Knittingmommy's Laboratory

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  • KharmaKharma Posts: 3,214

    thanks for the info, I may check with Novica and see if she has that product and maybe she can do a test render for time.  Most things render for me fairly quick, less than 10 minutes usually, this is the first item I came across that took much longer, I maybe need to tweak some settings to get it to be more speedy.  I do GPU render with a Nvidea 970GTX/  4G ram and my desktop has 32 gigs of ram, hoping to add a bigger video card and another 32 G of ram by the end of this year. Curious to know what Blender tutorials you are following as I signed up for a couple through Udemy, and have followed a few on youtube but I need lots of time and patience to learn Blender of which I usually have neither lol

  • KnittingmommyKnittingmommy Posts: 8,191

    I'm using a tutorial on YouTube by Tutor4u.  Since I know practically nothing about modeling in Blender, I figured I'd start small.  I figure after a few models in Blender and I might be able to do some of the cool things in Blender when making clothes that I've seen that I don't think is possible with Hexagon which is the only modeling program I've used so far to make clothing or any kind of models.  So, I'm starting with these two videos which are parts 1 and 2 of the same tutorial.  I settled on this one because it started out immediately going over controls that I hadn't figured out how to do with other videos I've seen.  In Hexagon, it is real easy to pan and move the camera around, but I'll be darn if I could even figure that out from most of the Blender tutorials because they all seemed to assume you already knew that much which I didn't.

    I used other tutorials by this user for GIMP and I like their style of keeping it simple, yet giving you all of the pertinent information without giving you a lot of extra information you don't need for the specific project.  The tutorial only goes into modeling the cup and rendering it in Blender so, at some point, I'll have to find something that goes into all of the stuff needed to export any models with uvs and materials and stuff.  But, for just learning how Blender works, this is a good start, I think.  I'll be sure to post what I end up making.  Hopefully, at some point, I'll be able to figure out how to get the model out of Blender and render it inside of DS.

  • KharmaKharma Posts: 3,214

    Thanks for the links, I am going to have a look at them tonite.  Definitely want to see what you achieve from the tutorials. Sickleyield has a tutorial on her Deviant site showing how to create I believe an outfit in Blender, but I can't remember if it was exported to DS and finished there or not, I will have to look that up again.

  • KnittingmommyKnittingmommy Posts: 8,191
    Kharma said:

    Thanks for the links, I am going to have a look at them tonite.  Definitely want to see what you achieve from the tutorials. Sickleyield has a tutorial on her Deviant site showing how to create I believe an outfit in Blender, but I can't remember if it was exported to DS and finished there or not, I will have to look that up again.

    I'm not sure, but I think it was exported into DS afterwards.  I have that video bookmarked to watch when I'm ready.

  • KnittingmommyKnittingmommy Posts: 8,191
    edited July 2016

    @Kharma So, I let the Northern Terrace Kitchen render out for most of yesterday and last night since I was working in Blender and didn't need access to DS.  It didn't completely finish on my systems after 25 hours of rendering and it reached just under 5000 iterations.  However, I was ready to actually render out the things I made in Blender and I didn't dare try rendering in Blender when DS was still rendering for fear of frying my systems.  I'm not sure what it is about this set that takes so long to render out with nothing else in the scene.  This is definitely one of those sets where it would be advantageous to have access to GPU rendering.  I think my Cookie Thief image too about 3 days to render, if I remember correctly, and most of that was for the kitchen and the glass with the chocolate milk.  The Little Ones figure itself rendered out fairly quickly.  It was just a matter of letting the other things catch up.

     

    NorthernTerraceKitchenTest.jpg
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    Post edited by Knittingmommy on
  • KnittingmommyKnittingmommy Posts: 8,191
    edited July 2016

    I mentioned yesterday that I was working on a tutorial in Blender for a coffee cup.  See above for the tutorials I was following.  I was surprised to find that I had a really easy time following the videos.  There was one major difference since I was using the newest version of Blender and the video was for a previous version.  The Add>Mesh that he mentions is in a different place.  The newest version of Blender has that at the bottom part of the screen instead of the top menu.  This is also accessed from the new tab system at the left of the screen.  All of the meshes you can add are under the Create Tab which I actually found easier to use and was using that exclusively by the end of the second tutorial.

