Show Us Your Iray Renders. Part IV
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Sweaty skin..... lets try this slider, lets try that slider .... finally got sweat but the skin on the face is kinda weird looking. Using just CPU to render over an hour and a half not sure exactly.
Hello, I want to thank Daz for the awesome free Studio program and the recent inplementation of IRay. Skin shading has never been easier and faster with IRay.
http://tourqeglare.deviantart.com/art/Long-Night-547050399
Getting the hang of it.
This is different though, that's for sure.
These images have a great look to them, Spit! The colors are fantastic on both of them. Very vibrant & 3 dimensional, though the grain is unfortunate (especially since the rest of the images are so smooth). Rather predictable where it's going to rear its head (see it in many Iray renders). Seems like Iray should be able to identify these areas ahead of time and shoot some extra rays that way!
Again, awesome images.
- Greg
Luxrender (at least the older versions I've used) has a "brush" feature where you can paint over an area you want it to concentrate on. Maybe they could add that to Iray. From reading the programmers documentation, though, I have not seen a feature mentioned that allows for this.
Aiko4
..very pretty. I like the look of the skin.
She is using my SSS shader # 9
I did another shot, this time with Optitex Dynamic Cloth.
Thanks for the comments, Greg. I really have to be careful with the grain and train my eye better. I have a hard time seeing it even when it's pointed out in other images which is a little scary
But I'll keep at it!
I don't know if this is any help (or if it is even true, to be honest), but...
With both Iray and Luxrender I have noticed that grain is more likely to appear when there are extreme differences in light. I.e. a very bright light behind some objects with the front only being lit by the indirect light. This seems to be an effect of the tone control struggling to make sense of the light input.
Related to this I have noticed that grain will appear if the overall lighting is extremely low and the tone control is bringing things up to a visible level.
As I said, this is just my observations from experimentation, so I could be completely wrong.
Jason that seems about right. Indirect light is the main cause and needs more cooking for all the light to get bounced around this is why some like to use a little fill light to help it along which not only helps with the noise but also shortens render time. Now grain is different to noise. Grain is part of a photo which many unbiased render engines will produce. Noise is normally a combination of high gloss and indirect lighting.
Szark, thank you for pointing that out. Too often I see people pointing out grain as noise on this forum. Photoreal has grain.
A question please. Why is 9000x13500 "art quality?" That's even beyond the resolution of a current medium format camera and wel beyond the resolution need for "art quality" photographic prints in sizes like 17"x22".
Not a challenge, just looking for perspective.
In this day of diminishing film photography, the pedantic fights between "Grain" and "noise" seem academic at best and irrelevant at worst. From my perspective Iray in low lighting produces color noise that is virtually identical to high iso noise from a digital camera. Also the grain visulaizers remind me of the pixel peepers in the digital photogrpahy world. Generally not a practical consideration at normal viewing. Kind of like complaining about the resolution in a Monet painting when viewed from 6 inches.
It's almost certainly overkill and I don't know if anyone will ever buy it except myself and my mom... but that size allows a high quality 30x45 canvas print from Deviantart. ;)
I said this before in another thread and was 'told off' for saying it...but it's true. From a mathematical viewpoint, it's all noise and the difference between grain and noise boils down to whether or not it was intentional/desired. If it's not...then it's just noise.
This is exactly correct. "Grain" put in as an effect in image software is a type of noise in digital post processing. Noise from a digital camea is functionally different in that it comes from the sensor but as was mentioned it ends up very much like the noise we get when rendering software hasn't processed long enough. I think that in digital images, Grain = intentional noise for effect and the rest is just noise pretty much sums it up.
If anyone wonders why someone would want to put noise into an image, there are a couple of reasons right off the top. One, to simulate old time photos, and two, to tie together composites which have different sources, some rl, some digital for instance, where the rl might have a bit of inherent grain in the image.
Digital processing software such as OnOne have carefully created the various noise patterns that they use as grain filters, and in the case of OnOne for instance, there are many to choose from. Using a grain filter from such software can give various artistic effects to the final image, from a soft ethereal effect to a grunge effect.
This points out an interesting concept that I think many 3D artists overlook, photographic post processing software can with simple to apply presets extend the range of the artists results greatly. It is not cheating to use all of the tools available to get a final result. We don't always have to render to the point of total convergence (or even close) in some cases if the effect we are going for doesn't need it and post processing software will obscure any imperfections on the route to where we intend on ending up with our work.
