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I haven't tried AoA yet but I have worked with UE before and find it very, very useful for well-balanced lighting within 3DL. It does slow down rendeirng time, especially with a large set. Once I learned how to properly place spotlights in 3DL, I found that the very same shadows that gave me grief before now became something to creatively control. Getting expressionistic, film-noir style deep shadows is something I like in many of my renders and 3DL is ideal for that. I wouldn't want those shadows in a pinup render, but they are appropriate for other genres.
You know, one riff on the topic is that it's not the content authors.
The problem is Daz has long refused to do much to advance 3DL, and there's nothing content authors can do about that because it's deep in how 3DL is implemented in Daz.
If you are REALLY upset about content authors not supporting 3DL, blame Daz for refusing to devote development to the 3DL implementation; if the 3DL in Daz was more robust, it'd be easier and more attractive for content authors to develop for it.
I believe most of the advanced features of 3DL are available - if you write RSL code to access them. They are not supported by the current compiled shaders, and not (or not fully) by Shader Mixer according to what was said above, but nor are they locked out.
Practically speaking, that doesn't really contradict my statement.
Because some random content creator who is skilled in painting textures and modeling is very likely not going to ALSO be a skilled programmer capable of teasing out features, nor is 'JoeDarq's 3Dl shader' going to be compatible with what 99% of the rest of the market is doing, or vice versa.
any posts that don't follow the line are deemed as speculation... so I'm deleting them for the daz team
And in the mean time, because no disticntion is being made, a great misunderstanding is being perpetuated...that 3DL is somehow an 'incferior' renderer. It has nothing to do with the standalone. The included version in Studio has the same features/abilities but they are NOT being used nor are they easily accessible.
Besides, enough PAs saying 'We'll fully support 3DL, if you (Daz) make it easier to do so, by moderninzing the base shader' will have more weight than 100s of complaints in the forums. To get to that point, though, requires an understanding of what the real problem is...
Nobody seems to be somehow explicitly making this distinction. Which feels incredibly misleading. Especially given that most hobbyist users only learn anything from the PAs here and other content stores, not from VFX industry websites.
This is an example of how a published artist is painting an incorrect picture of what "3Delight" is allegedly not capable of. A "casual" user will read it and remember because Faveral's sets are so awesome, which means this artist knows their stuff (and they surely do =) - sorry I don't know which pronouns Faveral uses, so I'm using the gender neutral "they", hopefully nobody finds it offensive).
But this rather careless equating of 3Delight with "that outdated REYES module still used as the default in DS", well, it's truly misleading.
Chappie the movie was rendered in 3Delight. Check out the poly counts:
CHAPPIE FINAL POLYGON COUNT: 3,976,511
MOOSE FINAL POLY COUNT: 6,313,018
Source: http://www.cgw.com/Publications/CGW/2015/Volume-38-Issue-2-Mar-Apr-2015-/Creative-Robot.aspx
And, as Richard Haseltine has rightfully mentioned, it's still the same 3Delight as we have built-in into DS (it's just that the DS version is several builds behind).
any posts that don't follow the line are deemed as speculation... so I'm deleting them for the daz team
From the time Daz Studio was first made public, people has associated the basic 3DL setup in it with 3DL as a whole and assumed it sucks when it does not. In fact 3DL is capable of doing the same work as Iray and much, much more. It IS the more powerful of the two engines. However, there are two main issues. Anyone who REALLY is skilled in RSL is NOT going to waste their time making nickles and dimes here in a hobbiest community when they can make big money with VFX companies who will pay big for thier skills. The other main issue is that 3DL was NEVER meant to be run on a single desktop computer but instead on large render farms. So the more complicated shaders you use with it, the more your CPU has to work cause its the only one trying to render the scene.
Will, it doesn't take a "skilled" programmer, really. For one, I can do it, and I'm anything but a good programmer. This sort of stuff requires very basic coding skills.
But you're right that we cannot expect every PA (some of whom majored in arts not science) to be able to do this.
The problem is indeed that there has been very little effort on the part of DAZ3D invested into updating the 3Delight built-in shaders and interfaces over the last five years.
We once theorised as to what the reasons for this neglect might have been, over there in the 3Delight lab thread, and Rob Whisenant came and said that out guesses were off. Unfortunately he didn't have time to explain what those reasons were for real.
I reckon it's some sort of corporate secret and we'll never get the answer.
Those who lurk in the Lab thread might know that I have my own system of 3Delight shaders and DS scripts almost ready. It's self-contained, it's as up-to-date as RSL can be, and yet. I don't think that any content store is going to accept products that require a freebie set done by an outsider.
