A slight beef for vendors
Choppski
Posts: 630
When making the 3dl settings, should a really take 25 minutes to do a spot render because of the subsurface. With Owen 8, out of the box it took a while, like 5 minutes. With Edward it was 25 minutes. I have spent enough time with DS that I can make the textures look good even with a basic DS shader or ubersurface, or by adjusting the various aspects to make up for excessive subsurface settings. And I know, there are presets to reduce the SS, but then the texture looks like crap. I guess my point is, if some textures can look good and not take 20 minutes to START a spot render, why can't others. I would just stick with iray because dang they always look good, but with my setup it takes hours to render. DOne with rant.
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Yeah, it's crazy.. I much prefer 3DL Uber over AoA SS just because of that.. Uber takes longer to render than dzDefault when you add in SSS and translucence but it doesn't have that face plant time (as ZDG calls it - I think it's completely appropriate)
Well if it makes you feel any better, before long there will probably be no more 3DL support from vendors and you won't have to deal with it, LOL.
This is why I moved ditched 3DL for iray. AoA plus HD and transmaps is a major wait, especially for doing a bunch of promos. But then AoA was used because uber was bugged when it came to rendering SSS.
As stated only a few weeks ago ago by Daz_Steve
i was joking Chohole and I did say vendors, LOL
...and the long CPU render times along with how stupidly expensive decent GPU cards are these days is why I have been moving back to 3DL.
All Daz base figures still come with 3DL shaders and Zev0's Skin Builder Pro/Pro3 both work in 3DL.
Buy the card directly from Nvidia and it's the regular price.
That's one of the reasons I use Amazing Skins when I do 3DL renders of human characters. It just seems to handle all of that much better and faster. It can sometimes have real difficulty with normal maps, but then, it's not clear to me how much use 3DL makes of normal maps.
...they've been out of stock for a couple months now and have replaced the "Add To Cart" button with on that says "Notify Me". The "cheapest" card they have available is the Quadro P4000 (basically a 1070 with fewer cores for more than twice the price).
Put myself on the "email list" several weeks ago for a 1070 but not holding my breath.
As has been mentioned in couple of 3DL threads, the AoA SS shader is a shader mixer network with a built in bug, it always calculates opacity even if there are no opacity maps, thus the long render times. The workaround is to import the mats that don't use opacity into shader mixer and disconnect opacity from the root brick, which will speed up rendering. But it's a lot easier to simply convert to Uber Surface shader, isn't it. Don't know what bug Male-M3dia is talking about, I get very good results with US shader, with sub surface active it renders almost as fast as the DS default shader.
...my solution is to use the SSS option on Skin Builder Pro/Pro3 which doesn't have that bug.
My method with the DS default shader is to set lightning model to skin, plop the diffuse maps into the scatter channel and bump- or spec maps into the sheen channel, set limits off for scatter strength and up it to about 2.0. Looks pretty cool and renders very fast;)
...SBP it automatically sets to the "skin" lighting model. The Shader Mixer just looks incomprehensible to my dyslexic mind, like the aftermath of a dropped bowl of noodles.
I'll have to try those other tweaks of yours though.
I have Skin builder pro for V5 Uv:s. It's very nice but most of my skins use V4 uv:s (really like V4 and M4 skins:) so I've converted most of them to UberSurface now.
Lol it's not that bad, but I admit bringing in an AoA SSS skin to fix it is a bit tedious to say the least.
Would be cool to hear if that works for you;)
...I don't have the Gen4 skin converter utility for G3 as I heard it is very slow if you have limited system resources. Again never bought any of the advanced Uber Surface shaders/lights as when they came out I was still working in 32 bit and anything prefaced with "Uber" (or "Elite") translated to "render crash".
Often it's the hair that's the problem - I had a scene that took over 50 minutes to render, then I removed the hair from the figure and it took 5 minutes.
Yes hair and other transmapped stuff will really increase render times if you don't use any workarounds. Converting hair to UberSurface and turning occlusion off is one solution. AoA lights work really well too, and Parris recently solved the transmap bug together with some 3DL developers, IBL-Master has no problems whatsoever with complex hair, amazing speed:)
Thank you for all of the replies. Among other things, I have new products to explore.
I am curious, though. I have the ubersurface and human surface shaders and know them fairly well. I assumed that the out of the box 3dl materials used one of those as a shader. What it the AOA shader?
In my experience, if the texture is good, you can get some good results even with the basic DS shader. I have several gen 4 textures that I get better results with than for some of the newer textures. I just know that trying Edward 8 out of the box took 20 minutes for a spot render to even BEGIN rendering. There are several textures like that. I don't mind tweaking them (let's face it--for years we had to do that because so many vendors only sold things with POser materials), but when you see some skins that render well and quickly out of the box, you wonder why others cannot. To be fair, I can say that most render really well in iray out of the box, but I think that has as much to do with lighting as anything.
And I wanted to add that the 20 minute render had NO HD morphs and no hair. DOn't get me started on hair. I did an experiment one day and moved chronologically through my hair and the older, the faster the renders were. But I have learned a few tricks like converting all hair setting to ubersurface, increasing the bump and turning off raytrace and occlusion and you can get some good looking hair much faster. And fiber mesh works faster once you learn which hair materials render quick and copy and paste those on (fiber mesh hair seems to take almost any shader which is nice). Then, of course, I bought the recent matthew hair, did my usual, and it still took 2 hours to render about half the hair (figure at a distance) until I gave up.
In any case, thanks again for the feedback.
I don't see anything in the default ds shader for scatter strength
I did discover a workaround for Edward that seems ok. With the AOA shader, bump up diffuse to 80, lower subsurface on/off to about .4 and increase subsurface strength to over 100. You get a very similar effect (at least with an area light) and it renders almost as though there is no SS slowing it down. I tried the mat preset for 25% SS but that lowers only the suburface strength, so doing that even with bumping up the diffuse, still had a long spot render time.
Sorry it's thickness.
...ahh with SBP there is no place for inserting maps into the scatter channels and there is no "sheen" channel. Is that something provided by the Uber Skin Shader?
No it's the plain old vanilla DS default shader when you set the lightning model to skin;)
...ah, unfortunately I pretty much work with SBP/SBP3 as I don't have a ;arge collection of skin textures and again never purchased any of the Uber surface content.
I guess SBP looks better but the default shader renders fast so it's good for animation. My favorite is still the UberShader if I'm doing stills. I found some nice settings that work for what I do and rendertimes are ok compared to the AoA SSS.
...yeah SBP skins tend to render pretty quick and I have so much more control over them so I guess I'm good.
Keep an eye on the bitcoins. It's the reason why GPU prices skyrocketed and are all sold out or at ludicrous prices. If the bitcoin drops, lots will ditch their miningrig on secondhand places to get some return for investments. Those cards will have been battered and pushed to the max. But it will give the market some air again as the prices of new cards should settle as well.