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...this is why I wish texture resolution could be done from within Daz. Sounds like I'd be spending a lot more time adjusting and baking maps than actually getting anything else done (especially If I am using a huge set by Stonemason or Ferval).
I completely agree! This was HUGELY helpful! Instead of fiddling with the Environment Map and Environment Intensity to try and get it to look right, this makes it look great in one easy step! Excellent tip! Thank you!
Thanks very much for that.
You say that you understand, but I don't think you do.
The problems are not with the HDRI, the problems are with the materials.
This post has bothered me since I first read it.
That is all.
NIce. Haven't used the auto exposure tool in a while myself. Should give it a whirl.
LOL, I understand it enough to know I won't spend alot more time studying it in depth. Basically HRDI promises more than it can ever deliver. If a camera could ever capture all the light in a scene and you could print that photograph out you'd basically have what HRDI promises and it'd look for all the world like you were looking through a window. Well for any camera made by people that's clearly never going to be the case. It's a physical and technical impossibility.
So I think DAZ Studio, while continuing to allow us to use HRDI, should create an artificial HRDI environment in DAZ Studio's renderer(s). They have elements of that already but I mean to make it much more expansive in the environments it can simulate and much more easily configured by people such as myself that really only know how to use a consumer digital camera and know weather reports only by cartoon pictures of sun & clouds & rain & snow. I posted a request for them to add such features in the DAZ Studio 5 feature thread but I think that's complex enough that it might take til the end of the DAZ 5 product cycle, provided they even have the confidence to try to program such an environment or see a business case for it because then after all that is something a lot of game engines would like to do a good job at as well although DAZ Studio is not as hindered by the lower HW & SW specs many of the game engines must publish to and maintain.
I didn't understand everything in The Elegant Universe, but I read it anyway. And then I read it again.
And then I read some other things to help me understand the things I didn't understand the first two times I read it.
And then I read it a third time.
I expect to read it a fourth time and a fifth time.
Why? Becuase I'm an armchair theoretical physicist?
No, because I find it interesting. Which is far below the level of absorption I have with 3D rendering.
There's a cure for ignorance.
What I didn't do, after reading The Elegant Universe, is write Dr Greene a letter asking him to lower his level of discourse so that I could keep up.
For Daz core audience of hobbyists, its delivers a pleasing result without too much work. Ray traced renderers also deal better with high poly counts, and displacement than do hybrid/scanline solutions.
True, Daz sells more of what sells well. Not really surprising.
I disagree with your analogy.
LMAO, I am now a vegan for a few years and some of the wierd chemicals you have to learn use to replace those forbidden gelatinous compounds from animals and eggs.
If you are not into texturing you should not get into it , there are too much stuff beside just displacement to make it work proper , and the subject is too long and will not profit you at all , beside just info about converting some maps if you going to do , Stonemason sets are created the way to take as little as possible space to the minimum as Stefan monitor very well what is going into the sets and I can render most of them using less than 4GB VRAM , the biggest VRAM consumption is by Genesis figures that really not need that big resolution of textures in most of your renders at all as your eyes will not notice the difference in first place , the focus shouod go on normal, bump and displacement maps and less on diffuse color skin that matter less in iray especially if you render just full figures dressed to the next , of course resolution slider would be the answer and the best solution to avoid manual re-scaling but hey if you take your hobby so serious you should get yourself better card soon with more VRAM and forget about, starting from GTX 1060 LOL slower but better already than single CPU
I re-scaled maps for a long time before iray to fit it in my old gtx but there was nothing better at this time .. now we have more choices for the lower budged
I fully agree with what Mec said, but the above bolded section should be "your eyes can not notice" because the information is simply not there. Beyond a specific distance from the camera (varies by parameters) the render engine will start scaling down the textures to match the size of the item. Some engines do this scaling before the texture is applied to the item, and others after the texture is applied. The net result is the same, much of the information is simply lost; thrown away in effect. Normal, bump, and displacement maps for skin features being applied to figures beyond this distance are nothing more than wastes of space because they simply cannot be resolved in the number of pixels available to show them. It's like taking a 16Kx16K image of an oil print and viewing it at 1920x1080 on a monitor. At 16K one can see the textures, the brush strokes, the slight rises and divots in the paint, and maybe even the grain of the canvas under the paint.. At 1080p, you see a single color pixel that best represents a large square of pixels averaged over several iterations (in this example ~4x15 pixels squashed into 1).
