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Sorry, my bad! Post edited!
So UberSurface2 seems to be quite a powerful upgrade to the first version, funny it has received so little attention, I kind of rediscovered it, thanks to Tynkere;) Went straight into my wishlist!
@ Sven
Thanks for tips. Cut & pasted so I'll have to settings to experiment with.
I picked up 'Wireframe & Hologram shaders' and 'Advanced DAZ Studio Light Bundle' at the store. pwEffect, Catch, host and Surface (or the bundle) is on wishlist along with Uber Shader Pack. Didn't want to get carried away, and figured two of them will be plenty for now. : )
@ Mustakettu
Good to know some of the ones mentioned above can have more versatile 'every day' uses. Both bundles kind of expensive but might be about what I'd have paid for Poser 11 pro if remember right. Heh. Listen to me rationalize! I want to make flaming ghost figures look like they're being x-rayed. Loads of fun!
Just to be clear though, UberSurface2 is the one in the large bundle https://www.daz3d.com/uber-shader-pack
I think the link to documentation is out of date. 'Server not found' Freebies always sound good btw.
Thanks for replies!
try this link for Omnifreaker's product list and light documentation. http://www.omnifreaker.com/index.php?title=News
You're very welcome:) I think that's a pretty good "starter pack" for doing 3DL renders. You'll eventually notice that hair that uses transmaps, as most hairs still do, will cause long render times in general when using ambient light with occlusion. With AoA lights you can flag surfaces to use alternative samples. What I always do when I create a character is set the diffuse value of the hair surface(s) to 99%. That way they are already flagged for AoA lights. You just have to go to lightsettings in the parameters pane and set the AoA to use alternative shadowsamples for the diffuse strength of 99%. This also works really well for other things that use transmaps, as plants/vegetation. Set diffuse strength of leaves to 99% and they will render much faster. Instead of diffuse there are other options like ambient strength and so on.
And if you want to use the UE2 instead of AoA you can apply the UberSurface shader to transmapped hair and in the surface pane set occlusion to off. Will speed up your renders.
Happy rendering!
The pw stuff goes on sale every once in a while, and it's all really cool. I don't have all of it personally, but if I had more free time to play with stuff just for fun so that I could justify more investments, I would totally get it =)
But the Uber bundle, well, let's break it down.
The first UberEnvironment and omAreaLight are obsolete. You get better and newer versions of these with DS for free (UE2 and UberArea). I don't even know if these work with DS4 at all.
UberHair is not required, it's just some presets and maps for the free UberSurface that comes with DS. So purely a matter of choice, only get it if you like presets.
UberPoint and UberSpot have largely been superceded by the Advanced Spotlight. Which can also do flagging as Sven describes, and these can not.
UberSoft Lighting Kit is an interesting shader, and it does what it says: soft, diffuse-like lighting. No sharp-ish shadows at all. You will also need to use specular-only lights with it. It used to be my main environment light back then in the day I only had free DS3 (not the Advanced paid-for version which included UE2 and other goodies), but given that you have UE2 for free and you bought Advanced Ambient, the utility of this kit is questionable.
UberSoft Light Pack is a number of presets for USLK described above.
UberSurface2, now, that is the best thing out of the bundle, it's totally useful and it hasn't really been superceded by anything (yet).
So now you make your choice =)
One thing I like about Ubersurface is being able to have raytrace reflection, because I find that makes for much more realistic metals (and even sweaty figures). Fresnel is ‘better’ but I think a little overkill in many cases.
I strongly suggest shutting off Velvet on skin surfaces. A lot of skin presets have velvet, and imo it makes people look like they are made of vinyl; again, go with some reflection, and remember that reflection needs a skydive or enclosed space to look right.
Out of the shaders publicly available, UberSurface2 has the most complete and robust feature list. As mustakettu pointed out, the biggest one is fresnel affects both reflection and specular.
Since it is a layered shader, you get two of everything, which you can mix by adding them (recommended), multiplying them (not recommended). You can even use a mask for blending. There's two diffuse, two specular/reflections, both with its own fresnel. Each layer also has its own tiling controls, with separate bump, normal and displacement.
