NPR shaders for Iray
josephlemons69_4db0991b45
Posts: 423
in The Commons
Are there any NPR shaders that work with Iray?
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The only one I know of at the moment that is specifically for Iray is Sketchy - Toon Edge and Art Shaders for Iray. It's a great shader set and you can do a lot with it if you practice. The vendor also has a video on how to use it. So, you can check that out to see if it will do what you want. I like it. It's a nice tool to have in the NPR toolbox.
As unbiased renderers go, Iray isn't well suited for that kind of thing. Sketchy is probably as good as it gets. This is not say that it is bad, because it isn't, but its limitation are basically fundamental to Iray. This isn't even a case of Daz Iray vs the Nvidia SDK. I've looked deeply into Iray and there doesn't seem to be any way to perform some of the vector transforms (Beyond long fiddly chains of math nodes that are going to murder the over all render speed), that really let one get one's NPR on.
Oddly, Superfly is better at this, mostly because it based on Cycles, and the Blender community pretty much demanded actual NPR support in Cycles, so almost all (if not all) of necessary bits are built into Superfly.
If you aren't animating, though, it's easier just to make an export pipeline and use an external renderer vs trying to make it work in Iray.
3Delight is actually the better choice. (I know getting stuff converted from Iray to 3dl is pain, but the toon shaders and toon products require another conversion as well. Probably the same with Sketchy.)
Tell me more about this whole Cycles NPR stuff. What kind of conversion do you have to do there?
A lot.
It's not really a practical option if you don't know how to automate it.
The default options in Cycles are roughtly equivalent to those in Daz Iray. So at first glance one might not think it would be that hard. But the thing about daz shaders is, they come packaged.
Open up studio and import an iray shader into the shader builder. Look at the mess of nodes and resolve never open shader builder again. Daz iray shaders are over built nine times of ten, because they try to be Uber. Ready to do anything, rather than optimized to be one material. So one could make a Cycles shader for NPR with less mess, but maybe only 80% less. Generally, there are no cycles NPR shaders you could "buy." It's been suggest to me that I should make something for Poser and sell it, but I wouldn't know where to start, and my connection at Smith Micro got laid off.
In any event, the export thing is next issue. Once you have some shaders, you still have to the ting that must be done any time you export from on program to another. Assign the materials. Cycles now has a one click PBR node, but that's not NPR.
I hacked the ever loving sould out of mCasual's mcjTeleblender, and set up my blender defualt scene so that the whole conversion is automated.
While I was serious about using external renderers for better NPR, probably the easiest way to go would be to get Sketchy, render in Iray, then filter the result in Fotosketcher. It's free, easy to use and gives pretty neat results. I've been adding it to my workflow, and I don't particularly need it.
Sample: A stockings geograft I whipped up. Genesis 3 Female, Cycles render, no post work
Sample: WIP Raven, Cartoon Network's Teen Titans, Genesis 3 Female, Cycles render, no post work
On the other hand, you can get results that just arn't possible in the renderer, no matter what renderer, with a post work tool. I use Fotosketcher because it's customizable and free.
Sample: "Mako Marigold" (a terrible pun) Genesis (old render), Left, no post, right Fotosketcher
I can, in fact, teach you to do what it is I do. And once you have built your Cycles nodes, I can give you a version my hacked teleblender that would work with your set up. Or, if you use poser, I think I have a working version of my older Cycles NPR for superfly, and I'd be happy to share that, too. (I think. I may not have that anymore, but if I do, it would be a good place to start learning how to roll your own.) But it would not be easy. Indeed, it might be quite painful. I have nearly 5 years of effort into learning this stuff.
Your NPR images looks very nice, Singular Blues.
Dou you have any tutorial on your workflow?
It will be awesome to know the necessary steps for the conversion.
I use both Blender and Poser 11.
I'm not sure why you would want NPR shaders for Iray since 3Delight will do NPR renders much faster. It just seems like using Iray for NPR would be overkill.
You wouldn't want to use an unbiased renderer for NPR unless you have a hell of a GPU, at which point the speed increase will win out. A good PBR render needs 100 samples, min. The two recent images I posted were done with 17.
But still, it takes a certain kind of masochism to bother with NPR via GPU. Art imitates life. For ceratin styles of art, it helps to have renderer imitate life. Physically based or unbiased NPR admits things that hard hard to do with biased renderers but sacrifices control. With something like 3delight, you say "this part will be exactly this color, and it will be. Not so with iray (something that crops up even with photo real).
Pretty much, IMO, the biggest advantage of NPR on a renderer like Cycles or iray is almost no one is doing it. Makes for a personalized style.
I don't have a tutorial, per se. Tuts are not a strength of mine.
I'll see if I can't find that Superfly poser node file later today. Understanding the nodes is the most important part. Like I said, the rest of what I do is automated.
There's bits that do have to be done in Studio, but that's largely about picking colors and is specific to my style. It's not strictly necessary.
So, first you need to pick your software (if you have all the figures you want in Poser, you don't need blender) and then you need to study the nodes. After that, I can explain how I get where I end up.
I am also interested in workflow from Daz Studio to Blender, because I do not know how to transfer Genesis 8 to Poser 11 yet.
For older figures, Poser 11 will be just fine.
There is an IRAY toon shader for Genises 2. I got it recently, on sale. I've only tried it once and I wasn't all that impressed with it. As mentioned before, 3Delight works better for NPR. Why would I want IRAY toon shaders? The only reason is because I find the lighting easier to set up. That's probably because I'm still new at this and haven't learned all the 3Delight tricks of the trade yet. My favorite toon shaders, so far are Visual Style Shaders (3Delight only). If I ever get a copy of Poser 11, I want to try out their comic book style render plugin/engine (whatever you call it).
BTW, there is a thread devoted to NPR: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/54697/non-photorealistic-renders-npr#latest
I've learned a lot from that thread.
Some IRAY Toon Shaders:
https://www.daz3d.com/dg-iray-toon-styles-for-genesis-2
https://www.daz3d.com/v176-toon-textures
There are two art shaders in my free shader pack that do serviceable grayscaling and outlines.
Meh. So I checked and don't have the poser file. But that may be a good thing.
Sorry I didn't say so yesterday. I lay down for a nap and woke up 16 hours later.
Anyway, I have poser, so it follows (since I declared it would best for you to understand the nodes, and what they do first) I could start more basic.
I'll probably open a new thread, because this obviously leaves the realm of "for Iray," though some of the principles might beapplicable to Iray. To they extent I've studied it, though, there isn't much that is.
Thanks, Singular Blues. I will wait for the new thread on such topics, whenever you will create it.
how does one get your free shader pack?
Here it is:
https://sharecg.com/v/87095/view/7/Material-and-Shader/WTP3-Will-Timmins-Procedural-Shaders-for-Iray
There are a few other doodads you might find interesting if you click my name there.
For my part, without IRAY I lose bloom, caustics, IBL lighting, fog effects and camera lens distortions such as fisheye, barrel and pincushion to name but a few. Of course Zbrush 2019 has spoiled me for NPR with it's near infinite variety of styles and effects - yet it turns off perspective if the 'camera' gets too close to the mesh. This leads me to suspect that IRAY camera lens effects & lighting is basically incompatable with NPR filters on a fundamental level - at least on a level more advanced than geo-shells for outlines and toon or airbrush style surface shading. I do hope that I'm mistaken in this assumption...
Some of the Zbrush NPR filter renders I've composited: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Z5zelR