Digital Art Zone

I still seem to stumble on the most basic things:

I wanted to test out the “Reflect Me” mirrors and set up a simple test scene.

Test 1:
-open start scene with Genesis
- place Cube 10m “Primitive” in Scene
- place Base Ueber Environment 2 Light with quality settings 4 in scene.
- place random mirror object in scene ( I used AC_RMStandMirror from “Reflect Me”)

In the test render I noticed that Genesis and the Mirror are light as expected but instead of the cube walls showing white in the mirror they are just black.

Test 2:
-open start scene with Genesis
- place “Plane” 10m “Primitive” in Scene as ground
- place “Plane” 10m “Primitive” in Scene as back wall, z translate - 450, x rotate 90
- place “Plane” 10m “Primitive” in Scene as front wall, z translate 600, x rotate 90
- place Base Ueber Environment 2 Light with quality settings 4 in scene.
- place random mirror object in scene ( I used AC_RMStandMirror from “Reflect Me”)

In the test render I noticed that the front wall reflected in the mirror is black will the front wall is white.
I made a second test render to show the scene from an angle top view while looking at the front wall.
The front wall turned out to be completly black.

- - -

It seems the inside and the back of objects does not have the color of the outside or the front side.

Was this always like that?

Is there a simple setting to make the inside of cubes and the backside of surfaces also use the same color as the outside and the front?

Example:
In zbrush I just have to toggle on double sided. In vue it seems the outside and the inside color are the same by default when placing primitives into the scene.

I don’t know the answer, but one question comes to mind - What do you have your Max Ray Trace Depth set to in render settings? If you increase that, does it make a difference?

barbult - 12 February 2013 06:47 PM

I don’t know the answer, but one question comes to mind - What do you have your Max Ray Trace Depth set to in render settings? If you increase that, does it make a difference?

I set it to 14 for another quick test render it did not change the result as expected.

As far as I understand the Max Ray Trace Depth defines how many bounces the Ray will make.
This would be interesting inside a reflective cube were all you want to see the reflection of the reflection of the reflection add infinity.
Well 14 is more than enough o.0.

Notice that in the top view angle scene render in the first post there is no reflection going on anyway. It is just a plain render of the backside of the two planes.

- - -

added another screenshot to show how it looks when the front of the planes is facing the camera.

Edit / update:

Made some more test with different shaders applied to the planes:

For some shaders the backside automatically seems to have the same color as the front side.
For other shaders the backside is rendered in black again.

So there must be some kind of setting that influences if the backside / inside of a mesh uses the same shader / material as the front / outside.
I just have no clue which one.

It is most likely normals.  In the case of the cube its normals would point outward.  With the planes by rotating them both 90 degrees the normals are both pointing forward.

What version of Studio are you running?

Which shaders do which? The default DAZ shader should treat both sides the same, but others may well take account of the facing of the normal - I suspect if you put a plane facing the mirror beyond the “black” plane you may see it, as it may well be that the normal away side is not rendering at all.

mjc1016 - 13 February 2013 01:06 AM

What version of Studio are you running?

DS 4.5.1.56 - 64 bit on wndows 8 pro

Richard Haseltine - 13 February 2013 05:36 AM

Which shaders do which? The default DAZ shader should treat both sides the same, but others may well take account of the facing of the normal - I suspect if you put a plane facing the mirror beyond the “black” plane you may see it, as it may well be that the normal away side is not rendering at all.

UE2 base “Normal away” side Not rendering for:

For the default shader that is on the primitives when one puts them in the scene
it seems that the “normal away” side is rendering black with default UE2 base light.

http://www.daz3d.com/real-paint-for-daz-studio

http://www.daz3d.com/real-metals-for-daz-studio

- - -

UE2 base “Normal away” side Rendering for:

Some of the shaders that seem to render on both sides are

http://www.daz3d.com/hardcore-utility-shaders-ds

- - -

I made some more tests and then used an UE2 based light with a skydome:

“Normal away” side always rendering with UE2 and skydome
http://www.daz3d.com/urban-recreation

It seems all shaders and the default material render both sides when a skydome is also in the scene.

- - -

So the result of my testing seems to be:

For some reason the “normal away” side is not rendering with the default UE2 sphere without an additional skydome in the scene?

To put the question in a different way:

Is the only difference between a “skydome” and the UE2 Environment sphere that the skydome has a Environment Map applied?
Or is there any other setting I am missing that could cause the “normal away” side not to render at all with jthe UE2 base light setup?

The UE dome is, by default, set to be invisible in renders. It’s theer simply as a guide, to show you how the environment map is placed around the world, and could be deleted without changing the way UE works.

Richard Haseltine - 13 February 2013 02:09 PM

The UE dome is, by default, set to be invisible in renders. It’s theer simply as a guide, to show you how the environment map is placed around the world, and could be deleted without changing the way UE works.

!!!

Thank you so much. Up until now I was always afraid to break something by just deleting it.

Seems I built scenes way to complicated in the past.
Always kept the UE environment sphere and then added an addtional skydome to the scene.
I went so far to always adjust the scale of the UE environment sphere to be bigger than the skydome.

Most often I used Ubersurface2 on the skydome so I can “Fantom” it if needed.
I was always afraid to just use Ubersurface2 on the Environment sphere because I was afraid I would break UE2.

Glad I can in the future now also do it the easy way.