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i think i need a step by step explanation what changings bring what result
i read your pdf and tried a lot of options
but either it takes ages to render or is not what i want
i am on the end of patience here
as i need this for animation what means quick results i have no clue how to do that
perhaps you can help
The product was developed in 4.8 and theoretically should work in 4.6.??? onward. I don't think I can officially recommend using a non-current version of D|S, but theoretically it should work.
=/
There is indeed a learning curve, but the black and white settings preset should hopefully spit something reasonable out.
Yes I agree, this is what I need too because so far I don't really understand a thing I've read on how to get it working, when I first got DAZ 'iRay' was already in full swing and I learned to use it to quite an acceptable fashion, I've never once tried to use 3Delight and have no understanding of how it works at all so having to learn this product AND 3Delight is a big put off for me, which is a shame really because I'd love to be able to do cartoon type characters.
Cool, I already bought it, hopefully it won't be too diificult to learn, make some quick scenes to render and learn how to put together some books, sadly I work till 10 tonight so have to wait to try it out lol
I suggest playing with the cameras individually to get an idea of what the output of each component is. Render speed is going to be dependent on things that always cause renders to be longer. In the case of 3Delight, check that Pixel Samples X/Y are set to reasonable values (4-8), Shading rate is set to around 1.0. If you have advanced lights (using Ambient Occlusion), complex hair, or are using SSS shaders, all of that will increase render times. I consistently use an ambient surface shader with one distant light (for shadows) and get render times of minutes.
The "Color Id materials" option is very important and takes some experimentation, but that's the way to get the nice outlines around figures and objects.
I'm very happy to help if you have specific questions.
Just a little remark for those who - like me - are struggling with the very concept of LR9K:
The suggestion of djigneo to play with the cameras individually is very helpful; I did at first not even realize that you can load them by going to your library -> Camera Presets -> LineRender9000 and double-clicking without using the LR9K AutoRender Script or one of the Settings Presets at all. Then you can choose and direct the camera as usual. In the Render Settings panel you can choose "Scripted 3Delight" as Engine, and "LineRender9000" as Render Script (OK, that was obvious).
A trap I tapped in was the fact that by using PNG or TIFF, most of the rendered images are transparent, and the created line art is black. And because my image previewer shows transparence as black, the whole image seemed to be empty (black). Only by dragging the image into a drawing program I realized that there actually is output created, and what I have to learn next is how compositing with the AutoRender script works.
Ahhh yes!! If you right click the image and open in Windows Photo Viewer you can side step that little landmine - the newer default in Win10 uses a black background, fully did my head in!!!
I saw this in the store and was immediately very excited, and the output in the samples looks great.
After reading the PDF and this thread, though, I'm worried that it just won't work for me (and many Iray users). Can someone tell me what happens to Iray scenes lit by emissive surfaces/mesh lights? What about HDRI environments (maybe 3DL supports those just fine; I'm not sure). A lot of my lighting comes from mesh lights and I'm worried that taking that out would totally change the shadows (if not plunge the whole scene into darkness), making any adge detection irrelevant.
Do mesh lights cause a problem or am I just misunderstanding the whole thing?
And what about Iray decals? I'm guessing they don't get rendered into 3DL at all and don't generate any LineRender output? Not as big a deal to me, I'm just curious.
Thanks!
Scenes configured for iRay can get rendered out via iRay. LineRender uses 3Delight for the line outputs only. It's a completely supported scenario to render out the main scene with textures and lights with iRay then overlay the line work on top.
I start to see the power of this concept. It lets you use the tools you know and love for coloring, light and shadow, and what not, and adds "the difficult part": the inking. Take Iray, or Visual Style Shaders, or what may come in the future, and add line art by compositing the "layers" - all in DAZ Studio. Or skip the coloring part completely and get black and white images. I guess one can use the texture and/or bump maps to get a more grungy look, or remove them for clean images like manga. And because the line-art creation is independent of the rest, one has much more control over line thickness and amount of detail. I'm excited to see what is possible with this tool.
