Show Us Your Iray Renders. Part II
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As technical information, along with examples, tests, etc were in this thread all ready and as various people from DAZ3D had also been participating and adding, correcting, explaining things in this thread as well, it seemed best to keep all the information together as much as possible. There is an information thread for newer members separate all ready so this thread is for those with more general experience to share and show what they are doing, what they have found, what they have learned (including technical details) and helping each other. It seemed to make sense to keep that information together. Sorry for any inconvenience or confusion due to the merge of the two threads.
Have you tried just using the autoconverted materials for your clothes? I'm finding that looks good enough in most cases. And then if you need to tweak settings, you can apply the Iray Uber Base (like for metallic parts, if you don't want to use any of the Iray metal shaders for them you can apply Uber Base and set Metallicity to 1 and then adjust Glossy Roughness to the amount of shininess you want)
The clothes usually work pretty good, but gems, grass and stonework sometimes don't give happy results at all. Also, it seems like the more old stuff you use, the slower the render gets. I should likely learn the various layers of the Iray surfaces, and will slowly with time, but I suspect that there are pros out there who will be better at it than I. There are sales to be made for the pros doing it right and making their work available.
So, the high tech wizardry and the fairly basic stuff stay together? In that case, I just happened to be on the campus of Pixar today, and snapped a picture of this strange looking girl...
Definitely my favorite as well.
While there may well have been elements of luck involved, there are lessons to be learned there, and standards that could be set if one wants a reputation for producing quality HDRI.
...kind of do much of the same as well. I'll try certain basic suggestions, then see what I can do with (or to) them.
For example when I created the damp misty setting in the railway station scene I started with the tutorial on how to create "god rays" then just kept messing with surfaces and sliders until I was able to get the more damp "misty" look to the fog effect.
speaking of spinning dials, if you spin the right ones and Callie doesn't look quite so toonish anymore
Most of the HDRI are done manually it is also possible , my Windows8 Lumia 1020 can take 40 megapixels photos over 7000x5000 pixel resolution
and in raw mode , so I can create as much steps as I want from one shot and merge it into super HDRI maps automatic
the only thing is that you need to be exactly on the right place and time , not later than 10am or the shadows will be ugly on the face after.
I am going to make some maps this summer so we can play with
ok I had to put a Car on the Campus just to see how it looked.
It produces the best looking shadows of any HDRI I've come across. I opened it in Photoshop to see what it looks like at different exposures, and it looks to me like the sun was sweetened in post-production, to give it a boost for better shadow making.
Here's a crop of the Campus HDRI at normal exposure and then below darkened a lot. You can see how when the exposure is brought down, the sun is a fuzzy spot like a photoshop airbrush tool would make.
...how did you get the background to look so clean? It comes out a bit blurry when I render.
Also without being able to see the dome itself, how do you know position characters/props? Seems a lot of trial and error.
I see the dome in real time as I use the Iray view and not texture shaded but only with CPU it may be to slow ...
I set the samples to 10 in the view port, and then working on Tone mapping, what is not rendered it is post processing so you can adjust everything and see what you doing then change the samples to desire level and render put big image .
if I dont have much in the scene I can rotate zoom and pan in real-time other way it update every half sec
you need to use also finite sphere and scale it down to match G2 figures, the background will be much sharper , there are high resolution and low resolution too
...how did you get the background to look so clean? It comes out a bit blurry when I render.
Also without being able to see the dome itself, how do you know position characters/props? Seems a lot of trial and error.
Looks like but that is ok as it was made in 32bits mode
It produces the best looking shadows of any HDRI I've come across. I opened it in Photoshop to see what it looks like at different exposures, and it looks to me like the sun was sweetened in post-production, to give it a boost for better shadow making.
Here's a crop of the Campus HDRI at normal exposure and then below darkened a lot. You can see how when the exposure is brought down, the sun is a fuzzy spot like a photoshop airbrush tool would make.
...ahh, discovered I was using the low resolution (4000 x 2000) file. I set the dome to finite and tried rescaling it but it doesn't seem to have any effect I can see.
Read some PBR stuff. Made some maps
Skin test using Genesis and the Base Jeremy skin. I made an error with the maps resulting in a pretty scar
Spent a lot of time tweaking the translucency color and SSS reflectance tint by adjusting RGB colors step by step
I'm not sure you can find an universal preset for each skin type
Two renders with Sunsky
One with SIBL's Hotel Gold Room
Two with Pixar Campus HDR
I scale the finite sphere to 9%
I am not a big car fanatic but I played with the bloom effect in Iray , you can actually make a mist like hase effect what give me a nkce idea for the next render for tomorrow
...how did you get the background to look so clean? It comes out a bit blurry when I render.
Also without being able to see the dome itself, how do you know position characters/props? Seems a lot of trial and error.
I did nothing fancy. I used the high res file, finite dome, dome and scene. The rest is default. No scaling. I did rotate the dome 170 degrees to put the sun over my virtual shoulder, to produce a few shadows but not many. I tend to do that a lot, so the amphitheater shows up in a lot of my Pixar renders.
Yes, trial and error. When I'm doing HDRI, one of the first things I do before really working on the character is setting the background and light angle. With everything still simple the rendering time is still fast even using CPU render.
Even using high res, though, the dome seems just a little out of focus when compared to the render. I wouldn't be shocked to see even higher resolution HDRIs in coming years. I just played a little with Photoshop's Smart Sharpen. That might or might not seem to help some depending on taste, but sharpening the already ultra sharp rendered character wasn't pretty. One might end up masking out the rendered stuff when doing anything like that. My other thought was enabling depth of field to soften the focus a bit on the character, but I haven't worked myself up to open that can of worms yet.
Ah! He cheated! I've been contemplating something similar, opening HDRI files that cast weak shadows and lightening the area around the sun. Haven't tried it yet.
This is a test render, to see how M3 items fare in Iray. This is a Genesis base, and I am using HRDI for lighting.
The clothes are CIS Operative and Dreamer wings.
It's using the default shaders, so no changes to any surface; it will certainly look better after some tweaking, though I'm positively surprised how the wings came out in this default setting.
Ah! He cheated! I've been contemplating something similar, opening HDRI files that cast weak shadows and lightening the area around the sun. Haven't tried it yet.
If it works, it works! I've tried it a bit before with Photoshop, and there's a lot of trial and error involved in getting the balance right. Alternatively, there's a great tool called HDR Light Studio that lets you import HDRIs and add lights on them while seeing a realtime preview render of what you're doing. The free trial is a lot of fun to play with, but purchasing is a bit expensive unless making HDRIs is a big priority for you. You can actually paint in the preview window where you want your specular highlights to appear, and it will generate the appropriate light on an HDRI map. Must be handy for people who do product renders.
Still playing with light and skin textures. After several false starts I am pleased with my latest render which I have called Private Danny Dirk.
I used the Brodie 6 textures because I consider them to give a very good caucasian pale skin texture. The scene is lit by an HDRI called Sierra Madre B, kindly made available free from http://www.hdrlabs.com/sibl/archive.html
There is also a photometric spotlight pointed at his face for some eye reflections.
:-)
I did nothing fancy. I used the high res file, finite dome, dome and scene. The rest is default. No scaling. I did rotate the dome 170 degrees to put the sun over my virtual shoulder, to produce a few shadows but not many. I tend to do that a lot, so the amphitheater shows up in a lot of my Pixar renders.
Yes, trial and error. When I'm doing HDRI, one of the first things I do before really working on the character is setting the background and light angle. With everything still simple the rendering time is still fast even using CPU render.
Even using high res, though, the dome seems just a little out of focus when compared to the render. I wouldn't be shocked to see even higher resolution HDRIs in coming years. I just played a little with Photoshop's Smart Sharpen. That might or might not seem to help some depending on taste, but sharpening the already ultra sharp rendered character wasn't pretty. One might end up masking out the rendered stuff when doing anything like that. My other thought was enabling depth of field to soften the focus a bit on the character, but I haven't worked myself up to open that can of worms yet.
...the only issue I have with masking is capturing the shadow of the character on the shadow plane. One other workaround would be to possibly render at a larger than intended size then scale the final rendered image down. These scenes usually don't take that long to render anyway and render size doesn't seem as major a factor with Iray as it does with 3DL.
Bloom can be a nice thing if used carefully .I used it in a sci fi picture earlier in this thread and on candles. With candles it's giving a nice glow around the flame. Again, use it modest otherwise everything around will start to glow. In the sci fi pic it was intended to give a glow around the orb. Nice side effect was that it also lit up some details on the helmet.
Just a general question Mec. Can you give us your ultimate render settings as far as Progressive settings, Optimization and Filtering and anything else you do to speed up rendertime. You say you are running anywhere from 4 to 40 minutes. I know I will not be able to reach that since I'm running on CPU only, but anything that can make it faster will surely help.
Here's a problem I've had with other render engines, that I hoped might go away with physics based render engines. We have a girl in front of a mirror. The girl and her dress have Iray materials, while the hair is old style. Behind her is a cube primitive with the Iray silver shader, but tweaked to reflect somewhat better.
I was hoping that light from the single photometric spot would bounce off the mirror and light her back. The spot is lined up square with the camera. Anything the camera ought to be showing in reflection ought to be lit by reflected light. I see the mirror as working quite well in reflecting what is lit directly, but anything that might be lit by reflected light is black.
In 3Delight there is a parameter that limits the number of times a photon will bounce off stuff before the ray trace engine stops keeping track of it. The default is two. Once in a while I do room of mirrors renders where I've had it up around 16. I cannot find a similar parameter for Iray.
Am I missing something? Does anyone know of a control that needs to be tweaked, or do I have to create a light source behind the girl to light her back?
Have you switched on Caustic Sampler in the iray Optimisation settings? I tried it with the SciFi Bedroom and it works, but it's whole 'nother level of rendering and tweaking.
I created a test object for playing with light and materials with the Iray renderer. I renders quickly and it is easy to see various lighting effects. Might help you to adjust your parameters before trying them on a fully decked out Vicky.
http://www.the3dwizard.net/downloads/the3dwizardrendertestobjects.zip
Cheers!
Have you switched on Caustic Sampler in the iray Optimisation settings? I tried it with the SciFi Bedroom and it works, but it's whole 'nother level of rendering and tweaking.
Oh, wonderful. Just what I need, a whole 'nother level. ;) I'll give it a shot, thanks.
I have been working on the same idea. I got it to work with the silver shader on a plane, but I was using an HDRI rather than a photometric light. It definitely worked...and worked pretty well, reflected light was even colored by the HDRI. I did have to place the reflector pretty close (it was out of frame). Also, I was just using it to bounce light onto the front of the character... not what you appear to be attempting, which is bounce the light twice... from the mirror to the figure, and back to mirror (?)
This is nice... very soft. Needs more specular I think, but its very nice and sort of glamour shot in a good way. I think this portrait style good benefit from a little bloom, but I have not worked with that yet.
I think we will be all pleasantly surprised with how older products look, but the bad specular settings are going to be the biggest stumbling block. I never cared for most items' specular setups ... no one seemed to know how to really work with it, so they slapped on settings that basically just eliminated it from the equation and relied on diffuse for everything.