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Hi guys!
Just a quick heads-up, Snowy Mountains is supposed to release in a day or two. :)
The HDRI sky mentioned above will be added as update a little later when 4.8 comes out of Beta (I have no clue when that will be).
Awesome! I love your Easy Environments! :)
like the work you did on this .
Looking forward to this one - much like all the rest!
Thanks, happy to read you guys like the series!
These two scenes may not look like EE scenes, but could not have been done without FMs sets.
The Robot's Daughter, uses the terrain from EE Outback and the Speed Render Series 'night' lights.
Weaver of Dreams uses EE's Winter Lights. They have a nice soft way of lighting a winter scene, no matter what environment (or no environment) I use. I did turn them up a little but kept the ratios and colors the same. I especially like how all of the EE light treat the skin tones of my characters.
Hehe, you manage to sneak in a bit of EE into everything, that`s sweet ;)
I can't help it, lol.
The lights are awesome (especially for someone like me who HATES messing with lights), the boxes are easy to modify to suit the needs of my scenes, and the terrains and props (trees, rocks, etc) have amazing detail and accept alterations well, too; allowing me to use the same EE's over and over on different books while not looking like the same environment to the unknowing eye.
Don't know what I'll do if you get tired of making them, lol..
Snowy Mountains released :)
Link: Snowy Mountains @ Daz
Lost
(Philadelphia Experiment) Just playing with my two new purchases :-)
Love the footstep morphs!
Gee, poor guy looks cold, thanks for posting the image :)
I like the subtle depth of field.
May I ask ...is the snow-rain you added a texture from the night-builder set? It looks a bit like the "falling stars" there.
Thank you FM.
No the 'snow' isn't from Night Builder - I never thought of looking in there, duh - it is from a rain pack I got free elsewhere, I changed the colour and tilted the angle. I just needed something to say wind in a hurry, and what better than blowing snow. I think I will have a poke around in Night Builder this afternoon. :-)
Hehe, I wouldn`t bother with nightbuilder for this, I was merely surprised because that texture layer looks pretty much identical.
The snowy mountains set includes those snow drifts as seperate prop btw, a few of them in front of the camera could probably spice it up. But maybe they are too dense.
Actually the snow drift works great.
Oh nice, glad to see it worked that well.
Sailor on the mountain ...something is x-files about this. ;)
Hi there!
I noticed some of you tried to get the "old" skyboxes to render in Iray, which is a bit tricky, so I thought I`d post the required steps to make them show up.
In general I think it`s a better idea to stick to 3Delight with those sets though.
Future Easy Environments will support Iray out of the box, like "Snowy Mountains" once the free update gets released.
How to make EE skyboxes render in Iray:
-select all skybox materials in the Surface Tab (north, east,...)
-switch Surface Tab to "Presets", go to "shaders" and apply "!Iray Uber Base".
-find the "Emissive" preset in Shaders/Iray and apply it.
-switch the Surface Tab back to "Editor".
--set "Base Color" to white for all materials.
--go through the single skybox materials (north, east,...) and asign the right textures to the Base Color channel.
Daz Studio has the textures already loaded, so it should be easy to find them in the popup list.
--asign the textures to the "Emission Color" channel as well.
--select all skybox materials again, set "Emission Temperature" around 6000.
--set a value for "Luminance", usually that`s quite high numbers.
--"Two sided light" doesn`t seem to make a difference, but switching it sometimes fixed stuck previews for me.
/// in Render Settings you will most likely want to turn off "Draw Ground".
This should give you a working skybox, but you`d still have to create new lighting for the landscapes.
The image below is what I got making those adjustments to the Eternal Sands skybox.
Any hope of product updates for those sets, to automate that, for when Iray gets a full public release?
To be honest, it`s unlikely.
Snowy Mountains will have it`s HDRI update, and future EE sets will likely have HDRI Iray versions as well, using skyspheres.
I just posted the "tutorial" above for those who feel they absolutely need to convert a skybox ... but I for one see little point to it, I`d rather keep using them with 3Delight.