That's the thing. To have a viable competitive market, it NEEDS to originate from Daz. This hands off, roll your own approach pretty much forces 3DL into a subservient position, at least in terms of photorealism (again, for other stuff, 3DL can't be beat).
So any time folks get angry at vendors... it's really not their fault.
I entirely sympathise with your point, and I know from your posts over the years that this is a source of constant frustration. Unfortunately it is unlikely to happen now that iRay is the default renderer, and most of DAZ's customers, plus the majority of PAs, seemed to have moved to it. A year or so ago the bulk of renders I saw on DA and other galleries were from biased renderers done in DS or Poser. The few PBR images I saw back then were often noise filled under cooked renders done with Reality. It has changed radically since then, and a lot of renders posted now (possibly the majority) are from PBR renderers (mostly iRay).
I know if 3DL was properly supported in DS it could be throwing out images that are on a par with iRay, I just don't see it happening now.
Hi Matty =)
The thing with the PBR system in 3Delight that you don´t have to be skilled in RSL. It's literally incredibly easy to code. I can do it. I've done it. And I'm just a physicist.
And those shaders are faster than equivalent "oldschool" shaders because all the high-level math is in the renderer core, highly optimised by the developers. So you can do quite a lot on a relatively basic laptop.
http://mustakettu85.deviantart.com/art/Victoria-Aeterna-646377536 (sorry I'm not much of an artist, so the image is pretty laughable in that regard, but I tried my best) - that´s GI, path-traced area lighting, raytraced SSS, transmapped hair, reflection and DoF, taking maybe 1.5 hours on my laptop (the laptop specs are in my signature).
For the NPR looks, we should be thankful that first we had pwToon and then LineRender9K. Again, these are vendor add-ons, it's not what DAZ did.
Maybe, if I weren´t Russian, I could try and become a vendor, too, and then my stuff could be considered "semi-official". But alas.
The nice thing about PWToon and LineRender9k is that they are fairly self-contained. You don't have a lot of other content contingent on them, so they 'sell' better than, say, trying to release new content using Mustakettu shaders.
Though if you could figure out a way to make really good shaders that convert from Daz original or US, that would be an achievement.
Daz is trying to have its cake and eat it, too, sending mixed messages in the process. Iray is the default renderer, but the base Daz figures load with 3DL materials (D|S could certainly be coded to load the materials according to the currently selected renderer, if other options are available). While 3DL surfaces will auto convert in Iray, the process is neither efficient nor likely to yield ideal results. It's no wonder the marketplace is confused.
And that isn't even attempting to use the 'latest' part of 3DL...OSL shaders!
The other thing, adding the newer, more modern support does not mean the old stuff will stop working. All the basics, are, like they've always been, included in 3DL.
TBH, I've bought very few Iray conversions because I'd rather do them myself (I'm picky). One can do a blanket conversion of all surfaces with the Iray Uber shader script, but then after that they DO take tweaking. You can just use the script and leave it at that if you want to, but it's not going to look itsbest without fine tuning the materials.
FWIW, I knew that 3Delight is a very capable render engine and that the DS version is pretty crippled in comparison. I'm sure most vendors are not programmers of RSL or even expertly adept at shaders. It's just that with Iray, maybe because of its implementation in DS or because it's physically based (something we all look at every day), it's easier to create a more realistic result with less "skill" or technical knowledge. I've certainly found that to be the case myself. Please don't fault the vendors for wanting to spend less time on each project they do. It's universally true that "time is money" and the faster one can put out a product, the more money one has the potential to make. It's how a lot of them make a living.
Laurie
1. The Studio version of 3DL is NOT crippled. That's a falacy that's been going around for a long time. In fact, the Studio version has 'one up' on the freestand alone...it's 'core unlocked'. This means that it's just like paid version!
2. You don't have to be an RSL programmer to take advantage of everything. You need access to an up to date base shader...replace the one that's been there forever with an updated, more modern version and everything goes on as normal.
Adding some extra info from the clothing/character creation perspective to the words my fellow environment creators had pointed a while ago.
The first issue I found in the moment to decide if supporting both 3DL and Iray, or just focus on Iray was preciselly the PBR (Phisically-based rendering) textures and how to implement them to both render engines, how to adapt the PBR outputs to 3DL and how to emulate some effects. What I found was that the non-PBR textures needed for 3DL looked simply wrong with phisically-based light and also in the way Iray uses HDRI images to create the light environments. Some materials appeared in a some acceptable way, but others were simply impossible to set up. Adding 2 versions of each texture map (specially the normal and difuse/albedo maps) if you include 3 to 5 texture sets per product may produce 1 or 2 GB product packages... not sure if that´s reasonable for anybody.
