The Official aweSurface Test Track

Sven Dullah

Gone said:

I use AWE environment with an HDRI and an AWE distant light. I messed with the spec quite a bit but I think with this render I only used spec 2 with default roughness and strength around 50%.

Ok! I have more and more skipped the HDRI light, just plug a jpeg into the awe environment and use area lights for direct lighting, I seem to get better results with especially skin that way. Or... that's how I feel right now, tomorrow I might have another vibe

Gone said:

Garibaldi does have ambient, but it is turned off by default.

Ok! Do you get fireflies with the Garibaldi shader and just an arealight plane?

Gone said:

Skin seems to be a real problem for me. I've had irradience and SSS maxed out and still gotten noise. It depends on the texture I use - some render clean, others, not so much. This one is about middle of the road. HDRI's also play their role in noise so it's a real balancing act to get everything to play nice together.

I use 2048 shadowsamples and 512-1024 SS samples as a starting point. For background characters I may use like 512/256 or thereabout. Seems to work pretty well for what I do. But with pure HDRI lighting I may have to go up to 8192/2048 to get a clean render.

Gone said:

I'll likely come back and play with this some more in a few days but  there's only just so much frustration I can take in one sitting. 

I've been modelling a GB hair all night, can't get that damn comb to work.... But slooowly getting the hang of it. It's fun AND frustrating. You really know your way around those tools

Gone said:

Fun story by the way. Saw the sequence in the other thread. I thought Trump was the US president.

Tks:) Well he is NOW. I'll be back...

Sven Dullah

WIP, just a quick testrender...

Gone

Hard to keep the results of all the renders straight, but I did use a (very large) area light at one time and I don't recall it making any difference - otherwise I would have switched to it from the distant light.

Yout hair test doesn't look bad. There are a couple of settings you can use to manage the flyaways on top of the head. In the style pane about halfway down, there is a setting called interpolation. It is set to smooth by default. Changing it to linear will give a more aggressive follow of the guide hairs (the blue guides). Right below that is autopart. This is set to 180 be default. I usually set to to 100 but you can play around to see what setting works best for you.

With long hair, I find it is usually easier to use 2 nodes one for each side of th head. It's a bit more work but avoids a lot of the hair going through the head in unexpected ways.

Sven Dullah

Gone said:

Hard to keep the results of all the renders straight, but I did use a (very large) area light at one time and I don't recall it making any difference - otherwise I would have switched to it from the distant light.

Yout hair test doesn't look bad. There are a couple of settings you can use to manage the flyaways on top of the head. In the style pane about halfway down, there is a setting called interpolation. It is set to smooth by default. Changing it to linear will give a more aggressive follow of the guide hairs (the blue guides). Right below that is autopart. This is set to 180 be default. I usually set to to 100 but you can play around to see what setting works best for you.

With long hair, I find it is usually easier to use 2 nodes one for each side of th head. It's a bit more work but avoids a lot of the hair going through the head in unexpected ways.

Ah, excellent, just what I was looking for, well after at least 12 hours of not really making any progress, and a good night's sleep, I feel...uh...ready=)

Sven Dullah

@wowie

Btw, the base character conversion script for Genesis 1 could be updated. It sets the toggle for "multiply specular&reflections through opacity" to off for the lashes.

Sven Dullah

GB AWE testing continued..progressive render, 10x10 ps, skin with 2048 shadowsamples and 512 SS samples, 40 min

 

Gone

Interesting.

Did you know that it is possible to load the skin texture into Garibaldi so that the hair shades the same as the skin?

Sven Dullah

Gone said:

Interesting.

Did you know that it is possible to load the skin texture into Garibaldi so that the hair shades the same as the skin?

Yeah I figured it's possible, haven't tried that yet. Right now I have exported a GB hair as .obj and rigged it with the transfer utility, doing some testrenders...

Sven Dullah

Gone said:

Interesting.

Did you know that it is possible to load the skin texture into Garibaldi so that the hair shades the same as the skin?

Ok I can't get it to work, I thought it was in the distribute section where you pick the colors for the base and tip, but when I click on textures nothing happens. What am I missing?

Gone

I haven't done it in a few years so I may be a bit off here. It's not a straightforward process.

First off, Garibaldi only uses 1000x1000 textures so all the texture maps you want to use have to be converted to that size.

