Landscapes designed for Iray
tl155180
Posts: 994
I would really like to see some landscapes created with Iray in mind.
I'm not talking HDRIs here, because I don't really like those and struggle to work out how to use them. And besides, I'd like to use the Iray Sun-Sky settings. So, I'm talking landscape props like http://www.daz3d.com/dry-mud-desert or http://www.daz3d.com/land-of-the-ice-cold-sun or http://www.daz3d.com/planet-x-1, but with textures designed to look right in Iray. Like these examples they would need to be surrounded by mountains or some sort of raised horizon (because you can't use skydomes effectively in Iray). Unfortunately all the ones I currently own are next to useless to me in Iray.
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Comments
Didn't you try to rework the surface shaders for iRay?
I simply reworked some sets by my own.
--> http://andysanderson.deviantart.com/art/The-Seaside-Set-558012006
--> http://andysanderson.deviantart.com/art/Tickling-Her-557870847
--> http://andysanderson.deviantart.com/art/Bungalow-Mirror-Scene-555916735
For the first start you should apply the iRay base shader and then play around with the glossy parameters.
Yes I did try that, and even had some help from the Daz technical team which improved things slightly, but ultimately landscape sets still come out looking very poor and unrealistic. Interiors, buildings, props etc are all fine, but for whatever reason many landscape textures do not adapt well to Iray even after experimenting with the parameters.
If they have displacement, be sure displacement subd is at 3 (and possibly higher).
Also, if you aren't absolutely committed to sun-sky, you CAN use skydomes -- just convert to Iray material and plug the base color texture into Emission (and then play with Luminosity until it's lit right). If that doesn't create the shadows you want, you can boost the sun effect by placing a point light (set to Sphere geometry) where the skydome's sun is (this can be tricky). If you really want to get fancy, you can place a spotlight set to Disk in the same place, but then you have to aim it.
Thanks for the tip, but I've already tried messing with the subd and it didn't work unfortunately.
The skydomes issue does have its work arounds, I know, but they do not produce good results in my eyes. If you make the skydome an emissive object then not only do you have the problem of the environmental lighting taking on the hue of the skydome (usually an unnatural blue haze), but you also wash-out the skydome image and block out the Iray sun, which means (as you point out) that you are forced to use a spotlight as an inferior replacement. The overall results just look very unnatural in my opinion. It'd probably work well for alien skies on other planets, but for earth daytime renders its not for me. Theres also the issue that some products have mountains etc on their skydomes to simulate far off scenery and if you made those emissive it'd look pretty bad.
Basically what I'm saying is that, while I know that there are ways to fudge the existing products in an effort to make them look better, it'd be really good if we could get new landscape products that just worked in Iray without the need to fudge.
You can use skydomes with Iray. I wrote a tutorial on one method, and there are others, such as Will's emissive dome interior.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/61704/tutorial-using-iray-with-3delight-skydomes
See what happens if you take a cube and texture it with the ground cover you're wanting to use. Try different lighting, incuding Iray Environment dome with some HDRi of your choice. Hide the image itself with Draw Dome set to Off, so that doesn't influence your critque of the scene. You may find that the problem isn't the texturing, but the lighting of that texturing.
Often, extreme landscapes are helped by using very angular light. if you prefer Sun/Sky, set the sun very low in the horizon.
nVidia offers a free normal map conversion tool for use in Photoshop that you might experiment with, to see if there's any improvement:
https://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-texture-tools-adobe-photoshop
Finally, you might try substituting an existing Iray-specific shader for use as snow or dirt. There's no pre-made shader for snow, but there is one for asphalt. In Photoshop tweak the levels of this texture to be mostly white, and resave as a new file. Apply the Asphalt shader from the NVIDIA examples collection. You may need to dial up the tiles count, as snow has a finer grain than asphalt. The NVIDIA examples are simpler than IrayUber, so they lack things like nodes for bump and displacement or normal maps. Your ground cover will need to not have any kind of height map in this case.
These aren't full solutions of course. Given time, I'm sure many of these scenes will come with tuned Iray textures.
I think I managed to make a half-decent snow with metallic flakes, though it needs more tweaking.
As for mountains vs. sky, one solution is to use products with actual mountain props. Another solution is to use multiple masked domes.
Really, the simplest Iray solution is probably picking up a high quality HDRI pack that's designed to properly light a scene. That's a very simple plug and play, and you can see the HDRI packs as essentially landscape packs.
