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Opacity maps are (usually) black and white textures, used to mask out/make invisible parts of the geometry, where black will be invisible and white willl be opaque. This process costs processing power.
You could probably use the geometry editor to remove the Ivy, but that won't be needed, as, if you hide them, they won't get passed on to the renderer and won't affect rendertimes.
...also, if you select a surface, for example the Ivy leaves, and in the surface editor scroll down to the bottom, you find the visibility section. Here you can turn on/off visibility for camera, occlusion/indirect light, reflections and shadows. Meaning you could make the leaves invisible but still contribute to global illlumination, show in reflective surfaces and cast shadows. Or you could make them visible to camera but have them not show up in reflections, etc. Turning off all four visibility buttons is effectively the same as hiding them in the scene pane. The surface would still show in viewport but not in render.
ah i see, thanks
and i'm interested in whether increasing the number of rays branching off could improve the photorealism
Well, as I mentioned somewhere, upping the diffuse depth to 6+ will only result in long rendertimes with very little visual gain. IMHO 3 is a good number. Try setting it to 0 to turn off GI/bouncelight and see the difference.
Do note that Shaded Haven is an old environment with low resolution textures and lacking necessary controlmaps to take fulll advantage of the options available in the shaders. To step it up towards realism you would have to know how to make those maps in an image editor. Or replace the original maps with PBR textures (lots of free ones online, PolyHaven is good).
It's much easier to get good results converting IRay products, as they usually ship with the necessary maps (metallicity, roughness, bump/displacement, normal maps) to make them look physically plausible
And lighting is where it all starts. The light setup I provided was just a rough starting point, you might want to adjust intensity levels to your liking, test various skydome textures, rotate the aweEnvironment around the y-axis to change light direction and so on. (The emitter and dome environment sphere is parented to the aweEnvironment, but you can unparent the emitter pivot point and rotate it independently if you wish.
The environment sphere is using the environment shader, which is a fairly simple ambient emissive shader. But it has tons of adjustment options (in the surface editor pane) for finetuning the appearance and light. It also has the same visibility options I described earlier. So turning off camera visibility will make it invisible but still emit light and show in reflective surfaces. Turning off indirect light/occlusion will turn off the diffuse light emitted, but it will still produce reflections, unless you turn them off. So use the indirect light/occlusion toggle to see how much impact the env. sphere has on the whole scene.
This also means you could use one skytexture for camera visibility and another for lighting and a third for reflections
hmm, sorry maybe not sure if we're referring to the same concept with regards to the diffuse shading
and oh i see, earlier you converted some of the textures and maps of Shaded Haven right
...so I made a series of demo-renders, much easier than trying to explain;)
There's the aweEnvironment with a pitchblack env. sphere that does not contribute to the lighting, a ds standard spotlight with pure white light, physical falloff and raytraced shadows, aimed at the red plane but slightly overlapping to partly illuminate the bigger green plane. Also a ground plane and a sphere with an almost white diffuse color. Diffuse roughness is 0 on everything, so pure Lambert diffuse here:
Diffuse Depth 3, Reflection depth 2 (wowie's defaults)
DD0 RD0 = no bounce light no reflections, only primary rays
DD1 RD0
DD3 RD0
DD16 RD0
DD3 RD 16
My conclusion: The difference between DD3 and DD16 is smaller than one would think, which means wowie did a great job under the hood, optimizing his stuff for speed.
Ok, please explain;)
I used the original maps best I could, since I'm not allowed to share modified versions of the maps. I think I used the bumpmaps for the wood parts as roughnessmaps, I inverted them using the "invert roughness" button, found right above the visibility buttons in the surface editor. Not optimal but better than nothing;)
nice, these renders look pretty good
how do the surface materials compare to the one used for the central stone wall in your Shaded Haven render, the wall with the tap in it
oh i see, maybe we could go to DMs. and i mean that when a ray bounces off a diffuse surface, it splits into multiple rays going in multiple directions, and i'm wondering if that number of split rays can be modified
and also, the surface that's being used for the green wall in the test render, how do i apply it to every surface in the Shaded Haven
The surfaces in the testscene were just the aweSurface default with a generic diffuse color using the color picker, and the default specular roughness is 1%, with 100% reflection strength, (I dialed back a bit on reflections here). The SH stonewall I set to maybe 30% roughness and maybe dialled in some diffuse roughness too. 0% roughness equals perfectly sharp reflections, which should be used only for extremely glossy surfaces like mirrors, smooth metal and glass/water. Most surfaces use values arond 15-50%, think asphalt, stone walls, sand, fabrics etc.
And then there's the Glossy Freznel slider which is linked to the IoR (index of refraction) value, which makes surfaces at a grazing angle more reflective, the smaller the freznel roughness is set to, or the higher the IoR:) Read the manual;) Anyway, most dielectic materials use an IoR of about 1.5. Fabric is different, usually very rough with a rough glossy freznel, and a lower IoR.
Hmm... I had forgotten about LR
I actually got ALL their 4k V4 skins while they were still here, and haven't tried converting any of them to awe yet...what a great idea
hmm i'm having this issue with CPU rendering Iray
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/670116/iray-render-looks-very-pink-technical-problem#latest ;
oh i see, so the surfaces in your test render are awe surfaces right
and also you also converted the surfaces of the Shaded Haven to awe surfaces too, and the main geometric light-scattering parameters for the awe surfaces are the diffuse roughness and the specular roughness right
so hope you don't mind if i ask, what are the values of the light-scattering parameters of the green wall, and how do i input changing the light-scattering parameters of the Shaded Haven surfaces to match those of the green wall
That's correct! To be specific: They have the aweSurface shader applied to them.
