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I'd love to know more about this. I've JUST downloaded the standalone 3Delight. I often get terribly grainy AO in DS unless I take 50 years to render. For example, the image here (in its original 2400 x 2268 resolution) took 25 hours to render. The displacement settings (hard to see in small test renders) are not right, but I wasn't about to correct it and render again!
With tutorials I am so far behind on the ones that I have promised I will write.
I suppose the next time I make a set of lights for a set for the sore I should record what I do with some screen shots and that would be an almost like a mini tutorial .
In case you are wondering I do a lot of the DS lights for the Art Collaboration set. (especially the ones in the store with my name on as well)
thanks much for the kind words.
I often get terribly grainy AO in DS unless I take 50 years to render. For example, the image here (in its original 2400 x 2268 resolution) took 25 hours to render. The displacement settings (hard to see in small test renders) are not right, but I wasn't about to correct it and render again!
Lovely image. That ponytail has legendary render times even without bells and whistles. And it takes up a lot of the frame. Not to say that is a good reason for a 25hour render, but it now I understand what you mean about slow. The longest 3DL render I did was about 7-8 hours but it had hair, very large fairy wings (trans mapped of course) and a lot of grass and tress in the background. Resolution was around 2400x3800. I can't bear to wait that long for a render either so I can understand your reserve.
The more renders you do the better you get and it's no fun waiting for your computer to finish. thanks for the reference image and how long it took, it really puts it all in perspective.
Thanks everyone for your input on which is better, I most render animations and not super hi res renders so I'd rather not use Lux. I've used Lux before and for me it takes forever to render it properly without any grain at all.
I guess I have to read up about some AO and shaders, because I have no idea how to use them. I only know how to work around textures and I'm used to Maya and 3ds Max
I did an AO tutorial at RDNA. It's aimed at using the AO Manager script for Poser, but the main points about surface shaders vs. AO lights and Max Distance/Bias are universal across both platforms.
And, incidentally, I'm jealous -- wish I mostly rendered with Max and Maya! I have Max (free!) though volunteer work I do for high school robotics teams, but barely have scratched the surface of it. Maya is WAY outside my budget, lol.
I rendered this with the scripted Point Cloud Occlusion in DS4.5, it took 28 minutes, as opposed to the UE render I did last night that took a bit over 2 hrs.
Yeah, things aren't 'perfect', but for a first attempt at using that feature (yeah there's some stuff with cowl and cape that needs to be cleaned up..) I think it came out well. Need to play around with that example a lot more, if there is that kind of reduction in time.
Oooh! Thank you! I did not know such a thing existed! I'm clearly uninformed about updates, lol. Now I have to go play with that...
They are both pretty amazing, once you understand how to use it haha, but you can always attempt to learn Blender, its free and runs really fast compared to maya. But it's one Hell of a learning curve, even using Maya for a long time.
Attempt is the correct word for what I did with Blender, lol! User interface is beyond me. But I've seen what it can do... I'm just not patient enough!
And I'm finally able to post my two benchmark renders and times. The two renders are not COMPLETELY identical (and they're both too shiny!) but they're close enough. I tried to match the "bells and whistles" levels as best as I could. If the forums post the images in the order they're attached, then the Poser image is on top, and the DS on the bottom. My intention is to render this with the standalone, free (2 core) version of 3Delight, but I haven't gotten that far yet.
