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Too much work? How dare work impinge on your "fun" time, ha!
I don't use RR M3 as I have all the morphs for him. I also use the shoulder shoulder utility by corvas (Simple Details M3, Renderosity) but it's no longer for sale. Which is too bad because it did make quite an improvement with those bowling ball shoulders.
The skin looks pretty good, given its age and limitations. Nice work.
Uzilite made some great outfits for the older figures, but morphs -- especially adjustment morphs -- were never their strong point. Newer DS utilities like morph transfers, smoothing, and push modifiers help a little to improve the look and fit of the older clothes. I'd not considered even trying to dForce this suit. Do report back on results when you get the time. I'm very curious!
I have Simple Details for Steph3. Never used Mike or Vicky much back in the day, especially the full versions)
If only DS could import pre-painted weight maps for various dForce aspects - this would really make things run smoother for me.
DS itself is anything but a convenient 3D painting app, even for something as "simple" as weight maps... DS being this awkward to use in this regard is one of the reasons I really respect the artists who have to deal with it for a living - like those who make complex clothing or build character shapes that require rigging adjustments.
Insanity: Opera won't run today on my i9-9880H machine after upgrading... I did a clean reinstall of an older version, and it won't run either. Da. Hell?
I had to fall back to Firefox, hopefully temporarily. I guess I need to find a cross-browser bookmarks manager because this is annoying.
Another annoying thing are those product updates here that have no related info posted to their ReadMe files. Let's just say that re-downloading, say, the whole 750 MB package of Leonardo for Torment takes quite a while when other family members are watching their TV shows. Without knowing why, it doesn't feel particularly good. I wish it were possible to have only those files sync that were actually changed.
Eh. Whatever. These days, if you're sick, it's your fault; if your tech doesn't work 100%, it's your fault again. Dog eat dog.
...another interesting observation I can share is that at least some dForce hair - for example - Electro Hair ( here, which I happened to use on M3 a coupla posts ago ) is not generated as RiCurves, but rather as PointsPolygons. Which is a bit insane as well, since it means that certain vectors have to be swapped in the shader for the ones orthogonal so that everything looks the way it's supposed to. And it also royally messes up the idea to use the v position as the root-to-tip coordinate - which is actually already messed up in Garibaldi and its child SBH, but, well, I thought that this could be applied to those dForce models imported from zBrush or whatever. Well, nope. The UV mapping of the resulting "mesh" is pretty mysterious actually. Will need more work to figure out. I looked at the mixer network of the Iray shader, but couldn't find any UV info there.
To be honest, while I know that DS is now an Iray-based ecosystem, this sort of information would be somewhere in the readme, if I were in charge of those.
Looks like I will need to go through my collection and compile a table of sorts listing what dForce models are 100% RiCurves and what are, well, something else - for the sake of hypothetical lurkers who might need it ten years from now.
What's most annoying - again :P - is that not every dForce hair model (if any) uses that super awesome salting/peppering feature from Garibaldi/SBH. Alright, it gets basically hardcoded into Cs, but what's actually wrong with working with Cs?.. unless whatever scene description format that Iray uses doesn't have anything analogous. Who knows...
I'm thinking about simulating salting/peppering by loading two hair models and combining them with a slightly different RNG seed and, say, 20% of desired density in one and 80% in another. These may be subtle effects, but they mean the difference between a natural hair colour and a dye job. And of course, when it comes to natural colours and longer hair, the sun bleach effect towards the ends is also very important (this is what the root-to-tip gradients are for, not just for purple ombré effects).
https://www.daz3d.com/rocco-hd-for-genesis-81-male - the uniformity of colour is one of the reasons why the hair (most likely it's this one) looks this off on a character who's supposed to be a cisgender man, i.e. the sort of person you'd not expect to get dye jobs. And of course, the way the hair puffs out on top near the parting is also rather artificial.
The character itself (himself? I'm always wondering if we should talk about characters as inanimate products or fictional people??) has me on the fence big time: I really like the face morph and texture. But I don't like the photo-based ample hair on the chest and especially the arms. Not only does it limit the versatility of the texture - it also looks too fake too often.
Decisions, decisions...
Coincidentally, most clothing in the promos also looks rather meh.
So I've studied the (actual) dForce hair models I have, which makes for less than two dozens, over 1/10th of the whole range of those in the store... and they all generate curves as PointsPolygons. This sort of explains why I was sometimes getting unpredictable artefacts when rendering... with the right vectors, they go away.
In theory, I could be doing something useful with DS right now, but in practice, it's way too hot. And, like most "lower middle class" Russians, we have no air conditioning installed. Just look at this forecast. I have no words.
