Uberenvironment

SteveM17

I recently tried rendering a scene in 3delight which had an UberEnvironment as a light source, and it took a lot longer than using standard lights. Is there a setting with UberEnvironment that can be changed to speed things up?

NorthOf45

It's a speed/quality tradeoff. For example, you can adjust the Occlusion Samples and Shading Rate either way. More samples and lower rates take more time, with better quality. Lower quality renders start to look dirty, especially in low light areas. The documentation gives a good overview of the process.

SteveM17

I'd probably go for speed over quality at the moment (I'm not aiming for photorealistic, my poor old computer wouldn't be able to handle it). So, less samples and higher rates take less time, is that right? There are also options in the Environment Mode setting, which of those is the quickest?

Thanks for the info.

Sven Dullah

SteveM17 said:

I'd probably go for speed over quality at the moment (I'm not aiming for photorealistic, my poor old computer wouldn't be able to handle it). So, less samples and higher rates take less time, is that right? There are also options in the Environment Mode setting, which of those is the quickest?

Thanks for the info.

Ambient is by far the quickest as it does not involve any raytracing (shadows or occlusion). It will look rather dull and flat but will still accept an environment map. Bouncelight is the slowest, so the modes are sorted from the fastest to the slowest. To avoid having to use ambient mode, try occlusion with soft shadows, leave the UE shading rate at 32, set occlusion samples to 64 or even 32, set trace distance to a small value like 5- 25 cm. Consider using the OmUberSurface on all hair models (and possibly background objects and foliage) which gives you the option to turn off occlusion for faster rendering. 

SteveM17

I'll give that stuff a try, thank you for the advice!

SteveM17

Just another quick question, how do I apply (and where do I find) OnUberSurface to hair, to turn off occlusion?

Thanks again.

Sven Dullah

Go to your content library/shader presets/Omnifreaker/UberSurface. To apply the UberSurface base you need to select the hair model and all the surfaces you want to convert (in the surface editor pane) and double click the UberSurface base preset. Then, in the surface editor, check that it has applied properly. In the upper left corner is the name of the shader being used. It should now say Shader: omUberSurface. Scroll down to the very bottom of the pane, you'll find a toggle for occlusion. Turn it off. You could also select the hair cap and turn off both occlusion and raytrace. Turning off raytrace means the surface will not show in raytraced reflections (reflective glass, mirrors, metals etc), thus saving some rendertime.

Note that most hairmodels that ship with 3DL materials already use the UberSurface, so it's worth checking the shader name before applying the shaderbase. Also note that, for some reason, when applying the UberSurface bump will be turned off by default so you need to toggle it on manually. In some cases new hair models will have "so called" RSL (3Delight) presets that actually are MDL (Iray) presets. DAZ now thinks it's ok to fool the end user this way and will allow publishing artists to simply copy the IRay prests and re name them RSL, because "Iray kind of works in 3Delight". This is far from optimal so you should really do a conversion in case the shader used is IRayUber. Note that the transparency maps will not carry over, you need to find them manually and load them into the opacity strength slots (which is tedious but not difficult). Good Luck:)

Some additional tips;)

SteveM17

Thanks for the very useful info, lots to look into there. Cheers1

SteveM17

I've been experimenting with uberenvironment and found that when rendering a gen 8 figure in 3delight the reflections/moisture in the eyes no longer show up. Is there something in the settings I need to change?

scorpio

Uberenvironment, from what I remember, has a tendancy to lack specular so adding a specular only light can help.

SteveM17

That seems to have done the trick, thanks.