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Sorry I haven't posted for so long. Troubleshooting took a lot longer than I thought. Basically, I had to revert to the 1.2 build to track the bugs that I'm seeing. Very happy to say, I've sorted most of the bugs I've seen and performance is still good. Noise should not be noticeable anymore, regardless of irradiance/subsurface samples used and whether you're using area lights or just HDRI on the environment sphere.
The next build is a major step forward under the hood. There's still some stuff that needs to be worked out though.
No worries wowie, good to hear from you! Hope the new year has started out well (fixing bugs is always a nice thing)! I've been busy dealing with real life for a change;) Very much looking forward to trying the newest build!!
Wow what a cool thing to sayXD
Found the bug that's causing fireflies with hair. It basically has to do with opacity (when enabled). Working on a solution.
...so....had no internet for about 2 months, but now back in business
...
Been a while, I really hope you are ok, considering what's going down right now! And of course curious about your progress
Pretty good progress actually.
From the top of my head.
AWE Surface:
I did remove adaptive sampling in the process, so its very likely not be present in the next build. Translucency boost for SSS should be better now and looks more saturated. Also, everything except subsurface is slightly faster with 3delight 12. I've also noticed SSS with DS 4.8 - 4.12 seems to have more noise in darker, translucent areas compared to DS 4.7.
AWE hair shader:
I need to add a toggle to enable switching between a vertical ramp to a horizontal one (to avoid problems like what you see on the render). Probably also need to add a mask, which should help when users can't create the proper surface area themselves for their hair props.
Another thing I might add is a noise ramp to slightly break up the variations/highlights, roughly between midpoint and the hair tip.
AWE Environment Sphere shader:
AWE Environment Light controls:
Tks so much for sharing! Would love to see the color burn in action
Trying to imagine if it can add to realism or quit the opposite? Also can't wait to test the new environment shader, especially the smart adjust thingy;)
It's enabled by default. So, technically, you're already seeing it.
Edit: Some test renders. Default values, zero (disabled), burn, dodge.
Tks wowie! Yeah it's obvious now;) It's funny, because I've played around with those kind of filters in GIMP lately.
Tks!
...so I picked up Stonemason's Willow Creek and did a convertion. Only height maps are normal maps, so got some minor artifacts and a bit of noise, even with normal strength at 40%. Did not yet fiddle with smoothing angles etc. Will try to create bump/displacemaps from the diffuse maps and have a new go at it...anyway, beautiful set, and very resource friendly:)
...testing some stuff...
Testing some SS settings on the sclera.
...and some more testing...
Edited...fixed some details...
@wowie
...just a random thought...it would be pretty cool to be able to apply blur to specular maps inside aweSurface...
Technically doable, but what would be the reason? It will essentially blur out the details you expect to see in those maps, which in general you want to retain as much as possible.If you blur out the details, then your only way of 'adding' details would be via bump/normal/displacement maps.
Base with just bump
Base specular, base specular with specular to roughness multiplier set to 100%, and then with bump enabled.
I've actually have integrated a debug dial to control how much bump is used for specular/reflection lobes. Mainly because I didn't like having to directly adjust bump per surface zone. I've also rebuilt the specular to roughness translation, adding slight variations to the roughness to break up the highlights.
Now if you uniformly 'blur' the specular strength map, you'll end up having it look like the base roughness render. Here's what it looks like with a blur amount of 0.2 to the specular texture.
Tks wowie! Still trying to understand when and if specular maps are useful:) Looks like I have to test the specular to roughness multiplyer next, as a matter of fact never used it thus far
. I see the result in your render, but how does it actually work? It blends the values from the specular map with the values of the roughness map? If I use it, does the "normalize specular maps" then impact specular roughness also? Now my brain hurts:))
Testing my custom maps on this fellow, ships with diffuse- and bump maps, so made specular- roughness- and displacement maps from them. One area light (sun) and a jpg for indirect light/reflections.
Spec to rough multiplier at 20%.
Spec to rough at 100%, the difference is small but it seems to make the details pop a bit more...
You'll get different results because I've completely changed the way it works on my dev build. And yes, normalize specular map will also affect the result. The same is true for specular map strength as well. I've also tweaked that feature a bit on the dev build. Again, to retain most of the details.
Best way to notice the difference is to do a specular only render. I've actually found using both normalize specular map and specular map strength useful when dealing some texture sets with specular strength differences near the texture/uv seams.
All spec features disabled.
With normalize spec map
With specular strength adjusted for the legs.
Finally, with specular to roughness enabled.
If you disable normalize specular map, you'll get roughly the same output as the first render but without the difference near the seams.
Technically, you can do these adjustments in an image editor but I find it easier and quicker to use these features instead. Normalize Specular Map 'fixes' way too dim specular maps and Specular Map to Roughness 'transfers' details baked into the map (as strength) into a more PBR friendly data (roughness/glossiness).
