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Nice tinsel...
Also works for making grass...and you can use a modeled blade for even more fun.
Thanks. Will have to try this idea with a modelled blade, myself.
Amen to that. Also it gets old pretty fast, when despite all the help and suggestions nothing is good enough. We all know that Blender is not Hexagon, and probably never will, so maybe it's time to move on...
The (free) PBR Materials Addon 2.0 for Blender just came out complete with a set of both dielectric and metal materials. There is a video demonstrating it as well as a download link.
This is bloody awesome
Thank you Gedd
Wow!
Is there an any advantage to rendering in Blender/Cycles rather than Iray? When I tried it using Casual's Teleblender freebie, I found that the materials didn't transfer as I would have hoped. So I tried to figure the Blender noodle system which is frightening to someone not used to playing with shaders, etc. And then I didn't find Cycles any quicker than Iray or Luxrender when it came to actual render times. Admittedly, this was before I had a decent GPU and I later bought a GeForce 970 but the question remains: why would I send to Blender rather than use IRay?
My main complaint with IRay is the VRAM restrictions - the 970 quickly proved inadequate with it's 4GB so I'd be interested to know whether Cycles needs the same or whether I could render larger scenes without the need to replace my nearly new and expensive GPU.
Hi I can detail some differences on the "low end" of hardware performance betwee Iray and Cycles
On one of my windows laptops where I use DS 4.8
1.3GHz Intel Pentium Dual Core SU4100 CPU along with Intel’s GMA4500MHD graphics, 4GB DDR2 RAM. ..NO nividia graphic card CPU only .
I can get a render like this from blender in about 2 hours.
such a simple portrait would take at least 15 - 18 hours with Iray. in DS
So for me Using Iray for any actual production or client work is not feasible until I upgrade my hardware next year.
I have found that Cycles is typically faster then IRay by a significant amount. However, that comes with the added cost of having to convert shaders there is no real shortcut here. Since Cycles doesn't enforce a PBR workflow it is easy to stray away from one. This flexibility can be an advantage or disadvantage depending on one's goals and base knowledge. New tools like the one mentioned above help shortcut some of the learning curve necessary and there are other tools regularly coming out. Andrew Price has some interesting free shader node setups that are worth checking out.
Another point to take into consideration with Cycles is that currently it will use the GPU if set to and there is enough memory but automatically defaulting back to the CPU if not. With 2.8, Cycles is supposedly going to continue to use the GPU and just add main memory to the video memory pool when the video memory is insuficient so that could make a significant difference for many.
I am not trying to make a case for Cycles over IRay as I believe they are both very nice rendering environments, rather pointing out some of Cycles strengths so people can compare them with what we are already familiar with using IRay/3DLight.
Something else to consider as far as rendering environments go is the Unreal 4 Sequencer Cinematics for doing animation. It has some interesting features such as automatic LOD and texture resolution (based on distance to camera) that make it worth exploring. Even if the goal is to do a more detailed animation render, this environment could be used for visualization and blocking. The cost again is the time it takes to learn the environment, transfer and set up product into the environment and a certain amount of potential duplication of effort, so one's mileage will vary.
With the move towards PBR and other tools to help bridge the gaps between different environments, moving between different tools for different tasks is a moving target that may not make sense now for many but might in the not to distant future.
I have seen in different forums and continue to see statements by new and established artists alike that PBR is something that was invented for "game environments" that doesn't really offer anything to anyone using a "real render environment." I have and continue to try to put forth that this argument misses the point. The real benefit of PBR is being able to move between environments with predictable results, and the implications of that is huge.
Now if we can just get the equivalent for rigging, animation sequences and eventually, physics. ;)
Does Blender benifit from dual CPUs
Asking as I have a dual Xenon with 128GB ram and a Nvidia 1070 with 8 GB of ram on board set up to run Linux Mint or Win10 by selecting the apropriate boot drive through the bios when I boot the system
Yes, however... the GPU will probably still be much faster rendering then the CPUs so the dual CPUs will mostly come in handy when doing things like physics simulations. The processing of physics using the GPU is something that is currently being implemented so you may be able to get the GPU to do physics calculations or it might blow up as it is for the most part still experimental.
One thing I have been explaining to people over the last year is that the GPU is not a graphical proccessor unit really but a floating point processor vs the CPU which is optimized for integer math. As we move more into technology where floating point math is a significant factor (computer graphics, physics, etc...) vs integer math (databases, text or logic processing, etc...) the GPU continues to take on a more central role. The terms CPU and GPU are really not valid anymore, they just continue to hold on due to momentum as we have one foot in the old concept of computing and one foot in the new.
Thanks for the info haven't tried Blender in a number of years partially due to a lack of time although I've kept it up to date
For me that is the key ..Flexibilty!
like enabling branched pathtracing mode to set the number of bounces individually for volume,Diffuse, reflection caustic, SSS.
IRay ,in DS at least, is too much of an "all on" "Brute force" renderer for my preference.
This could be a huge motivator. I wish Iray could work that way but I'm told that the rendering algorithm won't allow it. When is 2.8 due?
The other drawback with the Casual script is that we are advised to default back to 3Delight materials. I'm assuming that more and more products will be IRay only so assigning materials from scratch in Blender looks like being the big time penalty. I am still afraid to delve into that node system but I guess I could start watching some tutorials. If you know of any good ones, please post.
I have a whole Pinterest board dedicated to Textures and Shader Nodes in Blender. I use Pinterest as a graphical bookmark system so if you go there you can find a raft of resources including 16 boards (think of them as separate topics/categories) on Blender alone.