    So, I made a coffee cup and it was really easy.  As I mentioned to a friend, I've collected quite a few coffee cups.  I've actually done that in RL, too.  I think everyone does that as a first easy model and they all get uploaded to various sites and they are all different.  I don't even drink coffee (I'm more of a tea drinker), but I'm thinking my digital people need to become caffeine addicted.  Of course cups and mugs are perfect for tea, too.

    Since DS was busy with the Northern Terrace Kitchen and I was having fun in Blender, I decided to go for another tutorial by the same YouTuber.  This time an alarm clock which was also fairly easy.  Certainly much easier than I was expecting.  The last time I had tried using Blender was with an older version and I have to say that I like the new interface.  I'm still not crazy about all of the hot keys, but I did manage to find most of the actual places in the menu to match all of the hot keys.  I'll have to make a sticky note of hot keys until I have the ones I use the most memorized.

    Here are the renders done in Blender.  

    Coffee Cup

    Alarm Clock

    The next step is exporting these out of Blender and importing them and rendering them inside DS.  I'll upload those renders once I've done that.

    CoffeeCupMadeInBlender2.png
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    ClockMadeInBlender3.png
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    Post edited by Chohole on
  • TabascoJackTabascoJack Posts: 865
    edited July 2016

    Really nice work!  I followed a wineglass tutoral a while back, which was interesting.  I should get back into it.

    Wineglass.jpg
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    Post edited by TabascoJack on
  • KharmaKharma Posts: 3,214

    Your results turned out really well for both of you KM and TJ...I watched a couple of those videos on the coffee cup and the teddy bear, which is awesome cause it shows you how to texture it to look like real fur, both videos showed where to add materials,I assume these would be the material zones,  but neither showed at what point you would uvmap the model or export out the obj to use in another program.  I guess you would just export the finished model before the texturing steps and take it into an external program like uvmapper and then import into DS to do whatever would be the next steps?

  • KnittingmommyKnittingmommy Posts: 8,191

    Hey, @TabascoJack!  That's my next tutorial, a wine glass!  I'll upload a render when I'm done.  :)  Did you render that inside DS?  Because if you rendered that inside of Blender, I have NOT even tried to render a full scene like that!

    @Kharma  I don't know how true it is, but I've heard that DS doesn't play nice with Blender's UV mapper.  I have a free UV mapper that I plan to use.  I've used it in the past of objects I've gotten from different sites that have funky UV maps that DS doesn't like.  It works really well.  I think it's the same one that @DestinysGarden linked to on her Texture thread.  I'll provide a link here when I've finished mapping everything and getting it imported into DS.  I did manage to export to a .obj from Blender. Now it's just a matter of doing everything I need to get it working in DS.  I'll include all of the steps I use in case you decide to do those tutorials and want to bring them into DS.  This will be first time I've completely modeled something and then tried to bring it into DS to try and render.

    The only thing I didn't like about the clock tutorial is that they didn't do the turn keys and things that make the clock work.  It's only accurate from the front.  At some, point I think I'll add those in so the clock looks just as great on the back.  Right now, it's just a solid back with nothing on it.

     

  • algovincianalgovincian Posts: 2,613

    @Kharma So, I let the Northern Terrace Kitchen render out for most of yesterday and last night since I was working in Blender and didn't need access to DS.  It didn't completely finish on my systems after 25 hours of rendering and it reached just under 5000 iterations.  However, I was ready to actually render out the things I made in Blender and I didn't dare try rendering in Blender when DS was still rendering for fear of frying my systems.  I'm not sure what it is about this set that takes so long to render out with nothing else in the scene.  This is definitely one of those sets where it would be advantageous to have access to GPU rendering.  I think my Cookie Thief image too about 3 days to render, if I remember correctly, and most of that was for the kitchen and the glass with the chocolate milk.  The Little Ones figure itself rendered out fairly quickly.  It was just a matter of letting the other things catch up.