The specular has anisotropy controls, but the reflection does not. As is the convention with DS 3delight shaders, speculars use glossiness/smoothness. Higher values mean sharper/smaller highlights. Reflection has blur, but in reverse - higher values, more blurry reflections.
Unlike UberSurface, the diffuse does change appearance when you alter roughness.
The second biggest feature is subsurface scattering controls. Unlike Ubersurface and Human Surface, it is more akin to what you get with modern shaders. You have separate scatter/absorption controls, so you could use values from other renderers or literature like the original Jensen paper. In fact, you get presets using those values. Doesn't have direction controls, but you can boost backscattering to get even more translucency.
You also get the occlusion shading override found in Ubersurface along with switches like Fantom to make the surface/material/object invisible to camera and Raytrace to make it visible in reflections and refractions. You can even disable AO completely with the Occlusion switch. However, if you use progressive rendering, you'll find the need to override occlusion shading and samples (via the shader controls or flagging) is not really needed.
You can definitely do some pretty neat stuff with it, like the presets in my Lumina library and Photo Studio Kit 2 showed. It is an 'old school' shader from a different time though.
Although it has specular/reflection and fresnel, I don't think it uses microfacet's masking/shadowing (well, maybe the implicit one). The Fresnel curve is based of a simple polynomial curve, but you can get them somewhat close to dielectric ones. Metal too, by combining both reflections, each with it's own color and Fresnel curve. The diffuse and spec lobe are not based off popular BRDF. Specular glossiness and reflection blur have very different scaling values, so you have to calibrate by eye (as I did) the values to get them somewhat similar looking. Plus, both glossiness and blur does not accept textures.
But then again, some (or all) of that is also true for most of the publicly available shaders for DS. I loved it though and I've learned a lot from it. Would I still recommend using it or presets (including my own) for it? Honestly, no. It's like recommending Mental Ray after NVIDIA announced they're not going to develop or even sell/rent more licenses for it.
Should work but that is difficult to get something "pretty". One of my old experiment below
I've made a worst experiment with a point light
Thanks! I guess one needs a very dense mesh and sky high sample settings, but it's good to know it actally works. Testing continues.
Progress comes slowly, but better than none at all. : )
Hopefully everyone can see the room, Stephanie 8 and Millie Cat now. I didn't know the render settings have gamma correction off by default.
1.) Is there a minimum distance for a spotlight? The one I made & scaled to about 21% (parented to her hand) doesn't show.
The one from 'Advanced' bundle has her face showing of course, but a hot spot next to it would probably be dark.
2.) Disregard the following error message?
"3Delight message #43 (Severity 1): P1094: RiRotate: invalid zero-Length rotation axis"
3.) Just because a file reads"material(s)" doesn't mean it's meant for 3Delight? (They aren't in IRay folder -- knob on the table, PBNG hair, window is opaque, etc.)
Thanks for all the replies. Picked up the pwBundle, so pretty much committed now. I'll have a look at Velvet and other surfaces. One I wasn't able to figure out, but didn't spend much time on it, was lips on Stephanie 8 that were too glossy. Somehow I managed to cancel it completely so render started to look like mask over them in photoshop. : 0 ! Only bought base actor for Stephie, so using FWSA 'low gloss' file for 'sharah 8' I think.
@ Wowie
I appreciate your honesty. I look at them like maybe metric & SAE in a tool box. A poor comparison, but both are tools in my toolbox so to speak. Both Iray & 3Delight might have their applications for me, so I hope to learn both.
Thanks for reading!
You're welcome. From my POV the Shader light and Photon Mapper Camera are OK. The problem is then a well written surface shader that will create good caustics. I planned to write one but never did
95%
Based off Vray's OSL Thin Film shader. Not as good as the Belour-Barla approach, but much easier to port to RSL 1.2
Just compiled and tested it out. Will need to add an enabling switch and a map input slot for the thickness. It is slightly different than 3delight's metal material. The thin film is tied to the coat layer, rather than the base layer.
You're welcome. I always try to look at these things from an artist's perspective first.