// this is obviously in Celcius, do your own math //
Ouch, that sounds terrifying! Is this the ordinary summer weather type in Moscow, or is it exceptional? Looks like we're getting a heat wave on the Finnish westcoast also, but temperatures will be around 26-30, so nowhere near those figures. But we have no air condition either, so it will be tiresome, especially for the dog. Need to toss her in the shower every second hour or so:)
It happens, but it's not "ordinary". Usually our weather forecasts match those of Tampere pretty well, for an unknown reason... sometimes the Tampere forecast turns out to be more accurate even LOL
28.3C indoors right now. Past sundown. With open windows, a straight line from east to west. I can feel the air moving, but it isn't exactly cooling anything.
Extreme heat (same as extreme cold) is a continental climate thing, like in Siberia; it's one of those things that contributes to forest fires there (the other, arguably even bigger reason, is that the locals there love setting fire to dried grass as a way of "clearing" it). One of atmoblack bands from there even released an album "inspired" by that sort of stuff (not the grass, the fires) recently:
Alright, useful DS stuff. A WIP lookdev of good ol' Haunted Mansion + Moyra's Gothiquesque textures (currently at Rendo).
Being me, I first just put in six square light planes pointing straight down (5 of them instanced), but it doesn't seem to be an optimal solution. 10x10 pxs, and still fireflies, and it's clearly evident where the light planes are; they flood the lampshades (or whatever it's called). Crossed planes, at least, then, and with the axis running along each respective lightbulb axis.
I also suspect it all is not going to be closeup-worthy, but we'll see.
Now that's better; most of the fireflies have cleared, and while the lampshades are blown out still, it's to be expected. I might try darkening the diffuse & translucency colours (the lampshades are no-thickness).
The rendertime has increased for about half a minute (using i9-9880H, my main 3D machine now); not bad, given that now there's twice as many lightplane instances, and the whole lighting situation is suboptimal technically: the lightplanes are wholly inside the lampshades, opacity and all.
All the other mats save for the main rug are draft versions; the chandelier itself may also get edited further.
I'm surprised you didn't get more grain than that after moving the lights inside the shades. Not sure, since I don't have that nice looking set, but using wowie's shaders I would have avoided that sort of lighting scenario at all cost :) And probably cheated by using low intensity large additional light planes to minimize specular noise...
Now waiting to see you light the candles:)
The "candAlabra" turned out to be a single continuous surface (and group). So the candles are cheats - I made narrow tall-ish light crosses and stuck them two-thirds in, and enabled translucency on the "wax" using a strength map. It's not actual SSS, but looks passable IMO, especially if the "candAlabra" is not the focal point.
There's some noise on the portrait, but again, I don't think it's particularly bad. I always get criticised for noise, though. Strange; there are Iray renders all over this and other websites with way more noise - some of those are even promos.
The candles will also need flames - either planes with ambient and opacity, or maybe 3D if I locate something feasible.
Total Rendering Time: 5 minutes 47.64 seconds
We've obviously gone up from the original 3 m 25 s, but we have sixty more tiny lightplanes this time, coupled into thirty lightcrosses.
The metal on the "candAlabras" and their stands... I sort of think the "candAlabras" could remain like this, but the stands might make more sense if I copy the metal tint from the chandelier.
Most other surfaces still need finetuning (which may not change much as-is, but at least I will know things are done right)
Looking quite nice. Pretty amazing render speed, although the shades still are a bit too noisy in my opinion, and, probably as a matter of personal preference, I'd like the light to be a tad warmer. Nice trick with the translucency on the candles, I've always fiddled with SSS for lit candles but have to test your method.
Thank you!
I was playing Queen's Wish today, the Mist Maze quest, so to me "shades" are still "hostile spectres"... which part of the room specifically?
We shouldn't forget two things here as well: a) the resolution of the final renders won't be this small, so fidelity will necessarily improve :); b) these forums recompress the files we upload, which isn't always optimal.
The candlelight is quite peach-tinted actually (check out the specular spots it creates), it's the colour scheme that leans towards cool. Check out the "happy sunlit" promos:
https://www.renderosity.com/rr/mod/bcs/gothiquesque/141743
Actual SSS would look more convincing, especially close-up. Wax is the easiest thing to simulate ))
Was thinking about the lamp shades, but, as you pointed out, the resolution is small so hard to say for sure.
Ah yes, so it seems;)
The lampshades are blown out, I guess? We'll get to them later when the other things are done.
...and the escapism bit...