Second, each map has to be renamed to match the material zone it is being mapped to. Since maps for Genesis figures cover more than one material zone, you would have to replicate the map as many times as necessary and name each one for the seperate material zones.

All the maps you make have to be contained in a single directory. eg: Create a directory named Bear textures. resize, and rename all the bear textures from the bear skin directory for that cool bear morph you bought. (This is an example - I don't know if there even is a bear morph )

In Garibaldi, go to the paint tab and select import. Navigate to the directory you created and select it. You must select the directory name and not the file names inside it.

This will import the textures for the figure using the name of the directory you loaded. From there, you can select it in the texture box for color settings in the distribute tab.

Once you've saved the Garibaldi hair file, you can delete the directory you imported if you like because all the info will now be in the Garibaldi hair file.

If my memory hasn't gone completely to pot, this should be it.

Good luck.

PS: You can also create a new texture in the paint tab and select color instead of the default grey in the pop up box. This will let you paint your own color map directly on the figure if that works better for your needs.

Sven Dullah

Gone said:

I haven't done it in a few years so I may be a bit off here. It's not a straightforward process.

First off, Garibaldi only uses 1000x1000 textures so all the texture maps you want to use have to be converted to that size.

Second, each map has to be renamed to match the material zone it is being mapped to. Since maps for Genesis figures cover more than one material zone, you would have to replicate the map as many times as necessary and name each one for the seperate material zones.

All the maps you make have to be contained in a single directory. eg: Create a directory named Bear textures. resize, and rename all the bear textures from the bear skin directory for that cool bear morph you bought. (This is an example - I don't know if there even is a bear morph )

In Garibaldi, go to the paint tab and select import. Navigate to the directory you created and select it. You must select the directory name and not the file names inside it.

This will import the textures for the figure using the name of the directory you loaded. From there, you can select it in the texture box for color settings in the distribute tab.

Once you've saved the Garibaldi hair file, you can delete the directory you imported if you like because all the info will now be in the Garibaldi hair file.

If my memory hasn't gone completely to pot, this should be it.

Good luck.

PS: You can also create a new texture in the paint tab and select color instead of the default grey in the pop up box. This will let you paint your own color map directly on the figure if that works better for your needs.

Thanks very much for this detailed tutorial:)

Well, as you say, definitely not straightforward, I will have to see if I could use scene optimizer to resize the textures, and I think the LIE baker script renames the textures to match the mat zones, would be much easier than doing the whole thing manually;)

By the way, that's Genesis 1 with some creature morphs applied (among a few others), and textures are from the Hound Dog product. Yeah he looks pretty cool:)

I think the second option you mentioned is worth looking into first, was thinking of making a white fur with black spots like a dalmatian or something...

Still experimenting with exporting GB to .obj, the tricky part is to get the strand amount and thickness right, I found that the push modifyer is very useful for thinning out the strands. Slowly getting there. The nice thing about converting is you can use dFormers and dForce to make morphs, and animation gets a lot easier:) Still struggling with finding the right settings for aweSurface though..

 

Sven Dullah

Ok, testrender with HDRI lighting and conforming GB hair. Converted to SubD and push modifyer applied. Progressive 10x10 ps, 2048/512 skinsamples, 35 min.

wowie

Gone said:

Wowie: yo're confusing me - the Garibaldi author called himself Futurebiscuit not Totalbiscuit. 

My mistake.

Gone said:

So, when do we get to play with the new hair shader?

When it's ready. Thanks for the info on getting texture maps with Garibaldi.

Sven Dullah said:

@wowie

Looks real nice. I'm very curious...what's the main difference between awe and this new hair shader? Does it render faster? Different specular models? Will it work for transmapped hair also? Or is it only for Garibaldi hair? Any helpful hints about using awe on GB hair, while we're waiting?

The hair shader uses 3delight's internal Marschner BRDF ( R, TT and TRT ) so it's specifically geared for hair. It doesn't need additional SSS or translucency because the Marschner TT component.At the moment, the hair shader will render but most of its interesting features (color ramp/modulation) don't work with Garibaldi hair. I did try out some LAMH presets and I think the root to tip gradient works with that.

3delight's hair BRDF is most probably made with curve/strand based hair in mind, so adapting it to work with poly hair is challenging. It should be more physically correct, since the Marschner BRDF assumes a cylindrical/tube shape for the hair. But that's on a curve, not on poly hair or hair cards.

