Workflow, 3DL, Iray
Oso3D
Posts: 15,085
So I'm realizing that while I love using Iray for my webcomic, it's just... taking waaaaaaay too long. A single panel can take 30-60 minutes to set up (depending on a lot of factors). Then each panel can take half an hour to many hours to render... and then again and again when I notice all the things not quite right. A page (and I'm ideally doing one page a week) can thus take anywhere between a few hours to dozens of hours to make.
I... just don't have that time or energy to be trying to race against a deadline for stuff I'm doing just as a hobby.
That said, I'm horribly torn, because I LIKE the result. I love Iray, I love how easy it is to set up, and so on. And I find 3DL extremely unintuitive -- and when I do things in 3DL to make things lit more easily (IE: meshlights), I end up blowing up render times.
Still, I'm wondering if I'd be better off splitting between comic in 3DL, where speed lets me tell a story in more than glacial epochs, and random artwork, where I can take the time and follow wherever my interests take me.
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Comments
Use 3DL.
You have too many panels to crank through to deal with the challenges you mention. But you do need to get a better handle on 3DL. With 3DL you can increase the speed of renders pretty easily by adjusting some settings.
Also for a comic I don't see Iray as having an advantage visually. It's going to be about style. You could style either render solution how you like but the innate appeal of Iray is realistic lighting. You actually dont need that in a comic. Unrealistic light will help you a lot actually..having shadows start and stop on a dime is hard to do in Iray, if not impossible. But not so hard in 3DL.
With unbiased rendering, your posework has to be a lot tighter to look good. If the hand is a half inch off from the body it's a distraction. With less realistic lighting solutions this isn't as noticable.
3DL can make great results, and it can be really fast. But you will have to take a bit of time to master the helm.
I never used Mesh lights with 3DL. I use them in octane and lux, but never needed them in 3DL. I found the standard point, spot and directional lights perfectly fine for all my needs. If mesh lights give you an issue, maybe dont use them?
I'm a tweaker with limited time to dedicate to 3D, too. I deal by working on a bunch of scenes simultaneously. I batch process all of the separate render passes and NPR processing for each scene overnight (scripting is your friend). Then, in the morning, I view the results and make the edits to the scene before sticking them in my queue again. This way I'm never waiting on a render!
- Greg
Oh yeah and are you using filters on your renders? If so I wouldn't waste the time with long renders just to cloak it with filters.
And random stuff is good. it's nice to have bigger goals and mix in random stuff for giggles.
I feel your pain Will. I love Iray too but find that a single image is taking me anywhere from 12-24 hours of work to finish. Thats why I'm planning to get a GTX 970 soon when a certain game I'm waiting for is released
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As to the question of should you use 3DL instead... I guess it depends on what you feel you get the best results from. Personally, I feel thats Iray so the time investment is worth it for me.
Are you familiar with the 970 memory controller issue? To save money they only put 7 memory controllers on the cards instead of 8. So some applications (games) sometimes have performance issues when they use more than 3.5 gigs of ram?
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/199684-nvidia-slapped-with-class-action-lawsuit-over-gtx-970-memory-issues
I don't think it would be noticable when rendering, but I did see it come up as an issue for gamers when I was heavily gaming this past year.(i have quit gaming yet again, thankfully)
Yeah, I'm experimenting with toon shaders at the moment (though I won't use them exclusively -- stuff with replicated patterns, like dresses, are probably best served with a different shader).
Part of my history is that I started using Daz just this November, so much of my vivid memory of using it is utter confusion. Coming back to it, I have to remind myself of all the things I've learned. So, tentatively... I think, yeah, webcomic will use the toon shaders.
(I've looked at the special shaders for doing toon rendering and, frankly, the core stuff + filtering covers my needs)
It's amusing how impatient I am with a 15 min progressive render in 3DL after dealing with multihour renders in Iray. Sheesh.
One thing I like about 3DL progressive is that it takes under a minute to get a reasonable glance at how it will look. It zooms from 0 to 75% completion in a minute, then slooowly trickles.
Another thing I like about 3DL toon shading is that it's a lot easier to get details to pop than with a realistic render, particularly at the limited sizes I'm working on (comicfury highly recommends no more than 800 pixel width).
Half of the reason I did postwork with the Iray renders was that a lot of details got lost without help.
Yeah, my brother has one. He doesn't do rendering but he says it works fine for his gaming, so I'm not too worried. He's the kind of gamer for who that sort of thing would be really annoying if it were bad, but he says he only notices it occasionally and even then its not that bad.
Like you say, I don't think it'll impact upon rendering and the GTX 970 is the best Nvidia card within my price range, even with this issue.