Both the elements here are from an iRay scene - when I got to compositing though I preferred the output WITHOUT the original iRay images (kinda wish I'd kept those to do a side by side!!). I changed the outline to red on the character to contrast the shadowing from the toon 2-tone shadowcam and then rendered the background/outlines and shadowcam - I did composite this one in PhotoPlus X4 but with it was only 4 images so there would have been nothing stopping me setting up a manual autorender to composite the 4 images in Daz Studio as you can select an existing image over a render pass for the composite cam.
Thanks for the clarification. This is how I thought it worked and it's good to have confirmation.
My concern is that the 3DL pass for the LineRender output won't have matching lighting. Will the LineRender output be based on an all-dark image (in the case that all lights in scene are Iray mesh lights) or contour around wildly different shadows? Will Iray decals be ignored in the contouring?
Drat, cant use it if it does not go direct to video :(. I had planned to use it for previz work.
You could always make a video out of the series of images.
Hm, I suppose that is possible for the Toon cameras and the Shadow opacity cam. I'm not sure how the lights will translate in those cases. In the case of Fresnel reflected v, Edge blend, or the "Use ColorId materials" feature, they will ignore lighting and just draw based on scene geometry. I think iRay decals will be ignored in those cases.
First: thank you for the example and the explanation and I really like that output!
How was this scene lit? Daz lights? Mesh ights? HDRI/environment settings?
It looks great as output, definitely. I haven't played with LineRender at this point, so I'm not sure which parts would be most affected by lighting changes.
The image that first made me think of it was the second in the block of sample pictures in the store (the first in the grid on the right--http://www.daz3d.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/0/1/01-linerender9000-daz3d.jpg), the one that looks almost like a coloring book and has the clear, nice shadow on the wall behind the Alice figure. If that were generated from a mesh light and the 3DL render pass that drew the outlines didn't have any way to honor that light, the picture would be far less compelling to me.
I'm trying to put together a sample comparison of Iray and 3DL renders with a mesh light in the scene but Daz keeps crashing on me when I try to render 3DL.
Both the elements here are from an iRay scene - when I got to compositing though I preferred the output WITHOUT the original iRay images (kinda wish I'd kept those to do a side by side!!). I changed the outline to red on the character to contrast the shadowing from the toon 2-tone shadowcam and then rendered the background/outlines and shadowcam - I did composite this one in PhotoPlus X4 but with it was only 4 images so there would have been nothing stopping me setting up a manual autorender to composite the 4 images in Daz Studio as you can select an existing image over a render pass for the composite cam.
I have always rendered image sequences over video - I'm never happy with the compression in the first instance and also it gives me more control if I need to make an adjustment that only runs over 10 frames or so only having to rerender those 10 images rather than the whole video again. With LR9k you'd effectively be rendering more than one image for each frame but it's easy enough to composite, in fact Hitfilm 4 Express is free and has some great options and imports an image sequence as a video for editing/compositing purposes.
I haven't had the time to play around with LineRender9000 yet. But, I was wondering if someone could point me in the direction of the User Guide, please? At least then, I'll get an opportunity to try the product out tomorrow. Thanks ^^
PM sent.
LineRender9000 looks great and people seem to be finding it usable and useful, I'm definitely hoping to pick it up at some point. I'm trying to evaluate how effective it will be for me right now and whether I can spare the (quite reasonable) price this month.
A lot of the scenes I'm working with lately are Iray scenes lit by mesh lights. I usually have an environment map as well, but some are entirely mesh lights and even with a map the lights are used to control shadows and highlights. I understand that LineRender9000 uses 3DL and its scripted renderer for all sorts of good reasons and that the geometry is going to be compatible between the two.
I've attached one image rendered with Iray. It's super simple: an untextured plane, an untextured sphere, and one mesh light from the IRadiance HDRI Meshlights product (one of several mesh light products I use a fair bit). The Iray render shows the expected lighting and shadow.
I have also attached the 3DL render of the same scene. Since there are no Daz lights and no environment map, 3DL just shows black where there are objects and transparent where the scene goes to infinity. If I were to use LineRender9000 on this scene, would it outline the sphere?