I'm fairly depressed these days - got reasons - but what really helps to stop thinking about it all for a while is those 90s metal gems. I did get into actual underground metal in the 90s, but a) in the late nineties; b) the bands I got into then were mostly the more popular ones, like Moonspell, Tiamat etc. So it means there is still a lot of records I haven't yet heard. It's awesome how many records are now being re-released digitally on bandcamp. So, what I was listening to today...
https://serpentriseofficial.bandcamp.com/album/gathered-by-2 - this is a very recent discovery
https://phlebotomizedhhr.bandcamp.com/album/immense-intense-suspense-skycontact - a band I've been familiar with for several years already; always a joy to revisit this record
https://avantegardemngt.bandcamp.com/album/heavenwood-swallow-20th-anniversary-1998-2018 - this is one of those exceptions, a not-that-well-known album, which I came across soon after it was released and have loved ever since.
Today I did some runtime decluttering - specifically concerning hair models for Genesis onwards. A lot of them, especially those coming from older bundles, never looked particularly attractive to me. Quite a few have been 100% replaced by dForce models.
To be honest, I think I also need to cast a critical look upon the Genesis and Genesis 2 (in particular!) clothing. Some of those outfits (again, from bundles) were quite... strange. And several had those Escheresque shirts with buttons on the same side as button-holes. QA, they said. Always on the lookout, they said.
There were also all those freebies for V4, of which lots were of dubious quality, of course... but these are not as one-click to uninstall as the post-DIM packages. P3DO Explorer might help, I guess. I do have the full version.
When it comes to pre-DS4 hair models, actually the quality also varied wildly, but style-wise they were mostly hand-selected by me (there weren't that many giveaways and much less spare cash back then), and even the more "random" ones tend to have strong nostalgic vibes to me. Lots of them are keepers for toonifying.
...and I'll leave y'all with Tiamat in 2005, playing a gothier version of their 1994 doom/death classic Whatever That Hurts. The era when everyone secretly believed Johan Edlund was an incarnation of a minor deity - well, he certainly looked the part! The era when the world was new and hope was undying. "We thought that it could never end", to quote a much older metal classic... but it ended.
Random fun: NVIDIA Canvas. I don't think it's going to stay free forever, but it's cool to have a chance to mess around with it. It feels a bit like lucid dreaming - the visualiser results are elusive and kinda unpredictable.
I can see them eventually adding an option to use your own photos as "styles".
Subdivided objects lose their interior volume shaders, any volume shaders. Can it be that extra AttributeEnd bug striking again?..
Gotta check the RIB.
We shouldn't forget as well that not all DS subdivision algos actually get exported to 3Delight as a subdivision surface; say, bilinear is PointsPolygons (which means that those can be used to mess around with vertex displacement... to a point - going too high on subdiv levels can make DS crash). And only actual subdiv surfaces lose their interior volumes. Gotta check as well if bilinear-subd'd instances lose their shadows or not. Hmmm.
I found that classic PRMan "interior smoke" shader listing and I'm thinking about putting it to creative use. Yeah it (like any ancient raymarcher) only responds to oldschool lights, but those are okay for "FX" (and using light categories, I can prevent them from affecting other surfaces). As you can see, the shader's scatter function gives interesting textures, and I tested a lo-poly cloud freebie from turbosquid - there's a point light in the middle, overexposing the cloud in the centre - looks ugly as of yet, but I can see all sorts of potential. Should work great for filling the mesh the Fluidos smoke sim creates (by playing with density, scatter colour and backscatter, fBm params, and of course our "secret light" placement, we can achieve various looks), and could also be made into actual clouds high-up-in-the-sky, I'd say - I'll test mCasual's isosurface plugin, but if not, well, it's not that difficult to rough up a cloud-ish sculpt. Maybe even candle flames for the Haunted Mansion - I have this cool flame mesh package by Porsimo, but the edges look too sharp as-is, so it's either that "ghost shader" with edge rolloff (which should allow texture maps to be used), or something like this, we'll see.
I'm also wondering if it might be possible to add fBm to 3Delight FastFog - it will require more manual work to set up user params, though: it's an RSL 2.0 shader so it can't be imported into shader builder. As-is, it works well for oldschool light sources, but it's quite... boring. I want texture.
Of course the "real deal" is that OpenVDB shader, but it's way less convenient to use for two reasons. First, you need to render in the standalone, or the vdb_evaluate DLL won't work. Then, the shader expects all those arrays as inputs... and let's just say DS has no control like this in its surface tab. So the easiest thing is, again, to input that data manually into the RIB. Lots of hassle, yeah.
Another crazy thing would be to actually try to implement trace()-light support into these raymarchers; crazy because I'm not entirely sure about performance. And figuring out which vectors to use is also something of a challenge.
