Show us your Blender Renders

mal3Imagery

Made tweaks to the wearable for issue 1 and 2 and adjusted the belt now :)  Thanks for the feed back :D

Cinus

Singular3D said:

Cinus said:

And now for some more Iray and cycles renders of "early 20's,ideal BMI white Girl,portraits" in a completely empty universe. Yes, I used several third party plug-ins (and my own) during the creation of the character and it took "alot of labor" tweaking nodes. etc. 

The character has P3D Libby's skin. Just for fun I tried to get the skin to look similar to what it looks like in Iray. I'm a big fan of Iray but I like the cycles render more in this case. To be fair, I spent no time on the Iray settings so the Iray render can certainly be improved.

The Iray render took 16 minutes 23 seconds. The cycles render took just over 5 minutes. If I decrease the roughness of the skin a bit (and thus the reflections that the render engine has to deal with), the cycles render time is just over 3 minutes.

The character was significantly changed after I imported it into blender.

I really like the hair in the Cycles render. The eyes do look better in Iray and the skin looks different but ok in both render engines. Good job!

@Singular3D Thanks! Completely agree about the eyes. The irises look OK to me, but I have not figured out how to get the sclera to look right yet.

Cinus

marble said:

Cinus said:

And now for some more Iray and cycles renders of "early 20's,ideal BMI white Girl,portraits" in a completely empty universe. Yes, I used several third party plug-ins (and my own) during the creation of the character and it took "alot of labor" tweaking nodes. etc. 

The character has P3D Libby's skin. Just for fun I tried to get the skin to look similar to what it looks like in Iray. I'm a big fan of Iray but I like the cycles render more in this case. To be fair, I spent no time on the Iray settings so the Iray render can certainly be improved.

The Iray render took 16 minutes 23 seconds. The cycles render took just over 5 minutes. If I decrease the roughness of the skin a bit (and thus the reflections that the render engine has to deal with), the cycles render time is just over 3 minutes.

The character was significantly changed after I imported it into blender.

 

Sorry but I see problems with both. Skin looks like plastic in both. Eyes are much better in the IRay render. Hair looks unrealistic in both - not sure which is worse. Brows better in cycles but still not convincing. Really sorry to be critical but I'm assuming that's why people are posting renders in this thread?

You assume incorrectly @Marble. Don't know about others, but I just post to show my renders. You are also assuming that I was going for photo realism, which I was not. Criticism is welcome though :)  

I agree about the skin, it looks somewhat waxy. The goal was to see if I could get my skin materials to look similar to the way they look in Iray (for this particular skin). Making the skin a tad less shiny does help to make it look more realistic. 

I disagree about the hair. The hair styling can certainly be improved, I still have a lot to learn about hair grooming in blender, but the hair itself looks realistic to me except for the area around her left temple. That area can definitely be improved, but even with that issue it still looks a great deal more realistic than the Iray render.

I agree about the brows. They need to be thicker. I started with too few hairs, but I was too lazy to redo them.

Cinus

rkrusty said:

Cinus said:

And now for some more Iray and cycles renders of "early 20's,ideal BMI white Girl,portraits" in a completely empty universe. Yes, I used several third party plug-ins (and my own) during the creation of the character and it took "alot of labor" tweaking nodes. etc. 

The character has P3D Libby's skin. Just for fun I tried to get the skin to look similar to what it looks like in Iray. I'm a big fan of Iray but I like the cycles render more in this case. To be fair, I spent no time on the Iray settings so the Iray render can certainly be improved.

The Iray render took 16 minutes 23 seconds. The cycles render took just over 5 minutes. If I decrease the roughness of the skin a bit (and thus the reflections that the render engine has to deal with), the cycles render time is just over 3 minutes.

The character was significantly changed after I imported it into blender.

What did you use to import into Blender, and how did you then do the hair?

@rkrusty I imported the character with the original (Mitchy) version of the DazToBlender8 plugin. I completely changed the material nodes though. The hair was created in Blender using particle hair. The brows are also particle hair.  

j cade

Cinus said:

Singular3D said:

Cinus said:

And now for some more Iray and cycles renders of "early 20's,ideal BMI white Girl,portraits" in a completely empty universe. Yes, I used several third party plug-ins (and my own) during the creation of the character and it took "alot of labor" tweaking nodes. etc. 

