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I know you can sorta do render passes in Studio, I played with it a bit a few months back. Nothing like what say, Carrara or Blender can do. However, Carrara's lack of support or updates makes me very leary to support the product. I believe anyother render option would need a great deal of money to plunk down, which is a shame for those of us that are hobbiest, even if I would like to head in a more professional direction.
Personaly, my favorite rederer is Cyray...
A render I'm currently postworking, hair is cycles, the rest is Iray (though with a lot of stuff made in blender) But yeah, no way to do that hair in Iray currently. I could of rendered it all in cycles, but I felt like it would be quicker to just postwork combine, and it was actially pretty painless Teleblender exports the cameras and light locations so it was super easy to match up. (only thing to note is that I had to manually adjust the camera focal length and frame width, but that was just copying some value) The rendering time for the hair was around 30mins, which for all the strands and detail is pretty excellent.
Only postwork on the hair is some color correction. I also painted the shadows underneath, there is a method for doing that more accurately, but Its going to be fairly postworked so I gust fudged it.
Oh yeah the clothing textures were made in krita too!
If you like the thread, make sure you consider subscribing to my Facebook page on art, as I will be putting some of the content up there to avoid this thread getting to derailed. I'm also setting up YouTube and eventually Twitter for anyone interested. I have a web site that I haven't done anything with that all of this will eventually work towards, but until I have the fundamentals worked out in the fluid environment of social media I don't see any advantage in coding a web page.
Anyways, that's the long term perspective. I want to evolve a community that works with various tools and concepts while still keeping a thread going here for people focused specificallly on Blender in relation to DAZ Studio.
Both do require setup of materials, that's the same when jumping from any render engine to another with the current standards and a choice between either takes into account many factors so there is no 'right' answer, but rather an right answer for a given person/workflow/situation. Lux might be the best engine for you. It definately is for many people.
There are a couple of things to clarify though here. In regards to speed, the article said that Cycles was slower but had fewer fireflys. Well, that's a contradiction since fireflys and render time are intimately connected so that statement alone invalidates the test. But there is another issue with any tests of this sort. Shaders vary quite a bit in how they test a render engine and what areas of the render engine are optimized or not. Any time we do a test like this, change the scene and/or the materials, we will find the results will change, often dramatically. There is no way to properly compare render engines except for in very limted test cases that only validate for said test cases.
My personal experience was that I got faster/better results with Cycles vs Lux but that really has no direct comparison to anyone else as my models, shaders and workflow will vary some from anyone else. Furthermore, it was for a limited set of tests which were enough for me but are by definition limted. Basically, I like Cycles because I like the workflow, the results, the flexibility it offers and how well it is integrated into the rest of Blender. Your point about being able to use the same materials and to some extent workflow between DAZ and Blender is a very valid point and would/should be the tipping point in favor of Lux for many people.
* There is another point about Cycles I forgot to mention. There are a plethora of shaders premade for Cycles available free. I'm aware there are for Lux also but not everyone is aware of that. When evaluating render engines, looking at the various shaders already available for free should be considered as not only do they offer a work savings directly but the offer a template for learning about shaders for anyone who is so inclined.
I'm not sure of the current status of things like particles, instancing, hair, etc... as far as what will carry over or not. The same goes for various add-ons. It's also something that changes from version to version somewhat between changes in the render engines and changes in Blender itself so your mileage may vary, which is one of the reasons many people stick with Cycles.
Actually, video editing compositors like Natron will also composite stills and is something to consider when looking at compositing options. A video compositor will have the same workflow for doing stills or animation and will have related plugins whereas an image editing program will have their associated tool set and plugins. As for which is easier, the video compositor is more of a straight compositor but many people have a background already in image editing programs (such as Photoshop) to consider.
This is an interesting program. I bookmarked that software to check it out later. I assume you could render your animation and use that program to add other special effects like smoke, fire, ect?
Yes.
That's interesting. I'm wondering what benefit using a plugin would have over exporting .exr files and compositing as a separate function since these are usually distinct steps in the workflow.
Ok, I'm updating my Facebook pages and am in the process of splitting some out so they are more focused. The page related to Blender, DAZ Studio and 3D Graphics in general (also including Unreal Engine, VR, Augmented Reality, etc...) is now on a seperate page called The 3D Dimension for anyone interested. Check it out if you get a chance and let me know what you think. Art of the Web will be focused on general art concepts and design principles.
wondering if anyone can figure this one out.
I created a model of the Shanghi Financial building, you can see it mapped in Blender but when exported to an OBJ (using default reset) and bring in to DS the map is gone plum loco!
I'm no expert but it looks like you might have some faces flipped.
no, but good looking out. I'm wondering if I stumbled on a bug
Who of us uses Blender for video editing? If you aren't familiar with that feature of Blender, or just want to check to see if there's any pointers check out this video by CG Geek.
I just realized I should probably point out something to people not familiar with advanced video work. There is something that is often very confusing, it definately was not clear to me for the longest time, and that is the concept of video editing vs compositing. They are actually two different beasts.
