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Here's a render I just finished in Cycles. I don't think it looks too "cartoony"? But maybe i'm just biased. I think the denoising was a little strong on her hair, but otherwise, it turned out ok. 800 samples on the GPU. RTX 2080 card. 3 minutes at HD res. This is the raw render, nothing at all in post.
And here's the viewport screencap of the same shot.
The gorilla-like hair you see in the viewport shot is the peachfuzz you see in the render. I could improve on that, but I was pleased with how it looked. I think I'll try a render at about 1000 samples next to see if the denoiser smears the hair too much or if it helps with the detail.
Click the attachment thumbnail for the full size closeup.
@gregsgraphics_cafd0962a0 Wow, that's very nice.
I think all your renders look awesome
Blender rules
just a shame I find it so hard to use
Thanks. Well, I went ahead and moved the camera to get another shot, and this time increased the samples to 1000 to try and get better results on the hair, but I'm still not happy with it. I've come to the conclusion that trans-mapped hair sucks for realistic characters. This hair looks "ok" but it takes too long to render (this time the render was about 5 minutes) and there was a lot of noise because i have a touch of SSS translucency going on there. Cycles just didn't like that with alpha maps. So I'm going to have to learn how to style the particle hair so that I can make Cycles happy again.
You can click the thumbnail attachment to get a much larger render to scrutinize. I think the skin looks fine, but there's problems with shading around the eyes and the hair is just gotta go.
Again, this is a RAW render. No touch-ups or post at all, except to turn the PNG original into a JPG.
Just for fun, I decided to switch from Cycles to Eevee and see how the render looks there. I turned on all Eevee bells and whistles. This is the same camera shot from my FIRST post. There's clearly less detail, but it's actually not horribly different. Cycles is clearly more realistic, but considering this same exact render only took 11 seconds in Eevee, compared to 3 minutes in Cycles, it's definitely not bad. I'd actually be able to render out a full animation of her using Eevee and it wouldn't take all day! The only difference really is the SSS is better in Cycles and the shadows are much more accurate. Oh, and I couldn't render the peachfuzz in Eevee either. It just didn't look right, so I had to disable that for this one.
Ok, last one for tonight. This is Eevee again. This time, I added an AO node to the teeth to get back some of the lost shadows from the Cycles render. I think this one looks very acceptable for Eevee. Again, only took 11 seconds to render out at HD resolution. Honestly, this feels like really good quality for 11 seconds. Compare it to the Cycles renders in my first two posts above, which took 10 times as long. It's a close call, and I really didn't have to change much to make it that way.
I've never been able to get EEVEE to look this good.
Have you tried the hair converter that Cinus wrote? Or the one in the Diffeo exporter?
@greg That looks amazing for eevee, the transmapped hair is not so bad even. Me too will be curious to see what you can get with hair conversion, let me know if you need any help with diffeo I could give some advice.
that looks amazing for both cycles and eevee, nice job!
Looks amazing... though is this model and texturing created using a photogrammetry approach? i.e., not optimized for posing or animating? Just curious...
Thx
You know the art is good when you want to console her and say "Look, whatever it is, I'm sure it's not as bad as it seems... eveything will work out fine, just wait and see."
Thanks, guys (and gals). @jeff_someone I don't believe it's done with Photogrammetry. It seems to be a standard subd model. No rigging though. It certainly has the potential to be rigged, and I might try doing that in Blender. I have other Blender characters that I found around the interwebs that are rigged, and I'll post some renders of those too. Realism is all in the lighting and materials to be quite honest. Detailed geometry helps. Here's a wireframe view of this character.
Definitely my favorite here. Really well done. Skin and eyes turned out particularly well.
Here are some ideas on transmapped hair. My opinion - the quality of the transparency maps and how they are applied have a huge effect.
When dealing with transparency maps, black is fully transparent, white is fully opaque, shades of gray in between represent the gradient from transparent to opaque. In blender, enable the 'node wrangler' add-on, then select a node, hold shift+ctrl and left click (viewport in rendered mode).
For this experiment I used the basic Toulouse hair, nothing fancy. The transmapped included with it was not great, so I added a transmap from OOT's IrayPair. The original transmap made the ends of the ribbons transparent (G8_test04), while OOT's gave some transparency along the length of the hair ribbon (G8_test05), then just multiply them together and fine tune some more (G8_test06). Adding color ramps help control the effect of each map.
Anyone else have a node setup they like or any suggestions on how to improve?
Thanks. I like your results there. I think my main gripe with transmapped hair is just that it often introduces tons of noise to the render, especially if you want some translucency in the layers as I had in that other render. The denoiser really smears the results, because it's still very noisy compared to the rest of the image. Let's take particle strand hair in Blender and compare the results.
Below is a different character. Nothing fancy here. However, instead of using transmapped hair, I went with actual particle strand hair, with a hair BSDF node. I didn't give it a lot of sheen or anisotropy, because I wanted more of a natural, dry hair look going on. Anyway, don't mind the fact that I do NOT know how to style hair very well yet. Just notice that there's almost no smearing from the denoiser here, and the samples were much lower than the previous model with transmapped hair that I posted yesterday. I also gave this model particle hair eyebrows and peachfuzz. There's about 20,000 total hair strands between the different zones. I really prefer this look to that of transmapped hair in most cases where we're trying to get the most realism. It's just a matter of trying to style it, especially long hair can get tricky. Blender doesn't have much more than a combing feature by default.
I think with some tweaking, this character can look very realistic. The skin is "almost" there, and the peachfuzz adds something extra. The eyes definitely need more work, but the render was decently fast here compared to the transmapped hair. I was able to use only 250 samples here, and with some settings tweaks, this rendered out in just over 2 minutes with denoising node. About the same as the previous character, except I think the hair looks more realistic, and certainly less noisy.
