Jason's Discoveries
Jason Galterio
Posts: 2,562
I've never posted in this particular forum before... I am giving it a go since I discovered a couple of new things the past couple of days...
To keep your interest, provided I have it at all, the end result of the discoveries was this:
1. The combination of any of Jepe's Iray enabled Special Effects (like this package: http://www.daz3d.com/jepes-graphicz-ii) and Filter Forge is incredibly powerful. I was able to pick one of Jepe's pre-existing effects that fit the general dimension of the electricity and then use Filter Forge to generate a suitable texture and Alpha. Replacing Jepe's default with this new texture / alphawas extremely easy as well. Just four pulldowns to do it.
2. I didn't realize that an Iray light within a G3F body would produce a realtistic looking glow. I assumed having light within the "skin" would create an ugly appearance. So I painstakingly placed the props so that they were just barely touching her fingertips. I forgot one of them when I test rendered. The results were my pulling them down so that they started inside the fingers instead.
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Comments
Nice effect - both the glowing fingers and the way her face is lit. Well done!
- Greg
You have my interest. Very cool effect and not something I've run across yet. I like the final result of your image.
Oh thats very cool! And I have bunches of Jepe's stuff to play with as well as filter forge.... Thanks for sharing!
What really kewl effects so real like!!!!!
Happy accidents. Love em.
A great first image and some useful info for the Filter Forge users.
Thanks! The "electricity" turned out looking a little too much like pipe cleaners, but it is an effect I am going to revisit.
Here is another example using the Filter Forge / Jepe's combination. I posted a post processed, closer up version of this image as part of the PC Weekly contest. This image is pure render, with no post processing.
In this case there are three Jepe's props submerged in the pool water. The deepest one (pardon the pun) is a stock "energy" burst from the Jepe prop. The two above it are Filter Forge modifications using a "Runes" filter.
Very nicely done Jason it gives the render a feel of creepyness
I haven't posted in a bit and have been feeling pretty creative... So I thought an update was in order... (A week's vacation really helped to recharge my mind...)
"The Bride"
The first step was to set up the scene and the lighting. Essentially turning off all the lights except for the fireplace, the fireplace candles and the hallway lights in the background. Once I was happy with the general atmosphere, I rendered out a final version of this.
Next step was to introduce the figure and her adornments. I posed and placed her where I wanted her in the final scene, then deleted everything but the figure and the camera. I rendered this and saved as a PNG (to preserve transparency). This allowed me to have the "ghost" plus her shadow on a seperate layer.
The last step was to take the two images into Photoshop and begin the layering process. With Filter Forge and Ron's Brushes I completed the ghost layer then brought it all together to the final image.
"On the Shelf"
This started as an attempt to reuse some old models that I hadn't touched in a while (Toon Puppy, Toon Cat, etc.) and retexture them with Iray textures. The pain in this was posing them all. I also didn't realize how big a resource hog the glass dome was going to be. That object alone made the render take three or four times longer.
"Clowder"
Not much to say about this one. No special techniques were used. The coloring was achieved by using the Expanded God Rays set, but angled off camera so that it wasn't obvious.
Nice ghost image! I really liked that On the Shelf image! I haven't been to the gallery in awhile. Did you put them up because I'll have to track them down and give them a like! Clowder is good, too. I like the coloring you did. It kind of reminds me of a vintage postcard type picture.
Thanks! I did post all of these to my gallery as well... I don't like to post here unless I have some technical and / or artistic input to offer. Otherwise it just seems like begging for attention.
The coloring to Clowder was almost purely render, I only post processed the vibrance a bit to draw out the contrast. Otherwise I only used one of "Divine Bodies" from "Expanded God Rays" to get the sunset like coloring. It's just aimed off scene so that only the reflected results show up in scene.
That's a nice effect. I don't think I thought to use those lights in that way before. I'll have to give it a try.
love the cat picture
whats the building used here ?
Thanks! The building is from the Tuscany set by Stonemason (http://www.daz3d.com/the-streets-of-tuscany). You can see the angle of it that I used in the tenth promo picture on that product page.
I particularly like the golden tones of the cats at the window image.
I wanted to share this because I am so $&%@ impressed with the models...
This is Isa. Straight out of the box. Out of the box pose. Out of the box clothing. Out of the box hair. Out of the box expression. (Almost) out of the box light rig. No post processing, purely DS4.9 render.
I do these types of renders all the time when I purchase a new item. A quick, clean render to have a real world reference picture.
I, however, never post them... until today. I was stunned at how nice the various models looked at how well the lighting came out.
To prove that this is an out of the box image, this is what I used:
Genesis 3 Female - Isa Character
Chevalresse Full Outfit - Default Textures
Emma And Jordi's Battle Heart Expressions - Full 01
Mele Hair - Default Texture
Capsces Poses Rune - LeanB
The lighting (the only part I tweaked):
Render Studio Scenes - Shadow FX
Additional Fill Light Center, Luminosity turned way down
Additional Side Light Left
Render settings were set to Ultra. Bloom was turned off.
That's cool, Jason! For just "out of the box" it did come out nicely!
Last night I decided to try dusting off Koshini and seeing what Iray would do to her...