Looks like, at least in the case of Electro hair, the UV is straightforward: a strand is a "plane", tip at the top. Kinda cool.
I spent a while poking around at morph conversions and ultimately decided to try out the commercial route by the late great Dimension3D - GenX2. I had gotten quite a lot of use of his Morphing Clothes utility back in the day... and GenX2 turned out to have a way of porting Laura/Luke and Maddie/Matt to the Genesis line, which was an unexpectedly awesome bonus. So... yes it was worth the investment (this latest sale was good, to boot). Now I can use all my favourite Gen3 heads and skins on G3F, with minimal effort. I don't transfer body morphs because I don't want to deal with JCMs and other rigging adjustments (no FBM conversions are ever 100% usable without all that, it's simply a given).
G3F because it's the only figure that has Gen3 UVs, thanks to Cayman Studio's "experimental" product. And with Agent Unawares' "Transgender" freebie, it's possible to turn G3F into a male figure. Isn't it awesome?
Why "with minimal effort" and not "without effort"... because it does need a bit more work than just running the scripts/plugins. Getting from Gen3 to G3 requires intermediaries (Genesis and G2); their built-in clones aren't 100% accurate; all that introduces a certain measure of error to the morph, so you need to finetune it. Still, all the unpleasant and boring stuff like adjusting teeth position etc is handled by the GenX2 plugin. It even automagically smoothed the transition between the A3R head and everything else. Oldtimers will know what I mean :))) Hallelujah big time.
...incidentally, anyone old enough to remember the days when Gillan joined DP and they covered this quirky song? I've always wondered what it could have been like, to witness the birth of those classic lineups...
...and many years later BG covered that cover :P
There's a certain lip contour mismatch, at least when it comes to M3 - I'll need to find out if it gets introduced due to the morph conversion process or if it's an underlying issue of the UV map.
Conversion will also mess up the eyeballs most of the time... but I didn't actually ever plan to use G3F vanilla eyes. Even venerable eye replacers Blackhearted made for GND2 are better than those. There are Arki's EYEdeas (oldie but goldie, y'know), there are Raiya's Look at Me HD eyes... anything but those vanilla ones.
Moving to the G3F base also means I can finally use fibermesh eyelashes and eyebrows with those characters. Of course, with Laura- and A3R-based morphs - the most difficult ones - the lashes need quite a lot of adjustment, but it's still better than transmaps.
This is an "M3X" with Black(hearted) eyes (V3 "dark blue" colour, I like those maps better than M3's own), OnFleek brows (freebie by AprilYSH) and Soto's Lashes Utilities, wearing Army Uniform for G3F.
This uniform has this weird t-shirt that somehow renders with artefacts from certain angles with any sort of relief mapping enabled - that's a first for me... I tried its own maps and a number of tiles, bump, normal - still much the same ( the renders use this tiling normal map: https://polyhaven.com/a/fabric_pattern_05 ). Its own maps - all of them - have baked-in shadows in creases, to boot. I mean... why.
Let's just say that late July was tough. The world of metal will not be the same again. And I'm not even talking about the ex-drummer of Slipknot or the ZZ Top guy. Oh well.
Today I noticed that my CPU temperatures were above 90C when rendering, which I obviously didn't like, so I went to dig deeper into performance modes and all... basically these contemporary CPUs are all about dynamic overclocking, so I chose a more conservative preset. Now I am under 80C (much happier), and it doesn't add _that_ much to render times - the Haunted Mansion scene went from 5m 48s to 6m 20s, and I had actually also added slight displacement to the rugs on the stairs and a proper metallic reflection to the main doorknobs... which may've also factored into those thirty seconds.
I might try a manual tuning mode eventually; right now I'm okay with the preset.
What else... In these latest $5 "base figure" sales I got Freja 8 (and then her HD), who turned out to be the best fox-approved female DAZ O character out of the box: not model-tall and not model-thin, with the right amount of muscle in the right places. Like... arms! Freja is officially the first Genesis+ base whose biceps I had to dial down rather than up to match my own (yes, even Gia is too wimpy in that regard, and it's not like I'm a weightlifting champion). And even before Genesis, I think only the "She-Freaks" for V3 and V4 had actual athletic arms. So I'm thinking about approaching my G8 characters from a different angle now...
Several renders of my Haunted Mansion / Gothiquesque WIP... with a random candleflame forgotten on the floor )) Example flames in the right places are on the rightmost "candAlabra". These are from Porsimo's pack. I guess they need a texture recolour to better fit the ambience.
The materials are more or less finalised; not all of them have full-on reflections, but quite a few do. And those hanging lights have so many maps driving mat params - since they only have a single mat zone... - it's surprising they don't explode.
