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I would pay for this as well.
- Greg
Ok... thank you fro the clarfifaction.
What is a NPR engine?
OT: My main motivation to use cycles over iray would we the better light bouncing.
I'd be interested. My system struggles to render Iray scenes of any complexity. I haven't tried Blender yet so I don't know if it would be any better. If the plugin is fairly low priced, or if there is a demo version I could try to see how well it works then I would love to try it.
I think it means not photo real.
Also, I would he highly interested in this fork. I always end up giving up out of frustration after a few months of fiddling, every time I try to get daz people looking good in other programs. I fall back to iray, because it's not much fiddling around, compared to when I was trying to bring daz people into houdini to use their amazing render engine for example. In DS, all the fiddling around I really have to do to make some art is compostition and lighting. Sure, some fiddling, but I don't have to go mess around with shaders, making sure textures are plugged the right place, and their gamma is set right and all that other stuff lol.
Like gerster, one of the main reasons I ever try getting daz people into houdini blender ets, is so I can use them with the powerful tools in other programs such as the physics. With houdini mantra render engine was also a big factor, I could do ridiculously large renders in the same amount of time I could do a normal sized render in DS. Cycles, I don't know a whole lot about, I messed about, but it was after my houdini phase, and I really didn't give it much of a care once I figured out I was going to have to do a boatload of fiddling to get people into it anyways. No sense pissing myself off if it turned out to be better than iray, since I can't use it anyways lol.
Does this mean that it is possible to export DAZ HD to Blender? I thought it wasn't.
As for your proposal - count me in! I have struggled with Diffeomorphic and perhaps I am too used to getting my renders how I like them in IRay and have no idea how to do the same in Cycles. Anything that eases that switch from IRay to Cycles is welcome, especially since - as I mentioned in my PM to you - I am totally intimidated by the Blender node system.
Trust me when I tell you that Superfly is a very CRIPPLED version of Cycles. So, if you're judging Cycles because of Superfly, the two are not even in the same ballpark ;).
Laurie
I guess Thomas of the diffeomorphic plugin will be seriously interested. Actually materials get converted to cycles bsdf nodes by empiric formulas, and the result is not always the same as iray, especially with sss or "advanced" materials. If a custom iray uber shader can be done using mdl in cycles it will be a revolution. I didn't even think it was possible since afaik cycles is based on osl.
Just to let you know that @JClave seems to be going to start it .. I guess contributors are welcome. Of course this will be a revolution.
https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import-daz/issues/7/convert-shader-brick-materials-from-daz
Although I've had very good experiences with the Diffeomorphic plugin itself together with BlenderKit, I would still pay for this on day one.
I fully support this, but if someone could ELI5 what it does and how to use it upon release that would be much appreciated.
Here's an update from Jessub Kim to anyone interested.
I think it would go off like hotcakes on the blender market !
or even hit them up for a bit of funding !
I would definitely pay for a better bridge product to Blender. Interesting work!
@marble This book may be just what you need. I'd really like to see you satisfied with your renders with Cycles, and this book really de-mystified a lot of things for me.
Cycles Encyclopedia
Thanks. I have to say that I am not sure that I still have the powers of concetration to study a 340 page book on a render engine. My attention span gets shorter as the years pass. I guess I learned to make resonable pictures using IRay because I had no choice. Before that I learned to do the same with Reality/Luxrender also because I had no choice (other than 3Delight which I never cared for). So if I am to use Cycles, there will have to be a compelling reason and that would be something like being priced out of the IRay market with GPU demands reaching the 2080ti level or greater.
Maybe this shorter alternative might be a good place for me to start (but I would still need to learn that damn node system): https://www.blenderguru.com/articles/cycles-shader-encyclopedia
Disappointing that the subject of this discussion is also limited to NVidia but I suppose Cycles can help NVidia users too with OOC capabilities.
By the way, I'd still like to see a few examples of what others consider to be acceptable renders using diffeomorphic and Blender Cycles. I've seen a few which, TBH, didn't impress me but maybe I've been looking in the wrong places.
I use Diffeomorphic just for materials, and apply them to a figure I import via Alembic.
I think I used all of the Diffeomorphic converted materials, except for the skin. The skin was a combination of Paislee's bump and specular maps with Skinbuilder 8 diffuse and SSS maps, with just a little bit of tweaking on the strengths. It's an extremely simple setup that got me what I wanted. All the eye materials, for example, I didn't change at all.