Computer Specs:
Intel CORE i7 920 (2.67 GHz)
12 GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce GTX260
Win7 x64
Image Resolution: 1200 x 900
Poser Pro 2012 (x64)
• V4 with SSS
• All Poser mats
• 1 HDRI Light
• 1 Specular Spot
• 1 Spot with depth-mapped shadows
Render Settings:
• Raytracing, shadows, SSS, smooth polys, and displacement on
• 1 Raytrace bounce
• 100% Irradiance Caching
• Pixel Samples = 10
• Min Shading Rate = 0.8
TIME: 3:32
DAZ Studio 4.5 (x64) with Native 3Delight
• V4 with HSS
• All DS mats except hair and earrings
• Uberenvironment with 65% occlusion, 128 occlusion samples
• 1 Specular Spot
• 1 Spot with deep shadow map
Render Settings:
• X and Y pixel samples = 10
• 1 Raytrace bounce
• 100% Irradiance Caching
• Pixel Samples = 10
• Shading = 0.08
TIME: 6:04
those are actually very close in look, Very impressive. Sure there are differences but I couldn't pull that close of a look in two different engines at all.
The time for daz fairly slow compared to Poser for certain. Sorry for being stupid here but are those minutes or hours?
Attempt is the correct word for what I did with Blender, lol! User interface is beyond me. But I've seen what it can do... I'm just not patient enough!
And I'm finally able to post my two benchmark renders and times. The two renders are not COMPLETELY identical (and they're both too shiny!) but they're close enough. I tried to match the "bells and whistles" levels as best as I could. If the forums post the images in the order they're attached, then the Poser image is on top, and the DS on the bottom. My intention is to render this with the standalone, free (2 core) version of 3Delight, but I haven't gotten that far yet.
Computer Specs:
Intel CORE i7 920 (2.67 GHz)
12 GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce GTX260
Win7 x64
Image Resolution: 1200 x 900
Poser Pro 2012 (x64)
• V4 with SSS
• All Poser mats
• 1 HDRI Light
• 1 Specular Spot
• 1 Spot with depth-mapped shadows
Render Settings:
• Raytracing, shadows, SSS, smooth polys, and displacement on
• 1 Raytrace bounce
• 100% Irradiance Caching
• Pixel Samples = 10
• Min Shading Rate = 0.8
TIME: 3:32
DAZ Studio 4.5 (x64) with Native 3Delight
• V4 with HSS
• All DS mats except hair and earrings
• Uberenvironment with 65% occlusion, 128 occlusion samples
• 1 Specular Spot
• 1 Spot with deep shadow map
Render Settings:
• X and Y pixel samples = 10
• 1 Raytrace bounce
• 100% Irradiance Caching
• Pixel Samples = 10
• Shading = 0.08
TIME: 6:04
In studio, from the surfaces tab set "Raytrace" to Off for the Hair. That will speed the rendering greatly. EDIT2: If the Raytrace: Off option isn't available, then you'll want to apply the HSS to the hair, and then turn the raytracing off.
EDIT: Also, in the new 3DL you may find that using full raytracing to be faster than Shadow Maps in some cases.
Kendall
Turning Raytracing off for the hair means that if I'm using raytraced shadows or reflections, the hair isn't there. I could make the hair invisible to raytracing in Poser, too, which would also speed up its render time in exactly the same way. For the purpose of a render comparison, I wanted to keep the options as similar as possible. If I was creating a scene in Poser, I would not turn raytracing off for the hair, so I needed to keep it on in DS, regardless of whether it speeds up render times. I also could have turned SSS off in Poser, which would have knocked a minute off of the render, but that didn't seem fair if I used the HSS shaders in DS. Just wanted to keep things equal, as much as possible.
And I still really need to look more into the new 3DL. Sounds very promising! Wish I had more time to experiment. *sigh!*
Ok good to know :) Based on your 24 hour render I wasn't sure ;)
Lord, you should have seen how many test renders I did to try to achieve identical renders... If they'd been 6 hours and 3 hours each, I'd have been 80 before the benchmarks were done! :)
Bookmark this - http://digilander.libero.it/maclean/DStutorial.htm - and take your time going over it. All screen shots are DS1 but the information is still relevant.
When it comes to rendering in DS, everyone has their way of doing things and there are many factors to consider that effect render times. One thing that may not be very obvious is how certain options in a light set or surface shader overlap with the advanced render settings. Since 3Delight is a renderman compliant shader, it is very easy to find informaion online about the different features.
