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Comments
Yep, Fantastic image. And thanks for sharing how you made it as well.
Thanks Platnumk and you're welcome!
Cheers,
Lyne
:)
WHen I press crtl+R, it launches iray rendering :/
I have reality installed (I put a button of it next to the render camera icon), but only the text "render using reality..." comes. No icon like in your tutorial videos.
You have to be in Reality for that to happen. All the tips in this thread refer to Reality. If you are in Studio then the keystrokes for Studio will be applied.
Cheers.
I have seen a few people asking if they could use LAMH with Reality. The answer is YES. The tutorial below was created by sigstan
This tutorial covers how to make LAMH and Reality work together. Tired of naked plastic animals? - Then learn how to put some fur on your animals using the free LAMH player and Reality.
This is more or less a straight conversion of my old tutorial from RDNA Reality forum.
Enjoy.
Thank you very much Kim.
Mac OS users rejoice!
Last year I posted an article denouncing the fact that the OpenCL device drivers included with Mac OS were old and broken. Because of that, LuxRender could not render using the GPU on Mac OS.
That article was also an open letter to Tim Cook, who I had previously emailed asking him to fix the situation. In that occasion I invited the readers to email Mr.Cook as well and a lot of you did exactly so. About two days later I received a phone call from an Apple manager. Incredible isn’t it? Feeling a little apprehensive, I asked him how did they find me so quickly. I mean, he called my cell phone directly. He replied: “You are a registered developer with Apple.” Which, of course, I am, so there was nothing nefarious about Apple finding my phone number. So much for the conspiracy theories.
We discussed the issues about GPU rendering in Mac OS and worked together in testing any new builds of Mac OS. A lot of progress showed up but, at that time, I could not test the new improvements on a proper setup because I never change the OS or the development tools when I’m in the middle of development. Experience proved that doing that can be disastrous and add considerable time to the release date. So I used a laptop instead of my main machine, which is a MacPro with AMD 7950 in it. The laptop uses one of those mobile GPUs, which are never good enough for this kind of tasks. That machine could render some simpler scenes but it would fail at the “Hotel” benchmark of LuxBench. Then I moved to South Carolina and more obstacles added to the busy schedule.
Today I was finally able to install Mac OS 10.11.5, El Capitan on my main desktop system, and I immediately tested the OpenCL rendering. The result is visible in the figure below.
The Hotel scene used to always crash under Mac OS and so this is a good indication of how stable GPU rendering is now. In addition I used the “Stress test” mode of LuxBench to really load the GPU. It worked like a charm.
I did also some testing of my own, using Reality with multiple figures and everything seems to be working well. So, if you want to use GPU rendering with Reality and Mac OS you need to update to the latest version and make sure that you have support for at least OpenCL 1.2. This last thing is very easy to verify: just look in Reality’s Render | Scene Configuration pane and you will see the details about the OpenCL driver.
There is nothing to do about Reality to make this work, the program does not need any update. Just make sure that you have version 4.3 installed and you will all set. The rest is simply to update Mac OS to the latest version, which today is 10.11.5. I’m testing the beta of 10.11.6 on another machine.
So, great news for Macintosh users, and thank you Apple for listening to your customers.
Reality makes it easy to create special texture effects without having to use complex node systems or Photoshop. If you have even a moderate amount of experience using DAZ Studio or Poser you can use this tutorial and benefit from the techniques shown in here.
Procedural Textures
A texture is a graphic pattern applied to a surface. You need to really understand this concept. If you thought that a texture is an image file then you need to drop that definition and re-read what I wrote at the beginning of this paragraph. A texture is a graphic pattern applied to a surface. Nowhere in that definition we see the word “image” or file. It does not matter how you create the pattern, as long as you are able to paint pixels on 3D geometry. Think of a texture as a square of a given resolution–512×512 20 2048×2048 for example–with RGB pixels in it.
In the simplest case, a solid color is a texture, where all pixels in the square have the exact same RGB value. A jpeg image can indeed be a texture. In that case it’s called an “image map.” But we can also have textures that are generated on the fly, by software, following some special mathematical model. If you ever heard of fractals, that’s the idea behind procedural textures. A procedural texture is a software-generated image that can be adjusted via parameters, instead of being the same fixed image every time that you use it.