Speaking of which, I have a few new boards for anyone interested, Video School, Storytelling/Writing & Character Development, VR/AR...
It's too bad Pinterest doesn't have a method for communicating with the board moderators or have related forums, but it does make for a good visual bookmark system, and anyone here can of course message me through DAZ's message boards.
As to when 2.8 will be out, good question. The Blender team (and Ton) have taken a "it'll be out when it's ready" approach pretty much. :)
Something to think about... Subliminal Influences
Thanks for the Pinterest link. I viewed a few of the videos but I have to say that the node system is still daunting. I feel like I would need 5 years experience plus a maths degree to produce anything worthwile.
...that is very beauiful.
Thanks KK
It is the Genesis 2 female with the "Horizon" For Vicky 4 Skin maps By Sydd Raven of the former RDNA
The Character morph is basic slider manipulation of the default G2 female with a multitude of commercial morph sets installed of course
I still use Sydd'sVanilla Sky & Horizon Textures as I find them more realistic than most of the New ones out for G3
but that just me.
Actually you wont be starting from scratch for the most part.
With the obvious exception of emissives and some metals
Most of the "Iray Materials" I am finding in newer daz content are not true Iray procedural materials but indeed
Image based UV mapped 4k textures merely "optimized' for Iray.
Here is a quick test of Ivan for the G3 male exported to Blender Via teleblender.
He is head to toe "Iray materials"
In blender I simply loaded a SmartIBL HDR environment and set the veiw port to "rendered" for 32 non squared samples.
Certainly these materials need work such as adding emissive nodes to the glowing armor elements and some gloss shaders.
Along with an SSS node to the face skin.
However I am certainly not having to re-assign all materials from scratch.
Yes - I agree with this. Even using DS shaders that are supposedly Iray only, I have had great results in using mcasuals script to get things into Blender. Even where the Blender materials require tweaking, it still saves a ton of time on setting up the basic materials and most things come over with very little adjustment necessary. I know the nodes can be intimidating at first but there are a lot of videos out there explaining the basics and the node setups created by the script are pretty simple once you get what the basic nodes are doing.
Here's a Blender render using G3F - I setup and posed the character in DS, sent it over to Blender and was essentially ready to render. I did make quite a few changes to the shaders, but that's just because I am finicky, not because it was really necessary. Altogether this image took about 20 minutes from opening DS to hitting "render" in Blender, and a big chunk of that was actually setting up the particle systems for the atmospheric dust/pollen and the plants (and ony about 35 minutes more to render).
These results are certainly impressive. I wish I had my PC here already (it is being shipped to my new home in New Zealand) but I will have to wait a few weeks. But I'll certainly give Blender and Cycles another try. Just to clarify the point about VRAM: am I right that, as it stands (pre-2.8), Cycles requires the same amount of VRAM that Iray would take for a scene? There are not yet any Octane-like, Out-of-Core features where some things can be offloaded to the system memory/CPU?
And, in terms of render time using a GPU, is there much difference between IRay and Cycles?
I'm following along with this tutorial to make anime style hair using Bézier Curves. I'm using Star the Original figure as my model.
It took me about twenty minutes to figure out why my rotation wasn't working! It's all about settings and sometimes mine just don't seem to be the same as in the tutorials and sometimes it takes a long time to figure out what those different settings are! I always seem to miss a step or two no matter how careful I am about trying to follow the directions. :( I do have to say that Blender is getting a little easier the more time I spend in it. I just hope I can figure out how to turn the whole thing into a mesh when I'm done so I can bring it into DS, rig it, and put it on Star.
It's always good to hear when someone is able to make progress. Blender can be challenging to learn, but it can be worth the work. As to exporting it, you can have it convert it to a mesh on export. It's among the settings. :)
Well yes generally Cycles will be faster to render then IRay, but there are a lot of variables and it comes down to "your mileage may vary" type of situation. IRay will tend to have a more photorealistic result "out of the box" but again, it comes down to how much one understands each of the environments. As to memory, they will typically use about the same video memory but things like instances vs multiple individual mesh items, shaders, etc will cause the two different environments to vary. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. Any time one is talking about two different render environments, at least at the current level of technology there will be a lot of variables. The best thing is to take the time to play with both environments and see for yourself as no one can possibly answer all of the different situations that one could find themselves much less what you specifically might run into vs them being that we all have different expectations, workflows, etc...
Thanks again, Gedd. Seeing as I can't access my PC, I'm collecting ideas and background information to fill in some idle time. I usually learn by doing but there's no harm asking questions and this forum has some clever bods willing to help. :)
Strictly in terms of rendering, you could setup a home renderfarm if you have many computers at home or use an online service when the scenes exceed your VRAM. I find Cycles rendering in CPU mode to be way quicker than Iray or Luxrender. So that make it more usable if you do big scenes
You also have many possibilities to tweak your scene in blender that you don't have in DS like adjusting or smoothing geometries, surfaces, using particles, or physics simulations etc..
The list could be very long depending of what you want to do or achieve
Before I bought a decent GPU (970) I used Reality/Luxrender in CPU and network mode. It was pretty quick compared to Iray in CPU mode (in my experience, at least). Another advantage was that I could get to work on the next scene while Luxrender was busy in the background. I'm assuming that would be possible using Cycles. I have a Windows 10 PC (i7, 32GB RAM) and a 2012 iMac i7 with 24GB RAM) so networking would be a possibility again.
The disadvantage was that I spent hours tinkering with the Reality/Lux materials whereas with IRay it seems more straightforwad and less time consuming. Assuming I have the VRAM to play with, of course.