As for performance compared to aweSurface, I think it's faster though it's hard to compare because the two shaders don't necessarily have the same final output. So it's an apples to oranges comparison. aweSurface can be faster at times, but then it's not doing the same amount of work, plus it doesn't use the proper BRDF model.

if you want to use Garibaldi hair with aweShading kit, I suggest omitting any point/spot/distant light from any awe Surface applied surfaces via light categories. Unfortunately, that means it can only be done with the point/spot/distant light in the freebie pack (since any other lights don't have category input fields). But the Garibaldi shader (or any other shader for that matter) will still see the lights.

Anyway, I've found what the problem was with normal mapping, I was erroneously using the wrong vectors. Now normal mapping looks correct.

Test shots of the hair shader on AprilYSH's Portia Hair below. Just 512 samples on the hair and 2048 samples on everything else.

khorneV2

Sven Dullah said:

Hello there,

is there a sort of  short tutorial/workaround that sums up the best/quick settings using AWE surface/lights/scripts and  converting 3delight basic scenes/setups ? ?

thanks in advance

Sven Dullah

khorneV2 said:

Sven Dullah said:

Hello there,

is there a sort of  short tutorial/workaround that sums up the best/quick settings using AWE surface/lights/scripts and  converting 3delight basic scenes/setups ? ?

thanks in advance

I'm afraid not;) Best advice I can give is to save your own presets for the most common materials, such as water, rock concrete etc. Start with wowies glosssy- rough- reflective- or one of the other presets and go from there. I basically use two methods of converting environmental sets to awe. For very large sets I go to the scene tab and expand everything, then select everything and every surface, then use the base shader script. (It's easy to miss some bones/items so they still have the default shader and will render black.) Then I just go surface by surface and make adjustments, testrender, adjust some more... For less complex scenes I just select a surface and choose one of the presets, adjust and go to the next surface. So it takes time to do the conversions, but having your own presets will save you some time for sure. For skins I use one of the base character presets as a starting point. I've found that I usually make about the same changes every time, so doing things slightly different than wowie, obviously. I like to use more diffuse strength, less specular strength, less SSS scatter strength, more SSS absorption strength, and add a good bit of "Use diffuse texture with SS", maybe 60-70%. But then again, no expert at tweaking skins=)

As for lighting, I've made a couple of subsets with some nice HDRIs with different whitebalance, as well as a couple of area light sets. Make it easy to test the surface settings after conversion without having to set up the lighting everytime. Well that's obvious of course. I guess the 3Delight users are on our own when it comes to presets, no matter if we use awe or the presets (if any) that come with the products;) Maybe someone will start adding awe presets to products at some point, but...I have my doubts=)

Actually I haven't tried the IRayUber to awe conversion script, as I have very few IRay only products, should give it a go...

ETA When you've converted a set and you're happy with it, save as a hierarchical materials preset for later use;)

Sven Dullah

wowie said:

 

Sven Dullah said:

@wowie

Looks real nice. I'm very curious...what's the main difference between awe and this new hair shader? Does it render faster? Different specular models? Will it work for transmapped hair also? Or is it only for Garibaldi hair? Any helpful hints about using awe on GB hair, while we're waiting?

The hair shader uses 3delight's internal Marschner BRDF ( R, TT and TRT ) so it's specifically geared for hair. It doesn't need additional SSS or translucency because the Marschner TT component.At the moment, the hair shader will render but most of its interesting features (color ramp/modulation) don't work with Garibaldi hair. I did try out some LAMH presets and I think the root to tip gradient works with that.

3delight's hair BRDF is most probably made with curve/strand based hair in mind, so adapting it to work with poly hair is challenging. It should be more physically correct, since the Marschner BRDF assumes a cylindrical/tube shape for the hair. But that's on a curve, not on poly hair or hair cards.

