Digital Art Zone

hmmm I never relate to people talking about render times as I always render at ridiculous pixel sizes and use raytraced shadows so most of my renders are several hours.

This one was done more as a test so I used a much smaller (for me) pixel size (1990x1407) but it still was walk away and leave it rendering for a while and I think it took close to 2 hours... but better than 5 or 6 which is often the case... although I have had many huge multi day render times in the past... I guess I need more than just 8gb RAM with how I operate.

Most of my renders are over double the pixel size of this one because I put my better renders in a Print On Demand gallery and offer prints fo rsale so I need the large size.... I sold a 3foot x 4foot framed canvass the other day and you need a large render to print that big!

Anyway at the moment I am making a series of hair colour maps from a noise map so I have some quick options at hand for when I want styles like the ponytail with multiple nodes to match. The noise map approach is working well and I will post some samples of the different colours when I have a batch of them.

Since we are on ponytails, I thought I would try my hand at it.

Being the ornery cuss that I am, I put all the hair on the head. There are 3 nodes: one for the main head hair, one for the ponytail, and one for the "tie". I was trying to make it look like the hair was tied in a knot as some have been known to do. Total hair count for all 3 nodes and the eyebrows is just over 125,000.

The main hair and the tie were the hardest to do. Fortunately, now that I have it saved as a wearable preset, I don't have to repeat that exercise again. Render time was just over 2 hours.

Very nice man! You know your stuff Well it sounds like two hrs is norm for a pony tail. The hair density for your ponytail node looks really good. And the parting is great, well done

@Mangey - When you have a call for large renders, it makes sense to leave the computer do its job. I'm thinking long hair should be rendered in that same view. And 9 times out of ten, the results are totally worth the render time with GH. At least I know what time to expect the ponytails to render... Just got to check and test all settings/GH surfacing settings before rendering the longer hair.

Some amazing looking hair being done here. Can't wait to get back into it

Finally downloaded the latest version of Garibaldi, after hearing that an OBJ exporter had been added. Things are working much smoother, with far fewer freezes and crashes, (5 year old laptop with only 4G RAM in it), and was able to export as OBJ, but am not experienced enough to figure out how to get textures to export with it. My laptop chokes severely when importing back into Daz....it imports into Daz 3 easier than Daz 4.5.....anyway, ended up layering the 3Delight render of this curly do with the Reality render of the girl to achieve the desired results, but it works! Love the way the hair renders in 3Delight, just not loving how skin textures render in it. Once I figure out how to export the hair textures with the OBJ, assuming they will export looking like they do originally, I'll be more than pleased....

wow cool renders well done

I've just sent out emails to the beta testers with links to Garibaldi Express beta 13.

As always make sure you read the changes for this version in the email.

mjc1016 - 21 January 2013 01:25 PM

Not too unexpected/outrageous.

Not to go into too much detail about the implementation but... Follicles are placed on a per face bases, generally if you have a large amount of follicles on a small amount of faces things will average out to be the set distribution value per square centimetre. If you have a small amount of hair on lot of faces the algorithm won't give as a even distribution, but this is a unusual case for hair/fur.

mjc1016 - 21 January 2013 01:25 PM

Now here's where the oddity starts coming in.

This doesn't really answer you problem but anyway...
So when you create a Garibaldi Node and connect a Geometry node (normally with the dialog provided), then open the Garibaldi Editor for the first time the current worldspace pose/position is cached for use in the editor.
This pose is used for follicle distribution amounts regardless of how you change the pose/position is the Daz scene (but the hair position etc updates). This is done to guarantee what you get in the Garibaldi Editor is what is rendered in Daz and when geometry has animation the same amount of follicles are created to make sure no jumping/flickering of hairs happen. Think about as an animal moves their skin stretches so the surface area of the skin changes. At any time you can update the geometry used by the Garibaldi Editor by using the update button in the Setup workspace.

I don't know why you get different results using a script and the Daz UI, Garibaldi uses the geometry the Daz would use to render.

On a side note...
If you use very dense overlapping hair you might find memory usage is high when rendering (especially when the hair is semi transparent), reducing the render bucket size (may slow render speed) and reducing pixel samples (lower render quality) will reduce memory usage

Just a quick image. I reworked one of my older short styles and used one of my noise based colour maps.

futurebiscuit - 26 January 2013 02:01 AM

I don't know why you get different results using a script and the Daz UI, Garibaldi uses the geometry the Daz would use to render.

There are a couple of other scripts that work that way, too. I think that it is because by using a script the changes aren't 'committed' until you save the geometry. My question is...bug or by design...and I can see valid points for both

Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

does this software still need an nVidia card to use?

Gone - 26 January 2013 11:59 AM

Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

"Was your head with you, all day today?"

wow gone good render hun

Now here is something odd that's recently started...I don't recall it ever happening before beta 12, but it did sometimes. It only affects the viewport image, so I thought it may be a driver issue. But I rolled back a couple of versions, in addition to using both the latest 'certified' and beta versions of the Nvidia driver.

But, and here's the kicker...it doesn't affect the render.

Also it takes creating a new scene, without a hair node or a restart to fix.