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I'm not seeing any Iray-specific notes, certainly not referring to a bug ticket, in the Change log post 4.9.3.71 so no, I don't think that has been fixed yet.
Regarding 3DL and TD3, here's an example of stuff I think you just can't DO in Iray, at least not with typical hardware; displacement adding wonderful detail all over the place.
This is Azone, Bzone, and then a simple pane for the sand ground, textures are all from one of the Badlands TD3 shaders and put on Ubersurface, to get normals. Although, frankly, I'm not even sure I needed to use it over Daz basic shader; I'm just in the habit of converting.
Yes, the sand is tiled a bit poorly, but that's just the issue with tiles. (I think one of the ground/dirt shaders I have does some funky large/fine displacement tricks, so I should try that)
So, for completeness:
Azone, TD3 Badlands 'rock' shader converted to 3DL and Bump put into Displacement and increased to -50/+50, tweaked a bit for proper glossiness (20% glossiness, 20% specular strength, medium gray specular color). Tile 30x30.
Bzone, same, but displacement is -25/+25 and Tile 60x60 (increasing apparent range)
600m radius sphere for sky with one of the TD3 HDR skies.
Plane set to... 256 segments? Then subd. Critically, I then had it smooth/collide with the Azone. I should see what happens if I do the reverse... hmm.
AoA atmospheric fog camera
Gray wolf. Stomp stomp clap clap AROOOOO
Edit:
Oh, should probably mention lighting: AoA distant light + AoA ambient light at 25%. (I've stopped using UE2 lights; the slight improvement in realism isn't worth renders taking 5x as long, IMO)
This looks pretty impressive! Even better than the Iray versions... :)
Again, the thing is? Iray's displacement is TERRIBLE. Just... ugh. This gives 3DL an ability to have really detailed, real-looking textures far easier.
I mean, yeah, Iray's lighting has a subtle realism 3DL has to work hard to match. Buuuut... this is one area where 3DL has a leg up.
Increasingly, I think once I wrap up my current Iray shader thing I'm going to do 3DL stuff next. Normals/altitude/patterns shouldn't be that hard to do.
Wow Will that looks really really good
When you say Iray's displacement is terrible, are you talking about when you don't have enough geometry? I've been playing around with making diffuse/displacement/normal maps from stereo pairs of photographs, and I think the results rendered in Iray look great:
- Greg
I remember reading somewhere in these forums that Iray's displacement is per vertex, whereas 3DL's is per pixel. To get decent displacement in Iray on low poly objects, increase the subdivision on the texture itself in the surfaces panel. I noticed that textures could be subdivided when I first bought Aeon Soul's Alphakini as it's used heavily in the textures for that product.
The subdivision required, in most circumstances, to get sufficient detail from a Displacement mesh generally crashes the computer. At least, it does with me.
If I have a terrain and I'm trying to extract that kind of detail, I probably need to subd 4 or 5. And it's already 1 million polys.
I've EXTENSIVELY attempted to make use of Iray displacement, and my conclusion is that, except for some rare cases, it's not worth it.
There have been a few products I've bought with Iray displacement. And they either look terrible or are incredibly slow to render, and I usually just grab the map, make it a Normal in Photoshop, and use that instead.
That's gorgeous, Will! Love the "cragginess" of the rocks. Beautiful textures!
Here are a couple of renders of Stonemason's Winter Terrains using materials from TerraDome 3.
Luci: Nice! Makes a lot of older content more usable.
Oh, oh, I'm really screwed. My first render, 25 minutes, NOTHING on screen yet! Mac 32GB RAM... Oh wait, it was hidden somehow behind the UI. It's starting but at 1% and super grainy. This simple scene is going to be an all nighter and it's only mid-afternoon! Plus this scene has no water, just a flat pinkish sky. I can see I'm going to need to do a LOT of postwork...
I couldn't find the nice skies, it's just a light orangish flat sky, no clouds. 32 minutes 3%, super grainy, not much to the scene... This may be a return. My first one... :(
Are you using Atmosphere?