Editing is where we cut and stitch video together, combined with things like cross fades, adjusting speed, integrating or removing sound tracks, basically anything to do with the timeline. Compositing is where we do overlay work like green screen, special effects, etc.. similar to layers in Photoshop. We also do overall effects with color correction and similar tasks.
In going from start to finish in a project one will often go between these tools. We may cut initial footage into segments with an editor, bring into a compositor to overlay some special effects on pieces of the footage, do some color grading, add some film grain... Then, we might bring those pieces back into the editor to stitch them together, then back to the final composite to give an overall color grading and any final compositing effects to tie all the pieces together visually to make up a visual whole.
Blender has a video editor and compositor in it. They are two different tools with their own learning curve. Hopefully, if this is of interest to you, the learning will be an adventure.
Substance Painter 1.6 is out. Even if you don't use Substance painter, check out this quick video as I think you will be amazed.
Yup, updated in Steam and got the download for the program on my desktop. Still haven't had the time to really crack that egg shell. I actually know how to use Blender better and that's saying allot! lmao
Today on the FB page The 3D Dimension the focus is on VR. As Blender, DAZ Studio and related technologies move forward, at some point there will probably be an intersect for many here. Check it out and share your thoughts.
One nice aspect of using the Compositor in Blender for scenes rendered there is that it can use animation and depth data from the scene to add motion blur and other effects that might not be as easy to pull off in Photoshop. The Video Sequence Editor has some quirks, but if one has already mastered the Blender interface, it's not difficult to use. In fact, one way that I used the VSE was as a reference window for creating an animation. By stepping frame by frame through my animation with the video reference at the same frame number in another window, I was able to refine my keyframes more easily.
I posted a link to a good series on the VSE (Video Sequence Editor) in Blender on my 3D FB page for anyone interested.
Looks like Blender will be support Alembic format in the future: https://developer.blender.org/T37578
Daz sells a plug in for that right now. This will make bringing things into Blender to render/animate a LOT easier.
When you model in Blender, I always recommend keeping Backface Culling on (Properties tool shelf [N]>Shading), it allows you to see when you have flipped normals as they appear as alpha (don't work with double face on). In addition, it's important to apply rotations and scale. If the scale, in particular, are negative, you will get false readings on your normals. Rotations should read 0,0,0 in most cases, and Scale 1.0 on xyz. However, you must not set these values by hand, you must reset them by applying with the mesh selected in object mode, Ctrl A and select which to apply.
There are addons for Blender that you can purchase that are really quite nice. One such is Retopoflow by CG Cookie, who just put out a free course on using these tools for retopology.
https://cgcookie.com/course/introduction-to-retopoflow/
Thanks for shareing! I finally got my figures into Blender and am learning Cycles. It's fun and a bit more intuitive than I thought. Things like this might be of some use.
at appears I had to add the map to the texture tool in addition to the UVmapping room. I've never had to do this before but some user on the Blender forums pointed me to it. Oddly enough when I bring the object into the DS viewport the texture display is still mapped incorrectly even though the texture does not repeat, the object has one zone and no transparencies, and the horizontal/vertical tiling and offset are all default, and the blender OBJ export is defualt as well. Once I render in 3Delight the texture maps fine.
..and I think my GPU drivers are up-to-date but I'll check tonight.
Blender Conference 2015 videos are up now on YouTube for anyone interested. Of particular note is the Blender 2.8 Workflow Project by Ton, Blender and Cloth Moving Forward by Richard Colburn, How to Create Awesome Lighting in Blender by Expressing Yourself, by Gleb Alexandrov, and From Photographer to 3D Artist by Piotr Zgodziński
There were other presentations that were very interesting but it will depend on each person's particular interests as to which are the most applicable, so check them out and post any comments.
Loved the Blender and Cloth moving forward. He's got a great sense of humor and I was just wowed by his python based cloth development.
I was ignoring the conference, because I thought it was more about BF dev meeting notes (on a grander scale). I follow Blender closely, so I am pretty much aware of all that is going on, but I was in the dark with this one. Thank you, Gedd, for illuminating such wonderfulness.
The new cloth development is HUGE! I have been following small development of current Blender cloth advancements by coder Abertofx (cloth tearing, pinning, and possibly dynamic pulling/movement) for awhile now, but this news trumps everything I have seen since the cloth sew patch.
This will give us a direct competitor to Marvelous Designer for free (unless somehow implemented as add-on for purchase via Blender Market) based on Gerber's Accumark 10's 3D cloth simulation module, Accumark 3D. The commercial Accumark 3D software is built upon Blender's core the same way Fluid Designer built their software on top of Blender core. And, like FD, Gerber is releasing the code to Blender Foundation for GPL usage.
It's a win-win... Gerber will rake in the money with their proprietary add-on module for their fashion industry mogul clients, and we will reap the rewards of the coder's using Blender to create the software in. Now, it is just a matter of time, and how long it will be until we see the fruits of Richard Colburn's labor. I believe sometime in 2017, or possibly 2018. After all, FD has been out for approximately two years, and we haven't seen a drag-n-drop content library implemented into master, nor the parametric mesh building system. I am hopeful on all fronts though...
When in doubt about normals, Ctrl+N is your friend. You can also visualize and modify them one by one, see this video.