Digital Art Zone

Hi there! I´m using DAZ 3 (I like that old friend) and I would like to know if there is a way to make the same light to apply different shadow softness on different objects. I hate the rendering time of the hair, really, but I have no problem with the other things. I would have no problem sacrificing some hair quality in order to fasten the renders without loosing quality on other things. Is that possible???

Thanks a lot!!!

No, but you might consider a two pass render - one with soft shadows and all opacity maps removed from the hair, and one with the hair and figure but nothing that wasn’t affecting the hair - apply your soft shadows in the first, plain shadows (or none) in the second, layer one over the other in an image editor and erase or mask most of the hard/no shadow version to let the soft shadows show through.

Yeah, that´s a good idea. For the second pass (the unshaded one) I could untexture everything but the hair, make that things totally black, and then use the image editor to overlay it. When the hair is specially good designed, removing the opacity textures is enough to give it an average looking and it takes almost no extra time to render. But does´nt work every time, sometimes the hair looks cartoonish and that´s all, but sometimes it looks really ugly without transparencies.

Thanks!

Strictly speaking it’s possible in the scripted renderer since it loops through nodes you could write a script to change shadow softness for only one or a few nodes.
Simplest solution is to speed up renders is to use Ubersurface on the hair and turn off Raytracing for it.

This is a workaround I’ve found with surfaces and overlay (transparent) textures.

1. Select the ‘offending’ surfaces (transmapped eyebrows, lashes, hair etc).
2. Apply the Elite Human Surface Shader. UberSurface is OK too.
3. Instead of using the overlay textures on the Opacity Strength field, load it into the Opacity Color, like the attached image.