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You're welcome.
Hope you don't need years to figure out how to use the tut
If you have further questions I'll try to answer
Thanks! I managed to create a test scene with a sphere on a plane with a caustic camera, shader light and a caustic surface applied to the sphere. Then I tried to make the sphere reflective but couldn't find the right way to connect a brick to get the desired result. Testing continues...
Just don't think there might be something wrong with you if you get weird bugs. Unfortunately Shader Mixer is an extremely unstable plugin when it comes to RSL. Maybe it's the bee's knees for developing in MDL for Iray, I just don't know. But it can be disheartening on the 3Delight end.
Well, for MDL shaders, it does have an entertaining feature that, working with large shaders, it’ll very occasionally disconnect stuff. For laughs or something.
That and the almost complete lack of documentation.
Fun, that.
Does any MDL documentation exist outside of MDL Handbook at all, though?
All the documentation I’ve seen is high level stuff.
I’ve pretty much had to guess and check what stuff does.
=((
Well it's crashed a couple of times so need to save often:) But I'm having fun, the possibilities are mindblowing. Here's what I've come up with so far:
That looks cool =) Where does this atom (or a ringed planet??) model come from?
Just primitives, a sphere and two toruses:) I used one shader spotlight to reflect light onto the big sphere. Rendertime 10 min.
Wow. Amazing. =)
See, that's the thing I'm talking about in the 3Delight render thread. I hope it can be learnt.
Almost done. Now we can have raytraced reflections, raytraced subsurface scattering in minutes with opacity mapped surfaces. Still with the old DS 4.7 and UE2 IDL/bounceGI.
Cross posting. but this is what it will have:
Some other important features ;
Plus some other stuff. Mostly having to deal with specular/reflection. Plus visibility overrides and light categories.
If I can muster the last 10 % of features.
I particularly like the russian roulette part
. OMFG, can't wait to hear more about this stuff
I have a WIP I want some advice on please and thanks!!
It is a Snow type render and well the trees were in IRay that I converted into 3Delight and it did not turn out quite the way I expected it too.
Can someone give me some feedback as to why it looks so cartoony and also looks like charcoal on the trees.
Not sure about the tree/charcoal thing, but for the snow on the ground it doesn't appear as if anything is touching it. There are several possible things that could be done.
One, shadows (although I don't know how much of a shadow there will be on the snow, this may or may not be appropriate. I would have expected a little bit perhaps at the front of the sled right where the sled and snow meet underneath that curve? Possibly the snow has lots of ambient and you can't see any shadow.
Two, interaction between the snow and the sleds, feet, and tree bases. The figure's feet should probably be sinking into the snow a few inches, and of course not smoothly so foot holes or rumpled up snow along the edge of the depression would be good. If it's packed snow the sleds MIGHT be sitting completely on top, but they should probably cut in just a bit, and if any are moving there should be a packed path behind them or leftover from previous runs if appropriate. The tree bases all look identical, but probably the base of each tree would be a little unique with a slightly different shape to where it meets the snow. This could probably be solved by just putting in a few random sized snow-colored blobs or deforming the snow there or deforming the tree bases. Or not, your call, just ideas.
I think the "charcoally" thing with the trees looks like you lost the opacity on the leaves in the conversion, so you just have little squares instead of leaf shapes ......
This is all in the existing 3Delight implementation in DAZ Studio? Incredible.
It basically allows the shader to take as many bounces as it needs (limited only by maximum trace depth set in the renderer settings). There are still ray trace depth overrides, since I want that biased type of control. Some statistics - for a 3 minute render with UE2 IDL/bounceGI, the time attributed to raytraced specular with a max trace depth of 16 is around 1 minute.
Actually, this is done on DS 4.7 which is using 3delight build 11.0.105, released in 2014-09-11. A build that is now more than three years old. More updated builds have support for separate single and multiscatter subsurface scattering, plus GTR based specular.
I've also been working on a modified version of kettu's DelightGI. Basically adding my Russian roulette code and depth adaptive sampling. Prelimary results show it renders in half the time as UE2 (in IDL or bounceGI mode) with the same amount of samples. Taking the above example, render times with the shader and the modified DelightGI is now around 2 minutes. It still needs further testing though.
Here's a shot of a pure raytracing test. It's a simple scene and I probably should raise the pixel samples to get rid of the noise.
41 seconds.
On an Intel Core i7 4770.
Additional render stats.
Ok so making progress, managed to create a mirror scene so it's possible after all;)
Cool!
Is that the RNDA Sluggian figure?
Yes, he's a handsome fellow and he knows it;)
One more question about caustics: It works with a shader spotlight but I've tried to create distant shaderlights as well as linear pointlights and render through the caustics camera with no success. Will this effect only work with spotlights or am I missing something?
It's just easiest to get with spotlights because their energy is like focused in a beam. It is possible to get caustics with distant or point lights, it just takes a lot of placement tweaking. Or a special shape. I think if you have a model of a lens, it should give you some noticeable caustics with a distant light, like it would IRL with the sun.
I don't remember if shader mixer caustic cam has an intensity slider for the caustic effect? It may help too, if you want "sun bunnies" (kids' game with sun and mirror, I hope I'm making sense because I never found out what it's called for real in English). Our distant lights are a bit too dim by themselves as compared to finite spots and points because we don't usually use tonemapping in DS.
// and even those who do, like me, will often not bother with getting the tremendous difference in energy right because "it should just look believable, we aren't simulating for a scientific publication" //
Thanks Kettu! Yes there is a possibility to adjust the intensity for the caustic effect. Ok, good news, I guess it's all about getting parameters into the sweet spot;) I'll give it another go=)
Hi everyone,
Hope I'm not 'barging in' and interrupting a discussion as it were.
Learning 3Delight & DS, so couple of questions.
Items I found in browsing: 'Photo Studio Kit' (requires 'UberSurface2' or the bundle.) Another bundle or maybe one product on sale: "pwSurface 2" and "pw Shaders Bundle."
1.) If I aspire to special effects like Sven's mysterious 'quantum' chess player, this requires special products/shaders & so on?
2.) Besides intensity, any trick to make spotlight bringing out detail of cat less obvious? Might still be thinking in 2D terms with 'dodging out' the shadows, but obviously has to be light there in first place. ; )
Thanks for reading
It requires https://www.daz3d.com/ubersurface2-layered-shader-for-daz-studio
UberSurface comes free with DS, found in content library/shaderpresets/omnifreaker.
Yes, for that effect I used Marshian's https://www.daz3d.com/wireframe-and-hologram-shaders
They are very useful and fun to play with
. Also used the pw ghost shader to get access to the ghost opacity, very versatile shader IMO.
Aah, so you've added some light I can see;) That is two standard spotlights, right? You choose a spotlight in the scene tab, then go to the parameters pane/light/shadow or something like that. There you can make the light actually cast shadows, shadows are off by default. Choose raytraced shadows, they look the best and render faster than shadow mapping. In the rendering settings tab make sure you have raytrace depth to min 1, if 0 you will have no raytracing and thus no shadows or reflection/refraction etc. Also if you don't have progressive mode on, make sure shadow rate is set to max 1, (I think that is the default). The lower the shadow rate the sharper the detail, but render times also increase so find a setting that works for what you want to render.
You might also need some kind of global illumination/ambient light in your render that simulates light bouncing off surfaces. Easiest and fastest (but not most realistic) way is to use one or more spotlights at low intensity with shadows turned off. That way they render fast and add some fill light into your scene. Experiment with light colors, maybe orange or blue to create different moods. Or you can use Omnifreaker's UE2 (free with DS) in ambient mode, which also work as a (rather flat looking) fill light but renders really fast. (UE2 has a lot of more realistic options as well but generally renders slow)
Or if you want more realism I strongly recommend the AoA ambient light, or infact the bundle:https://www.daz3d.com/advanced-daz-studio-light-bundle
I use them a lot. Render fast and can be used in many ways.
To get back to your question, shadows help with creating depth and moods in your scene, try soft shadows for atleast one of your spots? Shadows can also be tinted if you want to try that out (shadow color).
Then there is the question of gamma settings/linear workflow but I am not the right one to talk about that stuff, search the forums if you want more info;)
Well these are my thoughts on the matter, others are free to chime in, just do a lot of experimenting with lightning and camera to get the feel for it, you're off for a good start anyway:)
And don't hesitate to ask if there are questions!
Edit to add: Softer shadows require a higher number of shadow samples to appear smooth. For the standard DS lights they are found in the render settings pane/ shadow samples.
Ok thanks for the advice on the snow interactions and the trees are identical because they are the only winter type trees I have atm. I guess I am going to have to search out a tutorial on deformers again on youtube. I learn more by watching a video then reading a tutorial.
I think the AoA ambient light would work well for this type of scene to give a sense of "ground attachment". And of course UE2 with a bit of soft shadows/occlusion, but won't render as fast. Nice scene composition!
Sven, didn't you mean the first UberSurface, without "2"?
pwSurface2 can give you some interesting NPR looks. It can also be used for "realistic" renders, but UberSurface2 wins in that regard - it's the only store shader that attenuates specular which is quite important.
pwSurface can do surface-based indirect diffuse or simple AO - which may be more efficient than using UE on the whole scene. I think MattyManx used to swear by pwSurface back then.
Other pw shaders - pwEffect, pwToon, pwGhost - also give interesting NPR looks. pwGhost and pwEffect can also be used in "realistic" renders for magic and other special FX.
In my signature there's a link to my freebie thread, check it out, maybe you'll find something useful =)