Definitely visible progress =)
What environment light are you using BTW? I assume it´s AO only. You may want to play with the trace distance then to finetune the way the corners look. I don't remember the default one for AoA's light, but the UE2 default is way too high for occlusion (3 meters!) and not that much for bounce.
Welcome to DS land =) As Takeo said in the holywar thread, it's a remnant of days gone by which somehow never got fixed.
...oldtimers may remember me ranting viciously about this, no need to rekindle the flame LOL
I'm now trying to remember if DS behaves like many other software packages and scales light intensity down with the size of its avatar...
Why don't you try applying UberArea to the phone screen - purely for fun? Don't forget to enable falloff and set it to quadratic (2) if you do decide to experiment with it. Distances should be left at 0 to use a "physically plausible" decay.
If it's a newer product from this store, there seems to be a trend to print "RSL" on the icons of 3Delight settings. Generally if these settings are DUFs in DS library structure, they're probably for 3Delight (quality may vary...). If they're pz2's in the Poser library structure and it's an older product, then as Takeo says.
Thanks for the encouragement. At another topic, I was tempted to comment in reply to a member saying there should be only one rendering system, but don't know enough about either of them to really have an informed opinion. If IRay doesn't yet have the ability to enable/disable shadows or tint them, then maybe the 'old' system might suit my tastes more. More on my efforts later, but first a question. : )
Where would I find more literature & information? Occurs to me, I'm going about this the wrong way. A low light scene when I'm trying to learn, isn't very methodical. : )
I should start with the basics. Maybe a sphere in a well lit environment. (I picked up UberSurface2 and he seems to have a good user guide and some tutorials.) Step by step before I get to the fun stuff.
Or maybe not! Since I wasn't getting anywhere with PBNG Long Hair reflecting light, I decided to play with some of the goodies such as pwGhost. I had left shadows on and noticed a cool looking, but fuzzy projection on the wall. One thing led to another, and I made a very bright spot to create a projection along with another camera. Wanted to see how much detail I could get so did a search for render settings that led to a post here from "Adamr001" in Feb 2013. Entered the values for his 'quality' settings I think, and got the following error.
"3Delight message #45 (Severity 1): S2072: the shader 'C:/Program Files/DAZ 3D/DAZStudio4/shaders/pwSurface2.sdl' uses a different interface version. Automatic conversion was successful. It should be recompiled for better performance."
I was manually entering part of what should be a 'scripted' render? I haven't tried them.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/16085/render-profiles-for-daz-studio-4-5/p1
Anyway, here's where a little fun has taken me. Not sure what practical value it has, but I kind of like the silhouette. When I've learned more (and had time to visit sites and check out freebies) maybe I'll try just a profile.
I really appreciate all of your help and patience. I'm sure you were probably doing other things before I came blundering in!
Thanks for reading!
"Superman Checks in on Lois - She's fine and so is Millie the Cat" : )
I like that render very much, well done! And I get the same error code whenever I use the pw ghostshader. Severity 1 errors are pretty much ignorable, not an expert on the subject, but as long as it renders it's nothing to worry about really (although a little annoying).
The original paper - A Practical Model for Subsurface Light Transport
https://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/bssrdf/bssrdf.pdf
Page 5
Pixar converts the above values to be used with an albedo and diffuse mean free path scheme
https://renderman.pixar.com/resources/RenderMan_20/subsurface.html
It is easier to think of the subsurface color as the opposite color of what you see rendered. Not a fan of the scheme, but it is what omnifreaker used for UberSurface2. I stuck to it since it allows you to import the material values from UberSurface2 when you apply my shader.
Here's a good tip from Solid Angle
https://support.solidangle.com/display/A5AFMUG/Subsurface
So, if you use UberSurface2 or my shader, just invert those values. 1.0, 0.35, 02 becomes 0, 0.65, 0.98. In DS, you can enter decimal values like these into color fields by CTRL clicking the color fields. Easier and faster than multiplying them with 255 to get the actual color values.
3Delight errors with severity 1 generally can be considered notices, rather than warning or errors. The shader will compile and run, but may not have optimal performance. In your instance, the shader is compiled using a different build of 3delight. Recompiling (made easy with Takeo's script) should solve the problem. Well, at the risk of being pedantic, it is only true if the shader in question is compiled with an -embed-source or comes with the source code. Omnifreaker did use the flag, so it should be fine.