The character has P3D Libby's skin. Just for fun I tried to get the skin to look similar to what it looks like in Iray. I'm a big fan of Iray but I like the cycles render more in this case. To be fair, I spent no time on the Iray settings so the Iray render can certainly be improved.

The Iray render took 16 minutes 23 seconds. The cycles render took just over 5 minutes. If I decrease the roughness of the skin a bit (and thus the reflections that the render engine has to deal with), the cycles render time is just over 3 minutes.

The character was significantly changed after I imported it into blender.

I really like the hair in the Cycles render. The eyes do look better in Iray and the skin looks different but ok in both render engines. Good job!

@Singular3D Thanks! Completely agree about the eyes. The irises look OK to me, but I have not figured out how to get the sclera to look right yet.

 

My general rules: Treat contiguous meshes as a unit > so in G8 cornea and eye surface should hare identical materials as should the iris and sclera (This one isn't limited to Iray).

 

For the Cornea and eye surface use a glass node. mix a glas node with its ior to 1.377 with a transparent node. Blend them via a mix node with the factor a light path node > is shadow  This will make the eye have proper refraction without casting shadows. also provifed the bump or normal map your using on the sclera doesn;t have a weird seam where the cornea transitions to the cornea (a lot of textures do and it annoys me greatly) plug it in to the glass node at low strength

for the iris and sclera I like loottts of sss for the sclera. make it so theres less sss on the iris with a map (most characters will have a black and white map that you can use for this)

 

It has some major advantages over iray as you can get proper refraction without weird shadowing. However I will say in irays favor it does caustic effects much better which can help make the eyes look less flat

and the actual nodes for the cornea.eye surface as describing nodes is hard to do

Cinus

j cade said:

Cinus said:

Singular3D said:

Cinus said:

And now for some more Iray and cycles renders of "early 20's,ideal BMI white Girl,portraits" in a completely empty universe. Yes, I used several third party plug-ins (and my own) during the creation of the character and it took "alot of labor" tweaking nodes. etc. 

The character has P3D Libby's skin. Just for fun I tried to get the skin to look similar to what it looks like in Iray. I'm a big fan of Iray but I like the cycles render more in this case. To be fair, I spent no time on the Iray settings so the Iray render can certainly be improved.

The Iray render took 16 minutes 23 seconds. The cycles render took just over 5 minutes. If I decrease the roughness of the skin a bit (and thus the reflections that the render engine has to deal with), the cycles render time is just over 3 minutes.

The character was significantly changed after I imported it into blender.

I really like the hair in the Cycles render. The eyes do look better in Iray and the skin looks different but ok in both render engines. Good job!

@Singular3D Thanks! Completely agree about the eyes. The irises look OK to me, but I have not figured out how to get the sclera to look right yet.

 

My general rules: Treat contiguous meshes as a unit > so in G8 cornea and eye surface should hare identical materials as should the iris and sclera (This one isn't limited to Iray).

 

For the Cornea and eye surface use a glass node. mix a glas node with its ior to 1.377 with a transparent node. Blend them via a mix node with the factor a light path node > is shadow  This will make the eye have proper refraction without casting shadows. also provifed the bump or normal map your using on the sclera doesn;t have a weird seam where the cornea transitions to the cornea (a lot of textures do and it annoys me greatly) plug it in to the glass node at low strength

for the iris and sclera I like loottts of sss for the sclera. make it so theres less sss on the iris with a map (most characters will have a black and white map that you can use for this)

 

It has some major advantages over iray as you can get proper refraction without weird shadowing. However I will say in irays favor it does caustic effects much better which can help make the eyes look less flat

and the actual nodes for the cornea.eye surface as describing nodes is hard to do

Thanks j cade! Will definitely give that a try. May I ask which characters eye textures you were using in that render?

nicstt

mal3Imagery said:

Thanks guy!  I appreciate the honesty.  Especially since I can't make edits to clothing after it sims in Daz.  So I won't be able to get the results I would like if it were from MD and modified in Blender.

You're welcome.

My original first comment: Bloody Hell, still applies.

TheKD

Padone said:

What figure is that ?

I think that one started using dayton loaded for the base, then I dial spun in some other stuff.

