Digital Art Zone

I save my hair nodes as scene subsets and merge them back into a new scene and that works very well. beta 6 works with my old saved nodes which is good. The render below I did with both Disk Cache and Ram Cache with the following results

2 lights, 1 distant & 1 point... both with ray traced shadows

Disk cache
Time: 6mins 35secs and I got a 3Delight error #43 with a truncated message that I think was saying an object was unnamed

Ram Cache
Time 5mins 36secs with no error message.

Neither scene took all that long so the time difference was not a huge issue but with scenes that took ages to render that time saving as a percentage of time saved would be significant so I will probably always switch to Ram Cache... but if the Disk Cache helps some systems render then it seems stable enough, although I don't know what the 3Delight error I got related to.


EDITED to fix my typing errors!

futurebiscuit - 17 November 2012 04:09 PM

Gone - 17 November 2012 01:04 AM

When I turned the head to disk cache, I got a R5017 error. It didn't stop the render but there was no significant speed increase either. When I added disk cache to the eyebrow so that both nodes were using it, I immediately crashed to the desktop when I tried to render.

The the 'Disk Cache' render method is not designed to speed up renders, just lower the memory usage. With small amounts of hair strands it may even slightly slow down render speeds (probably not noticeable though).
Don't worry about the R5017 error warning... I just am not quite being exact enough with some of the data I pass to 3Delight... Should render fine.

Gone - 17 November 2012 01:04 AM

On a separate note, I tried to use this texture for a texture map in Garibaldi. It worked fine for providing a texture colour for the head hair. When I tried to use it to line up paint with the eyebrow it came back to DS above the textured eyebrow. I had to repaint it lower in order to line up with the texture in DS but that meant that Garibaldi was now taking the texture from the skin instead of the brow so I couldn't use the texture map for the brow node.

If I understand correctly... this is probably because Garibaldi will use the uvset set when the node is first created. I'm guesting you changed the uvset when applying a texture... For version 1 there no plans to allow changes of the uv map that garibaldi uses post creation.

Well, if speed isn't the purpose then no worries.

I wasn't concerned about the error message - I was just passing along information. What did concern me was the fact that setting 2 or more nodes to disk cache would cause an immediate crash when I hit render.

It isn't the UV set. The texture in the render is the same one used to produce the density and texture maps for Garibaldi. That's why I was surprised when they didn't line up.

Just another test...Needs some work but its getting there...

I cant seem to Isolate sections and use the Frizz or Clumping on the Highlighted area's it seems to only work on the whole mesh....Or am I missing something obvious...?

And Genesis morphed into Freak4...No Re styling at all...

just a quick one to ask if you can think about a horizontal flip control for the curves... this would be great for asymetrical styles to have them easily available as mirrored styles.

I couldn't resist trying it out on a mermaid... I would like to get a better result with the hair but it shows lots of promise.

MangeyDesigner - 18 November 2012 04:18 AM

I couldn't resist trying it out on a mermaid... I would like to get a better result with the hair but it shows lots of promise.

cool

futurebiscuit - 17 November 2012 05:16 PM

ecocam - 17 November 2012 04:02 PM

I'm having problems with the disk cache method... W7 64bits, 12 Gb, I always get a DS4.5 crash when I try to render using disk cache..

Can you email a simple scene where it crashes if possible. thanks

Here is a very simple scene with genesis and a basic garibaldi hair. Some details in the txt and jpg files included
https://dl.dropbox.com/s/csq3qp8gx49aio0/test43.rar?dl=1

futurebiscuit - 17 November 2012 05:16 PM

ecocam - 17 November 2012 04:02 PM

And finally a question : What exactly does the 'Extrude Settings' on Style Tab ?

Is an advanced feature...
Lets you fade between interpolating the hair strands between style curves and extruding the hair strands to just follow the style curves. Should be used in conjunction with a control map.
Is useful for fixing issues where hair needs to separated between the style curves instead of interpolating in between and the auto parting is not suited. Such as long hair that splits in-front and behind a shoulder.
Basically means you can get effects that would have traditional required needing to split parts of your hair node into separate setups.

I got it, and will try these days.

Keep your great work !
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futurebiscuit - 17 November 2012 04:32 PM

Spot lights with deep shadow maps although more time consuming to setup (although the look through spot light as camera feture helps) will mean you shouldn't have any memory issues with even 2GB of ram when used in conjunction with the 'Disk Cache' mode.

Sounds promising, thank you. I'll try building a spotlight rig as soon as I have time (I gotta drop in a gel spotlight, then, to compensate for lack of environment IBL, and try adding AO to the skin surfaces).

futurebiscuit - 17 November 2012 04:32 PM

Well garibaldi uses the standard libpng impelentation for loading png files... I haven't had any troubles with it so far. Being that Paint.Net is quite popular I'll add it to the list of things to look into.
Did you get any errors in the dialog box that should show after importing the image directory?

Here is the error message, "color_type" is mismatched. SkinFace was saved over in Paint.NET. Garibaldi then proceeds to say it's loaded successfully, and indeed the mesh turns from transparent to dark, but it is uniformly black, the white colour does not come through.

PS I keep crashing when saving a scene with Aiko3 and Garibaldi hair. It renders fine, but does not save. I'd thought it could be because of my whacky skin shader on her, but no, even a default A3 with no textures causes a crash when saving with hair. Should I send you the error report DS creates?

Playing with clumps and scraggle.

Haven't had time to play lately :( Love the renders people are doing - so much you can do with this!!

Experimenting with lights and the Garibaldi settings within Daz 4.5......long hair style this time. Had Nicole Kidman's hair in Dead Calm in mind here.....

Ok I thought that I would Make a new Mane for The Mil Big Cat aka Lion...

No go..I can start the Plugin select setup then I choose skin and when I click to accept The plugin goes Bye Bye and I am left with just DS4.5 and no Error message...So I am going to try on a few other legacy files...

MangeyDesigner - 17 November 2012 06:59 PM

Neither scene took all that long so the time difference was not a huge issue but with scenes that took ages to render that time saving as a percentage of time saved would be significant so I will probably always switch to Ram Cache... but if the Disk Cache helps some systems render then it seems stable enough, although I don't know what the 3Delight error I got related to.

The error message will be fixed in the next beta... Coming very soon.
When using raytraced shadows the Disk Cache is unlikely to save much memory.
I still recommend using Spot lights with deep shadow maps for optimal performance with Gariabldi Express.

Gone - 17 November 2012 09:15 PM

It isn't the UV set. The texture in the render is the same one used to produce the density and texture maps for Garibaldi. That's why I was surprised when they didn't line up.

Seems very strange... It's not that the image files imported/exported from garibaldi are currently flipped compared to the textures used in the daz studio materials?