You can click on the thumbnail attachment to get a closer look. Edit to say: I forgot to mention that even her eyelashes here were particle hairs, just with a different shader.
Yup, I prefer particles to transmapped hair too. I think that is one of the advantages Blender has over DAZ. The facial hair in the last render turned out much better since it is much less noticeable but still there, more like real life. The head hair looks good, great place to start building a character.
Installed my new graphics card and been doing some tests. I can get the results I like quicker in Blender, but it's hard to say which is a faster renderer. Blender image 22 seconds and the Studio image about a minute; it took 1m 18s to reach convergence, but it was about right at approximately the minute stage. The renders look different, and getting them to match up would be a waste of time imo; with my new card, I'll be at least enjoy rendering in studio where the results are fine for my needs.
Diffeo does a nice job of converting particle hair now; had to tweak some though.
I didn't pose in Blender, just exported as is; I changed the materials to my own, instead of using the default ones.
The character, for those interested, is P3D Harper textures (customised) with some Ava and Tika morphs and some tweakage.
One of the majoy things for me is tweaking the little things: thickness on cloth when it needs it; adjust props, such as bracelts (especially when a solid object with no bones as the case here. Then there is adding body to hair, or tweaking how it rests on the figure.
Looks like the big difference between the two renders in your example is the light bounces and also the materials. Also, your iRay render took longer, but it has a smoother result because of that extra time.. Did you use the denoising node on the Cycles results? If you tweak the hair shader, it's possible to get it much more like the iRay result, but you definitely should increase bounces in Cycles if you want to duplicate iRay. Cycles is a path tracing engine, but unlike iray, the light bounces can be limited not only by time but also by material.
I think, by default, Cycles limits the number of light bounces per material to around 16. This is not the same as overall samples. In order for Cycles to emulate the light transfer that iray does, you need to really crank up the bounces. In most cases, it's not necessary to go over 16 bounces, but to be physically correct, 128 is around the sweet spot.
Edit: I'm sorry, I just opened a clean copy of Blender 2.91. It seems the default light bounces are set to 12 overall. And much lower for some things like volume and transparency. This is fine for 95% of the scenes you will render, and it will provide excellent results. However, if you want to ensure physical accuracy then setting the bounces to 128 across the board is more physically accurate and guarantees the best possible light transfer. The problem is, it could double or triple render time.
Remember, increasing samples only affects aliasing, not light bounces.
Thanks for the response
i mean, there is a Daz version of angela sarafyan on renderosity - "Clemency for Genesis 8 Females"
not sure if you can get it to the same quality, but ultimately could be an easier base to start from.
Are you sure you uploaded the right file? I'm not sure I understand the point of comparing the render time of the 2 images:
- Greg
I have messed with light paths previously and also have done since your post and am not seeing any difference, so im missing something; guess it's time to trying google.
I was curious about the render times, which took up the first couple of senteces, with the rest generally being about other stuff; not sure what the point of your post was really, considering it ignored most of what i wrote.
The thread is obviously about renders; and one of them is a Blender render, so it is certainly on topic.
Most of the time, I'm not interested in making it look like an iray render, or a cycles render; I just want a render I am happy with. I'm actually unhappy with both of these for different reasons - with the only similarity being the hair - i don't like it in either. I prefer the eyes in the Iray, and the skin in the Cycles
Wasn't suggesting that it was off topic at all - just seemed that the Blender version didn't even render the hair, so any comparison in render times seemed strange. I thought that was the main point of your post since you took the time to attach 2 renders making the comparison and commented on the render time - my bad.
- Greg
If you can, take a screencap of your Cycles settings. Especially the light paths and sampling areas. Also, I'd be interested to see what your material for that hair looks like in Cycles.
It's a shame we can't share .blend files when they have DS characters in them. I'd like to take a crack at improving that scene for you. That could help in pinpointing why it's not turning out more like the Iray render.
Here's a quick render of Padme I just did tonight. This was a free .blend file, but I changed up the lighting and some of the materials. The original lighting was good, but I like to have an environment to reflect, so HDR is part of almost every render I'll do. Anyway, this one took a little longer I assume due to the hair. There's a combination of particle and transmapped hair going on. Cycles GPU. I tried it with Eevee, but Eevee does not render particle hair very well yet. It can render it, but it will not use the shaping feature that Cycles has, which is extremely important if you want realistic hair.
As usual, you can see all the details if you click on the thumbnail below.
Skin and eyes turned out really well. What's your secret for skin? Are you using the principled BSDF?
Thanks. It's really no secret. I always use Principled BSDF for just about everything. The reason being, it can transfer to both Eevee and Cycles reasonably well if needed, and there isn't much about it that isn't better than the old nodes for diffuse, glossy, etc. Anyway, the secrets are just in the scale and the texture maps. Things like SSS and lights always work better when the objects in the renders are scaled to real world units and as accurately as possible. In other words, SSS might not look correct for human beings if your character's model scale is 6 mm tall or, alternatively, 30 meters tall. Especially in Cycles this is important. Other than that, making quality detailed texture maps based on PBR principles is key with Principled Shader. Good quality maps for everything, including SSS, roughness, normals, and even displacement if necessary. The small details matter. I'll always try to incorporate some peachfuzz using particle hair, just because it helps catch the light and add more details in closeups without adding too much to render time. For stills, I really don't care about render time, but I'm trying to learn animation now so it's becoming more important. That's why Eevee is so interesting to me now.
First time trying blender and the hair plugin here at the forums,
Another test, testing the hair particles