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Really interesting. Thanks Chris.
Bringing this back up because firstly:
Blender is getting fast. The guy on the video is using a GTX 1070, but I downloaded the build and even on my underpowered laptop it still speeds along pretty well. (not realtime but maybe 4 seconds to get it similarly clean, rendering with cpu)
The same build also had the Principled shader, and I have to say I like it. While I'm certainly capable of and often enjoy building node trees, I still havent actually organized all the shaders I have made in a way where its easy to just pull them up. Being able to just slap this on 95% of a scene and not worry is pretty great. I definitely think it will be nice for a DS>blender workflow where one often has to set up a bunch of materials (and the users are less likely to be super comfortable with nodes and have their own PBR nodegroup at the ready). I managed to convert an entire scene from internal to cycles in about 10 minutes
And while I'm here my monthly "yeah you can't do this in Iray"
praise Cycles ability to cheat on materials. I'm using so many cheats here. Technically there are no volumetrics or SSS here. The only actual shaders used are refraction, glossy, transparency, and translucency. But despite that it's still 99.9% energy conserving (adding in the little bit of fake caustic). Lots of abuse of the light path node to make the shadows mostly transparent. If I could have any feature from Cycles to have just Iray, it would definitely be the ability to make materials not cast shadows. (The light path node is how I cheated on the SSS and absorption too)
All told the render took about an hour and a half, (it's even larger than the one up in my gallery) if I had set up the materials with proper volumetrics it would probably take twice as long, and given that most of my glass renders in Iray took about 2 hours without any glossy roughness or scattering at all (and I wouldn't be able to cheat like in Cycles) I don't even want to imagine.Until I read your description, I didn't even doubt that it was some sort of normal thick glass shader. Nice work!
This is why cycles Branched path tracing options make it a superior render engine to IRay.
IRay is a somewhat "Dumb" Brute force implementation of path tracing IMHO.
On the matter of compositing ..well
as an animator Compositing is not an option
it MUST be used for my VFX post work.
I recognise that you can do far more subtle things with Cycles, but most of the time a dumb click brute force with minimal setup renderer is all I need (which I think is the case for many Daz users) so Iray is preferable in that situation. They're just different things for different purposes.
That said, I'm sure it's equally possible to have Cycles in DS and have vendors selling appropriate materials with all the required render presets for a "decent" brute force result, but that's not the situation we're in.
The way I look at it is this: there is a lot of depth and subtlety to photography. There are fancy cameras with many settings that those with the knowledge can take suitable advantage of. But for most people, point and click solutions are good enough for their needs. Rendering has many subtleties that I don't care about. I'm not a renderer. Rendering is just the end result for me.
Hopefully someone will add Daz3D support.
Ihttps://www.blendernation.com/2017/05/06/od_copypasteexternal-copies-pastes-3d-data-apps/
Just a heads up ... Udemy currently has a sale where all courses (even the comprehensive ones) are $10. I have not looked before so I have no idea whether this is the normal price but the courses look pretty heavily discounted to me. I just bought one called The Blender Bitesize course which is said have a normal price of $175. There are others marked at $200. Anyhow, there are plenty of Blender courses on offer so it might be worth a look.
they have sales, just not like Daz. :)
Also, if you're a bit more into learning about Blender in-depth, CG Cookie is also a good source. Seems a little expensive, but if you're like me and need some deeper learning, it's great ;) It is video based tho and for people that don't do video very well, probaby not optimal ;).
Laurie
By now, many have probably seen previews for Eevee, Blender's realtime render engine which is designed for game/vr previz so that we can get an idea of how our models will look in realtime environments while we work on them. There is another interesting engine though that is a bit less well known, and that is Blend4Web. This very interesting add-on will output html/json files from Blender to give a 3D environment in the web browser. I haven't even played with this myself yet as I wanted to put it out there for others to start playing with. If anyone plays with it, give us your feedback on what your experiences are with it. :)
Forgot to post link to the actual site for Blend4Web. The GPL version is free but it falls under GPL license which means you need to make source code and blend files available for download. There is a professional version where this isn't necessary but it's a bit pricey.
Also forgot to mention, it supports physics. :)
Vegas odds are 10:1 on if anyone does it, it will be Casual
Took a look at it. Currently moving fbx files between apps give better results then this, but maybe with some work it will be worth another look.
Forgot to reply to this post. Blackmagic == DaVinci (same company) so Black Magic Fusion/Resolve == DaVinci Fusion/Resolve. These are my personal favorite programs for video editing, color correction and fx. Resolve was originally the top color grading tool on the market then they added features to make it a full featured linear editor. It is a very nice tool, very powerful, robust and is free even for commercial use. It doesn't have a node based workflow which is now pretty much the popular workflow for high end editing but Fusion does. They added the ability to export and reimport with a click to Fusion, so one can send a clip out for greenscreen, roto, fx, etc.. to Fusion and reimport for assembly. As you can probably guess, the biggest downside to this is they are professional tools so there is a bit of a learning curve. Personally I didn't find it to be much more of a learning curve then any of the other tools out, but I've been playing with various video editing tools for a while so I may not be the best judge. Again, I love them.