Ok, I hope you get it sorted, had a feeling the BRDF  played a part in this, as I mentioned in some earlier post, it seems I get nicer results using the AS Classic on GB or poly hair. The funny thing is it doesn't stall like when using it on transmapped stuff, and renders pretty much as fast as the default BRDF.

wowie said:

As for performance compared to aweSurface, I think it's faster though it's hard to compare because the two shaders don't necessarily have the same final output. So it's an apples to oranges comparison. aweSurface can be faster at times, but then it's not doing the same amount of work, plus it doesn't use the proper BRDF model.

if you want to use Garibaldi hair with aweShading kit, I suggest omitting any point/spot/distant light from any awe Surface applied surfaces via light categories. Unfortunately, that means it can only be done with the point/spot/distant light in the freebie pack (since any other lights don't have category input fields). But the Garibaldi shader (or any other shader for that matter) will still see the lights.

Ok good to know;)

wowie said:

Anyway, I've found what the problem was with normal mapping, I was erroneously using the wrong vectors. Now normal mapping looks correct.

Test shots of the hair shader on AprilYSH's Portia Hair below. Just 512 samples on the hair and 2048 samples on everything else.

Slightly off topic...did you notice the black line on her chest? Looks a bit like the DoF bug Nice looking hair

Edit: Haha please ignore my last comment, I cleaned my screen and it went away

khorneV2

Sven Dullah said:

khorneV2 said:

Sven Dullah said:

Hello there,

is there a sort of  short tutorial/workaround that sums up the best/quick settings using AWE surface/lights/scripts and  converting 3delight basic scenes/setups ? ?

thanks in advance

I'm afraid not;) Best advice I can give is to save your own presets for the most common materials, such as water, rock concrete etc. Start with wowies glosssy- rough- reflective- or one of the other presets and go from there. I basically use two methods of converting environmental sets to awe. For very large sets I go to the scene tab and expand everything, then select everything and every surface, then use the base shader script. (It's easy to miss some bones/items so they still have the default shader and will render black.) Then I just go surface by surface and make adjustments, testrender, adjust some more... For less complex scenes I just select a surface and choose one of the presets, adjust and go to the next surface. So it takes time to do the conversions, but having your own presets will save you some time for sure. For skins I use one of the base character presets as a starting point. I've found that I usually make about the same changes every time, so doing things slightly different than wowie, obviously. I like to use more diffuse strength, less specular strength, less SSS scatter strength, more SSS absorption strength, and add a good bit of "Use diffuse texture with SS", maybe 60-70%. But then again, no expert at tweaking skins=)

As for lighting, I've made a couple of subsets with some nice HDRIs with different whitebalance, as well as a couple of area light sets. Make it easy to test the surface settings after conversion without having to set up the lighting everytime. Well that's obvious of course. I guess the 3Delight users are on our own when it comes to presets, no matter if we use awe or the presets (if any) that come with the products;) Maybe someone will start adding awe presets to products at some point, but...I have my doubts=)

Actually I haven't tried the IRayUber to awe conversion script, as I have very few IRay only products, should give it a go...

ETA When you've converted a set and you're happy with it, save as a hierarchical materials preset for later use;)

ok tnks a lot

Sven Dullah

@wowie

Tks, I saw your message just now, much appreciated!

Gone

Did a bit of sleuthing and discovered an error in the texture import info.

The maps need to be 1024x1024 and in .png format. Everything else should be correct.

Sven Dullah

Gone said:

Did a bit of sleuthing and discovered an error in the texture import info.

The maps need to be 1024x1024 and in .png format. Everything else should be correct.

Ah, ok, tks!

wowie

OK. Starting to look like it's ready.

21 minutes 20.39 seconds

Sven Dullah

wowie said:

OK. Starting to look like it's ready.

21 minutes 20.39 seconds

Very excited about this:)

Sven Dullah

I might as well post my latest GBhair to .obj to conforming - experiment... kept the hair at base level to keep rendertimes down, shadowsamples 512, skin shadow/SS-samples 2048/512.

Rendertime 11 min

Rendertime about 25 min, slightly different push/smoothing modifyer settings:

kyoto kid

...where are the four spheres from in the previous images?