Our "benchmark" camera clocks at 6 m 16 s (undervolting + a less conservative mode = 85C on average when rendering; guess I can live with that?).
The hanging lights at the entrance likely need lights inside. And putting lights behind stained glass windows would probably make sense as well.
The varnished wood surfaces of the doors, particularly the second-floor one that gets hit by the chandelier full blast, need more samples, I guess. Specular seems to be more firefly-prone than reflections somehow (the floor is rough stone, hence no reflections, but it does have its firefly moments).
I also used varnish on the canvases (the paintings on the walls), though I'm not entirely sure it makes sense. Probably not.
Normal maps need a check-up in terms of whether I got all their gamma settings correct (DS thinks they're "colour" by default, which is wrong; and there's a lot of those so I may have missed some), and also amplitudes may need to be finetuned, particularly on those varnished wood parts and the stone floor.
The scene is set up like a theatre stage, no fourth wall, so the final envmap should be an interior one - otherwise the reflections get suspiciously lighter as we approach the opening... =D Yes it will likely mean that interior lights may need to be cranked up further - we'll see what the hanging lights will add. And I do think that when I add figures, there will be "magic lights" (invisible light planes) for those.
Looking from the top, we can see the shadowed sections of the lightcrosses in the lightshades )))) I'm thinking about trying to make a double-sided area light shader, but I'm not sure about possible performance penalties.
There's something odd about the geometry of those framed pictures on the tables. The oddness is also visible in the viewport. Guess it's best to replace them with something else; something more "personal" :)
And, as I'd suspected, closeups aren't exactly a forte of this set.
The attachments are mostly about 1000 px wide, apart from the "huge" one which is 2000 px (otherwise same as the "benchmark" cam). Their file names end in render times, just in case. Shame the forum can't keep the filenames when opening them.
I'm still here... even though the "music" in a DS ad I clicked on out of curiosity nearly killed me in about fifteen seconds. But everyone in the comments was in love with that track. O tempora, o mores...
In the chandelier, swapped the lightcrosses for lightcones (yeah, I know it's a term from relativity ;D) - to eliminate the shadowed quarters inherent to lightcrosses and potentially add a bit of visual interest; the bottom face does not emit light (the test render shows different examples, I used three-faced cones for the scene). A new environment map - Fireplace from PolyHaven - and then, a lightplane added behind the stained glass (half-) rose window (had to invert its normals to make sure light transmission is visible), and finally lightcones in these two stained glass lamps near the entrance. These are single mat zone, map-driven everything, and yes they basically cast coloured shadows all over the scene, same as the chandelier and the half-rose. Upped general GI samples to 128 due to the new envmap being darker... and we're still hovering around six-and-a-half-minute mark for our "benchmark" smaller res render.
Still thinking whether I need to swap crosses for cones with candles. And of course the flames aren't there yet :)
Good to see you're still here:)) Curiosity killed the cat, so...be careful with those things:)
Overall I find the new light scenario more exciting, have a couple of questions, if you don't mind:
Why not simply use emissive cubes, unless you need one face to be non-emissive of course? And how do you use that environment map in this scenario? Or, to be more specific...why use an HDRI if there are no windows to let diffuse rays or reflections through?
I'm not a cat, you see... It's being forcibly reduced to a cog in the machine that reliably kills my kind. Never curiosity.
First of all, yes, why have this bottom face be emissive if it's not going to do anything? But the bigger issue is the top face in a cube... you either turn it off but then risk a "capped lamp" type of shadowing, or you have it on but it's an extra face as compared to a pyramid.
I think I've mentioned it before that it's a theatre stage kind of set: no fourth wall. Like many of the older sets are - it's easier to set up cameras this way. If you look at the renders side by side, you'll see that due to there only being three walls (the ones we see), there's a huge difference between a sky/ground kind of map and an interior map.
Moreover, there are windows on either side, towards the camera (you can see them in one of the older posts) - they're stained glass windows, though, and I haven't yet figured it out if it would make sense to have "daylight" pouring through them or something else. The top door with its (half-) rose leads to either something like a throneroom (if the entrance to the mansion is in the non-existent fourth wall behind us) or an open gallery/balcony if the entrance is the actual entrance to the whole building. In either case, it makes sense for brighter light to be shining through the (half-) rose. But the sides... I'm not really familiar with whatever kind of architecture this set is supposed to represent.
Ahh that explains it, had forgotten about that;) I did view these two renders side by side, and the new one looks so much better. Couldn't grasp how you did it, thinking you were maybe playing with trace distance, light categories or something...
The stained glass lamps look really nice;)