Natron is an open source clone (basically) of Nuke and is free including commercial use. It isn't as robust or as full featured but it does follow Nuke to the point that people have used it to learn Nuke before Nuke PLE (personal learning edition) came out. Nuke PLE is not licensed for commercial use but if one's goal is to learn "the tool" that is used by major studios across the board, Nuke PLE is the route to go.
Did we talk about Filmic yet in this thread?
Well regardles, here is a good treatment on it which gives some hilights as to why we care. Supposedly Filmic is going to be rolled into the next release of Blender so it's worth taking a look at it now (Even Blender HQ has decided it's the way to go evidently.)
I tried Natron and found it horribly unstable
with many crashes.>uninstalled
I recently installed free NL video editor "shotcut"
It handles all of the pro res codes of apple's venerated Final Cut Pro
Have you considered trying DaVinci Resolve/Fusion? They are both commercial grade software, free, and allow commercial use. They basically create top notch software that works with their hardware (which is where they make their money.)
Hi
I create all of my Character animation on Windows
(Iclone Daz Endorphin etc) and ,of course PBR still in Blender
however ,at the moment, all of my post production is done
on an older Mac.
Adobe After Effecst CS for Compositing& VFX
AutoDesk Combustion for some effects as well
Apple final Cut Pro(Mostly just use IMove HD though)
sound studio pro.
However I am Looking at window based finishing
solutions as a prelude to my eventual total migration
from the Mac OS as the Mac is no longer a tool for 3D /CG artists
So your suggestions are well recieved and will be considered
Thanks.
iMovie and Garage Band are great programs. They have their limitations of course, but for what they are, they are great imo. Well designed, well targeted, and a perfect tool for getting started. For many people they are all they would need and they come free with the Mac. But yes, if one is committed, they usually grow beyond those tools. :)
I like Adobe tools and they are used by a lot of smaller video production/effects teams, even professional commercial teams. However, I believe the future is in node based workflows, and as far as color grading, it's really hard to beat DaVinci Resolve.
If Nvidia doesn't come up with a workable node based shader tool I'm afraid it will get left behind personally. There is just no way they can keep up with the various node based environments if they don't join in. The Substance tools can provide some integration for (IRay) and the wider CG community but Nvidia has to embrace it more as an integrated component at some point, and the sooner the better. Again, these are all just personal opinions for whatever they are (or aren't) worth.
As a side note, for anyone using Cycles, remember that I have a pinterest board that links to various Cycles node structures for learning, experimenting and expanding from/on. It's one of many Blender boards but specifically on shaders.
Also, Lynda.com has some training courses complete with exercise files on DaVinci Resolve and DaVinci Fusion. If anyone is considering them, I highly recommend the courses there. You can get a free month which is more then enough time to complete the courses.
If anyone wants to connect with me on LinkedIn btw, my profile is here: Joseph Cotter @ LinkedIn. Artist, PA, in the end, it's all about community. :)
For anyone looking to be a PA here at DAZ I don't have numbers for the DAZ store, but this infographic might be of some help.
That's really interesting. It's cgtrader specific data so obviously some of the stuff, like number of formats, doesn't direcly apply here but I would imagine the general trends still do.
I agree completely
The lack of node based shader mixer
is one of the reasons Nvidia IRay does not interest me
I understand why Daz prefers a simplified,brute force pathtracer
But many users dont have the push button hobbyists mindset.
This is why Cycles branched node based pathtracer is superior to IRay IMHO.
and just for fun.. :)
Cool one of cousin Its relations
I haven't really followed this thread, but FWIW Blender has been one of my main apps for many years And even after all these years it drives me nuts. I love it, it's incredibly powerful, but geez if you're using multiple 3D apps it's always a stumbling mess going back and trying to remember the steps to do simple stuff and the keyboard shortcuts and so on.
ZBrush the same way, even more. Drives me nuts.
I have a lot of respect for the folks who can code the incredibly complex 3D world. But I think those are very different skills from developing really good UI's. IMO, that's been one of DAZ's strengths. Others not so much, IMO.
Heck, ZBrush hasn't had even the simplest universal manipulator until the latest version just released this week. Hard to believe, especially when you see the goofy Transform tool they have. And they call the camera zoom button as "Scale Edited Object" or something. Huh? And the list goes on...
So yes, IMO Blender is hard to learn and often counter-intuitive. And so are many 3D apps. I guess it goes with the territory.
Yes, the name of the thread was a little tongue in cheek, but new tutorials continue to come out and it does continue to get easier as more great tutorials come out.
It was mentioned earlier in the thread but a while back that one of the main goals of 3.0 is to decouple the system from the interface so that custom interfaces can more easily be spun up. Currently, Blender is the only (that I know of) 3D app that one can totally replace the interface on, but it is still complicated and takes a lot of Python, with the inherent maintenance issues any 'fork' has. With the next .0 release, spinning up custom interfaces will be officially supported. (At least that's the plan.) And, as part of that, the Blender team mean to spin up a more approachable interface for people who want to have something easier to get into without all of the bells, whistles, spinners and knobs immediately available.
For anyone who took the time to look at the "for fun" link above and enjoyed it, here is the full series at Vít Procházka's YouTube channel. I find this particularly interesting because it highlights what can be done with mocaps and characters (such as imported DAZ characters) within Blender currently. :)