It looks a little orange/red because there's an animated candle lit chandelier on the ceiling, and the relatively low light hides some detail, for example she looks much older in normal light as her sunken cheeks and crows feet really pop more, but these are editorial things. My point is that there may be subjective things that you personally would change, but Diffeomorphic gets you pretty close, where anything that you want to change can be done with just some basic knowledge of how the node system works.
Actually, I had never seen Andrew's explanations. I like 'em... the Encyclopedia is kind of over-kill, I admit. But it is all in there.
Good luck with whatever you decide, but I do think that your aversion to Blender's node system is rather irrational; it's well designed and intuitive, it's flexible and fun to try things, and the payoff is very rewarding when you get exactly what you were looking for.
I'm sure you are right about the node system but I find it daunting. Maybe the way my mind works - if I see a node with maths expressions I want to turn and run. And when I see tutorials and they say - add this between this node and that node - how is anyone supposed to guess what that intermediate node will do? And there are dozens (hundreds?) of them! Seems to me that experts doing tutorials assume a level of expertise in those who are following the tutorials.
It has taken me years to figure out combinations of parameters in the IRay surfaces tab and I'm still a novice. The Blender node system looks far more complex and I probably don't have that many years left to figure it out.
Marble, did you look at the node set up I included? For many cases, it need not be any more complicated than that. There are no math nodes, and only one intermediate node. If you had a specific question I'm sure several of us could clarify things for you, and you'll be getting results like you want, in no time. Come on in, the water's fine :)
@TheMysteryIsThePoint Don't forget that daz is basically selling premade content to play with. I guess that makes the customer choice. I mean, if one comes to daz in the first place it's probably because he/she doesn't want to fiddle with parameters and/or too much learning, they just want something that works fine out of the box.
Then I do like using blender with daz assets because this expands so much what you can do with them, especially for animation and effects where daz studio is very limited. But again this comes at the cost of some learning and fiddling that's probably not what daz users want.
@Padone Deep down, I know that you are right. It's just that I can feel his frustration in his posts.
That's a wee bit condescending. Nothing I produce is "out of the box". I'd just rather spend my time on the aesthetics than the techie details - and I am a techie myself having spent a long career in computer hardware and network support before I retired. The point is that if I can produce a nice picture using IRay then I am less inclined to learn the Blender node system (which may or may not be as daunting as I imagine). That is not to say that I don't spend time tweaking IRay to get just the look I want. I certainly don't load a couple of Genesis figures and props and press the "make art" button. I do object to the technical snobbery that sometimes passes for informed comment here.
I understand your confusion and I have tried to explain. But here's another go:
Way back when I was using Reality and Luxrender, I decided to try Blender instead. I watched some tutorials on the node system and got nowhere - I just found the whole method unintuitive (you obviously find the opposite). Reality and Luxus had a form of surfaces panel which suited me better so I stayed with that method. So I do have Blender and I use it for other things (mainly morphs and the video editor). Since then I have tried both TeleBlender and Diffomorphic in comparison to IRay and have been disappointed. As for evidence that I have tried ... I posted some efforts to a thread on the subject in which you and @Padone were involved:
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/5095591/#Comment_5095591
The point about aesthetics vs technology: some people seem more concerned with the workings of a process rather than the results. I've seen images posted here from "experts" and I have to say that many of those images look pretty awful to me. Perhaps that's subjective but the resulting image has to look good to me. It seems their much vaunted technical expertise has not done much for their aesthetic appreciation, IMHO. Unfortunately this "one click art" accusation is often bandied about by these same "experts".
Postscript: Perhaps what I find daunting is the amount of time it might take to learn Cycles and the node system well enough to produce similar quality to the IRay renders I am happy with at the moment. It has taken me a long time and a lot of tinkering to figure out the IRay surfaces and that panel happens to be something I feel comfortable with. I just know it would take at least as long to be equally happy with Cycles results but, hey, I might be forced down that route anyways if the cost of IRay becomes prohibitive.
I have never been a fan of nodes, but if they're taken in very small chunks, they're not too bad and after awhile you get a feel for exactly what they're doing. This is from a person that used to nearly cry in Poser's material room....lol.
Laurie
I've been getting familiar with Blender's node setup lately. After a few tutorials, I'm comfortable with what goes where. If it's just plugging maps in and varying their intensity/interaction, it's quite simple once you've got the hang of it. Making whole procudural textures can be a bit more daunting but I've followed tuts while understanding what's going on, even if I couldn't make it myself from scratch.
Like anything else, it's a question of having the time and making the effort to practice. (having the time being the bigger hurdle for many).
I still render in DS, even if I could render some things in cycles since I know DS better.