She looks pretty good! I just picked her up last week during one of the sales, but haven't rendered her yet. I really like your image!
Started as another experiment...
Urban Sprawl 2, all four blocks, which is an incredible resource hog for my system. Retextured to Iray textures. Then instanced 8 times using Instance Plus. Those instances were then laid out in a 9 by 9 grid. My goal was to see if I could produce a reasonable looking huge city. And if it would render without grinding to a halt.
Once I found that sucessful I started playing with what I could do with it. That's when the Above the Clouds and Eagle 2.0 entered the mix.
Thank you for the comments on the other two pictures I posted. I apologize for not being more dilligent in replying, I was down for the count from last Thursday until Tuesday.
I find it kind of ironic that I dusted off Koshini (one of my favorite old models) last week, and then she returned to the store this week. Koshini Kismet!
Due an unfortunate hardware mishap, I have made a few technical discoveries. I am only going to summarize them here, but more detail can be found here: http://jasongalterio.deviantart.com/journal/Adventures-in-Computer-Upgrades-616414457
The picture below is what I have been using as a test render.
My old desktop rendered the above image in 8 minutes, 1 second. It was a Dell desktop, about a year an a half old. i7-4790, 8 GBs DDR3 RAM, GeForce 970,
The meltdown involved the motherboard itself, so I had to replace that. In the process I replaced the case, the power supply, and the harddrive. The new specs turned out like this:
Intel i7 4790 CPU
ASRock Z97 Extreme6 Motherboard
Cooler Master HAF XB Computer Case
Corsair RM850i Power Supply
GeForce GTX 970 Video Card
2x DDR3 4GB RAM
SanDisk Ultra II 960 GB SSD
Windows 10 Pro on USB
Now that that is all out of the way, we get to the crux of my observations. I tried a number of diffeent hardware combinations to test the results.
1st Render, GeForce GTX 970 only: 7 minutes, 19 seconds.
2nd Render, 970 + CPU: 6 minutes, 31 seconds.
After these two renders, I decided to install the GeForce 750Ti to see the impact it would have.
3rd Render, 970 + 750: 5 minutes, 19 seconds.
4th Render, 970 + 750 + CPU: 4 minutes, 49 seconds.
Thinking that I could still squeeze out a little performance boost, and seeing that 970s were on sale at Best Buy, I purchased a second 970 and replaced the 750.
5th Render: CPU, 970 x2: 4 minutes.
6th Render: CPU, 970 x2, SLI on: 4 minutes.
7th Render: 970 x2, SLI on: 3 minutes, 38 seconds.
8th Render: 970 x2, SLI on, Optix Acceleration on: 3 minutes, 22 seconds.
9th Render: CPU, 970 x2, SLI on, Optix Acceleration on: 3 minutes, 29 seconds.
Comments before I continue:
1. The system is woefully underpowered RAM wise. I have additional, faster memory on order. And plan to repeat the test renders.
2. I am not sure why Optix was turned off, but I turned it back on to test.
3. Turning the CPU off was counterintuitive. Hence why it took so long for me to test it.
Take aways:
1. So far SLI provided no improvement.
2. I might have been better served to pick a different video card instead of goign for two of the same. However, the jury is still out on this. There might be additional hidden benefits that I have not discovered yet.
3. When in doubt, try turning the CPU off.
SLI is not used, and should be disabled, in Iray.
Are you saying that the SLI being on might have a negative impact? I.e. I should try a test render with "CPU on, 970 x2, SLI off, Optix on?"
The impression I got was that SLI being on had neither a negative nor a positive impact.
nVidia say SLI should be off, I have no first hand experience.
Yes, SLI should be turned off, use only your GPUs & OPtix turned on. Once you have multi-GPU the CPU becomes really a bottleneck. With one GPU you might get a small bump in performance with CPU added. (Think about it, how do you compare 4 or 8 cores, to 3000 cores of more. And once you get to 5000 cores its a joke.) Its not counterintuitive when you realize the scene has to be loaded to memory before it can be rendered. In the time it takes to load that scene to your CPU memory it could have been rendered again by the GPU. This has been discussed in another thread where we all compared and did out own tests using the same exact scene in Iray, but I can't find the link now.
Thanks. I will give it a shot.
I assume just turning SLI off in the NVIDIA control panel is sufficient, yes? I don't need to yank the bridge and change the bios, right?
I ask because I am assuming that other programs can still benefit from the SLI if I turn it on and off.
Correct, no need to physically disconnect it, just turn it off in the control panel.
Today's test renders...
32 GB of RAM installed, 8 GB of RAM removed.
Three more fans added in preperation for closing up the case.
Old 5200 SATA 3TB drive installed (as storage, not boot).
Hot swap SATA fixture wired up.
Render 1: SLI off (through NVIDIA Control Panel only), 970 x2, CPU off, Optix off: 3 minutes, 58 seconds.
Render 2: Same as above, Optix on: 3 minutes, 16 secoonds.
Rebooted after turning off SLI to see if that makes a significant difference. And nope. Actually slower. Start up overhead I am guessing. Second render was back to 3 minutes, 16 seconds.
Seems like that is about as good as it is going to get. Time to close this sucker up and get back to work.
Does the system have the capability to take the 750 in as a third card?