Show us your 3Delight renders
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I generally find Iray faster and more useful under most circumstances.
But not all circumstances, and one of them is very big/elaborate scenes where the realism of Iray starts choking on the massive load, while 3dl's ability to have myopic rendering provides an important tool.
I love Yvoire, and found it next to impossible to render in Iray. But in 3DL, maybe 10 mins.
My usual lighting is AoA ambient + AoA distant, used RSSY Iray -> 3DL converter. I tweaked the reflective surfaces (windows and water), converted to UberSurface and gave them some raytrace reflection.
As an aside, one frustrating weakness I've encountered in 3DL is properly refractive/cloudy water. However, lake and river water often acts like a mirror in most large shots, so... I don't have to worry about it.
Very nice Will!
Well aweSurface makes that possible:)
Tip for easy reflections with UberSurface:
Raytrace (duh), strength about 20-40%, a tiny amount of blur (1-5%). I put a little more blur on the windows, less on the water, since the water has ripples to help break it up.
Again, looking at water in large natural scenes, it often is functionally a very dark surface (I use a low saturation shade somewhere in the blues and greens, though silty water might go more toward red), with reflections on top. You almost never seen transparency unless you are REALLY close up. Also, refraction tends to reduce the apparant transparency further... so unless you are doing a really REALLY close up render of a shoreline, best treat it as a reflective opaque surface. (I've even started doing this in Iray)
Yeah, hate to be the bearer of bad wallet times, but... ;)
Human skin gets a bit more fussy, but most other content is really not SO hard to convert.
When I convert Iray skins to 3DL, I usually find a 3DL skin texture I think looks decent (I don't like most of them), and then copy over the maps.
This is fine and dandy, it's just a lot more work to convert than just about everything else.
The color / Intensity slider in the 'General' section have no effect on renders, with the only exception that it always needs to be more than 0. Changes are visible in the viewport though.
Dark renders generally comes from not having enough strong light in the scene, be it from the HDRI or area lights. Remember that AWE AreaPT's light intensity/exposure is in energy per unit scale. If you want a more 'diffused' bright light with very soft shadows, you'll have to scale up the emitter, but dial down the exposure (on the area light). Vice versa.
Think of 'Exposure' dial on AWE Environment light as an exposure compensation to have 'ambient' or bounce light more visible in the render.
Here's an example Btw, I'm using the first AWE AreaPT emitter with a uniform scale. It should be similar with just scaling on a single axis or more complex shapes.
400% emitter scale = base exposure.
200% emitter scale = 2 * base exposure
100% emitter scale = 3 * base exposure
50% emitter scale = 4 * base exposure (probably needs between 4 to 4.5 if you want to get somewhat the same brightness).
Put in another way, if you're using a 400% emitter scale, you will need to use 1/3 of the base exposure you're using. There's actually two emitters used, but the other is just an instanced version placed next to the original one.
@wowie tks for shedding some light
on the light! Makes sense;)
=)
The default upper limit of tonemapping compresses highlights quite significantly, BTW. Generally it looks good and prevents fireflies and overexposed sort of looks, but on very smooth surfaces like corneas it looks somewhat too subdued. So it might be worth it playing with per-surface tonemapping override and increasing the top limit.
Vanguard...rendertime 44min
interiorshot... close to 2 h...
Thanks, should have been obvious I suppose, but I've got it now! :)
Interesting, I shall have a play with this... thanks!
...late for the party...
An alternate solution. Enable both specular lobes - If you're using an area light, limit the 1st specular lobe so you have specular but not reflections. If you have a figure with a cornea and eye surface/reflection layer (Gen4/Genesis2), you can effectively 'double' up by enabling specular/reflections on both surface zones.
For figures without the eye surface/reflection layer, you most likely have to resort using the coat layer to achieve the same hack.
In terms of shader setup, it's pretty possible to have a generalised skin material whose settings would change veeeery slightly depending on the specific maps (and, for SSS, often mesh density and scale of the figure).
But some maps just can't be saved by material wizardry alone. For instance, baked-in highlights on diffuse maps will always look like weird pale spots unless your scene lighting matches exactly the lighting of the real-world studio where the model was photographed.
I find Iray faster in most situations. Buuut... not all.
One of the situations where I find myself returning to 3DL is with big heavily instanced scenes. This is a case where you really want to cut some corners so your computer isn't trying to render a billion leaves realistically.
To whit.
(The other situation is toon stuff, although I continue to chip away at Iray toonery)
Beautiful lighting there Will! AoA lights?