I'd say LuxRender is probably the equalizer... but just out of the box... It really seems to now be a case of 6 of this and a half dozen of that... Sometimes I will render an almost identical scene (as close as I can match) and just choose which one seems to look better. I like DS for outdoor scenes more at the moment... certain models of mine seem more natural looking in DS, but when doing interior renders I've been favoring Poser. I'm sure skill level also has a lot to do with it though... I'm average, at best. Often when I look at comparison promos for well prepared models, you can barely tell them apart.
But that is just an opinion.
Not really...For a few users maybe but for most it's just another option for creating poorly done renders.
And I'll go out and say most luxrenders don't look good at all. Because again it goes back to learning the tools. What lux has for it is that it does light things very realistically. A lot of people use Reality/LuxRender as it is "out of the box" and don't modify textures or really spend time on lighting.
So lux won't bring the quality of poser/daz content up necessarily. But time with the tools will.
Turning Raytracing off for the hair means that if I'm using raytraced shadows or reflections, the hair isn't there. I could make the hair invisible to raytracing in Poser, too, which would also speed up its render time in exactly the same way. For the purpose of a render comparison, I wanted to keep the options as similar as possible. If I was creating a scene in Poser, I would not turn raytracing off for the hair, so I needed to keep it on in DS, regardless of whether it speeds up render times. I also could have turned SSS off in Poser, which would have knocked a minute off of the render, but that didn't seem fair if I used the HSS shaders in DS. Just wanted to keep things equal, as much as possible.
And I still really need to look more into the new 3DL. Sounds very promising! Wish I had more time to experiment. *sigh!*
They've got one of the newest builds of 3DL in 4.5.1.6, 10.63, I believe...so I'm not sure how much 'newer' they can get. It's the version that fixed several problems, including a nasty raytracing one.
Not really...For a few users maybe but for most it's just another option for creating poorly done renders.
And I'll go out and say most luxrenders don't look good at all. Because again it goes back to learning the tools. What lux has for it is that it does light things very realistically. A lot of people use Reality/LuxRender as it is "out of the box" and don't modify textures or really spend time on lighting.
So lux won't bring the quality of poser/daz content up necessarily. But time with the tools will.
One thing, most of the time, Lux is NOT faster...but I do know of a way to get very nice Lux results in a fraction of the time...use SPPM and then edit the snot out of the lxs file to tweak it even further. I've set up a tweaked SPPM profile that gives very nice results in under an hour, with comparable results being in the 2 to 4 hour range with DS and 1 to 3 hour range with the stand alone 3DL on my machine.
Materials tweaking in Lux/Reality is an absolute MUST. By default, unless the material is specifically set to Matte, in DS, it will translate as a 'glossy' one in most Lux exporters. And transparent materials will give you a Mixed mat in Lux...null/glossy. Glossy is one of the most 'expensive' Lux mats around.
Another thing, Lux is very brutal. It WILL highlight EVERY flaw in a texture...so crappy textures aren't going to be improved upon by Lux...they will just be more realistically rendered, which usually means 'look like s***', instead of just 'bad'. So, low res/quality textures are going to look it.
I haven't tried poser yet so I'm not sure on the Shading Rate of the Render Engine, but is the .8 you used in Poser the same as the .08 in Daz?
No, I really don't think so. But if you render this in DS with a 0.8 shading rate and uberenvironment, your results will look like a sandbox. I was trying to get the renders to LOOK as close as possible and compare the times, not get renders at the same times and compare the quality. The latter would be enlightening, too, I suppose.
Check the default shading rate within the Uberenvironment settings it comes in at a very low quality 32, I think. Even at the highest quality preset its only increased to 8.
If you set it to 1 within Uberenvironment then the main shading rate can be set to .8 and still get equivalent results.
Did you use 'Occlusion/shadows', 'ILT/shadows' or 'GI Bounce' as the Uberenvironment environment :) ?