Thanks for the tips - I appreciate the attempts at helping me resolve the issues, but it wasn't really what I was asking for. Like I say, I know there are fiddly workarounds for some of these issues which produce varying levels of success and I have already tried most of them but I posted in the Product Suggestion forum because I was suggesting what new products I'd like to see - new landscapes for Iray so that I don't have to do these workarounds.
Again, I'm aware of that particular skydome workaround, but I don't like it personally. If you cut the top off the skydome and then shine the Iray sun-sky into it what you end up with is a shadow cast by one side of the remainder of the skydome. If you're the type of artist who only needs to render one image from a particular angle then that wouldn't bother you but if you need to shoot lots of images from multiple angles to tell a story then you end up having to move the sun around to avoid the problem, which ruins your timeline.
Yes, I realize the suggestions don't replace actual products, but we all know it'll be a long time until such products -- at least good ones -- come out. Until then, all we have are the work-arounds.
Perhaps you didn't realize you can section the dome at any angle, so there is never EVER any shadow. It is easy to retilt the sectioning plane for any shot you want should the sun change position. Section planes are provided precisely for these types of situations. It's not really a work-around, but a common tool in CG.
The problem is...the ONLY advantage of IRAY is that it is a GPU renderer (without GPU rendering, it's just an average PBR renderer). You start loading up with all the geometry involved in a massive landscape...and guess what, you no longer have the advantage of GPU rendering. Yes, in most cases geometery is 'cheaper' than highly detailed images...but when it comes to a a single image for a backdrop or a few hundred MB of geometry AND and another couple hundred MB of textures for that geometry, you will quickly run out of memory on the video card, dropping the render to CPU mode.
As to other 'problems'...most of those are tonemapping settings.
Well, the other advantages of Iray include physically accurate materials, easier translucency and backscatter of light, easier and more straight-forward light set up, and all of that. Recently I tried going back to 3DL and I found that if I used meshlights, everything slowed down to Iray levels (and also tended to lock up my machine since it wasn't GPU), or it was really weird trying to set up all this pseudo backscatter effects and whatnot so it looked decent.
I'm not saying Iray is better or everyone should use it or anything, there are plenty of things 3DL can do easily that are hard in Iray (like objects that don't cast shadows and some weird procedural effects, RI curves, etc).
No, I did realise that but it still doesn't help. I'll try to explain with an example - I have a camera pointed north at my model and shes facing south towards the camera. The sunlight is shining more or less north on her front at a 45 degree angle and casting shadows out behind her. Now, if I cut the top off the skydome and use it as a kind of curved backdrop prop, as you're suggesting, then that would work ok for that shot. However, in the same scene I have another character in front of her who she is talking to that is facing north with their back to the first camera. I now want to face a second camera south to show this character's face and the first character's back, but I don't want to change the sun at all because it would mess up the timeline. So what I'd end up with in the background is a section of skydome that is shrouded in shadow, or I'd have to cut off that side of the skydome completely to let the sun passed which would look inconsistent. So there is ALWAYS a shadow from one angle with your method (unless of course you move the sun, which would ruin the timeline in the story).
You're thinking of it from the point of view of just wanting to render one image of a scene and be done with it. Thats not what I do.
A further advantage beside the automaticly present iRay photometric light (comparable to pure IDL in 3Delight) is the transmission property to produce that natural murkyness of water. (see attachment)
With 3Delight I had to use the omnifreaker UberVolume shader. Even using simple UE2 that effect slowed render dramatically down. With iRay's transmission effect I didn't notice any influence to the render time.
The only negative point is that iRay still has a bug related to refraction depending on the incident angle of the sunlight.
If your surface has small structures which must be produced by displacement you have to raise the subD value. The smaller the details, the higher the subD value. In my case above a certain level DAZ crashed.
Keep both halves of the dome and hide the one you aren't looking at. If there's strong sun shining from behind one of the figures then it's going to be in shadow when filmed from its front anyway - if you want to see both you need to arrange or light the scene differently (a film crew would use reflectors, which again can be hidden for half of the shots if need be, if they couldn't arrange to have the light coming from the side).
I'm not sure we're on the same page here... or maybe I'm just misunderstanding your wording. The point is that in the south facing shot the strong sun would be coming from not just behind the 2nd figure but also from behind the skydome section far beyond them, which would mean that the inside of the skydome would not be lit by the sunlight. If I set up reflectors to light it they would have to be huge and the light from them would have to stretch a very big distance. It doesn't sound practical at all to me.
I really didn't expect so much opposition to this product idea. Is everyone really saying that they'd rather keep on doing messy work-arounds with skydomes than have, for instance, HDRI skies that are one click solutions?