For the SSS settings, it was set at whatever diffeo defaults to. It was more of a one-off render I did on spur of the moment, after I rendered a few thumbnails I was redoing for a clothes set. So I didn't save a scene file or blend or anything. I assume that diffeo reads what the DS SSS settings are at, so it would probably be better if I remembered which random skin I slapped onto the mannequin before rendering it lol.

brainmuffin

This is quite a rough experiment using a green screen clip off of YouTube (link in the description) and I didn't key her movements to the camera (yet, that's next to learn). Urban Future 3 using Dreamlight's Iray add-on in macOS to Blender on Linux via Diffeomorphic. Cycles Render.

 

nicstt

That looks decent Brainmuffin; lighting doesn't quite match the figure or background - depending which you need.

mal3Imagery

One for the thread :)

brainmuffin

nicstt said:

That looks decent Brainmuffin; lighting doesn't quite match the figure or background - depending which you need.

Yeah, I'm not sure why she looks so washed out. I'll work with it  some more. Took me 3 days to not have Cycles render it as a pink rectangle.

I'm also not sure why she looks so close to the railing. The plane with the clip is set back under the overhang.

TheMysteryIsThePoint

brainmuffin said:

nicstt said:

That looks decent Brainmuffin; lighting doesn't quite match the figure or background - depending which you need.

Yeah, I'm not sure why she looks so washed out. I'll work with it  some more. Took me 3 days to not have Cycles render it as a pink rectangle.

I'm also not sure why she looks so close to the railing. The plane with the clip is set back under the overhang.

@brainmuffin Please keep us (well, me at least) up to date on your progress! I'd be interested to know what is causing the image to wash out as well.

Edit: Or, I could just subscribe to your channel, or to what I assume is your channel...

TheMysteryIsThePoint

j cade said:

Cinus said:

Singular3D said:

Cinus said:

And now for some more Iray and cycles renders of "early 20's,ideal BMI white Girl,portraits" in a completely empty universe. Yes, I used several third party plug-ins (and my own) during the creation of the character and it took "alot of labor" tweaking nodes. etc. 

The character has P3D Libby's skin. Just for fun I tried to get the skin to look similar to what it looks like in Iray. I'm a big fan of Iray but I like the cycles render more in this case. To be fair, I spent no time on the Iray settings so the Iray render can certainly be improved.

The Iray render took 16 minutes 23 seconds. The cycles render took just over 5 minutes. If I decrease the roughness of the skin a bit (and thus the reflections that the render engine has to deal with), the cycles render time is just over 3 minutes.

The character was significantly changed after I imported it into blender.

I really like the hair in the Cycles render. The eyes do look better in Iray and the skin looks different but ok in both render engines. Good job!

@Singular3D Thanks! Completely agree about the eyes. The irises look OK to me, but I have not figured out how to get the sclera to look right yet.

 

My general rules: Treat contiguous meshes as a unit > so in G8 cornea and eye surface should hare identical materials as should the iris and sclera (This one isn't limited to Iray).

 

For the Cornea and eye surface use a glass node. mix a glas node with its ior to 1.377 with a transparent node. Blend them via a mix node with the factor a light path node > is shadow  This will make the eye have proper refraction without casting shadows. also provifed the bump or normal map your using on the sclera doesn;t have a weird seam where the cornea transitions to the cornea (a lot of textures do and it annoys me greatly) plug it in to the glass node at low strength

for the iris and sclera I like loottts of sss for the sclera. make it so theres less sss on the iris with a map (most characters will have a black and white map that you can use for this)

 

It has some major advantages over iray as you can get proper refraction without weird shadowing. However I will say in irays favor it does caustic effects much better which can help make the eyes look less flat

and the actual nodes for the cornea.eye surface as describing nodes is hard to do

@j cade

I had no idea there was a light paths node :) Thanks for that.

brainmuffin

TheMysteryIsThePoint said:

brainmuffin said:

nicstt said:

That looks decent Brainmuffin; lighting doesn't quite match the figure or background - depending which you need.

Yeah, I'm not sure why she looks so washed out. I'll work with it  some more. Took me 3 days to not have Cycles render it as a pink rectangle.

I'm also not sure why she looks so close to the railing. The plane with the clip is set back under the overhang.

@brainmuffin Please keep us (well, me at least) up to date on your progress! I'd be interested to know what is causing the image to wash out as well.

Edit: Or, I could just subscribe to your channel, or to what I assume is your channel...

