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Thank you!
+1, even though I no longer use 3DL, it's very thoughtful!
Go over to the scripting forum, you'll find the basics you need. Its not hard, really; Get the object, iterate through the surfaces, store the variables, apply the shader, write the options from the variables.
Its going to be interpreting those variables that is going to be cumbersome. Good luck, Will!
I wonder if Daz would let you do a kickstarter for this, Wll???
I usually only use Daz as a starting image to pull into Corel Paint...and I miss the clarity and sharpness of 3 Delight renders. Most of what Iray does, I can do myself in photoshop.
I Ray is great in it's own way, but I'd definately pay good money for new 3 Delight Shaders.
Not sure you would need Daz's permission to raise funds for third party coders to make what is essentially third party content.
Whet is the "quick fix" to convert 3DL to Iray?
That Studio does it on the fly for you. You don't really have to do anything. If you want to alter the materials its a good idea to apply the Uber Base (could someone go back in time and tell the guy who wrote that Uber Light shader for Renderman that he was going to have an effect on naming for decades to come and to please come up with a different name?), but you can just leave the 3DL shaders in place and Studio will convert them on the fly as it sends the information to the renderer.
Not all 3DL shaders are converted only uber or DS default, and not always very well often specular/gloss is bad and then of course theres the displacement settings, really its not a quick fix.
You're right, not all, and its not perfect. I'm certainly not touting it as the end-all-be-all... I don't believe in quick fixes, for the most part; they are generally not all that complete.
When I've tried to render 3DL characters in Iray, they always come out very pale. I think I need a tutor. Anyone available in Eastern PA/Western NJ?
Yes, I'm one of the PAs that has fully embraced Iray and pretty much dropped doing 3DL texture sets. Both of the render engines have their strengths and weaknesses. Some are in opposition to one another. Not just at the point of texturing, but at the point of project viablility and inception. Exploiting these strengths of the render engine starts with the base mesh modeling in many cases.
If I try to build, model or even concieve for both render engines, one or the other can potentially limit being able to do, in some cases, the item period and in many other cases throttles what can be done. Yes, in many cases texture conversions can work, but in many cases there could be a substantial loss of quality or a huge degradation of render speeds. Here are just a couple of quick benefits to Iray: 1. Poly count has little effect on render time until you get insane. 2. Iray handles transmaps so well that I don't notice any speed change. I'm not trying to slam 3DL. These are just a couple of the differences that can make some of my products render painfully slow in 3DL. I don't want to deliver that type of product. So the alternative is in many cases not just a second texture set, but a second product... or... skip the strengths and not have the same quality in the one product... with one engine or the other.
Lastly. I'm not saying this is always the case, it just can be the case. It does depend on what is being modeled and the end goal. Now... when is 3DL going to get PBR added? :)
3Delight already has "physically plausible materials" from what I understand, but they have not come to Studio yet because no one is writing the shaders. whatever happened to Omnifreaker and Pendragon and who was the guy that did all the pwShaders... I loved his stuff.
If you have 25 years on this camp, you should already know how things works in 3D.
tweaking shaders is a common task AND a "must to know how to do" for anyone involved in 3D software.
If they're like me, there just isn't enough time to do it. My RiSpec coding time is close to Nil now because of other "more pressing" needs.
Kendall
Do you really think that is why? Or do you think it is perhaps because the 3dl users regularly cite the non realistic aspects as the reason they continue to use 3dl? Why prioritize something that the few remaining 3dl users say they don't want.
As is learning how to properly use the lights in the Render Engine being used. This includes learning all of the ins-and-outs of the settings. Presets are only supposed to be a starting point.
Then there are camera settings. Some things translate fairly well between engines, most do not. Few people seem to want to learn how to apply the correct settings for the type of scene they're trying to create -- even simple things like depth-of-field.
As with photography, coding, makerspacing, (insert hobby here) there are things that need to be learned and researched.
Kendall
My issue is that Daz is putting all their eggs into one single Iray lit basket. Iray does some great things, but it also has some very high negatives. If Iray was so great, why isn't an industry standard? Iray is horrible for animation, you'll never finish rendering a movie. Iray is poor for dark lit areas. Iray doesn't do special effects all that great. Sure, you can do some of these things, but many people don't have all day to leave their computer tied up running a render of a single picture. If you want to do any of these, you are better off using something else, and Daz is not offering that. For free software, they are pushing their product out of the average consumer's price range considering the high cost of a machine that can is practical for iray. That doesn't make a lot of sense, does it?
And when something comes along that surpasses Iray, Daz is going to be stuck in a corner stuff holding that basket. A basket tied to a single graphics card manufacturer. You better hope Nvidia doesn't decide to give up on iray, or decide they don't want to license it out to Daz anymore.
+1
Unfortunately, DAZ and the PA's are coming too close to providing the "Make Art" button, I would venture to guess that most of the users now never even touch materials/shaders, and for the most part use canned light sets. There is nothing wrong with this as long as you can buy everything that meets your needs, but it does greatly limit what you can do if there isn't some sort of preset available.
I don't believe DAZ is putting all their eggs in one basket. They still are paying for 3Delight to be in the software. I haven't seen anything saying DAZ is locked in to using only Iray. There are ways to speed up rendering in both Iray and 3Delight, but there are those who are clueless, even after numerous threads have been posted showing how. You can use Octane if you need more speed or memory. You can buy a better graphics card. There are ways of using compositing which fall on deaf ears or blind eyes. If you have a problematic dark scene, render part of it in 3Delight and composite with what you've rendered in Iray. It just takes a little thinking and planning, and being open to different possibilities.