The same is true with displacement bound notices. For optimal use of memory, you want something close to 100% of the displacement bound. I don't know what displacement bound limits DAZ used though, probably south of 50%.
I haven't encountered that RiRotation error before, but since it's severity 1, it isn't (likely) serious.
That render is quite fun =) But in general, here I am going to perk up my ears and whine a little bit the way "us foxes" do...
Pleeease be gentle with them shadows =) Only disable them when really needed (like when you're using a geoshell to represent bodypaint) and only tint them if you aren't using an environment light at all or if you are doing something strictly NPR (like that render would be classified). If you have an envlight and want "realistic" output, just tint the envlight.
And if you have an item with opacity colour enabled, its shadow is going to get reversed transmission colour automagically.
Don't worry, unless you have explicitly changed the "engine" to "Scripted 3Delight" and selected a render script, you are still using the vanilla interface.
This is the script:
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/23867/free-script-to-recompile-daz-shaders
Thanks. Have been as busy reading & trying to get up to speed on the concepts, so Jenson was real eye opener. It led to so many other interesting articles on the wiki.
Where I found... A certain teapot that looked familiar from DS. Hmm... Beginning to make a little more sense now! : )
User guide for DS AoA Shader has a fun cartoon “Hitomi” character w/hand mirror so a chance to use Aiko 7, a character I picked in November’s sale, but never done much with it. (Large eyes = easier reflections?)
Ketchup obvious red prop for RGB, but the teapot stuck with me. Quick search on net: “DAZ Store “PA Teapot $19.95” pass. Free teapot @ DAZ forums. Why settle for just any teapot when someone (mCasual/Jacques from zipfile) had made the exact one! : ) Merci beaucoup.
Aiko’s shirt to blue easy enough.
Green ‘Milk’ inside glass is kicking my butt though. Trying to make the bottle transparent with ‘Caustic Glass’ preset will make i-7 (6700k) cpu go into turbo and Win-10 will stop DS every time @ around 82% at 2:11
So the bottle is a 0 : 255 : 0 variation on ‘marble’ for now.
Anyway thanks for reading & enjoy holidays.
PS: hopefully the gamma is working now. no autolevels or anything w/PS
One more then a break for the holidays. I seem to be at an impasse anyway.
How do you make glass (or any translucent/reflective material) look more 3D?
I’m hoping it’s just something simple I’m overlooking in surface settings.
Might be a week before I can reply from desktop as we're doing some traveling. Happy holidays!
There are a bunch of ways. I THINK the base Daz shader can do it with refraction, I'm pretty sure UberShader has a decent refraction.
The thing I can never get to work is refraction + SSS.
It should work. What glass material are you using? Try a different one, for example the default glass shader (glass.duf) or something to see if that affects your result. Presumably you want to look at the index of refraction and refraction strength if you are using the daz default shader, perhaps other shaders have different parameters. Can you post a screenshot of your parmater settings?
For glass with dsDefaultMaterial, turn up reflection and refraction to 100%, refraction index (IOR) to 1.5 and opacity to 0 (zero).
With UberSurface and UberSurface 2, set reflection strength to something like 10%, enable fresnel with the default settings, turn on opacity and set it to 0 (zero), with opacity color set to pure white (255,255,255). Then enable refraction and set refraction index to 1.5.
However, you won't get something like physically plausible glass since those shaders don't use correct fresnel (accounting for total internal reflection).
With opacity set to 0 (zero), your diffuse lobe(s) or anything that's tied to diffuse (velvet, SSS) won't show up since they're multiplied by opacity. What you can do is set opacity very low (5%), and then boost the strength to get those things to show up. It's doesn't make sense of course, but that's the way to do it with those shaders.
Pixar shows a more 'proper' or physically plausible way to do it - https://renderman.pixar.com/resources/RenderMan_20/opacityRevealed.html
I think I actually suggested that a while back. Maybe in the old thread. There's also absorption to consider. Forget about using RSL's built in Fresnel if you want proper glass. Even if you muck about with ShaderMixer with all the glass recipes around, you still won't be able to get something plausible.
