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The specificity of Menonite made me laugh.
Your Blender velus hair work has me curious about switching, until I think about how much work would be involved :p
Wow, magaremoto, the images you included in your comment ("my latest attempts to get natural skin via glossiness/specular mode") are superb! I am especially impressed with the closeup of the lower face.
Questions for you: (1) What skin did you use? The detail is very realistic. (2) what were the glossiness and specularity settings you used? (3) This is not about the figure but about your post. How do you get the forum comment to include your example images inline? I've never been able to get that to work. I always have to include images as attachments.
@lamoid: very kind of you, still learning
pbr specular/glossiness mode looks promising because you can have more intuitive control on reflections and white albedo; the maps I've been using are included here:
https://www.daz3d.com/perfectly-imperfect-skin-and-merchant-resource-for-genesis-8-female, but actually I made myself maps needed to get bpr outcomes, by using only the provided diffuse maps.
In the attached screenshots you can have a glimpse of my settings, still working on sss and translucency and no work on top coat to drop the albedo so far
The trouble is not so much to re-use settings but re-using those settings will give you the same look for every person regardless of what they really look like or what you want them to look like. To change that you have to alter the settings to be appropriate for wat the person really looks like. That's not a problem with DAZ 3D because all the characters are essentially made up and it doesn't really matter altimately what the original source people looked like.
Hmm. How are you guys seeing these harsh shadows? Mine appear pretty soft...?
Also, for the record, here is the difference between faithful / natural with an HDRI. Seems pretty minimal...
In terms of sequential art there's a better trade off. either you have the figure rigged in blender in which case everything is self contained, or if you use teleblender and you can export out your scene and load the materials from a previous scene, as long as you keep all the material names the same you're fine.
the big diference is unlike DS you can't just select the leg and face and adjust their sss settings together (you can set up things such that you can with nodes but that requires some setup and it still lacks a bit of flexibility) or say you have scenery with 20 different windows each with their own material, even if youu just combine them, you sill have to go through each one to combine them. now if you reuse that set in 10+ renders you can append it from the initial scene and it won't need setup that extra setup gets canceled out pretty quickly by the faster render time (though fwiw both diffeomorphic and teleblender do pretty decent conversions that scenery never needs that much tweaking usually just glass)
I've also recycled strand hairs I've created in blender, as long as they're sat on a skull cap you can just append that and reposition it, on the other hand strand eyelashes, brows, vellus, would not easily transfer to a new character (there are ways you could but they would probably end up taking as much effort as just recreating them)
I'm pretty sure theres definitely a functional pipeline for sequential art, but if you're me and every render you do tends to be a different character that I've never rendered before, even though I/ve got my setup pretty stream lined and Ive gotten very very fast at nodes, theres still a good bit of manual texture loading
TL;DR Theres an initial setup, but if you're reusing the same exact figure multiple times you should only have to do it once.
Irays buggy bump strikes again :( Bump should soften the transition not make it worse. Its definitely a smoother transition without bump, although still less soft than reality as I've observed it, and not using bump or normals isn't exactly a solution. Even with them both set to 1 theres still some artefacting. That explains why this was so much less of an issue in blender (after hitting my head against the wall with how much better bump looked on clothers in blender I did some digging and the answer seems to be blender has added a several of fixes for various shadow terminator issues that iray lacks)
so the problem is the bump and normals but since not using them isnt really a viable solution I'm still back to trying to find alternate ways to soften the transition and bump + vellus has a softer transition than no bump at least
also the figure is in a cube, (a sort of grey blue for the last few renders) for some tests i set it close to black to better isolate the main light but in my testing I also always make sure to set it to light grey so there is pure physical calculated bounce light
for the record the white transmitted color absolutely works with a 3 point light setup I dont know why you would think it wouldnt
The struggle of my existence, :(
Thank you for the in-depth reply, j cade.
Which do you recommend if I don't plan on posing the characters in Blender? Diffeomorphic or teleblender?
I'd probably go teleblender in that case. Diffeomorphic doesnt currently have an easy way to export out figures without their rigs, but I also might be biased because I'm more comfortable using Teleblender (mainly because when I started exporting to blender it was the only option)
Teleblender is definitely the "do everything in daz and then export to render" option whereas Diffeo is designed with the goal of getting daz content to work in blender
On the other hand I think Diffeo does better with its default material conversion, which never really factored into my decision making, because I am phisically incapable of leaving materials on their default settings anyway. Never the less I think I/ve done some frankensteining on atleast one render, where I exported the figure via teleblender but the scenery via diffeo (it was a stonemason set and I decided I didn;t really feel like adjusting quite that many materials for a single image)
The reason I have avoided Teleblender is, as I recall, it requires 3Delight materials rather than Iray. I can't be fussed to convert everything back to 3Delight - even if there is a 3Delight material available which is becoming less and less likely. That said, the last time I tried the Diffeomorphic DAZ Importer I was disappointed with the conversion. If it comes down to a trade-off between the time it takes to tweak materials for Cycles/Eevee and the time taken to render in IRay, then the latter seems less hassle.