Yep, that's my channel. It is a mix of a bunch of things.

brainmuffin

Another test and learning render, this time with a different green screen clip and an added drone (https://www.daz3d.com/recon-drone). I do see a few issues. The Drone is clipping through the causeway and the green screen subject still isn't casting a shadow. The Urban Future 3 set is using an IBL, so I may have to add a spot off camera, not sure. Will do some more research. I have ordered more memory for this old Linux rig and that should let me start rendering with a bit more detail. I'm really pushing the 4 GB of the current spec.

 

nicstt

You'll likely need to add a shadow plane.

Add a normal plane, scale it appropriate; apply the scale if you do it in object mode Ctrl A.

Making sure the plane is selected, navigate to the Object Properties, and under Visibility, check Shadow Catcher.

Although, as this is an environment and not an HDRI, maybe it's something else.

brainmuffin

nicstt said:

You'll likely need to add a shadow plane.

Add a normal plane, scale it appropriate; apply the scale if you do it in object mode Ctrl A.

Making sure the plane is selected, navigate to the Object Properties, and under Visibility, check Shadow Catcher.

Although, as this is an environment and not an HDRI, maybe it's something else.

Thanks, I'll look into that.

I'm also trying to figure out why the green screen insert looks so washed out. I exported it as a series of TIFs, but they look darker.

 

nicstt

btw, is it eevee or cycles?

nicstt

This is Emma & Jordi Makenna; discovered the character whilst trying to find an image I dropped into a folder. :) I actually found four charactes like that, don't you just hate that!

Just threw her into Blender for some testing; has some tattoos I'm going to treat as overlays - see how it works out with my materials; it should work ok.

Was converting some items to tried those too.

TheMysteryIsThePoint

brainmuffin said:

Another test and learning render, this time with a different green screen clip and an added drone (https://www.daz3d.com/recon-drone). I do see a few issues. The Drone is clipping through the causeway and the green screen subject still isn't casting a shadow. The Urban Future 3 set is using an IBL, so I may have to add a spot off camera, not sure. Will do some more research. I have ordered more memory for this old Linux rig and that should let me start rendering with a bit more detail. I'm really pushing the 4 GB of the current spec.

 

@brainmuffin

Thanks for posting your milestones. This is really interesting what you are doing and one of the more innovative things that really shows that getting your content rendering well in Blender is the beginning of the journey, and not the end.

brainmuffin

TheMysteryIsThePoint said:

brainmuffin said:

Another test and learning render, this time with a different green screen clip and an added drone (https://www.daz3d.com/recon-drone). I do see a few issues. The Drone is clipping through the causeway and the green screen subject still isn't casting a shadow. The Urban Future 3 set is using an IBL, so I may have to add a spot off camera, not sure. Will do some more research. I have ordered more memory for this old Linux rig and that should let me start rendering with a bit more detail. I'm really pushing the 4 GB of the current spec.

 

@brainmuffin

Thanks for posting your milestones. This is really interesting what you are doing and one of the more innovative things that really shows that getting your content rendering well in Blender is the beginning of the journey, and not the end.

Thanks. I was wondering if I have clipped the black range on the green screen, but the TIFs still seem darker. I haven't quite figure out that yet. I'm also looking into Cycles and the settings that help.

mike_from_nz

Rendered using Cycles. Was really happy with the orc, but for the life of me could not get the female's hair looking right :(

SadRobot

mike_a5f82f8385 said:

Rendered using Cycles. Was really happy with the orc, but for the life of me could not get the female's hair looking right :(

 

You need to raise transparency bounces. Try something like 48 or maybe higher.

Krys Kryngle

mike_a5f82f8385 said:

Rendered using Cycles. Was really happy with the orc, but for the life of me could not get the female's hair looking right :(

 

Can you post a screenshot of the node setup for the hair material? 

mike_from_nz

SadRobot said:

mike_a5f82f8385 said:

 

You need to raise transparency bounces. Try something like 48 or maybe higher.

Aha, I will look at that today.

mike_from_nz

Krampus said:

mike_a5f82f8385 said:

 

 

Can you post a screenshot of the node setup for the hair material? 

I will try and pop on today :)

Mendoman

@mal3Imagenery Just wow! Your renders look really great, both characters and clothes. Well done. Can't wait until your clothes are available in the Daz store 

brainmuffin

A little closer, but now she looks like she's floating about the ground a bit. I rekeyed the video in Final Cut and added a shader to the image plane. The shader is really the better change. I also increased the number of samples Cycles was making.

 

TheKD

that's a really cool composite there