Kendall
Just FYI for the folks that are complaining because Iray "requires" an nVidia card for "realistic" renders; the latest version of Iray supports three render modes. Two of them are the modes that we see in DAZ Studio now, and the third, called Iray Realtime, seems to be intended for renders similar to what we can do with 3Delight.
+1 ... exactly , and my point was for people to let go a little bit , stop focusing on things that does not matter or will not make anything better , it is obsession that will deliver only satisfaction to your own mind and yours only , it is autosuggestion .. so free your mind and allow some emotions instead , to capture the hearts of the viewers .
and if you are on the edges of cutting your own ear here is something for you
Iray Prayer : Please grant me the serenity to accept the speed of my cards I cannot change. Courage me to change the rendering settings to improve my renders and the wisdom to know the difference... Amen !
You can't compare standard 3DL to Iray Realtime , maybe Uber Environment to Iray Realtime without Ambient occlusion and 50 times the speed .
plus there is nothing real time about in 3DL and the OpenGL does not counts .
This is what I find interesting is that, most of the posts now in this thread are how to do this and that with IRay which to me at least has derailed what this thread was about. In that the amount of products being released are Iray only..
...the first quote is not mine. I rarely if ever use HDRIs as Iray view mode runs like molasses on my system and eventually crashes the programme. Somehow my name got appended to it by a cut & paste error.
As to the second (which is mine) why is it so bothersome? I felt that suddenly things became a bit too technical. I never dealt with adjusting bit map resolution since I started in this.
All I wanted was an easier to understand explanation of what was being discussed. Mec4D provided that with good illustrations.
Unfortunately I don't have a modelling programme with the capability to handle the adjustment as it doesn't do surfacing, just basic UV mapping.
I come from a traditional art background that dealt with paints, brushes, graphite weights, and inks. Where you create surfaces by hand as you draw or paint the picture and don't have to worry about the impact on CPU, Memory, VRAM, and render time.
...thank you. The other part that discouraged me was when I did post pics of experiments, I received no feedback.
...the Pascal Titian X was just released with a 1,200$ price tag for an air cooled 12 GB card with an extra 500 CUDA cores than the Maxwell version.
However it is not just getting the card and plopping it on the MB, it is also having the system to support it. The best my current system will support is a Kepler 780 TI with 6 GB. To move to Maxwell or beyond would require a whole new build from the ground up to get the optimum performance. Not in the position for that right now unless I hit tomorrow night's Lotto..
My current card is useful only for running the displays and little more. At least with 3DL I don't have to worry about GPU performance, just playing hit and miss trying to make content with "Iray only" materials look right.
Iray isn't going to be for everyone, and I don't think it should be either. There are things 3DL can do which Iray can't and vice versa, so it's just another tool in the toolbox for me. I do understand why it's gained so much traction though, and why Iray materials have eclipsed 3DL materials in the store. What the market demands, the market gets. We often forget that while we may argue over the merits or otherwise of a product, it's the sales which paint the big picture, not words. Right now the safe money seems to be in Iray.
If I'm honest, I've used Iray pretty much exclusively since it was introduced in the 4.8 beta, even upgrading my graphics card to meet the demand. People mention how slow Iray is, but the truth is that if I wanted that same level of realism in 3Delight, I could expect similar rendering times (try using GI Bounce on UberEnvironment). Ultra-realism isn't always necessary though, and art takes many forms, so really you should just use the one you're most comfortable with.
I am not so sure about that. Recently, with most tech related markets, I feel they rather dictate their own rules and pace, and everyone has to tag along if they don`t want to be left behind.
As for Iray, personally I think it`s a fine addition to sit next to 3Delight but tbh. it`s pretty much the opposite direction of where I`d like to see Daz Studio go.
I attempted to comment on the content, without singling you out because that was not my intent, but rather the concept I felt your statement implied: "don't bother me with technical jargon tell me how to do it".
My apologies if you felt I was singling you out in some way for derision. I was not.