Will, your current web comic doesn't need Iray. You can get the same shadow texturing with 3DL. Save Iray for the materials and the effects it can give you, none of which you are using right now.
There are a lot of really nifty 3DL shaders, including some "visual arts" shaders. As these are older they're more likely to be on steeper sale. I still use these, for both Poser or D|S, when I'm doing that kind of work. I got the pw bundle years ago, and it still works with 4.8 (there's one, I think pwSketch, that won't work in 4.8 - you can at least partially replicate the effects with FF).
970 is what I have now. It's way better than before. ;)
I'm hoping to get something with one or more 980Tis in a few months, money willing.
Yeah, I have pwEffects, and a number of other stuff.
Plus, it'd be nice to use LAMH without a lot of hoops and jumps.
What did you have before? I've got a GTX 660 at the moment.
I have a 660ti as my main render card, and a GTX760 as it's partner. Most of the time both render and I use the intel graphics chip for handing 3D apps. I am so happy I have no need to upgrade.
Tim, you could for test renders at least, disable lots of the hair shadow settings and it will zoom. If you want to turn them back on for the final render you could. Depends on the shader you use.
But do you use this for your web comic?? I think that's the point. The current art style doesn't make use of what you get with Iray.
Think of it this way: a faster renderer for your web comic will drastically cut down your workflow, allowing you to do more art someplace else. This here 3D thing is a mixed medium. Mixed medium artists tend to be all over the map in artistic output and style. One render can be manga, the next photorealistic, the next abstract. All in the same afternoon.
Yep yep. This 100%.
So here's a side by side of an image processed the way I had been, with Iray, and a new version with 3DL Toon rendering (note that the lighting isn't ideal in the second case -- I kept it as is for comparison purposes. Also I was reminded that UberEnvironment should be AVOIDED for these purposes, because that 3DL ended up taking almost as long as the Iray render did, with it. Oy)
Hi Tim, I assume you already do this, but I typically render things in the alt viewport before I do a full render. Another strategy I do is to have a notebook and sketch out the scene that I want to present before I start working on it. I find pre-planning helps immensely, as I don't have to figure out my placements on the fly.
There are settings to manipulate to speed up UE as well. I don't use UE anymore so I am short on tips right now, but I would hunt down some advice on that if I were you.
Decent starting point though. I would tweak the toon shader specularity on the skin so he can pop a bit more. I know you said just started but figured worth mentioning.
Well, the big problem is he's lit from behind. If I were going to improve the image more I'd make sure there was another light, maybe a point light, to add some more depth.
But I need to try to work on my webcomic. I have one panel that came out rather nice (but has nudity so I'll wait until I post the page).
The version that works is up to you, and your artistic intent. Personally, I prefer the 3DL toon version, as it more closely matches my expectation of "comics."
What toon shader did you use for this, BTW? pwToon?
Nope, just the stock 3DL Toon. I upped the shading level and blur (the low blur options just look... bad, to me). Also had to shut off outline on the floor since that often looks bad.
One plus, compared to when I started, is that I have so many products that I have loads of skydomes and lighting set ups to just add, though I then have to be judicious about removing most of them (more than two lights is just not that useful for toon style)
I also have that geoshell shader for extra outlining, but so far I haven't really felt the need to use it.
More Experiments. The nice thing about this approach is that I can mix in more realistic looking stuff. Mmm.
Don't let DS use all of your cores. I usually leave 3 out, although leaving just 2 out would be fine, and I could still do stuff with the computer. Leaving 3 out ensures me that I can pretty much do anything non-cpu-intensive with normal speed.
BTW, to me personally, the 3DL version of your picture looks a lot better.
Huh. I didn't know I could change cores. Had to dig around for the method, thanks!
Here's hoping that fixes the issue (it sounds like it may, from past threads)
I'll chime in and say I like the IRAY version much better - but I've never been a big fan of most toon shaders for these rendering tools. They don't really end up looking toonish enough and thus end up in a sort of netherworld where you'd want it to go either more towards realism or more towards comic/toon. I think it has to do with how the level of detail is sort of uniformly reduced rather than selectively reduced, whereas in a 2d toon/comic detail is there where it's important/intended and reduced in most of the rest of the image.
I agree with Gr00vus, the iRay version looks better to me as well, although I feel you need some bump or displacement on the lizards skin. If you are going to the trouble of setting up an iRay render, and waiting for it to render at the quality you want, then I can not see why you would then want to "toonify" it. As Gr00vus also says, toon shaders don't make it look like a classic toon comic, but I guess it comes down to the look you are happy with.