IRAY textures/shaders in Other Render Engines
Fauvist
Posts: 2,219
in The Commons
Do IRAY textures/shaders work the same in IRAY as they do in other "reality" based render engines? Do these other reality based render engines - like Octane and Reality etc. render DAZ scenes?
Thanks!
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The maps should be fairly consistent across PBR engines, shaders less so though MDL is meant to be a standard.
NO THEY DO NOT. The main issue is that while the iray uber shader can generate pbr materials, that are compatible with most pbr engines, unfortunately it can also generate non-pbr or "specular" materials, that will not transfer to pbr engines. One example of this is specular colors that are not physically possible, yet allowed by iray. Also materials with a high specularity and a high roughness, again not phisically possible, yet allowed by iray.
On the other hand, if you use iray in a "pbr compliant" way, then your materials will transfer fine if they are texture-driven. Unfortunately this is not the case with most daz content in the shop.
How would these be transferred? I mean what file format would be used to transfer a scene to Luxcore keeping the shaders intact? Obj doesn't seem to store any info other than opacity, specularity, emissiveness (there may be a few more, but those are the only ones I can think of right now.) I'd like to be able to go from Daz to (Reality/Luxus)Luxcore without having to tweak every material by hand.
I was wondering exactly the same thing. iClone now has iray as a render engine option and I would love to be able to transfer shaders from one to the other, but have no idea how to go about it.
For blender there's gltf support that serves the purpose to transfer scenes and characters together with pbr materials. This is also supported by maya, substance painter, unreal engine and unity.
As for daz studio you can export to blender with the diffeomorphic plugin that's quite good converting materials.
I've been doing a lot of converting Daz assets over to Lightwave. From Daz, no matter which export route you take but I generally try to go with FBX, only the base texture and maybe a bump get transfered. Once I get the file structure in place for the Lightwave files, I manully copy over the rest of the Daz files to the new maps folder. From there, it's a mostly a manual process to convert the Standard surface to what is areferred to as a Principled BSDF. I use a tool from Origami Digital's OD Tools that's a PBR importer. Properly named files (and not all are) will have a basic name such as TableWood, but then for each will have a _xxxx.png structure so there's a _Diff. _Norm, _Spec, _Rough, etc. The tool then simply connects the nodes but then you still have to set the correct UV mapping, either Object or a UVmap if the object has one.
Before I do any of that though, all the Daz lighting gets replaced although I keep their place holders for reference. In order to evaluate PBR surfaces that have any meaning, you HAVE to have the lighting in place first. For interior, I'll just set up an area "Work Light" near the cieling, but for exteriors I'll find an appropriate HDR.
Here's a sample of a recent effort with "Streets of Morroco":
Thanks for that summary
I used lightwave before passing to blender. It was a great platform and I loved it. But time goes on and lightwave was somewhat stuck in the past. Then the new version of lightwave is much better but has nothing that blender has not already. So no reason to turn back. And there's blender being free of course.
As I said above, for blender there's the diffeomorphic plugin that converts materials quite fine and you rarely have to fix anything. So all the manual work is mostly not needed.
I guess that's the kick in the pants I need to finally get me to learn Blender. I'd like to be able to export to Blender and render in Cycles, that way I wouldn't be limited to Nvidia cards.
I tried Luxcorerender a couple of days ago. It will read the .lxs files outputted by Reality/Luxus, but with some errors, the camera settings were different, for one. I'm guessing that since Luxcore was written from the ground up with the main purpose of avoiding some of the Luxrender baggage that had become such a burden, backwards compatibility was not a priority.
That brings me to another question: Does Luxcore use shaders? I've been Googling Luxcore/Luxrender/OpenCL shaders for the past day or so and I don't really get anything. I know it's a question of semantics what a shader is or isn't, but I'm talking about the code that tells a machine how to render a mirrored surface as opposed to asphalt or something else. It kind of irks me that I can set up a scene in DS/Reality, lets say, Solaris Cabin and tweak the materials for Lux. But if I close that scene and open Solaris Corridor, I have to go through all of that again even though it has a lot of the same material settings. I wish there was some kind of preset I could save in Daz Studio that converts to Reality/Lux without manual tweaking. Luxus has DS presets, but I have other issues with Luxus.
There's quite a bit of Blender activity on Newtek's forum and some impressive things being done with it. I just didn't feel like trying to learn yet another 3D app. The Devil ya know I guess. Until recently though, I simply didn't have the hardware & horsepower to work with Iray in Daz. Now I'm able to have both running with full display which goes a long way to compare surfaces.
Blender is a handful. I'm doing all I can to learn Hex and DS. I'd just like to find another rendering alternative if possible. Nice render, by the way.
Just to show something .. Below are two renderings of the same scene. The first is iray and the second is cycles with the diffeomorphic plugin. I did not touch anything. Just exported and rendered. You can see that materials, even skins, match quite fine. There's some difference in the foliage though that appears brighter in cycles. Also cycles is much faster and takes less vram being tile based, that means you can render larger scenes with the same card.
EDIT. I forgot to tell .. the only thing I did in daz studio is to resize the textures to save vram since I really don't need 4Ks. And also because imho it's the only way to survive the iray hunger for vram. I also converted materials to uber shader to be more iray friendly. That's quick enough to do with xnView and the daz studio surfaces pane.
EDIT. For the sake of completeness it is to be said that I used the stable release versions of both daz studio and blender in my comparison. This is mostly because I don't like wasting my time with betas and driver issues. If you use the daz studio 4.11 beta it implements a nvidia denoiser so the rendering times get comparable with cycles. It is also true that if you use the blender 2.8 beta it implements eevee so you get real-time pbr and your rendering times fly away. Apart rendering times though, blender has much better animation tools and physics simulation and fx, so for animation and general use I like it most.
daz studio 4.10 render time 5m 09s (15% convergence) memory usage 2930M ram 2300M vram
blender 2.79 render time 0m 34s (64x samples + 8x denoiser) memory usage 2870M ram 1700M vram
Nice. I guess I'm going to give Blender a try this weekend.
So you don't need an NVIDIA card to render in Blender? And you can use iRay textures/shaders from DAZ?
I tried that plugin earlier, couln't get it to work though, not sure why. I got it installed in DS and blender as far as I can tell, mapped the libraries I could fit in the 9 slots it is limited to, but no dice. I forgot how much I hate blender lol. At least it's got the maya preset though, I don't like the backwards clicking and other odities.
Exactly .. cycles works fine both with nvidia and ati cards, and diffeomorphic does a great job converting materials for you.
It was straightforward to me .. I just followed the instructions on the site and everything worked fine out of the box. If you need any assistance I'll be glad to help for what I can do. I only use manual install though .. if you use daz connect I guess you may have issues with encrypted assets. I also strongly advice to use the development version of the plugin since it's generally better and more featured.
http://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/p/daz-importer-version-13.html
I totally agree with you .. indeed while you were writing your post I was adding a note to mine about this issue. My purpose was to compare two final renders. Since 4.10 doesn't have a denoiser my best choice was convergence. As I said in my note above if you get betas then eevee flies away compared to a denoiser, though with some pbr limits. So overall I feel the gap between daz studio and blender rendering times will still there nonetheless.
This is just to tell that the foliage issue in the pergola scene above is fixed. This was due to iray using the same color texture for the diffuse and bump channels, so the plugin was confused as to using color or non-color data. The latest development version is smarter and can manage those cases fine.
http://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/p/daz-importer-version-13.html