    These people clearly do not have children ;)

    - Greg

  • KnittingmommyKnittingmommy Posts: 8,191

    @Algovincian Ya think? :)  I know my kitchen has never been that clean unless we had just moved in!  Oh, my kitchen in NY was that clean the day we moved out, but that was about it.  It is constant chaos in my kitchen.

  • TabascoJackTabascoJack Posts: 865

     

    These people clearly do not have children ;)

    - Greg

    So very, very true.

  • TabascoJackTabascoJack Posts: 865

    Hey, @TabascoJack!  That's my next tutorial, a wine glass!  I'll upload a render when I'm done.  :)  Did you render that inside DS?  Because if you rendered that inside of Blender, I have NOT even tried to render a full scene like that!

     

    No, I exported the object and then imported to Daz to render.

  • KharmaKharma Posts: 3,214

    @Knittingmommy I have that uvmapper also and used it for the lesson from DestinyGardens thread also, not really good at uvmapping tho, takes lots of practice I think.  It would be great if you listed the steps you do for reference. I think some poses to set the time on the clock might be interesting, are the hands each separate so that you could do a pose to set the hands at different times?

    I couldn't imaging waiting as long as you did on the kitchen render, I have no patience and I want everything done yesterday, lol, but it turned out very nice.  I have no clue as to what makes it take so long to render either, as I mentioned I turned off everything not being seen in the render, but maybe you actually have to delete those parts not just hide them?

  • KnittingmommyKnittingmommy Posts: 8,191
    Kharma said:

    @Knittingmommy I have that uvmapper also and used it for the lesson from DestinyGardens thread also, not really good at uvmapping tho, takes lots of practice I think.  It would be great if you listed the steps you do for reference. I think some poses to set the time on the clock might be interesting, are the hands each separate so that you could do a pose to set the hands at different times?

    I couldn't imaging waiting as long as you did on the kitchen render, I have no patience and I want everything done yesterday, lol, but it turned out very nice.  I have no clue as to what makes it take so long to render either, as I mentioned I turned off everything not being seen in the render, but maybe you actually have to delete those parts not just hide them?

    @Kharma  I do think in Iray, you really need to delete anything not in the view.  I think Iray still 'sees' those items and calculates them as well even if they aren't shown, but I could be wrong.  I think I remember reading that, though.  It was easier to wait on the kitchen to finish since I was working on other things.  Even though I use CPU only and rendering does tax my processor, I can usually still do other less intensive stuff while that's going in the background.  So, I was still able to have Blender loaded and work on those models the whole time DS was rendering.  I have 8 cores so it isn't really that bad.  I just can't play games or have Blender render something while DS is rendering.  That would be bad for my processor.  But, I can watch YouTube videos so following the video and do the work in Blender wasn't a problem.  If I hadn't been doing that, though, I might have stopped that render even earlier than I did.

    As for the clock, the hands are separate and can move.  At least, they can in Blender.  We'll see if I can still move them once I get them into DS.  I'll let you know.  And, yeah, preset poses for the hands on the clock would be a great idea.  The tutorial that follows the clock shows how to animate the clock in Blender.  We'll see how that goes.  I'm doing the wine glass tutorial first, though, before I try to tackle the animation.

  • NovicaNovica Posts: 23,887

    I have an Alienware51   upgraded to  32GB memory, it has a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 with 4GB GDDRS.  Whatever GDDRS means.  I know the 8GB card was a heckuva lot more expensive (IIRC $300 or $400)  I think I tried that product and didn't like the narrow kitchen, not sure if I returned it but I was thinking about it, it was hard to light because if I did it from the front with an added distant light, it cast shadows on the character. Let me see if I kept it, just now found the post.

