Kettu's free stuff: lights, tutorials, etc

Liana

Mustakettu85 said:

Liana said:

My brain has been completely confused reading this stuff. haha... 

Edit: I am working on your IBL tutorial when I go to click on accept for making the new light shader Daz gets a fatal error message. Any clues maybe why??

"Accept" when you're done connecting and want to save everything? This is new, I've never had that happen to me.

What DS version are you using and what OS? And if you locate the log after the error before relaunching DS, what does it say at the bottom?

On Windows, the log should be in [your user folder]/AppData/Roaming/DAZ 3D/ Studio4

And if you click "Save network" and then "Compile shader" before you click "Accept", does it save and compile normally, or crash?

I run Daz 4.9 64 bit on a windows 10 64 bit machine with 16 GB of Ram. Hmm.. I will go check on it. It is easy to replicate. I did it 3 times yesterday. haha

Edit: This is the point I get to in the tut when it crashes..

The default option is ”Distant light”, but for our purposes you need
to select ”Ambient Light (GI)”, as shown.
Give the shader a name you will recognise (”Envlight2” or
something). Click ”Accept”.

I click that accept and it gets the fatal error message. The pic is the message. The zip is what I saved from that message "pic"

Edit: Last line of the log:

2016-56-18 13:56:10.815 WARNING: QLayout: Attempting to add QLayout "" to DzNameBlockDlg "DzNameBlockDlg", which already has a layout

 

*shrugs* Clueless

 

Mustakettu85

Liana said:

I run Daz 4.9 64 bit on a windows 10 64 bit machine with 16 GB of Ram. Hmm.. I will go check on it. It is easy to replicate. I did it 3 times yesterday. haha

Edit: This is the point I get to in the tut when it crashes..

The default option is ”Distant light”, but for our purposes you need
to select ”Ambient Light (GI)”, as shown.
Give the shader a name you will recognise (”Envlight2” or
something). Click ”Accept”.

I click that accept and it gets the fatal error message. The pic is the message. The zip is what I saved from that message "pic"

Holy [SEHT], you're right. It does exactly the same thing in the DS general release on this home machine of mine. I'm also on Win10 64bit. Wondering if it's host OS specific, again...
It doesn't crash in the beta, though.

So you have two options: either use the beta for the tutorial, or instead of creating a new shader, duplicate an existing one and remove whatever is inside it. DzAmbient should work as a "master" for the latter case - right-click it and select "duplicate".

Liana

Mustakettu85 said:

Liana said:

I run Daz 4.9 64 bit on a windows 10 64 bit machine with 16 GB of Ram. Hmm.. I will go check on it. It is easy to replicate. I did it 3 times yesterday. haha

Edit: This is the point I get to in the tut when it crashes..

The default option is ”Distant light”, but for our purposes you need
to select ”Ambient Light (GI)”, as shown.
Give the shader a name you will recognise (”Envlight2” or
something). Click ”Accept”.

I click that accept and it gets the fatal error message. The pic is the message. The zip is what I saved from that message "pic"

Holy [SEHT], you're right. It does exactly the same thing in the DS general release on this home machine of mine. I'm also on Win10 64bit. Wondering if it's host OS specific, again...
It doesn't crash in the beta, though.

So you have two options: either use the beta for the tutorial, or instead of creating a new shader, duplicate an existing one and remove whatever is inside it. DzAmbient should work as a "master" for the latter case - right-click it and select "duplicate".

Oh weird, but it would not surprise me either. Windows 10 seems to have its issues with programs.

Ok I renamed it. As for you saying remove whatever is in it. Is that the view with all the pahtways and boxes in it?

Mustakettu85

Liana said:

Oh weird, but it would not surprise me either. Windows 10 seems to have its issues with programs.

Ok I renamed it. As for you saying remove whatever is in it. Is that the view with all the pahtways and boxes in it?

Yeah, basically you don't need anything outside the User Parameters box on the left and the small box with a picture on the right that should have the shader name on it and the Cl / Ol params.

Liana

Mustakettu85 said:

Liana said:

Oh weird, but it would not surprise me either. Windows 10 seems to have its issues with programs.

Ok I renamed it. As for you saying remove whatever is in it. Is that the view with all the pahtways and boxes in it?

Yeah, basically you don't need anything outside the User Parameters box on the left and the small box with a picture on the right that should have the shader name on it and the Cl / Ol params.