Not everyone who uses Iray uses mesh lights/emissive surfaces, of course, and I don't use them in every scene. They may be most popular in scenes with fireplaces, candles, or sfx glows. If people using these lights need to do some workarounds to use LineRender9000, that's probably not a huge deal in the grand scheme of things. I just want to know how many of my scsnes will require this work and to make a guess as to how much time investment it will be on top of learning the product before I try to pry the (relatively small, but significant to me) cost of the tool out of my current budget.
Here's a quick outline done via LineRender9000 and composited in Photoshop. I ended up doing a 2nd render of the outline only, setting the Line Edge Threshhold to .1 (the base is .5) in order to get more detail for the hair. I used the Barefoot Dancer and Level 19 from the Scene Builder: Starter Essentials. The hair isn't ideal for a coloring book type illustration, IMO, but I wanted to show what you can get without much optimization. To avoid shadows, I set the colors in the Ambient Channel and set the Ambient Strength to 100 while setting the Diffuse and Specular Strengths to 0. (It flattens the colors.) No lights were used in the scene so it rendered fairly quickly. What took the most time was setting different LR9K Color IDs for each surface to make sure everything had distinct lines instead of melding together. (Level 19 has over 30 surfaces.)
And here is a quick color one I did with just the dancer. I used the Posterization filter on the Fresnel render then set it to Color Burn @ 30% opacity as the top layer of the composite. The line layers were next, set to Multiply. The base layer was the Default Camera.
There are a few places I could have done clean up - like adding a map in the Ambient channel for the face to create eyebrows, but this should give a good idea of what can be done quickly. If anyone would like more explanation as to how I did these, let me know.
Based on the way the scenes look, I can say confidently that you will get an outline around the sphere because one of the tricks LineRender9000 does is color-code the scene ignoring lights so that outlines will be drawn in a pretty fool-proof way. Detail lines will also work just based on geometry. Now what won't work is going to be the Shadow opacity cam and the Toon cameras; but if the intention is to have main color and shadows from iRay, I don't see the utillity in attempting to use them anyway. Seems to me the notion would be to use the geometry based cameras for whatever line work you want to generate and leave the main image and shadows to the iRay setup. In my art, I use just those two line passes and both of them work purely based on geometry and color-coding.
Use ColorId materials will create an image like so:
Which will draw lines like so:
Fresnel reflected v will draw the scene like this:
Which produce lines like this:
Hope this explanation is helpful.
Thanks for the examples, @Crescent!
I agree that the ColorId assignment is one of the more tedious parts and will likely release a freebie assignment script that I've been using to speed things along. It decides on a color for you and assigns it to the selected surfaces. It'll keep the colors distinct based on the colorId "groups" in the scene, and will re-assign them to try and get a good color spread. I made it since mostly I don't care what color is assigned to surfaces as long as the colors are distinct enough from each other and this way I don't have to remember what colors I've already used.
So it's completely useless to me...
Problem with installation.
Have installed 3 times, same problem, camera presets etc are all there.
But.
In render settings scripted 3d delight, options are missing.
This is one of the best things anybody has said on the forums.
This isn't a tech support thread. Also, installation stuff should be going to DAZ support. But I'm a nice guy so here we go:
Track down the folder where you've installed DAZ Studio. By default it'd be "c:\Program files\Daz 3D\DAZStudio4\". There should be folders like: bin, displays, docs, libs, plugins, resources, scripts, etc. From the LineRender9000 ZIP file (manual install option), drop the contents of "DAZ Studio_4.5;4.x Private Build;4.x Public Build" into that folder (this should merge the resources and scripts folders). Your specific issue is that these files are missing, which is why the Scripted Renderer option for "LineRender 9000" is not there. Either that or you haven't restarted DAZ since you've installed.
Your content library seems to be correct, but here's how to manually install that bit also. Track down your library folder. You can determine that from within DAZ Studio via Edit > Preferences > Content Library (tab) > Content Directory Manager (button) > expand DAZ Studio Formats. Drop the contents of the "Contents" folder (from the ZIP) into that directory.
That should be more or less what's required for a manual install.