to also upgrade from DS4.9 to 4.20. So finding out there are actually less options available and no actual improvements from a 3DL perspective was disappointing. Now, fixing the uv-layout and making the SBH accept textures and adding .obj export would be an improvement.
well AFAIK the Garibaldi source code was released so someone else could in theory develop a fork with other features
I cannot seem to find it though as the site is now reference only
https://www.garibaldiexpress.com/
how much of what DAZ added is accessible via the API I wouldn't know, obviously not the dforce curves but shader features might be
I happen to "know" that the devs didn't see it fit to fix the uv issue. It's about changing a couple of lines of code if I'm not mistaken.
Have you put in a feature request?
Actually not yet. Wanted to gather some more information first.
it's a strand, does it really need to be UV mapped?
I dont know about that there 3DL shader you speak of, but the Iray shader just has root and tip color biases to adjust the hair color lengthwise across the strand, and then if im not mistaken color is mapped based on the UV of the surface the SBH is connected to...
Yes I agree that a better uvmap could be used. Upon occasion I have straightened it out in good ol' Hexie but that task is something of a nightmare.
Garibaldi has its own OBJ exporter, but Stand-Based hair is exportable to OBJ and other formats as part of the scene. It's a change in workflow but not a feature loss (the reverse in fact).
So the strands have implicit UVs and can also extract the UVs from the surface from which they grow to pick up the underlying map colour.
Aah, thank you!
Wish they had retained the .obj export feature (with textures, of course)
I recently put in a feature request to allow for UV to be retained when working with 3Delight. The reason I wish for .obj with UV export is a want to render animal fur with toon shaders. Maybe the shader will be ugraded in Daz Studio 5... here's hoping my computer can handle the upgrade...
Oh that's interesting, will have to give a try, thanks :-)
We may have cross-posted https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/7705836/#Comment_7705836
What do you mean by issues? Daz Studio is esentially just passing the shader and settings to the render engine, so unless there are issues there it's likely that it is the renderer or the shader is the issue.
or any other render engine that couldn't handle RiSpec curves, or indeed any other usage (such as mesh export) that couldn't handle RiSpec curves.
Okay, I tend to think of the renderer as a part of D/S. However as I recall, if I start trying to use the GB shader "as is" in D/S, it did not work too well.
This was back a few editions of D/S by the way.
When I tried to make changes on the surface tabs to the GB shader, D/S at times kicked up a fuss [lagging and/or crashing or whatever]. D/S worked better if I changed the shader to the default shader preset types. [pre-Iray days] [stopped lagging and/or crashing etc.] So I just keep it that D/S doesn't particularly like the GB shader type and replace it. No big deal. Translation would be that the shader is the issue.
Arguably the Garibaldi shader is the best there is for rendering RiCurves with the ancient standard vanilla 3Delight tech that DAZ still supports. Note that it requires a linear workflow with gamma correction enabled both in rendersettings and in the shader. Without that it's extremely hard to get meaningful results.
GB Express was not stable, it crashed DS to desktop quite randomly. I learned to save after every edit to either curves or shader;) I haven't had the time yet to give the SBH a serious try, hoping it's working better in general, but I've already had some crashes so not holding my breath...
Thanks, Richard Haseltine. Maybe my export settings were incorrect. I've tried exporting a scene with the Daz House Cat tabby and its strand based hair, and the UV coordinates were lost even in Iray. What export setting do I apply to retain UV such as tabbies, tigers and leopards so I can apply a 3Delight shader once imported back into studio? Kinda like I can with LAMH (well not exactly as LAMH creates textures for the furs based on the figure texture; just the general idea of being able to apply a texture to the fur corresponding to the texture on the figure).
I've used 3dl shaders with dForce Hair on a few occasions. I've even experimented with PWToon shader, heh.
There are no 3dl shaders that will do texture UV based on the underlying figure, which is obviously a problem for some things. But there are some ways around that, and for many uses that's not so critical.
I think I need to (try to) comission a certain fox to make a proper pathtracer compatible SBH shader;) The GB shader of course renders solid black with scripted pathtracing so can't use it anyway. Wowie's AWE Hair shader is actually based on the 3DL hair spec BRDF, same as Garibaldi, and sees RiCurves, but it is geared towards rendering traditional polygonal hair cards, so, due to the uv-solution you get this flat shade (root-tip blending of course works), and, even worse, you can't adjust specular roughness, it's either 0 or 1. So yeah I use curves for brows, vaellus-type stuff, armpit- etc hair, long hair looks just plain bad, but renders in seconds/minutes.
Edit: Made this scene some year ago to test AWE Hair shader on GB hair. So it's still useful for obscure non-PBR-stuff, but as you can see the diffuse color is uniform.