    Kharma said:

    thanks for the info, I may check with Novica and see if she has that product and maybe she can do a test render for time.  Most things render for me fairly quick, less than 10 minutes usually, this is the first item I came across that took much longer, I maybe need to tweak some settings to get it to be more speedy.  I do GPU render with a Nvidea 970GTX/  4G ram and my desktop has 32 gigs of ram, hoping to add a bigger video card and another 32 G of ram by the end of this year. Curious to know what Blender tutorials you are following as I signed up for a couple through Udemy, and have followed a few on youtube but I need lots of time and patience to learn Blender of which I usually have neither lol

     

  • KnittingmommyKnittingmommy Posts: 8,191
    Novica said:

    I have an Alienware51   upgraded to  32GB memory, it has a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 with 4GB GDDRS.  Whatever GDDRS means.  I know the 8GB card was a heckuva lot more expensive (IIRC $300 or $400)  I think I tried that product and didn't like the narrow kitchen, not sure if I returned it but I was thinking about it, it was hard to light because if I did it from the front with an added distant light, it cast shadows on the character. Let me see if I kept it, just now found the post.

    Kharma said:

    thanks for the info, I may check with Novica and see if she has that product and maybe she can do a test render for time.  Most things render for me fairly quick, less than 10 minutes usually, this is the first item I came across that took much longer, I maybe need to tweak some settings to get it to be more speedy.  I do GPU render with a Nvidea 970GTX/  4G ram and my desktop has 32 gigs of ram, hoping to add a bigger video card and another 32 G of ram by the end of this year. Curious to know what Blender tutorials you are following as I signed up for a couple through Udemy, and have followed a few on youtube but I need lots of time and patience to learn Blender of which I usually have neither lol

     

    @Novica  I had a really hard time finding the perfect camera angle.  Playing with the camera lens width was a big help for that.  Once you set the camera up in a good position, you can adjust camera lens for a wider shot.  It's how I got the image up above.  I'll be interested to hear if you still have it and how long it takes you to render it.

  • KharmaKharma Posts: 3,214
    Novica said:

    I have an Alienware51   upgraded to  32GB memory, it has a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 with 4GB GDDRS.  Whatever GDDRS means.  I know the 8GB card was a heckuva lot more expensive (IIRC $300 or $400)  I think I tried that product and didn't like the narrow kitchen, not sure if I returned it but I was thinking about it, it was hard to light because if I did it from the front with an added distant light, it cast shadows on the character. Let me see if I kept it, just now found the post.

    Kharma said:

    thanks for the info, I may check with Novica and see if she has that product and maybe she can do a test render for time.  Most things render for me fairly quick, less than 10 minutes usually, this is the first item I came across that took much longer, I maybe need to tweak some settings to get it to be more speedy.  I do GPU render with a Nvidea 970GTX/  4G ram and my desktop has 32 gigs of ram, hoping to add a bigger video card and another 32 G of ram by the end of this year. Curious to know what Blender tutorials you are following as I signed up for a couple through Udemy, and have followed a few on youtube but I need lots of time and patience to learn Blender of which I usually have neither lol

     

    @Novica  I had a really hard time finding the perfect camera angle.  Playing with the camera lens width was a big help for that.  Once you set the camera up in a good position, you can adjust camera lens for a wider shot.  It's how I got the image up above.  I'll be interested to hear if you still have it and how long it takes you to render it.

    I would like to know too, altho its too late to return the product as its past the 30 days, I purchased it June 1.  I thought our systems were the same, and they are, as far as memory and graphics cards, but because yours was prebuilt its may be better optimized than mine as I built mine and maybe didn't know all the tricks to get everything out of it that is possible.  I was really surprised as to how long this item took to render compared to other products I own, maybe the creators have some tips to speed it up somewhat.

  • NovicaNovica Posts: 23,887
    edited July 2016

    48 minutes. Could have stopped it at 45, it hung up on 99% for 3 minutes. 

    I sat there the entire time and it was interesting to see it rendering. Here's some of the percents/minutes

    1% / 38sec          2% 1min      6%  6min        10-13% in one second! at 8 min    leaped to 19% 8min 50 sec (1514 iterations)

    24% at 9min 45 sec (1673 iterations) then leaped to 29% at 10 min 45 sec

    Went from 29% to 37% at 11min 50 sec (wow!) to 42% at 13min 9 sec

    Another jump 50% at 15min 35 sec        to 55% at 16min  (so halfway was about 15 minutes, then things slow down, it takes twice as long to finish from there, another 30 minutes.) 