The second issue was about render times. 3DL was very unfriendly to complex shading operations, increasing the render times to really huge amount of hours in some cases if you used shaders such as Uber2 or SSS and other complex, but cool light shaders and effects. I´m not kidding you at telling that I´ve spent in the past up to 27 hours just to render a simple promo pic in 3DL. Iray adds almost all of that complex shader effects natively, and it renders fast enough both with phisically-based light and HDRI spheres.
A third problem, as Stonemason and Faveral had commented comes with the optimized triangulated geometries, but it also happens somehow in the quad-based geometries: HD geometries are render-killers for 3DL and displacement maps are (a bit less, but also) render-killers for Iray. Including a HD morph for any Genesis figure may increase the set in about 35 MB, not a bad deal for Iray... But including 16-bit displacements to emulate that in 3DL means 4 maps in a range of 40 to 60 MB each, just for the skin, not including dental plans or hiperrealistic eye displacements.
Talking about clothing (form fabrics more than hard surface elements), we can do normal maps that make a good deal both in 3DL and and Iray, but if you want an extra of detail in the clothing like making softer forlds in the fabrics, an HD morph do the job without causing too much poke through with the character... displacement maps are a true, REALLY TRUE nightmare even to fit the basic shapes of your clothes to genesis, not to mention the full body morphs.
I have two computers: a main and powerful workstation with a huge amount of RAM and 2 gtx970 cards in SLI, and a laptop working with an intel 4400 graphics chipset and 8 GB of ram. Obviously, the workstation renders fast as hell, but the laptop does the 3DL renders somehow slower than the the Iray ones, even without nvidia hardware support.
I can fully understand people who still prefers 3DL, the same way I prefered Poser to DS for a really long time... until I seriously used DS to do a render and it convinced me. With that experience learned, I decided to give a try to Iray in the same moment DAZ included it in the public beta, and I totally LOVED it, but being honest, I was playing with PBR textures for some time before DAZ announced Iray, so it was a natural change for me.
From the sounds of it, nobody is actually taking advantage of one of the major advances in 3DL that IS available in Studio...with NO additional shader work, coding or anything more complex that turning a button from OFF to ON. Simply turning ON Progressive Rendering in the 3DL render settings enables the much faster raytrace hider (3DL speak for renderer) which really does speed up quite a few of the commonly claimed 'too slow to use' things...and it can be sped up more (but requires a one digit change in the base support files, that would need to be done on Daz's end or accessed by scripted rendering), by enabling ray caching.
I'm sorry I don't really understand what you specifically mean by "convert".
Talking about my experience :). The 2 times I activated progressive rendering it crashed DS here, so I used the so-many-times used method of zig-zag rendering to see first the center of the scene instead if the sky or ground of the background LOL. Currently, I have a mini-viewport doing iray progressive rendering and it works just fine, not sure if it was a problem in my older computer/cpu/gpu, but it never worked here.
I can understand that "oldschool" 3Delight shaders will be slower for compex effects than the current PBR implementation that isn't done in the interpreted shader code (the way "oldschool" shaders work) but in the renderer core... but 27 hours for a promo-sized image... It should've been a signal that something wasn't being done quite right. Most likely, something wasn't optimised (maybe the shading rate was too low, or there were volumetric shaders triggered by an environment light, or heavily transmapped surfaces were not excluded from AO...).
It makes me wonder how much communication exists between published artists here.
See, I do not expect any PA to listen to what I say because I'm a nobody. // If Luthbel actually reads this, I'll be surprised //
But Wowie, who is a PA here, is a veritable expert in using precisely the "oldschool" 3Delight shaders like US2. He has store products to prove his skills. Before Wowie, Omnifreaker himself was seen around relatively often.
Is it not customary among PAs to ask each other for help?
To be fair...it's not really been that long since environmental lights could be excluded, at least outside of scripted rendering. And no, I'm not talking about AoA's lights...it can be done with any light, now...well, almost. The AO exclusion has always been in the omnifreaker line.
There is definitely something wrong...possibly hardware, but other than the first version of Studio that used that feature, it should 'just work'.
Relatively speaking, it's true, but were there many people using true volumetrics at all before AoA's flaggable EZCamera? And it's a few years old already.
I used progressive rendering a lot when I was still using 3DL. It did not crash for me, however I found that the overall rendering time was not significantly reduced compared to a non-progressive render, and on occasion was longer. Having said that, I rarely had a 3DL render of any type take much more than 30 mins, and 10-15 mins was typical. For me, the main advantage of progressive rendering was the ability to quickly see what the image was going to look like, so could be abandoned if the lighting was wrong etc. I basically used it in a similar way to the way I use the iRay preview window today.
Um...probably not