Yeah I have a number of sets (Jackson's field, the Hemlock folly etc) that are pretty heavy on resources. AoA has been my "to go" lighting for those, when IBLM was released I started using that also, it handles opacity very nicely, so works well as long as you remember to increase ray trace distance so the shader "sees" everything;) Am yet to test those with awe, I think wowie's opacity optimization parameters will help keeping rendertimes down...and you don't have to worry about trace distance or shading rates
I think the awe version of the Vanguard is ready to use, everything works now, emitters, HDRI, sunlight... I used a geoshell to make those panels a bit reflective. Ran into some major problems but found a nice workaround so quite happy;) Have to say I'm impressed with all the optimization going on, with UE2 and Omnifreaker's Uberarea lights this would probably have taken days to render out. With awe a couple of hours with fairly maxed out rendersettings. And exterior shots render in about 20 - 30 min
And no grain
Sorry the babes are not in the foreground this time around
Thanks for the compliment and the feedback.
Plus no fireflies.
Maybe I should try to make a denoiser shader. 
After all, it's all the rage with other renderers.
Kinda sad, but so true. Plus color maps that don't respect physical albedo values and specular maps that just lack details.
AoA lights, yeah. I find them very easy to work with and they render decently fast.
Every time I've tried anything more realistic, it's turned into a slog and I've regretted it, so .. when I don't mind a somewhat illo style or I really want things to move a bit faster, it's been enough.
Yeah definitely done with UE2, well basically the whole Omnifreaker product line;) Hmm Ubersurface is still very useful when rendering in vanilla mode. (Read when rendering animation)
You are very welcome! I'm sure when I get more familiar with every aspect of awe I will learn how to best optimize my scenes for fast rendering.
I would love that! Maybe one could get away with less Irradience samples for even faster rendering;)
Oh btw, I assume the shadow samples in the render settings only affect the area light,not HDRI lighting (Irradience samples, right?)? And if I for some reason would like to use a standard spot, will it use the same settings or the shadow sample settings in the vanilla render tab, when using the scripted raytracer?
You mean the shadow samples in the Render Settings tab? I think that's only used by DAZ own point/spot/distant lights (via their internal Renderizer, well, 'thing'). The one in the standard and scripted renderer settings are the same. They're pretty much ignored if you use modern 3delight path tracing framework.
AoA's light does its own samples, as do mustakettu's Radium point/spot/distant light. So again the value entered in the Render Settings/scripted renderer will be ignored by those lights.
Area light samples and irradiance samples are actually the same, which is why there's no 'samples' settings in the area lights. That's one of the great decision made by 3delight devs. With this arrangement, you practically only need two sample values, one for specular and another for diffuse regardless if it's direct or indirect light. Even the shadeop for doing direct and indirect is the same and you can invoke both with just one call.
Modern 3delight is a unidirectional path tracer after all.
Probably not just less irradiance samples, but also less pixel samples.
"Pretty much"=)) Ok thanks. I used a standard spot in a render and set shadows to very soft, it looked smooth so I figured it uses the scripted render's shadowsamples at 128;) The vanilla tab default is 16 IIRC, which hardly would be enough to produce a nice soft shadow?
Cool
This is good to know! But does that mean I can just go to the rendertab and increase shadow samples instead of using the irradience samples on the env sphere and/or surfaces? It seems 128 isn't generally enough to produce grainfree renders, I've been using more like 1024 or more on the sphere and increased it for surfaces that are only hit by indirect light. But I have only ocasionally increased the render tab shadowsamples to 256, thinking that would only influence the area lights, well I was wrong about that;)
Yes that would speed up the render process quite a lot.
Yup. I generally think 64 or 128 samples for really soft shadows with those lights.
Only if you use any of DAZ point/spot/distant light. With AWE Surface, most of the relevant render quality options (irradiance and subsurface weight/samples) are now in the shader. Only pixel samples matter in the renderer settings. By the way, irradiance samples on the environment sphere is only needed if you have diffuse enabled (on the sphere).
In the readme, I recommend using 512 samples with 8x8 pixel samples before going with even higher irradiance samples. From my experience, combining both gives you much of the advantages of going full 2048 samples with 16x16 pixel samples, but just a little bit of slower compared to draft renders (4x4) with 128 irradiance samples. Something like going from 1 minute to 2 minutes, instead of 8 minutes. If you find it still noisy, try raising the pixel samples first before raising irradiance samples.
But of course how stupid of me;) So I just need to adjust surface settings as long as I use only HDRI and/or arealights. Nice!
Ok I mostly go with 12x12 or 10x10 pixelsamples, have found it plays pretty well with DoF. And start with the def. 128 Irradience samples, make a testrender/spotrender and then increase samples on grainy areas. Right, slowly getting there
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