Going slightly technical, Normalize Specular Map remaps the original texture values to what it would be if pure white (1.0) is set to the surface reflectivity, which is determined by the index of refraction you set.
If you IOR is 1.3 then reflectivity would be
(1.3 - 1)^2 / (1.3 + 1)^2 = 0.01701323251417769376181474480151.
Values above that value would be treated as 1 and below that would be smoothly remapped from 0 to 1.
Impressive stuff, wowie!! So...any hints? About the release date, I mean?
Still tweaking some stuff. Currently, Specular Map to Roughness is slightly too aggresive (if you use very high roughness ie more than 50%). Plus I'm also tinkering with a new scheme for opacity optimization. Like the old builds, it will remap values between 0 and 1 to either 0 or 1 depending on your opacity filter settings. But this time, the way it works should be easier to understand and work with.
Opacity Filter 1 will determine the threshold point. The default value will be 0.5, literally the midpoint between 0 and 1. Opacity Filter 2 will be the cutoff point and set between the midpoint and end points. For example, a value of 0 means 0 for low values and 1 for high values (essentially the same as no filter). A value of 0.5 would be halfway between 0 and the midpoint. In this case, 0.25 and 0.75 respectively. But if you use 0.75 for Opacity Filter 1, you'll get 0.375 and 0.875 instead. So Opacity Filter 2 will determine how coarse the filter will be.
Roughly similar to what you get with this graph where Opacity Filter 2 blends between linear and 'stronger' smoothstep.
Opacity Filter 1 will skew/shift your filter. In that graph, basically you can shift the value to be above or below 0.5.
Since it can get very coarse, the default Opacity Optimization will be set to 0% (or disabled) and both Opacity Filter 1 and 2 will bet set to 0.5 and 0. There are still other optimizations at play for opacity, but they are not affected by this. The opacity optimizations are there if you want to squeeze out as much rendering performance as possible, but you will have to manually tinker with the values to best suited to your needs.
Obviously, the coarser the filter, the faster it will render. But this scheme should allow you to keep some gradient to just what you need it to be. There might still be extra opportunities to make it smarter like taking into account distance from the camera and neighbouring texture values in the opacity map. But I haven't worked them out yet.
My goal is to have release AWE Surface with AWE Hair, soon.
Excellent !!!
Awww tks:)
Ok I can't seem to get those dramatic changes with my current build, I see what you mean. Increasing spec to rough multiplyer has an impact on the result, nevertheless, but not sure what it actually does:)
This is the original render with zero spec to rough multiply:
And here I set it to 100% and doubled the bump min/max on the skin...the brightness/contrast is slightly different due to some minor postwork, but there is a difference in the appearence of the specular highlights. Better or worse? Wowie, do you have any tips about when to use that function (with the 1.3 build)?
Sweet
Ran into some reflection issues with this render. The road prop uses an opacity mask to jag the edges a bit. Took me a while to figure out, but removing the map solved the problem, and it wasn't really needed here anyway. Still an interesting phenomenon. Check out the reflections on the door! I used the GGX BRDF, but the same thing happens, albeit slightly different, with the default BRDF.
After removing the transmap (and fixing some other stuff):
First time I see something like this:) The background is a simple jpeg, lighting is 3 emissive planes.
Excellent !!!
@wowie
With the 1.3 build there are still issues when using opacity maps with the PT area light shader (to be clear, when using a map in the area light shader opacity slot and with opacity enabled). The maps work with diffuse rays but not with reflections. They work perfectly fine with the environmental shader, though. Any chance of getting a fix for that, as it sure would make life a bit easier?
That's not an issue with AWE Surface, but rather AWE Area PT. And actually, it's already fixed awhile back.
With a checkered opacity map.
With a different map.
One of those stock stuff, hence the watermark showing up.
That's great! Tks a lot:)
So I got this idea from the IRay photo realism thread about building a ring light rig within an actual enclosed space, just a simple cube, to maybe catch some more bounce light. Also testing to raise bump levels and decreasing specular for the skin, and using the specular to roughness with about 80% strength. Granted, the torus (with pretty much the minimum polygon number possible) produces an interesting shadow fall off, and also very long render times, as expected. I first used two cubes as rim/fill lights, but replaced them with wowie's emitters (front&back enabled) to speed up things a bit. Still struggling a bit with GB hair (brows) with the aweHair shader, they tend to look a bit blown out no matter specular levels...more testing needed. Sure I can make them look dark, but then they just look kind of painted on.
Well my first humble attempt looks like this, no postwork except removing some fireflies and a bit of gamma correction. Suggestions about the setup and everything else are welcome, as always
I can already see an unlit area under the left armpit that doesn't look too nice, so have to move around stuff abit for the next render.
Converted to jpeg due to size:(
The setup used. The small emitter is on her left side and the larger one serves as a rim.
50% scale png: