Digital Art Zone

BWSman - 24 June 2012 08:34 AM

I moved the key spotlight & adjusted the UberVolume cone to give a more even "halo" around the head.

Very nice. I really like that one.

Haaru_Windwalker - 24 June 2012 05:40 AM

Ahahaha.... I would have posted by now, but it's at 18 hours rendering and counting >.>

Some of the information I found talked about UE2, and since I've been using the Simple Soft freebies, I thought I'd try and build my own. I kept getting a 'mottled' kind of thing going on the skin, and found out that's because UE2 has it's own shading rate, like it has in the rendering tab... >.>

I think I might have turned it down too much. Haha...

But mostly it looks like it's taking aaaages because of a small bonzai I put in the scene? The character, background, everything else rendered in about five hours, but this little plant is making it take so much longer? Any idea why?

As others have said I would suspect the transmaps and also raytracing is probably turned on. Both will add considerable time to a render.

Thanks for the help. I'm still waiting for it to render... (23 hours... heh)... but I guess that gives me some time to find out what a transmap is, and learn about why it takes a long time to render.

Thanks again.

Welcome to the wonderful world of 3d.

I had one Bryce render took 2 days. ANd when it had finished I discovered I had made a mistake.


Guess what, I left the mistake there,

I won't spam this thread with the render, as it is not a protrait, but if you have a rendoroisty account it is here.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=743711&user_id=12932&np;&np;

Things like leaves and hair, which could potentially come in huge numbers, are often modeled more coarsely and then given a transmap, which makes parts of the object transparent. This keeps the size of the models down -- otherwise they'd rapidly use up all the memory on most machines. However, raytracing requires light calculations to deal with all the transparency, figure out if something behind the transparent part needs to reflect light or be shadowed. You'll often find the render speed slowing down while doing hair or foliage.

Haaru_Windwalker - 24 June 2012 12:45 PM

Thanks for the help. I'm still waiting for it to render... (23 hours... heh)... but I guess that gives me some time to find out what a transmap is, and learn about why it takes a long time to render.

Thanks again.

Page 9 in this thread starting here http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewthread/1201/P120/#18544 Jad explains how to use Transmaps to make some blinds. Where an image is balck it will be transparent and white fully opaque and greys in the middle. So yes Gray can dicatate how transperent it will be. Light Grey not so much with dark gray making it more transperent.

Thanks for that stuff, it seems really helpful. Loving that fake-blind effect...

And how is your render doing ?

It was done yesterday, but I was waiting to get home to resize it for the forum.

Looks like I forgot a few things and probably overdid the lighting. Overall for a first go I'm pretty pleased but by all means, if you see improvement I'd love to hear it.

Edit : Like that silly little mon on his right >.> GAHH.

Damn that little plant...

I see what you mean about that little bonsai, it looks as though it could either be very high poly, or have lots of transmaps one on each leaf.

That does look like a bugger to render. That and the hair will add lots of render time. As for the image I think you are right, your fill light or Ambient lighting is a bit too high if you ask me. If the background was darker than your character the character would stand out so much better.

Just My two cents.

Jaderail - 23 June 2012 12:28 PM

ZamuelNow - 16 June 2012 12:29 PM

Daz Studio 4, no postwork except signature
Zamuel's Image

I'm sorry ZamuelNow. I do miss some stuff from time to time due to my illness and the fact my brain just goes on vacation from time to time.

Okay, the first thing is I do not think the background compliments the image. It's to light to fit the character IMHO.
Second your lighting is very uniform, not very much shadowing at all. I would expect to see at least some shadows from the glass frames.
Lastly I think the dress looks very good but you could adjust your Bump/Displacement settings for the skin. You should have a little detail in an image that is this close to the viewer.

Hope that helps.

EDIT: Opps... keep forgetting Quote will not do images any longer.

Changed the shadow type from Deep Shadow Map to Raytraced and I used a darker sky. I would assume that some form of blue would work well as a contrast to the orange on her dress. Not sure how to add more detail to the skin, both from the perspective of being new and from the fact that this is a V4 texture moved onto a Genesis morph.