If you need special effects, use what works best and composite them in. That's what the studios do.
...however, converting surfaces using the built in Iray Uber shaders before rendering saves a bit of render time as the engine no longer needs to make the conversions.
...applying the Uber IRay shaders to surfaces before rendering is quciker than having to go the other way.
Select item in the scene tab, click "expand all" from selection, click "Select Children" (these two steps only necessary for large sets or props that have multiple parts), open the Surfaces Tab, click on the triangle to expand, then click on the item (which will select all the surfaces forall the parts) then apply the Iray Uber Base shader. To use individual Iray shaders like glass or metal, yes it does involve a bit more, but you don't have to mess with individual surface parameter settings.
...Iray doesn't handle thin or wispy 3DL hair transmaps well. You often have to change the maximum parameter setting of Cutout Opacity above 1 and then run test renders to see which setting works the best so the character doesn't look like a victim of radiation exposure. If you have Slosh's UHT 2 it includes tools in the Utilities folder that do this.
Again a lot of us don't have the resources for a system that would efficiently support Iray rendering and don't care to wait days for rendering to complete in CPU mode. Unlike Reality/Lux and Octane everything has to stay open (the scene file and Daz programme) until the rendering is complete taking up a greater amount of system resources and for many, making the system useless for any other task. I certainly don't want my workstation tied up like that for days.
Octane and Lux can also run in background mode as well as be paused, closed, then opened at a later time to resume rendering. Iray can be paused to adjust tone mapping & such, but again the Daz programme and scene file need to stay open or the render process is aborted.
It is interesting that a scene I tested in both engines which had a lot of transmaps, reflectivity (and in the 3DL version used SSS) rendered in 3DL (using the AoA lights) in less than one eighth the time it took in Iray (and I manually applied the appropriate Iray shaders before rendering so it didn't have to do it on the fly).
My personal Experience with both Blender Cycles (via MCteleblend) and LUX (via realty),indicates that most of those 1990's era transmapped hairs look like rubbish in all the PBR engines ..........not just Iray
...the issue with buying a new GPU (pretty much a necessity for Iray unless you are content with not using your system for hours or even days) is it is expensive if you want optimal performance (meaning a card with a lot of memory). If you have an older system there can be compatibility issues that would actually reduce the performance (for example my system's MB has only two PCI 2.0 x16 slots) or cause conflicts, so it pretty much means building an entirely new system as well. Short of winning tonight's Megabucks Lotto, I don't see that as a reality anytime soon.
About the only thing I use Iray for anymore is for proofing characters and fairly simple scenes, most of which are outdoors due to the lengthy amount of time it takes to render indoor scenes. I pretty much cap most render jobs at 4 - 5 hours. If it can't be done in that time frame (usually run overnight) the scene ends up in the WIP folder and I go to 3DL. (I set up two scene files one for 3DL and then make a copy for Iray though it is becoming increasingly difficult to create the 3DL one due to the more new content being released for Iray only).
I can undertand how people are deaf, blind and clueless to and about so much of the information posted in the forums. Often I'm only enlightened myself when someone asks a question I don't know how to ask, and someone else provides a link to a specific post in a thread that runs to hundreds of pages and thousands of comments. With the time I have available and the resources currently at my disposal, that's what I am relegated to when it comes to learning from the forums. Thanks to those who make it available anyway.
I'm greedy. I want the best of both worlds, so I can't wait to be able to use Iray effectively and efficiently. I like the idea of having everything I can incorporate in my arsenal. I sympathise with people who can't afford the you beaut technology and I just feel sorry for people who are as dislexic as I am when it comes to navigating the virtual world looking for information on anything at all.
...In one work which I rendered in Lux I was using Osean Hair and it came out fine. In Iray it looked as if the character had taken a high dose of rads as it was all thin and stringy. That was also after I applied the Iray base shader manually to the hair. The only solution was to increase the Cutout Opacity beyond 1.0.
I have to depend on the content resoruces I have I don't have 1,000s to spend on new Iray content nor on a system that supports total GPU rendering. It seems like it is coming down to the choice of either get on board with Iray or be prepared to be left behind on your own.
..exactly. I don't care to spend hours if not days slogging through long threads to glean information (particularly with the poor search engine the forums have) especially when it seems the discussion is going to minute extremes. The Fiddling with Iray skin Shaders thread is an example where it was becoming totally incomprehensible as people were discussing very tiny nit picky details. I ended up unsubscribing from it because it just seemed to be too much to digest and remember.
I also am dyslexic as well as have a poor retention rate when it comes to video learning. I find myself spending far more time just replaying a video over and over again than I do actually working on the issue at hand. There are times it makes me feel I am getting nowhere in spite of all the effort. Unfortunately I am a minority in this respect, se no amount of requesting PDF tutorials is going to get anywhere. Makes me feel as if we are heading towards a Fahrenheit 451 type of scenario where, while books may not necessarily be banned, but for the most part the vidscreen takes precedent over the printed word.
I'll still do it all though. Whatever it takes because I want it that bad. It will just be more difficult and take waaaay longer. :) In learning Blender, Gimp and DS, frustration has become my friend. It means I'm getting somewhere.