I recommend all artists to look at software like OnOne, Snapseed/Nik, Filter Forge, etc.. for what they can do to take our art to the next level. Post processing isn't cheating, and it doesn't have to be as complicated as having mastered Photoshop. It can be as simple as clicing on different presets to get a preview of what applying a given preset might do with our image. The creative part is finding the preset or stack of presets which express our vision for our image.
I've started doing post processing to enhance the look I want in my webcomic, go for a slightly illustrated-looking style.
Anyway, here are two shots of a hobgoblin soldier.
That ended up more orcish than I was intending. Here's more hobgoblin-ish...
Having been a photographer since the late 60s, I wouldn't group digital noise with film grain. One is an abberation, the other a physical property of the medium itself. I don't see Iray's "grain" (which is really pixels that haven't converged yet) looking anything like film grain, and I would cringe that people start using it as that. Hopefully that's not the suggestion. Iray's grain tends to show mostly in extreme tones -- whites and shadow -- which was not the case with film. You'd seldom see grain on black or very dark objects, which would be solid tone, and it persisted across all grays and into white.
There are some filters that add respectable "film grain" effects, and some are modeled after famous films, like TriX, PlusX, and Ektachrome. Some are better than others, but any of them will look better than settling for the noise in an incompletely converged render.
But iunless they say, explicitly, that they are actually sampled from real pieces of film, they are still 'noise'...yes, they are desired, carefully crafted, but at the end of the day...
But, to be clear, they both are noise, as in both cases it's not a property of the object being filmed or rendered.
- Greg
Exactly the sky if not cooked long it will have grain. The indirect lighting "noise" just takes long to cook out but generally I find if the surfaces are set up correctly the noise disappears before the sky grain.
Yes, they are "noise" in that they are both random elements of the recording medium (though, I believe Iray "grain" is not random, but follows a coverage algorithm). But that's about as much in common that they do share!
The sampled film grain is fine -- I had some I scanned on my old HP smart scanner years ago -- as long as it respects the appearance of the grain at different tonalities. The filters, using textures or not, that apply the grain broadband are behind the times. An active filter, like FilterForge, could probably do a better job procedurally because it can do things like change the apearance based on luminance, alter the grain at sharp outlines, that sort of thing. Some intelligent filter that combined both a real texture and computed algorithm would be the best.
Fastbike, you're right that film photography is diminishing as a process to record images, but its cultural influence is still strongly felt. So we see, often overdone, film effects like sepia toning, scratching, jumping gate, splices, and other artifacts to make it look like "film." For pop art, much of this doesn't have to be physically accurate, just impart the impression. So this is not a purists' thing, unless you're adding it for realism, in which case unconverged pixels don't look like film grain. A good grain filter can do that much better.
...I'll have to wait until Daz gets online rendering up and running to do those sizes.
Or come up with the funds for building my duo 8 core Xeon, 4 Titan-X, 128GB Colossus Workstation (and possibly a liquid nitrogen cooled box to put it in).
I edited this comment as I do see someone referred to IRay noise as grain. Yes, the noise in an incomplete render is not 'grain.' If someone is intending to add a post production filter like grain, they may not have to let it come to the same level of convergence because the 'noise' may blend in with the post production 'grain' so that it is not visible.
Yes, as in it was a grainy image in spots - I did not say anything about film grain. lol
From the Full Definition of GRAIN from merriam-webster.com:
...
4a : a granulated surface or appearance
- Greg
If I render a bottle of whiskey, will that make you guys shut up about grain? (I keed! I keed!)
Kyoto: I was actually able to render a 9000x13500 scene in 34 hours, which was... doable. Barely. But it was a single figure scene (though I used fog effect and so on)
Several people on this page alone specifically use the term "grain" when describing what they see in Iray. So I'm not sure where you got this idea.
I agree it's possible to mask the noise from an Iray render using a film grain filter, as well as using other types of filters. But isn't that already obvious? Applying even a simple filter in Photoshop is going to hide the smaller details. I think most of us first want to see how good we can make the renders, then once that science is down, apply the creative brushstrokes after.
LOL Tea please