Sven Dullah

Hmm problems...I can't get opacity to work with the awePT arealight shader, it ignores the transmaps. I try to make a burning hair, have replaced the hair diff maps with a flames texture, and applied the PT arealight. The areas that should be transparent render black and solid. Any ideas why? Couldn't get it to work so applied the OmUberlightshader and it works, only it doesn't allow for tiling adjustments:(

Sven Dullah

Sven Dullah said:

Hmm problems...I can't get opacity to work with the awePT arealight shader, it ignores the transmaps. I try to make a burning hair, have replaced the hair diff maps with a flames texture, and applied the PT arealight. The areas that should be transparent render black and solid. Any ideas why? Couldn't get it to work so applied the OmUberlightshader and it works, only it doesn't allow for tiling adjustments:(

Don't know what I did but today I applied the flame diffuse and opacity textures to a plane, and it worked with the PT arealight. So it's all good. I ended up using the environmental shader on the burning hair and used a PTghostlight for the emissive light. Not exactly the way I wanted it but good enough for my non-art experiments;)

Sven Dullah

Progressive testrender after converting https://www.daz3d.com/odysseon-station-control-center. Didn't feel like cheating, so made the light bulbs emissive and that's that...2h 45min. A bit of grain on parts of the ceiling, will need to increase shadowsamples a bit, but no bad normals as far as I can see, Nightshift rocks:)

kyoto kid

...wow, that is impressive.

khorneV2

Sven Dullah said:

khorneV2 said:

Sven Dullah said:

Hello there,

is there a sort of  short tutorial/workaround that sums up the best/quick settings using AWE surface/lights/scripts and  converting 3delight basic scenes/setups ? ?

thanks in advance

I'm afraid not;) Best advice I can give is to save your own presets for the most common materials, such as water, rock concrete etc. Start with wowies glosssy- rough- reflective- or one of the other presets and go from there. I basically use two methods of converting environmental sets to awe. For very large sets I go to the scene tab and expand everything, then select everything and every surface, then use the base shader script. (It's easy to miss some bones/items so they still have the default shader and will render black.) Then I just go surface by surface and make adjustments, testrender, adjust some more... For less complex scenes I just select a surface and choose one of the presets, adjust and go to the next surface. So it takes time to do the conversions, but having your own presets will save you some time for sure. For skins I use one of the base character presets as a starting point. I've found that I usually make about the same changes every time, so doing things slightly different than wowie, obviously. I like to use more diffuse strength, less specular strength, less SSS scatter strength, more SSS absorption strength, and add a good bit of "Use diffuse texture with SS", maybe 60-70%. But then again, no expert at tweaking skins=)

As for lighting, I've made a couple of subsets with some nice HDRIs with different whitebalance, as well as a couple of area light sets. Make it easy to test the surface settings after conversion without having to set up the lighting everytime. Well that's obvious of course. I guess the 3Delight users are on our own when it comes to presets, no matter if we use awe or the presets (if any) that come with the products;) Maybe someone will start adding awe presets to products at some point, but...I have my doubts=)

Actually I haven't tried the IRayUber to awe conversion script, as I have very few IRay only products, should give it a go...

ETA When you've converted a set and you're happy with it, save as a hierarchical materials preset for later use;)

ok tnks a lot

Sven Dullah said:

Progressive testrender after converting https://www.daz3d.com/odysseon-station-control-center. Didn't feel like cheating, so made the light bulbs emissive and that's that...2h 45min. A bit of grain on parts of the ceiling, will need to increase shadowsamples a bit, but no bad normals as far as I can see, Nightshift rocks:)

wowie

Sven Dullah said:

Hmm problems...I can't get opacity to work with the awePT arealight shader, it ignores the transmaps. I try to make a burning hair, have replaced the hair diff maps with a flames texture, and applied the PT arealight. The areas that should be transparent render black and solid. Any ideas why? Couldn't get it to work so applied the OmUberlightshader and it works, only it doesn't allow for tiling adjustments:(

I'm looking into it. It has to do with values passed from DS to 3delight. Light shaders don't use the same naming conventions as surface shaders. I got around this limitation for PolyShape and Textures by adding my own parameters.

The hair shader is basically 90% done. Just finished testing all the features. I've also added extra ones like saturation adjustment, a 2nd specular/reflection lobe and sheen. Render times with zero optimization - 22 minutes. With 100% optimization (the default value), 5 to 6 minutes. When the 2nd spec is enabled, render times goes to 7 or 8 minutes, depending if you're doing just specular or specular and reflection.

Test renders below. The variations are all done with just playing around with the shader controls (melanin controls, highlight, root to tip ramp). From testing, the shader works best if the model comes with pretty detailed opacity maps. You can still plug in specular maps long with proper bump, normal and or displacement maps.