Change the HDR, I am pretty sure only one of the included HDR's has an orange sky.
My whole system ran out of memory! Froze DS and Firefox! I have 32GB RAM , wow! I will try again with a different sky but I had no water or anything. Clearly this is not going to work for me. Hope the Poser version works better....
So the first one was what I was trying to do, really simple... It took so long to render that I took a screenshot and played with it in Photoshop, added a pre-rendered old Poser render and started playing around randomly in Photoshop just trying to entertain myself, and created the fantasy mish-mosh below. So much for realism LOL... The original render is a screenshot, DS froze when it ran out of memory... It actually looks better here, full size on my screen, it was just hugely grainy, only got to 8% before freezing my system.
Actually I kinda like the way the girl turned out (that was a pre-rendered png I did ages ago, stylized in Photoshop, but I think the background kind of ended up being a mess, but kind of growing on me. The original screenshot was so grainy, it was unusable, so I blurred it and in my boredom, went a bit crazy... The background actually is the image above though after extensive wacky postwork.
This looks like you have one of the atmosphere presets selected. You might want to check that because adding the atmosphere setting slows it to a crawl on my machine as well. If I don't use the atmosphere it only takes about an hour. With water, buildings and people in it.
Wonderland, don't load any of the preset scenes. Start with a blank scene, load up the A Zone, morph it a bit, apply a texture to it, then hit render. This should take no more than 3-4GB max to render, at least it does on my box, and like yourself I have 32GB, however my machine is a Windows box, not a Mac.
I didn't load a preset scene... I did A, B, separately, desert terrain, and added the Wyrm thing I just picked up. I was trying to find a colorful sky and was confused because I couldn't find many sky choices. I bought a bunch of add ons but I did for Poser as well and thought there would be more sky choices for DS. Maybe the orange sky was an atmosphere, not sure. Where are the choice of skies? I used a render setting to get the the sky because I couldn't find it under materials or shaders.... And I raised the render to a larger size, 1000 pixels on one side (with the same aspect ratio) which is still smaller than my usual renders at 2000 pixels and up. The preset was for like 450 pixels which is useless to me.
But if my machine can't handle one of their preset scenes (which I haven't even tried yet) at a normal render size for print, the usability of this seems very limited... I will try again, but this seems headed for a return unfortunately. I think my Mac is literally the top of the line that exists at this point, so it seems like this, just like Bryce, is unusable on a Mac... Anybody else with a Mac able to use this at printable render sizes?
I may be using the most outdated machine ... a 2009 iMac with 8 GB of RAM .. GPU is AMD and thus irrelevant. OS X 10.11.6
A very simple fifty foot woman scifi piece .. about eight hours. The only trick was my standard use of Iray section planes to exclude invisible mesh elements. I haven't gotten around to adding any detail, but I've had worse test renders. I did have email and twitter open at various times during the render and wasn't experiencing serious sluggishness. I didn't check swapping statistics.
One of these days I'll get a newer machine.
Just wondering if it's possible to modify the displacement subdiv in iray based on distance from camera. I'm not au fait enough with the Shader Mixer/Builder to know, but I suspect it's feasible.
You probably already know this, but just in case, do you have instancing optimization set to "memory"?
You know, it's weird. I ran a scene with one figure, Iray skydome, and Azone, and I got a 1080x1080 render at normal settings in maybe 5 minutes. Huh.
Yay for the discounts return!
Now to see how this renders with underwater Iray lighting to simulate ocean canyons...
Yes. That is the correct setting, right? I just assumed it was, so checked it...
This could have done with longer but it had 13 hours.
Oh, I love that! Sci-fi fantasy realms are right up my alley!
@scorpio That is beautiful! I love what you did there.
Unless your scene has a lot of instances, then best to have that set to optimize for speed, not memory.
Really? Why? My renders are running on CPU only because it's a Mac. I thought memory was checked to conserve memory, like low bucket size works in Poser... My system keeps freezing because of lack of memory (although I have 32 GB RAM.) I thought speed was to make it go faster and memory was to have it render slower but use less memory. Am I wrong? So confused now...