Yes. everything except the environment sphere that uses the aweEnvironment shader, and the light emitter that uses the awePT arealight shader.
Yes, diffuse- and specular roughness are important for defining how lightrays react to the surface. Also bump-, displacement-, normal-. IoR-. and GlossyFresnel roughness settings will have an impact.
As I mentioned, I just used the aweSurface defaults with a 0% diffuse roughness and a 1% specular roughness. This is what you get if you go to file menu/create new primitive/primitive plane, select the plane in the scenetab and its surface in the surface editor tab, then go to your ContentLibrary/shader presets/wowie/awe shading kit and double click the aweSurface icon. Then go back to the surface tab, find diffuse color /white by default), click on the color field to open the color picker and pick the color of your choice.
To save that as a shader preset, have the plane and its surface selected, save as shader preset.
To apply the shader preset to all surfaces of Shaded Haven, select the Pergola and its surfaces, doubleclick your preset.
oh interesting, cos i was reading the documentation and 1% specular roughness still seems pretty specularly shiny (Page 4), and the green wall doesn't seem to be shiny
http://docs.daz3d.com/lib/exe/fetch.php/public/read_me/index/55819/55819_awe-surface-user-guide.pdf
also are there more updated versions of the documentation
I designed the demo-scene to show diffuse bounces as clearly as possible, which is why I used a narrow light spread from the spotlight as to not light the sphere directly. Had I included the sphere, you would have seen the specular highlight on it. The planes are perfectly flat, and placed at such an angle to the light and camera, that the specular highlights on the planes can't be seen here, only the reflections. Had I used spheres instead (convex surfaces) you would have seen the highlights, (or, more correctly, the specular highlights from the spotlight would have found their way to the camera).
Yes, in the AWE Shading kit zip you downloaded. It may already sit in you runtime (ContentLibrary/readme:s or documentation or similar), if you installed with DIM, or just DL the zip again, move the manual to your desktop or whatever, delete the zip.
thanks so much for all the help
and in the Shaded Haven DUF which you sent me, under the Surfaces Editor menu, i see a very long list of parameters, starting from Transmission, Transmission to Roughness, Metalness ... all the way to .. UV Projection Influence, Smooth, Angle
just wondering is there documentation which explains each of the parameters
also the parameter which is important here for your Shaded Haven render is "Specular 2 Rougness" right
and what does "Max Ray Depth" mean
i'm also a bit confused by what this text means
additionally your series of demo renders looks really good. i tried rendering your Shaded Haven scene again with Max Specular Bounce Depth turned to zero and unfortunately it looked quite not good, i was wondering could you teach me how to modify the Shaded Haven surfaces properly, thanks
and IKEA's catalogues, they don't take photos but they do CGI renders, i think that is pretty impressive in terms of the photorealism
Yes, in detail...I repeat, if you missed the aweSurface user guide, download it again and put it in a safe place!
I guess you could say it's one of the most important properties for defining a material. Glass and metals are not as rough as natural stone, for example.
The maximum number of ray bounces is limited by this value. In the classic scenario with parallell mirrors, you will not get more bouncing reflections than specified here.
Right, I'll try to explain: Every surface can use their own trace settings if you wish. Example: You could use a higher trace depth on reflective surfaces and a lower for fabric and other very rough surfaces. (The same goes for Irradiance samples, saturation, tonemapping and temperature). This is all done in the surface editor, and allows you to manually optimize your scenes for faster rendering, if needed. As always, quality vs rendertime. So, if you set trace depth for a surface to 16, but in rendersettings you have specified 12, 12 is what you get. if you have specified 16 in rendersettings but 12 in surface settings, 12 is what you get.
Now, have a look at the awe Environment Light. This provides a very easy way of adjusting all this globally, instead of having to type in values manually for each surface. Simply go to the Override section of the light and enable overrides for Irradiance(shadow)samples, SSS samples, aweHair samples, diffuse depth, specular depth, metal depth, hair depth (for the aweHair shader), type in the values you want to use, done. If you still would like to use a different value on some surface, you can override the aweLight overrides in the surface editor.
This is how I do it, so I used the aweEnvironment light overrides in the ShadedHaven scene. Feel free to use the overrides or disable them and set them per surface instead! And again, if your rendersettings values are smaller, that's what will be used for the final render output.
And a general note: Wowie's default settings do make sense. Raising these numbers a lot will not automagically make the render photoreal. It's also very much down to the quality/resolution of textures, the topology, the lighting, the environment etc. A metal object in a dark room will be dark, no matter the number of bounces.
Hope this helps!
That's because you literally turn off specular/reflection with a bounce depth of 0, just like setting diffuse depth to 0 will disable indirect light (Global Illumination).
I think I can't help much more, other than give technical/ general advice. You have to understand it took me 5 years to learn what I know today about 3DL pathtracing and wowie's shaders. I'll share what I think I know happily, no need to thank me, as I'm just passing on stuff I've learned from other forum members, today long gone. But when it comes to artistic interpretations, you're on your own;)
yeah sorry i did find the user guide but i don't think that it covers a list of all the parameters, i only found the "Iray Uber to AWE Surface Conversion" list
yeah, my idea is that the walls are meant to be diffuse and that more specularity will make them look "fake". and in your series of demo renders, for some of them the RD was 0 and i thought they ended up looking pretty good. and so i'm trying to replicate that effect with the surfaces of the Shaded Haven
hmm interesting, maybe the reason that my render didn't look good was because i wasn't aware of the overriding settings of the environment light in your Shaded Haven scene
In that case, simply dial down specular/reflection on the "offending" surfaces or simply turn off the specular lobe for pure diffuse light!