It's not that 3delight can do it or not, it's simply because the shaders available to 3delight in DS aren't doing it properly.
I haven't had a chance to sit down and experiment with it extensively, however for absorbtion, check out Tofusan's free Realistic Glass Shader with Absorption: http://www.sharecg.com/v/70879/browse/21/DAZ-Studio/Realistic-Glass-Shader-with-Absorption . Note that the scale of the object you are applying it to has a dramatic outcome on the result.
Thanks, but I have my own shader.
Frosty
Transmission at 73%, plus subsurface
With SSS and diffuse translucency
I posted a description of the features one page back. Handcoded RSL written in ShaderBuilder.
All right. Got this one working properly now. The code is rather ugly and it took a lot of twiddling back and forth, but it's done.
Note the blue tint on the dragon. Transmission shadows (for glass) similar to Renderman thin shadows. Except this one will change depending on transmission color, roughness and absorption levels, without needing users to fiddle with settings.
Less absorption
Since it's essentially shadows, it works best with a bit of shadow blur/softness. Which is true afterall, since there's no sharp shadows in real life. Intensity will mostly depend on direct lights, not reflection or GI. Admittedly, like the Renderman page says, this is an approximation of the real thing (caustics). Obviously, it isn't physically based. You can turn it off if you don't want it, just like the colored translucency shadow for diffuse.
The render is done with my new trace () based global illumination light. Based of mustakettu's DelightGI, with lots of my optimizations. In this particular case, it took 4 minutes 57.76 seconds with 8x8 pixel samples (using my modified version of her render script). For comparison, the same shot with UE2 IDL or bounceGI will take around twice the time.
The GI light does have a naive method of variance based, adaptive sampling, but it's very likely that won't be in the final build.
Sweet! So less absorbtion seems to make the caustics effect more pronounced. Turning off transmission shadows means regular shadows? How much will that affect render times? Also how well will your shader play together with the AoA ambient light? Or is it highly optimized for your GI light set?
I don't think that's caustic but rather colored shadows
@Wowie : Your shader seems nice till now
Well yes, but there is clearly more detail to the shadow in the last image with less absorbtion.
As Takeo wrote, it is not caustics, just shadows.
Turning off transmission and translucent shadows will give you standard shadows, like the one cast by the Buddha statue.
Impact on render times? I would say minimal, if any. I'm using raytraced shadows.
It'll work with any ambient light just fine. The shader works without resorting to all those acrobatic flagging tricks. Incoming light can be from point, spot, directional lights and ambient, environment, indirect or global illumination light. With the GI light, you can use a plane as an emitter if you enable ambient color/strength on the plane. Or you could use a proper area or mesh light.
Admittedly, it's a hack which can be useful at times. I'll probably look into supporting actual caustics with photon mapping on later versions, though of course, the caustics will only work with lights that actually emit photons. I can't think of any lights in the store that actually does that though.
It would be nice to have a set of photon-emitting lights that's actually publicly available.
Did a few, quick test to see how it renders with various lights. Pixel samples 16x16, irradiance samples is 128. Progressive enabled.
Just using the GI light. Ambient enabled at 350% on the plane. 2 min 50.79 secs
GI light with dsDefaultSpot. Technically, any spolight like Advanced Spotlight should be similar. 3 min 52.43 secs
GI light with mustakettu's RadiumAreaShadow mesh area light shader applied to the plane. Default settings. 3 min 33.3 secs
GI light with omnifreaker's UberArea light shader applied to the plane. Default settings. 3 min 42.96 secs
Oh, that's nice. Area lights have minimal impact on render times with my GI light. Didn't expect that at all.
Raised the resolution from 360x600 to 600x1000. Mostly to see noise levels.
Still with my GI light and omnifreaker's UberArea. 10 min 6.30 secs. Render times with standard shadows. 9 min 35.77 secs. As I said, minimal impact (5.5%).
With 8x8 pixel samples. 3 min 36.28 secs. Roughly the same as using 16x16 samples with lower resolution. Noisy though. 4x4 pixel samples, which is DS defaults takes it down to 2 min 0.81 secs.