Reality provides several procedural textures and they are often used to drive the Mix texture. The idea behind texture mixing is that we can mix two textures together and we can determine where each texture shows and where there will be a mix of the two. The Mix texture has three main components:
The third parameter can either be a number or another texture. If we use a number then we can set it at 0 to show only the first texture, or to 1.0 to show only the second texture. Obviously, these two extremes are are not very useful. But, if we set the number, for example, to 0.5 then we will obtain a texture that is has a perfectly equal mix of the two input textures. The mix will be 50% of the first plus a 50% of the second texture. While using a fixed numeric value can help in several situations, it’s clear that mixing texture with a single number has limitations.
That’s why the texture mixing can be driven by a texture. Wherever this texture is black the first texture will show. Wherever the mix texture is white, the second texture will show. And grey values will cause a mix of the two texture proportionally to the darkness of the color. Let’s see this in action.
Practical example: sick skin
Let’s add a Genesis 2 Female figure to a scene, and call Reality. We will work on the Face material, which is, by default, like this:
That’s all there is to it! Congratulations, you have created a “sick skin” procedural texture without using nodes and without Photoshop. Think of the possibilities that you can have by using this approach with other materials like Metal or Glass.
This technique can be used to create many texture effects, like lava, by using red and orange Color textures, or to create interesting fabrics by using the Distorted Noise or Clouds textures for the mixing. This example shows how simple is to create this kind of effects with the Reality material editor.
Cheers!
Per-Texture Copy & Paste
Reality 4.3 includes a very handy new featre: copying and pasting of single textures. This feature adds flexibility to your workflow and makes it possible to customize materials with ease and speed.
Here is a short video that shows how it works:
Enjoy!
BTW, we are accepting special requests :)
If you are wondering on "how can I do this with Reality?" please post your questions here and I will do my best to give you a practical solution.
Cheers.
One of the tricks I've been using is to attach (child) a spot to each mesh, placed slightly behind. If I was really clever, I would slave the spot angle to the snoot (I'm not that clever, so I haven't). The mesh light is set to cast no shadow in preview, so in my Poser scene, the spots are positioned and pointed to where the meshes are, giving me an easy approximation of the final render's lighting. The Poser spots are not used to render in Lux.
Anyway, this easy technique certainly helps get an idea of what things will look like when I'm moving lights around in a scene :)
Hi.
Not sure if it is covered before anywhere. I am looking to render a seaside scene, but the water mat is all smooth throughout. How do I add in something like sea foam at the edge of the shoreline?
I know there can be more work done with the lightning as well, but the sea foam thing is the more pressing issue right now.
It might be faster and easier to just paint some in in post. Some great free water and foam brushes on DA: https://www.deviantart.com/art/Water-Photoshop-and-GIMP-Brushes-37338369
I hope you don't mind, I did a quick mock-up to show you what some of the brushes can do. I'm sure you could do a better job with it though. :)
Does anyone know if the current version of Reality is the final one or if I should be keeping an eye open for updates/new versions?
Darn that's really awesome, Divamakeup.
Thank you.
I'm glad you weren't offended with me painting on your lovely render! :) Excellent work by the way! I really like that render!
Reality is on version 4.x so yes the store version is current. There has not been an update for a while, I dont think we will see another until the luxrender people release an update.
Glad to see some posts on this topic - some great tips here!
You might also try telescoping the light, it can produce some very interesting results. To do this, you need to create two shapes like lenses, one concave and one convex. Place them inside the tube (in other words, you're making a telescope). Be sure the shapes are glass textured. Place the light in the tube behind the lenses. Now play with the settings for the glass, morphing, etc etc etc. Have fun!
I am using this techique to focus some headlights in fog in a render I have been working on. Reality and Lux is so flexible you can also change focal length by adjusting the refractive index of the glass.
It is amazing that you can actually do optics inside Luxrender, Poser, etc. If you make a crystal ball, you can arrange lights, etc. so that the ball focuses an image on a table, for example.
Wow, that came out amazingly well!
Some notes over in the Carrara group indicate some new (and fairly active) development on luxcore. I wonder if Reality will be tracking this.
@Divamakeup, and @shinteo5 - the result of your ad-hoc collaboration is quite striking.
cheers,
--ms
lol Don't credit me, guys. It was all @Shinteo5 :) I barely did anything. But thank you for the lovely comments! :D
I have a guestion, how do I get some fur on clothes or on a teddy bear in reality.
The tutorial above is very good, but I was never able to do this with Reality/Luxrender because GPU driver updates "broke" GPU rendering for me. After version 1.6x, Luxrender kind of faded away, but is being revived with a rewrite based on LuxCore. Luxcorerender 2.1 is out and I believe there will be hair/fur support at some point. Paolo is going to post a timetable for an update to Reality for Luxcorerender sometime this year.
good to kow, just as I was starting to think of going back to using Reality again.