Digital Art Zone

And here's the 'final' version of the beard I had spotty success with rendering before...

This uses 3 hair nodes...one for the beard, one for the brows and one for the 'fuzz cut'...and memory use was well within 'normal', unlike the runaway from some of the earlier experiments. So between the updates to the plugin itself, the latest WINE and the couple of updates I did to build the latest WINE, it looks like everything is working correctly (and this is still the 32 bit version...). It's running rock stable now...I did have one or two crashes due to user error...like don't dry a density of several hundred on the old Poser bull (don't ask...it was late, 'nuff said).

futurebiscuit - 19 October 2012 08:37 PM

Male-M3dia - 19 October 2012 08:58 AM

This looks really great. One question: are you able to create an obj from this or does the plugin handle how the hair is generated within the scene. This may be useful in situations where you want to generate the hair in poser or pass it to Luxrender or Octane external renderers.

The plugin generate optimally structured curve primitives as you render in daz with 3Delight. I wasn't planning on offering the ability to export into any generic poly geometry formats.
I cringe at the idea of trying to push 10's millions of polys into a simple ascii obj file. Although I would be impressed if a fully physically based GPU render could handle that much geo.

If there a size-able demand for that feature it wouldn't hard to write.

This plugin does look very promising, however unless you did have the option of exporting to geometry (or exporting curves) I wouldn't be interested as I render exclusively in Lux through Reality. I don't know any stats but understand there are a lot of people in a similar position.

Whilst It is possible to achieve realistic results with 3Delight, the effort involved to fake that realism is much greater than the workflow when using an unbiased render engine, particularly when using a product like Reality which drastically improves the workflow.

I understand AM's product LAMH has had a lot of success with creating geometry and yes it can be processing intensive and use large files, but personally I think you could be cutting out a large proportion of your customer base by not offering this feature, particularly for those that want to sell or share hair products without a copy of your plugin.

Today's experiment...

Maybe i'm a simpleton, but i cant seem to get the genesis figure into the grabaldi system so that i can use it to create the hair. Am i doing something wrong?

Hopefully the images are attached. Is there anywhere i can look for debug info to debug this?

Thanks.

Okay please forgive me for not reading through all of the pages. I have a question. I was trying to put hair on Sants's cuff and I can not do so. Below is a screen shot of the right cuff and it shows all most all of the surface selected but as you can see some areas do not have hair on them. The second is a raw render no lights of Santa in his coat. Is there some trick I need to do to get the cuff fully covered with my fur?
Any help is much appriciated. This plug-in is very easy to use. You get good results with novice use. As seen in my render. I am quit pleased with the results, except for the cuffs that is.

Beautiful , I am testing the last build today .. working so far without issues

btw how you made the hair pick up the texture color ? in the last build I see no option to load textures
or maybe I am missing something

Cath

futurebiscuit - 06 December 2012 08:18 PM

bigh - 04 December 2012 07:36 PM

futurebiscuit - 04 December 2012 06:28 PM

Been a bit under the weather, put me a bit behind schedule... just sent out emails for beta 9.

p.s. Great renders... is inspiring me to spend some time to do some of my own...

thank you
please post some of yours - love to see them

Well, took a quick break from coding and had my first attempt at doing an proper animal. Previously I've concentrated on human hair.
Been meaning to do a Lion for quite a while, as they are a good test for long detailed hair and very dense short hair.
Built on the free Daz Millennium Big Cat LE.

16,747,292 Hair Strands.
57,880,132 Vertices.
Renders in about 8mins on my 4 core machine (1024px x 1024px).
Garibaldi Express beta 9 Release (Windows 7 64bit).

Maybe a little overboard with the hair strand amount, but why not when you can with not too much memory in Garibaldi.