It's the problem with UberEnvironment, however. It was written too long ago, and likely using PRMan (original Pixar Renderman) tricks of that time, and its code has become obsolete. If you write a very simple new 3Delight shader for GI which uses modern 3Delight internal functions and use "scripted rendering" to issue a diffuse ray caching command, then a 3Delight render (CPU only) takes about 1/3 of the Iray time (CPU + a laptop GPU).
But of course, it's "not for everyone" either because hey, many people would gasp "OMG! Coding! So difficult!" and run away =)
Basically, from what I have seen on my laptop, LuxRender isn't much slower than Iray (if at all!), and there are _two_ plugins for DS, one of them is even quite affordable when on sale (Luxus), so there are even more choices.
And then there is Octane for those with extra income.
And for those who like to tinker and aren't ready to spend a lot of money, there are Blender Cycles and mCasual's helper export scripts, all free.
And when exporting to other software, a whole universe of other rendering solutions, both production renderers and archviz tools and anything in between.
But.
My belief is: whatever your renderer of choice is, if you want to think of yourself as a "serious artist" - even if it's just a hobby - you _must_ know how to create good-looking materials from existing textures, all by yourself. It's not like it's 100% impossible with what DS has right now: just look at Wowie's work, using the UberSurface2 shader from the store.
The skills that this creative freedom requires, now they may well take time to develop.
Like any other skills.
See, I may have a certain advantage over a lot of people here because I have a degree in physics. But there are people here who have a degree in arts, and this way, they have a great advantage over me. What do I do? Well, I go online and study examples of classical painting; I buy books and try learning the basics of watercolours; in short, I try to bridge the gap between me and a real artist.
It's not really easy, y'know.
So artists may want to bridge the gap between themselves and a physicist. Because a little physics takes you a long way setting up good materials.
And a little coding helps everyone who ever used a computer.
I'm not going to argue over any of this because I know for a fact you cannot persuade an adult unless they want to be persuaded - but this is simply what I believe in.
...not so much tell me exactly how to do it, just explain it in a way that is a bit more understandable.
I can see not bothering an author of a book to simplify what he wrote, but this is a community of 3D artists. Most of us don't make a living at this like an author does.
When I look to explain a technical process, I try my best to write it in a way (often presenting examples, using more common terms and analogy) that is more "accessible" to someone with little technical background. In my job I had to do this a lot as I was one of the few in the plant who actually understood computers (even my co manager and the CEO were baffled especially when one of the IT people tried to explain a process to them). I was often praised for my ability to write up processes that were easy ti understand. Yes it is hard work, but if I am here to share my knowledge, I feel it is only right to not talk in jargon, over one's head, or down to them but instead, explain it on a level they can comprehend.
...@ Mustakettu85. I burned out on coding almost two decades ago (did it for a living). Most of these new scripting languages I've seen do not teach or demand good programming style. If I wanted to code graphics, I would have done it from the beginning over thirty years ago. However I was one of those traditional media artists who saw the process of writing reams of code as anything but "creative". At the time I dreamed of programmes like Daz and Carrara that would let the artist grab hold of this new media and take it to another level. Eight years ago I discovered it actually existed.
I don't have the tools to create my own materials nor can afford them. I am working with Hexagon as a modeller as at least it lets me learn polygon and vertex modelling without a lot of other things getting in the way. All it includes is a UV mapping tool.
Iray at first was a "nice shiny", offering more realistic looking results that came close to the big ticket pro software without the big ticket price. However as I began to work more with it I was seeing render times (CPU only) that not only bordered on but exceeded 3DL with GI (particularly interior scenes). Along with that came the fact that some of the older shaders didn't translate well even using Iray Uber. IT came down to a lot of trial and error as well as countless test renders that made me feel more like I was spinning my wheels instead of creating an image.
I have an old system, the best I can upgrade my GPU to is a GTX 780 TI (no longer produced). To get better, as I mentioned, I need to build an entirely new system. Unless I get some kind of small windfall that won't happen anytime soon. While I like Octane's concept (I can get away with a less beefier = less expensive GPU), its price tag pretty much puts an end to that as well.
So now in order to go back to 3DL and use new content that has IRay only shaders, I have I effectively have to become a PA who designs shaders. That is not what I got into this for.
iRay is very good, but Reality with Luxrender is much better in almost every aspect. Luxrender has made great improvements on speed. It's not expensive.