I use telebender with iray materials afaict it works, it grabs some of the textures at least, like I said I will adjust all of them anyway no matter what, I tweak every material in my daz renders and those were created for iray, so I never really paid attention to the material conversion
and he time trade off is why I have been talking to someone interested in doing sequential art so theres a very different time trade off at work, lets say the initial setup takes 4 hours or more, If you then end up rendering 50 images and the cycles render take 10 minutes where the Iray ones would have taken a half hour (and thats generous to iray, honestly) you very quickly end up saving a lot of time
anywho this is all suuuper irrelevant to photorealism in Iray, so heres further expiriments with vellus also I stuck the bump in the displacement at well and I kind of like the effect, it helps break up the surface a little at least
I loaded the morph that my cycles render used and matched the lighting (completely different texture though)
It still lacks the softeness of the cycles render and I may have to go to even more strands which is a bit terrfyingbut there are some elements that I really like and its a more reasonable ammout of furryness.
Thank you, j cade. I'm shocked the render time is really so different. I will definitely be experimenting with Blender. I've been using Daz for over 2 1/2 years now and have become fairly proficient, but I feel like it's now limiting my creativity. Not because of the PA's, but because of the software which just doesn't seem to be advancing very much, and also how it doesn't really play well with others.
This looks really good! I would love to use displacement all the time, but my God does it chew up memory! And, unfortunately, I don't think you can displace only one surface, right? So, for instance, you can't just use sub-d 4 displacement on the face, because it will apply to the whole body and suddenly your Geometry is taking up 2 GB. Ugh.
Anyway...
For my character I added some "color zones" to the face, and I really think they added something. Thoughts?
@isidorekeeghan As I already explained. You can't test light falloffs with a single light, because this way you can always adjust the size and intensity to match faithful and natural, as you explained you do. That's also of course wrong because you don't have to fit lights to a rendering method. But this will not work anyway with multiple lights with different size and intensity, for example in the three point setup I provided as test.
I do find your sss simplification interesting, mainly because it may translate better to eevee and I'm doing some tests on this.
edit. Also when you do tests, please include the scene file as I did myself so the result can be verified and eventually commented by anyone interested.
edit. There may also be different purposes here. That is, if you're only interested in getting a "believable picture" then anything will do. You don't need to worry about "fitting" lights or using any trick or tool at your disposal. On the contrary if your goal is to get a "believable 3d asset" then it needs to work in any light condition and you can't "fit" the lights to make it better.
j cade when I use the bump maps for displacement, I get seams. Did you find a way around that, by chance?
P.S. It definitely has a good effect on softening the shadows.
@emoryahlberg That happens when the displacement settings are mismatched. Put the corresponding bump maps into face, ears, lips, torso, arms, legs, and match values.
Hm. That's what I thought as well, but they are all the same.
I have had the Normal channel pop seams if the values are too high even when matched in values.
As already reported, hdri and sunlight work fine. The issue arises with photometric lights, that you may need to simulate studio or movie lights. To test it use scene only lights, or use a low intensity hdri with strong photometrics. Also I provided a premade test scene where the issue is most visible.
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/5743051/#Comment_5743051
p.s. As for iray vs cycles, the strength of cycles is it gets a much better and faster denoiser since it uses the albedo and displacement buffers to retain details that iray can't.
For those of us who don't know what photometric means, does this mean a scene lit with just HDRI or the "sun/sky only" setting will work fine but if you have any other light, such as a lamp or overhead light that is perhaps made with an "emmisive" surface setting, it won't work? Does DAZ Studio have specific light objects that are some kind of DAZ Studio lights, separate from emissive surface settings, which don't work?
In DAZ iRay world, photometric only refers to the lights you add via the DAZ Studio menu, eg spotlight is one of them. You get an actual node with a location and direction added to your viewport with you'll see as a node in the Scene tab. If you select that node in the Scene tab and scroll down the list of parameters that apply to it in the parameters tab you'll eventually see a configuartion button for Photometric. The Photometric button pushed down is light for iRay renderer while the Photometric button unpushed is for the 3DL renderer. All 3DL light sets that have light nodes in the Scene tab and a Photometric button for each of the light nodes can be converted to iRay by pressing down the Photometric button for that node. Those converted 3DL lights probably though will make for a much less showy and high contrast light in iRay then it does in 3DL because 3DL is more a comic style renderer and so exaggerates a lot for dramatic effect.
DS already shows/hides controls according to the render engine - for examplle Cast Shadows is available only with 3Delight, not Iray. Photometric is an option for Iray lights, it isn't a toggle for 3Delight vs Iray.
@NylonGirl
As for faithful vs natural the difference is, if you use faithful then any light energy and falloff is the same as in non-spectral rendering so everything works fine and you don't have to fix anything to make spectral work.
On the contrary, if you use natural, then photometric lights will get a different energy and falloff and you need to fix them to get the same lighting as in non-spectral rendering. That is a bug. Then HDRI and sunlight work fine with natural, that is, they get the same energy and falloff as in non-spectral so you don't have to fix them.
testing teeth and mouth
blender but interesting
Sure, Blender is awesome, but why does every thread turn into a Blender discussion. How does Blender help increasing realism inside DAZ Studio IRAY?
Can't fault someone for thinking that the ends would be more important than parochial loyalty to the means. That every thread turns into a Blender discussion is the universe trying to tell you something.
I managed to make it work
This conversation seems to get stuck in place when people run out of new approaches. For a long time, it focused on Jeff_Someone's approach. Now it's stuck on Blender. The topic is evergreen, so eventually, somebody will come up with something new they're doing in Iray. Or it will become all about Zbrush…