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Except that some are older products don't even have 3Delight materials either.
Also DS can read older Poser material formats and so the vast majority of these older products would work just fine. If it was missing the 3DL compatible tick, a lot of users would ignore those products, as they would think, incorrectly, that they do not work in 3DL.
This to some extend is also the problem with the whole idea. DAZ do not want people to be put off buying products due to these missing shaders, as many will work quite well in all renderers, regardless of what shaders are present. Most older products render pretty well in iRay using Poser or 3DL shaders. Yes, they can be improved by tweaking for iRay, but the model and textures are just fine.
I'm not interested in IRay for a few reasons:
Wanna see great crayon art? Check out the works of Don Marco - the master of the Crayola.
Most 3dl shaders, especialy ones that are driven more by the patterns than the surface settings like cotton and so forth, can be converted to Iray with one click. Just apply the iray uber shader over the old shader while you hold the ctrl key down so you can choose to retain the textures. I have over a thousand 3dl shaders and the vast majority convert without having to make adjustments to them.
The vast majority of 3DL 'shaders' available in the store aren't shaders...they are presets for shaders. And the AoA, omUber line (US, US2, HSS) and the Daz Default mostly convert, so the presets should be convertable, too. The few actual 'other' shaders may not convert easily (or at all) and other ShaderMixer network based shaders would probably need to be rebuilt with the Iray ShaderMixer bricks, instead of the 3DL ones.
If you haven't seen Iray hair as or more realistic than 3DL hair, you haven't been looking hard.
Feel free not to like/use Iray, and the profusion of exotic shaders for 3DL is a big reason, but... wow, the hair thing is so not the case.
As for 'I don't want to learn an engine I don't like anyway,' how do you know? (And I only ask because you provide a list of 'reasons I don't like Iray' and one of the four reasons given is 'because X, because I don't like Iray.' Which is really really circular)
Personally, I don't like the look of the vast majority of iray renders I've seen. But I've never been normal.
Willow: Can you identify what it is you don't like?
My issues with many Iray renders (not unique to them, but common to them):
Since they look fairly 'realistic' out of the box, a lot of people get so excited about rendering some cool texture or whatnot that everything else is left really basic. So you get dead-eyed doll people in stiff poses with terrible lighting.
Lighting, in general, is easy but hard. It's easy to set up lights that behave and have spill effects, bounce off walls, etc. However, it's then easy to forget to apply good lighting principles. It's also easy to get so sucked into the notion of 'I can make an accurate simulation of a room!' that you forget that in real life, when people photograph/film stuff, they do all sorts of stuff to make it LOOK GOOD. So you end up with muddy, indistinct scenes (most of the time).
Mastery of shaders. A lot of people are new to Iray so have no idea how to get good results from the shaders.
Don't forget...the CLEAN the room first. There's no everyday 'junk' lying about...no signs that anyone actually LIVES in that room.
A pristine room shot with most of the lights out with a vaseline lens featuring dolls posed stiffly.
I should make a joke terrible render. ;)
Or make a random selection from postings on dA...
Beat me to it.
We are horrible
I think one of the ways that makes iRay hair appear worse is because the rest of the image has improved a lot more compared to the hair. The hair thus retains more of the less realistic style of biased renderers, and so appears relatively worse than other parts. IMHO hair is one of those areas that needs quite a big step up to get close to Photo realistic.
This has always bugged me... People use the term "Shader" when refering to presets, textures/maps, and some other things... Sometimes it's really hard to figure out what you are actually buying... Then to top it off, not to know if they were intended for Iray or 3Dlight doesn't help.I simply come to accept that no two people use the word "Shader" the same, and look as close as possible at the description.
Yeah, skin you can punch the 'make Iray nao' button and you're 90% of the way there. Hair... you REALLY either need a product or a lot of understanding on how to remake it. For one thing, step 1 is get rid of pretty much everything except Opacity/Cutout (in the majority of cases).
Hopefully this won't cheese too many folks off:
http://willbear.deviantart.com/art/I-Mak-Art-577054087
(My tribute to art button pushers)
And have second and third looks at it...many times the problems start with that map.
Yeah, though often I find setting Cutout to 1.5 or so fixes those, thankfully.
(Hair tips: use a bump map of something streaky, maybe set horizontal tiling with Image Editor to get it fine. If you need closeups, though, you'll want to do the same thing in displacement map and a subd around 4. Don't put displacement on skull caps, though, or it'll look weird)
Slosh's UHT shaders are SERIOUSLY underrated for this. I use them in almost every promo render now. One click and everything's fixed for you, and you get a huge variety of color choices. I mean no insult to his rendering skills when I say his promos do not even do the product justice. It is a vast improvement on everything where I've used it, even some hairs that were made for Iray.
Hamilton Hair for G1:
http://xyshurondor.deviantart.com/art/Victor-Delacroix-576227459
Two 3Dream/Mairy hairs for G1 layered together, Orion and Duarte:
http://xyshurondor.deviantart.com/art/Balak-gro-Bael-575880011
I've been relying on Unshaven 2 hair shaders, but I keep debating getting UHT shaders, too.
The big thing Unshaven 2 does NOT do is make variegated hair, which I sometimes do by hand but, well, workflow.
One thing I've definitely come to appreciate is how much stuff I can 'just do myself,' but it's still a huge benefit to have some tools that do the same thing much faster (and often in ways that I hadn't thought of)
That's my thing with it. I can manually adjust hair shaders, but I'm not going to choose to do so when I've got a product that does it for me much faster. Especially when, with good hardware, set-up time for a render can take longer than rendering (especially when it's a promo that has a product on a relatively plain backdrop).
The thing about good shaders is the ability to really breath life into old stuff.
I was impressed by what I was able to do with V4.2 with good shaders in Iray.
This, for example, didn't even take a huge amount of time to do: http://willbear.deviantart.com/art/Victoria-4-Iray-555463203
Have to agree with this 100%. Slosh's product completely ended my struggles with hair in IRay. Before that I was playing with various cutout opacity settings, switching out maps and layering one hair on top of the other which really only increased my render times and frustrated the living daylights out of me. Once I got the UHT Hair Shaders product, I could stop fighting with hair and go on to learning other things about rendering in Iray.
I've rarely seen a Poser item work 'just fine' in 3Delight. The surfaces look always terrible.
And it's not about what works or not and how well (even '3Delight' items occasionally look really bad in 3Delight, because they were set up badly or the textures are of low quality). It's just about whether or not an item does include special presets for this or that render engine. Whether the presets are any good or not, well, that's a matter of taste and of experience with the way our various PA's work.
...keep in mind it took Pixar nearly three years and writing proprietary software to create the hair for the film's main character Merida.
again i am surprised how much more character this V4 models have
ok she was my first love, so....
It seems to me, back to the original topic, that the new 'stylized' (read 'toon') Kids remind us that 'photoreal' renders are not always the goal. I am not using these characters myself, but I strongly suspect that if I were, I would be choosing 3delight rather than Iray for most or all of those renders.
...there's also a new set of wet maps out for Genesis/G2 with all promo pics rendered in 3DL.
UHT is a great product. Generally, the only adjustment I make after applying it is to remove the maps from the glossy and/or top coat to get better highlights in some cases.