    81% was 24min,      85% was 27min         90% was 31min       95% was 6635 iterations and 36min 30 sec

    97% was 40min 35 sec      98% was 42min     99% was 44min and I could have stopped it there, was fine.    100% 48min 3 sec.

    This set is a pain IMO. Almost 50 minutes without a single character in the scene?  So how long did it take you guys exactly? Also, I did UberSurface on the overhead lights, and put the emissions to 900,000 lumens or so. ISO was 140. Also, this render was 1200 x 1010, what size was yours?

     

     

    northernTerraceKitchenTIME.jpg
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    Post edited by Novica on
  • nattaruknattaruk Posts: 535

    Hello everyone. May I suggest that a possible cause of long render times with this kitchen is that many of the surfaces are very clean, glossy and shiny. This would mean the light is forever bouncing around inside it rather than being absorbed. Maybe covering everything with a layer of grime or otherwise turning down the shininess of surfaces would speed things up?

  • KharmaKharma Posts: 3,214
    edited July 2016

    I know it was long past 20 minutes for me, I went to do other things while waiting on it and missed exactly how long. I can try it again tonite after work. I hid the one wall and everything else I couldn't see in the camera and only used the light on control for the ceiling light and the stove light, and default hdri.  I understand there are lots of shiny surfaces but isn't that the point, I want to render a nice clean kitchen not a grungy dirty one.  I would like to know from FW and David what their settings were and how long the render took.

     

    Edit I believe the size of mine was 1000 x 1300

    Post edited by Kharma on
  • KnittingmommyKnittingmommy Posts: 8,191

    @Novica  I let mine go for 25 hours and it reached just under 5000 iterations for the above image.  The image size was 1500 x 1500.  I stopped it early because I actually wanted to use DS.  I just used the window light the DB and FW put in the set.  I didn't add any other lights and since I was using all of the Iray shaders, I didn't do anything with the uber shader.  Keep in mind that while I don't have to slowest computer out there, it isn't the fastest and I'm running CPU only.  For any other activity, my system is pretty darn fast.  It just wasn't built with Iray in mind because I built it a couple of months before the beta version of DS that had it came out.  If I had known about Iray ahead of time, I probably would have tried squeezing out some more money for an nVidia card instead of the Radeon that I got.  At the time, though, I chose a card that is really fast when using 3Delight, not so much with Iray.

    Thanks for doing this!  :)

    nattaruk said:

    Hello everyone. May I suggest that a possible cause of long render times with this kitchen is that many of the surfaces are very clean, glossy and shiny. This would mean the light is forever bouncing around inside it rather than being absorbed. Maybe covering everything with a layer of grime or otherwise turning down the shininess of surfaces would speed things up?

    That's actually a good suggestion.  I may try that, but it will have to wait for another time when I'm busy elsewhere and am not actively using DS again.  Maybe in a couple of day.  I'll try turning down the gloss and throwing flour everywhere and see how it does and if I cut anything off of my render time for it.

     

    Kharma said:
    Novica said:

    I have an Alienware51   upgraded to  32GB memory, it has a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 with 4GB GDDRS.  Whatever GDDRS means.  I know the 8GB card was a heckuva lot more expensive (IIRC $300 or $400)  I think I tried that product and didn't like the narrow kitchen, not sure if I returned it but I was thinking about it, it was hard to light because if I did it from the front with an added distant light, it cast shadows on the character. Let me see if I kept it, just now found the post.

    Kharma said:

    thanks for the info, I may check with Novica and see if she has that product and maybe she can do a test render for time.  Most things render for me fairly quick, less than 10 minutes usually, this is the first item I came across that took much longer, I maybe need to tweak some settings to get it to be more speedy.  I do GPU render with a Nvidea 970GTX/  4G ram and my desktop has 32 gigs of ram, hoping to add a bigger video card and another 32 G of ram by the end of this year. Curious to know what Blender tutorials you are following as I signed up for a couple through Udemy, and have followed a few on youtube but I need lots of time and patience to learn Blender of which I usually have neither lol

     

    @Novica  I had a really hard time finding the perfect camera angle.  Playing with the camera lens width was a big help for that.  Once you set the camera up in a good position, you can adjust camera lens for a wider shot.  It's how I got the image up above.  I'll be interested to hear if you still have it and how long it takes you to render it.