Just got info that the Snowy Mountains Iray update should be available.
I hope everything works and you can enjoy the HDR sky ;)
Your products are amazing!
I love them very much.
I hope this technique could help on using them on iray.
The results achieved in iray are great, but if it means not to use Easy Environment (and I acquired every one of them) this could be a deal breaker for most of my projects.
=/
Thanks b.accioly!
It`s just my personal opinion, but I think Iray is not to be seen as the best choice in all possible cases.
For instance an Easy Environments "background" has nothing to gain from it, it`s "pre-rendered" anyway.
The Snowy Mountains set renders in about 1 minute with 3Delight for me, I think the Iray/HDR version takes about 20 minutes with (imo) relatively little visual advantage.
Of course if you do more character or object centric renders the Iray advantages start to kick in, and you`ll still need working backgrounds ...so I hope the conversion infos help a bit with that.
@Flipmode - One thing I've been having problems with in Iray is the ground textures for all of my landscape products. They all seem to come out warped/blurred. I don't have any of your Easy Environment series yet, but I noticed that your image of External Sands shows the ground sand textures as rendering correctly in Iray. Did you have to tweak them to achieve that, or do they work well straight out of the box?
Eternal! Sands lol But External is fun too ;)
Tbh. the image isn`t a good example ...it`s just the skybox, there is no geometry ground visible.
I think most "old" sets will require some work to look right.
As for textures/grounds in general ...did you convert the materials to Iray?
-switch Surface Tab to "Presets", go to "shaders" and apply "!Iray Uber Base".
Most ground textures rely heavily on displacement mapping (and / or bump mapping).
If the materials still look off after converting to Iray Uber Base that`s where I`d look first.
Iray displacement is a bit odd imo, it seems to use subdivision levels which you`ll likely have to adjust (I usually try to slowly increase it until it looks ok).
Haha! Whoops! Spelling error, sorry.
Yes I've converted them to Iray uber base and tried playing around with the displacement settings but I'm no expert so maybe I just wasn't able to stumble upon the right combination. timmins tried explaining displacement and SubD to me but I'm afraid most of it went over my head. Most of the ground textures I have are just turning out severely blurred right now in Iray.
So now I'm on the lookout for landscape scenes that might work well in Iray with little to no tweaking required.
Thanks for the response :)
Haha! Whoops! Spelling error, sorry.
Yes I've converted them to Iray uber base and tried playing around with the displacement settings but I'm no expert so maybe I just wasn't able to stumble upon the right combination. timmins tried explaining displacement and SubD to me but I'm afraid most of it went over my head. Most of the ground textures I have are just turning out severely blurred right now in Iray.
So now I'm on the lookout for landscape scenes that might work well in Iray with little to no tweaking required.
Thanks for the response :)
Could it possibly be that tiling settings aren't be used by iRay for these?
I love the look of these sets with the Skyboxes, save one minor thing, my skies never really appear bright enough. Any suggestions there?
It seems it could be... I raised a ticket about it and Topher has mentioned tiling. I thought I'd already tried that, but maybe I didn't do it right. I'll post an answer about it when he(?) points me in the right direction.
Thanks for the suggestion.
Edit: It was indeed a tiling issue. Iray doesn't retain the tiling info for some ground plane textures when you convert, so you have to make a note of what they are and then change them in the geometry section of surfaces after you've applied the Iray uber base. Then its all back to normal.
Thank God! I've been knocking my head against this particular brick wall for a few months now!
When converting them to Iray materials you mean?
With "Luminance" you can make them as bright as you want, up to full white. Depending on which kind of units you set for luminance it might take really extreme values with lots of 0000s.
I actually meant just using them with standard 3Delight as they load.
Oh, that`s odd then.
Do you mean "not bright enough for your taste", or "something seems to be off, it doesn`t look like on the product previews" ?
Unless there is some technical issue involved there is not much you can do within Daz Studio to get them any brighter. Except for one set they are all on full ambience, meaning as bright as possible. In that case the only option would be to brighten up the textures in Photoshop.