Great! I am moving forward with the tutorial now. Thanks! I didn't crash. :)

Mustakettu85

Yay! Awesome =)

Liana

Mustakettu85 said:

Yay! Awesome =)

Well..... sort of awesome. I finished the tutorial and I got errors. haha I thought I did things right, but it never fails I always miss something. I think my eyes were glazing over a bit at one point. :P

I attached a couple of pics to show what I have and the error log.I think I will take a break from this and do something else. The fog from my brain may clear up and it all won't look so 'greek' as it is said. haha

mjc1016

And after saving as a dbm and a preset to my library, reloading the scene in a restart of Studio...the 13 to 15 minute time frame. 

Liana said:

Mustakettu85 said:

Yay! Awesome =)

Well..... sort of awesome. I finished the tutorial and I got errors. haha I thought I did things right, but it never fails I always miss something. I think my eyes were glazing over a bit at one point. :P

I attached a couple of pics to show what I have and the error log.I think I will take a break from this and do something else. The fog from my brain may clear up and it all won't look so 'greek' as it is said. haha

I'm not sure, but it could be that you have 4 single quotes rather than 2 double quotes...

Liana

mjc1016 said:

I'm not sure, but it could be that you have 4 single quotes rather than 2 double quotes...

Opps... lost me there. 4 single quotes? I have not made shaders before of any kind just starting to look into them so I understand the different ones better with the possibility I could make my own in the future. I may have bit off more than I could chew at this point. LOL

mjc1016

The error is showing an 'invalid' character in the 'envmap' line...so it's either what should be " (double quote) isn't or you didn't change the type of variable it's expecting in the places it said to or change its value, in the tutorial...

Liana

mjc1016 said:

The error is showing an 'invalid' character in the 'envmap' line...so it's either what should be " (double quote) isn't or you didn't change the type of variable it's expecting in the places it said to/or changes its value, in the tutorial...

Ahhh, makes more sense. Sorry just learning so some of the verbage is like greek to me. :) I was thinking about deleting what I just made or going back over the tutorial again and triple checking my 'settings' so to speak. Oh.. and thanks mjc1016! :)

Edit: I triple checked and fixed what I thought was wrong. I saved and compiled with no errors. Yay!! :D

Liana

I did no adjustments just added my new enviroment light to existing lights. I wanted to see what the difference would be from my hand made light set-up. The first is the original, the second is with the new enviroment light shader added. I will play around with it more tomorrow. I see a slight difference straight out of the 'box' so to speak. A slightly more warm color to the overall photo. :)

Edit:I had to 'play' a bit. :) I have made a few changes the tree, added flowers, played with the 'new' light some more added suggested envromap from tutorial (3rd image). I think I now need to sit down and write notes on the different 'dials/sliders' I can change for skin, lights, and render engine and what they actually do, so I get a better understanding and have quick notes to peek at. I did manage to gain some extra knowledge beyond just making an envroment light and shader for lights. Thanks for the tutorial again! :D

mjc1016

Well, my ability to turn simple tests into full blown renders is definitely still active...

Started out with playing with a new texture for the tree rat...err....squirrel.  Which quickly grew into trying the LAMH preset...just to see how it looks with new texture, of course.  Well, that seemed a little off...I mean a squirrel just sitting there with nothing around?  So...it needed a backdrop...and since this is 3DL and has no built in floor...the leaf litter set I found on Blendswap a couple of weeks ago sounded like a grand idea (except it wasn't big enough...easily solved an instance later and it was).

Of course it's the spot, camera from up thread (no, didn't try the skin shader for the base of squirrel....hmm...good idea, though)

Not quite happy with the leaves or eyes, but I'll tweak them later...there's translucency to the leaves that I know needs some tweaking.

But..it was 28 mins to render.  Something I know with UE2 would be much longer  (yes, call me crazy for expecting LAMH hair to not take forever to render with IDL...)

 

Mustakettu85

Liana said:

I did manage to gain some extra knowledge beyond just making an envroment light and shader for lights. Thanks for the tutorial again! :D

You're most welcome =) Learning is the key =)

Mustakettu85

mjc1016 said:

 

But..it was 28 mins to render.  Something I know with UE2 would be much longer  (yes, call me crazy for expecting LAMH hair to not take forever to render with IDL...)

Fun little evil squirrel =)

Fun stuff about RiCurves and full path-tracing: when using a contemporary shader with the "hair" model in trace() (the memory-intensive thing I told you about), LAMH pwns transmapped hair for speed. With 0 "hair" bounces, though =) but it still looks good (especially if you hack in a diffuse term for lighter shades).