Couple of tests with the latest build, running under Windows 8

it looks to me as UV's problems with the Sants's cuff , make sure the UV's of the geometry are done well before creating hair on the model
any distraction on the UV's will reflect in bad looking hair ( missed or bald spots )

Dollygirl - 11 December 2012 02:49 AM

Okay please forgive me for not reading through all of the pages. I have a question. I was trying to put hair on Sants's cuff and I can not do so. Below is a screen shot of the right cuff and it shows all most all of the surface selected but as you can see some areas do not have hair on them. The second is a raw render no lights of Santa in his coat. Is there some trick I need to do to get the cuff fully covered with my fur?
Any help is much appriciated. This plug-in is very easy to use. You get good results with novice use. As seen in my render. I am quit pleased with the results, except for the cuffs that is.

Mec4D - 12 December 2012 01:17 PM

it looks to me as UV's problems with the Sants's cuff , make sure the UV's of the geometry are done well before creating hair on the model
any distraction on the UV's will reflect in bad looking hair ( missed or bald spots )

Thanks Cath. I will check that. Did you get your question answered. All I know is that under the Distribute tab there are Colour Settings.

I have another question for the followers of this thread. Does anyone know when the plug-in goes dead? Also if you have made a model can you still use it after the plug-in is no longer active. Not to change it but just to render it again.

Below is my Santa and his beard. Still need to work on a 'tashe but for first time newbie. Wow! This is very easy.

According to the plugin info, beta .9 expires on Dec 22.

I uninstalled Garibaldi and opened a scene with Garibaldi hair. The hair did not show so - no - you can't use the hair without Garibaldi.

Interestingly, when I reinstalled Garaibaldi, the scene I opened earlier with Garibaldi uninstalled crashed DS with a access violation in GaribaldiPlugin.dll. All other Garibaldi scenes opened without problems.

I'm sexy and I know it!

cute hehe

Gone - 13 December 2012 12:17 AM

I'm sexy and I know it!

we getting beta or are we done testing ?

bigh - 13 December 2012 04:02 PM

we getting beta or are we done testing ?

I've been a bit quiet as I've taken a short break from Garibaldi and have been dealing with some other issues.

A new beta is still scheduled to be released with week. As always the will be a multitude of fixes and enhancements.

StevieC - 07 December 2012 12:20 AM

Been struggling with this one for more than a week now, as I can't work on it more than about ten minutes at a time, due to my poor old laptop constantly crashing Daz. I have 4GB of RAM, but am running at full CPU capacity with only Daz and Garibaldi open, and 100% memory usage.....have to continuously accept and save scenes with each adjustment, but until I can afford an upgrade, this is how I have to operate.....anyway, have yet to work on the second horse, but here it it so far......

4GB should be more than fine. Email me the scene and I'll have a look into if you still feel that a unusual amount of memory is being used.

A few tips to save memory are:
* Only active character surfaces you will be creating hair on.
* Reduce the Garibaldi hair preview percentage.
* Don't use hair width preview.
* Increase the Garibaldi style interpolation segment length.
* Reduce the Garibaldi Undo/Redo limit.

StevieC - 08 December 2012 02:19 AM

....my laptop freezes trying to use uber environment, so if anyone has any suggestions of lighting that resembles uber environment, but won't kill my PC, please let me know....much appreciated, and beautiful renders from everyone so far!

The uber lighting tools in Daz will cause 3Delight to do various on the fly caching operations to speedup rendering the more advanced lighting effects. Although these caching operations make things quicker than simple ray-tracing but they may need quite a lot of memory.

If you want to render lots of hair with not much memory then use deep shadows with spot lights. Deep shadows were designed for rendering things like hair.

If you want to reduce the memory usage and increase speed of the UberEnviorment the try reducing the 'Maximum Trace Distance' (maxDist), reducing the 'Occlusion samples' (samples), increasing the 'Shading Rate' and increasing the 'Max Error'.
The UberEnviorment almost certainly uses the 3Delight 'occlusion' and 'indirectdiffuse' shader functionality, the technical docs for these are here: http://www.3delight.com/en/uploads/docs/3delight/3delight_35.html#SEC134