This looks better to me. The lighting has more contrast now. The Background does make her stand out now which is good in my book. As for the skin settings you should still have Bump and Displacement in your Surfaces Tab. Just Pick the Face/Head in the list of surfaces then start will small tweaks. It is easy to go too far with them very fast. Then move on to Neck and Torso and get what looks good to you.

Time to share this simple scene to show one way to use UberEviroment. This simple scene is made up of the figure and single wall behind. No floor and ceiling. Also she is nekkid from the waist down. I also put a light Dome in (a flat bottom sphere) and applied a picture of an interior as I have true raytraced reflections on the eyes and jewellery. With true reflections as opposed to faking it with a reflection map you need something to reflect. I find a flat bottom sphere like what (Light Dome Pro 2 has) helps with giving something to reflect. UberEnviroment comes with two reflection Jpgs one for Outdoor and one for a Kitchen. I used the kitchen one on the light dome.


How many lights do you think this scene has?


It has one UberSpot and UberEnviroment 2.1 and that is it.


The UberSpot lights can use Light Gels similar to what Jad showed on page 9 http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewthread/1201/P120/#18544 of this thread but with an image channel built in to the light itself, hence the Blinds shadow. This Spot was set to RayTrace Shadows with a slight orange/yellow light.


UberEnviroment settings shown below. No HDRI map involved. I am just using the light colour channel as the overall light colour. Notice I used 50 as the Maximum Trace Distance., default is 500. This will decrease render times. From memory this figure tells 3Delight how far apart objects are before it calculates ambient occlusion. 500 CM, half a meter, way too high for a portrait. You could get away with 25 for a scene like this


Next the shading rate: Here I used the default Max preset, normally when using the Indirect Lighting setting I would lower this down to 1 or as low as .10 as Indirect lighting needs super sampling to get the best results. I just chose the default max preset to show the results. If I get time I will render this at a lower shading rate and see how long it takes


The next image shows the Advanced Render settings I used. Notice the Pixel Samples x and y? Because I used DOF (Depth of Field) I had to increase these to 16 to get a clean blur. The more blur (lower the FStop is) the higher these need to be. I have not needed to go above 20 in the past.


Ok here comes the kicker. 18 hours to render at 750 x 1000 with a 32bit system, with 3 GB of Ram and Dual core. I would guess at 24 to 36 hours if I adjusted the UberEnviroment shading rate to 1. Which I will test.


You will get quicker render times if you fake Indirect Light by using extra Spot/distant/point lights. Something like a 5 or 7 spot light setup which is just an improvement on the 3 point lighting shown earlier in this thread http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewthread/1201/P30/#16096 . Just remember set up your Keylight (main light source) first, then work around the scene with Fill, back and bounce lights. All these other lights can be set to Diffuse lighting only. Meaning it won’t add any more specular highlights. But again this can be down to choice and the scene or the look you are wanting.

I would even go to the extent of setting all these other lights up with 100% soft shadows and raytraced shaodows. This willincrease render times but gives good results. This will reduce overlapping shadows. Bounce lights (shining upward) can have no shadows at all depending on the direction, as the light will go through objects and light behind them.


Since this thread is about lighting I won’t go in to the advanced skin shaders here. It would take me a week or more to get that info together. LOL


Oh and the Wall behind, the only light that got was from the UberEnviroment and it didn’t light up that well. Since I was using DOF I just applied 50% ambient in the Surfaces Pane and set the ambient colour to White. That made it light up a little more.


Here you will see two renders. The first the main finished render. I put the last render in to Photoshop Elements and duplicated it. Set the duplicate to “Screen” and set the opacity to 20%. That just mage it pop a little more. Yes I cloud have adjusted the light and re-rendered but I am not a render only type of person. Also I added the highlights to the eyes postwork.


Hope that helps a little for the future.

GOOD Stuff Szark. Wish you had of popped in earlier in the contest, but it's not over yet.