All shaders....and they are not advantages, just differences. Now if you want to talk about Studio, itself, the simple answer is Iray has the more modern shaders and tools than 3DL does. This is what gives Iray the perceived advantage.
There's no opposition for the product, but you have to know these aren't huge sellers. You'll be a waiting a long time for anything decent. Until then, you have limited choices: A) Work with the sets you have and find a way to improve their texturing; B) Use a skydome with an image for those situations where it works; or C) Don't render these types of scenes.
Richard is exactly right that you can use multiple planes for various shots, and still avoid shadows. Of course it's more work to find setups that cooperate with your environment. If you were doing this on a movie, every change in camera angle would require a resetting of the set. Whether the effort is worth it, that's up to you.
Recently, another user here posted a different technique of using a skydome with its refraction weight and index set to 1. You might try this as an alternative. In short, there are many ways to get what we need until someone else provides the product for us.
If it really is just HDRi skies you're looking for, there's plenty of those available on the Internet, some paid, many free. However, in your first post you said you didn't like them, hence the alternative suggestions for using sun/sky environment and a skydome for the backdrop.
In my sig is a list of HDRI sites...there are many sky only ones. In fact CGSkies is pretty much JUST skies. They have just about everything...and most of their items have at least a free low res version. The high res, suitible for both lighting and backdrop usage are pay for items.
Thanks mjc1016 - I have signatures switched off so couldn't see that, but I've checked out the site and looks good (although the paid ones are expensive). I'll give them a try. Edit: For some reason the lighting in these sample HDR skies comes out really, really dark. Do you find this as well?
Tobor - I did say that I don't like HDRIs but that was really more in terms of the context of the post, which was using them as landscapes. Somehow this thread then became all about skydomes - no idea how, lol. An HDRI to cover just the sky while I'm using a geometry-based landscape is a possibility that I'd be onboard with, assuming I can find a sky-only HDRI that produces the look I want, because as far as I'm aware you can't use an HDRI and the Iray sun at the same time. I think its going to be the best solution for Iray in the long run though.
I am not sure how you would do it in iray
but in Octane render 4 Carrara I can use a big sphere with 360° clouds I rotate west to east but add a transparency NOT an alpha/opacity channel and the clouds cast shadows etc while still using the Octane Sky for illumination, obviously you do not want a sun on the image though unless that bit were an emitter or your distant light placed there.
a skydome done like this has the same result but static but for still images what you would want.
it is less intensive resource wise than IBL too.
i do not know the iray equivalent setting Octane recognises Carrara's transparency channel so maybe Iray has a similar one to the 3Delight channel in the shader bricks, Iray still baffles me a bit shader wise and lighting, it should work but does not seem to.
I have read that the cloud-only domes (which use transparency) from this set http://www.daz3d.com/ultimo-paradiso can be used in conjunction with the Iray sun to create a cloudy sky. I haven't tried it myself though - I'm waiting for the set to come on sale.
That's pretty easy to do with Iray. The only potential problem is that the clouds aren't lit 'properly.'
TL: I think the problem is that people agree with you, and... well, there's nothing much to discuss after that. So the discussion veers, naturally, to how one can do similar things right now.
Apparently you can make the clouds emissive and then brighten them up to the right level... apparently. Again, I haven't tested it myself.
Yeah, thanks William (thats your first name right? Apologies if not). I think I'm just getting a little over-tetchy because its extremely difficult for me to breathe at the moment and it tends to put one on edge thinking you're about to die several times a day. Apologies to everyone for not taking your suggestions in the spirit in which they were offered.
Tony
Unless someone makes a product workarounds is all we can do.
a light up your dome shader or DZscript might be a great idea for a PA to create except there are so many different flavours of domes and skyboxes.
I have this set and will try that out. Previously my Iray renders with it turned out all black -- not light at all, but thgart might have been just with the HDRi and not sun/sky only.
There is a new beach product, Summer Island or something, that was built with Iray in mind. It has "sky props" that are set in the distant sky, and on which you can place clouds or other images. I don't know how well they work, but that's not much different than taking a skydome and removing 2/3 or 3/4 of the polys on one side, leaving a sort of amphitheater shell. You can actually do that right in Daz Studio, using the geometry editor, and hiding all the polys you "paint" over.
I have Vue Infinite and xStream where I make my own skies at 8 and 16k (exr and HDM files). They work great in Iray. Also, you can in fact use not only the dome but a distant light that is very good as the sun sub. You need to change the lumens to 100 and strength down to between 3 to 10% or it will be washed out.