    I would like to know too, altho its too late to return the product as its past the 30 days, I purchased it June 1.  I thought our systems were the same, and they are, as far as memory and graphics cards, but because yours was prebuilt its may be better optimized than mine as I built mine and maybe didn't know all the tricks to get everything out of it that is possible.  I was really surprised as to how long this item took to render compared to other products I own, maybe the creators have some tips to speed it up somewhat.

    @Kharma Was this the first computer you had built yourself? Just curious.  Mine is the first one I had built without my husband's advice this time around.

  • KharmaKharma Posts: 3,214
    @Kharma Was this the first computer you had built yourself? Just curious.  Mine is the first one I had built without my husband's advice this time around.

    This is actually the second one I built, but it's been about 10 years since the first one and things have definitely changed.  I did lots of research, gots lots of advice here in the forum posts, and found some great youtube tutorials by Carey Holzman who has his own channel plus does videos for newegg now. As soon as I can warrant it I am adding another 32 G of ram and another video card.   I now have 3 desktop and 2 laptop computers.

  • TabascoJackTabascoJack Posts: 865

    By the way, when you want to export to Daz from Blender, I used the following Blender Export options (based on SickleYield's morph tutorial+some other info):

    Selection Only
    Apply Modifiers
    Include Edges
    Write Normals
    Include UVs
    Write Materials
    Polygroups
    Objects as OBJ Objects
    Keep Vertex Order

    Leave the default Scale, Forward, and Up settings.


    Hope this helps

  • KnittingmommyKnittingmommy Posts: 8,191

    @TabascoJack  Thanks.  I'll keep that in mind.  I exported the coffee cup, but I forgot about the rotation thing in Blender being broken when you bring it into DAZ so it went all wonky.  I haven't had a chance to try it again.  I'll use your options and see how I do.  I'd like to get everything exported tomorrow and rendered in DS.  Because now, I have three items since I finished my wine glass tonight to try to get into DS.

  • IceDragonArtIceDragonArt Posts: 12,548

    I have really got to make time to do those tutorials they are on my (very long ) list of things to learn.  I need my laptop back so I can have the tutorial runing on it while doing the actual work on the pc.  Looks awesome though

  • IceDragonArtIceDragonArt Posts: 12,548

    "I'll try turning down the gloss and throwing flour everywhere and see how it does and if I cut anything off of my render time for it."

    lol that's more what my kitchen usually looks like...

  • KnittingmommyKnittingmommy Posts: 8,191

    "I'll try turning down the gloss and throwing flour everywhere and see how it does and if I cut anything off of my render time for it."

    lol that's more what my kitchen usually looks like...

    Yeah, mine, too.  Especially after the boys get done baking!

  • KnittingmommyKnittingmommy Posts: 8,191
    edited July 2016

    Well, I finished the Wine Glass tutorials:

    I think the glass turned out pretty good.  Who knew wine glasses could be so easy to make? 

    I did discover an interesting thing tonight.  On a lark, I pulled up my system monitors while Blender was rendering my glasses.  Blender only accessed 70-80% of my 8 cores the whole time it was rendering the image.  My core temp stayed about 10 degrees cooler, too.  While DS usually has a full load on all 8 cores and runs the processor a little hotter.  Does anyone know if you can change settings on DS so it doesn't try put a full load on all of the cores while it renders?  Where would I even find those settings?

    I'll have to bring all of these into DS tomorrow and render them in DS.  I really should make some champagne flutes while I'm at it, huh?  You know for all of those 3D celebrations!

    Glass02.png
    960 x 540 - 382K
    Post edited by Knittingmommy on
  • IceDragonArtIceDragonArt Posts: 12,548

    I am so going to have to make time for this... They look great!

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