Liana

I have wondered about the LAMH and how hard it is to work with. One day I will take the leap. I do like the squirrel makes him a bit more interesting. :)

Oso3D

One thing I've found improves the look of most physical hair models is lowering opacity to 90% or so. (Depending a lot on the hair)

i often use a combination of translucence and lower opacity, and it really softens the hair and gives it some play with lighting.

mjc1016

Posted the latest version of the squirrel here... http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/1908706/#Comment_1908706

Yeah, it's a nuclear acorn...I forgot to adjust the Ambient value on it.  Oh well.

Mustakettu85

I honestly wanted to package a shader mixer photon-mapping solution, but it's just not happening.

The "RSL" side of Shader Mixer is full of the most wondrous of bugs. Not being able to see the actual code (including DS scripting that certain shader mixer blocks invoke behind the scenes) means not being able to squash those bugs.

I mean, the stuff that has my name on it should work, unless you deliberately try to break it. I don't do "yeah, whatever" releases.

A "solution" is not production-ready at all if you can randomly wind up with a simple scene where any and all (not necessarily shader mixer) "spotlight" will stop casting photons. For no apparent reason.

So I would suggest taming UE2 through the point cloud - yeah it's "scripted rendering", but hey, scripted rendering is the gateway to all the goodness there is.

...reliably.

Mustakettu85

A fractal texture resource I posted at the Rendo free stuff:

https://www.renderosity.com/mod/freestuff/fractal-a/77405

Parris

Mustakettu85 said:

- a step-by-step walkthrough of using Shader Builder to get a nifty environment light shader "Envlight2" supplied with 3Delight standalone to be used in DS (I hope this tutorial is informative enough to facilitate your further endeavours into converting any other RSL shaders you may come across):
http://www.sharecg.com/v/75671/gallery/3/PDF-Tutorial/Alternative-Image-Based-Lighting-in-DAZ-Studio

Kettu, I can't thank you enough for this excellent tutorial! It did for me exactly what you hoped for folks in general - It helped me to understand Shader Builder and prompted me to learn more about RSL - both important first steps that led to eventual success with IBL Master.

Daywalker Designs

Here is an interesting test image. G3F using my Hive character head and body morphs, a modified version of Pixeluna's Synx character 3Delight textures (those are AoA based, and didn't want to render properly) converted to omHumanSurface and the G3F Basicwear. Render time less than about 30 seconds, mainly because there isn't anything else in the scene. The lights are the free distant lights from the top of page 2.

Mustakettu85

Parris said:

- a step-by-step walkthrough of using Shader Builder to get a nifty environment light shader "Envlight2" supplied with 3Delight standalone to be used in DS (I hope this tutorial is informative enough to facilitate your further endeavours into converting any other RSL shaders you may come across):
http://www.sharecg.com/v/75671/gallery/3/PDF-Tutorial/Alternative-Image-Based-Lighting-in-DAZ-Studio

Kettu, I can't thank you enough for this excellent tutorial! It did for me exactly what you hoped for folks in general - It helped me to understand Shader Builder and prompted me to learn more about RSL - both important first steps that led to eventual success with IBL Master.

You're most welcome, Parris! This really makes me very, very happy =)

// I'd hug you if I could =))) //

PS We're still curious if you could share the details of what sort of bug was slowing the UE2 bounce mode down for so long.

Mustakettu85

Daywalker Designs said:

Here is an interesting test image. G3F using my Hive character head and body morphs, a modified version of Pixeluna's Synx character 3Delight textures (those are AoA based, and didn't want to render properly) converted to omHumanSurface and the G3F Basicwear. Render time less than about 30 seconds, mainly because there isn't anything else in the scene. The lights are the free distant lights from the top of page 2.

Shouldn't be that different from any other distant lights if you aren't using a photonmapper camera, right?

Mustakettu85

So I was drinking coffee today and checking out the forums... came across this thread and felt like putting this little script together. It moves your selected scene items randomly around; you specify max possible distance and which axes.

Mustakettu85

This is a new shadow catcher shader that works with environment lighting and path-traced area lights. If you use wowie's aweSurface, either free or commercial, you will probably find it helpful. 

I do not support using RadiumCatcher without either of the AWE releases because RadiumCatcher requires my scripted rendering setup to work properly. The AWE releases both include it.

Get the file here; installation instructions are in a text file inside.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/8l42xa0is7a8ju0/RadiumCatcher.zip/file