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...Gimp and Daz are in my workflow, as is Carrara, Hexagon, and PSP. Blender, well after several tries over the years to wrap brain around it's UI and hotkey driven setup, I threw in the towel as I was learning zilch about modeling in the process.
...if I can get the funds up, I may just go the Octane route as it will allow for a less beefy (read less expensive) GPU and it also works with Carrara.
With the Maxwell Titan-X apparently out of production (and suddenly out of stock seemingly) there is no monster GPU available for Iray rendering unless you have 5 grand burning a hole in your pocket for a Quadro M6000 (or trust buying a used one).
"..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 actually use both. And I do want to know how, and have spent many hours trying to learn. But I too have walked away sometimes and just felt like my brain was going to explode. I am more than willing to learn but I also want to actually spend time on making art. I have a day job, I have a family that would like to see more of me than just the back of my head as I work on the computer at night. I like to spend some time outside in the summertime... And I like the look that 3delight gives and for me, its far more intuitive to set up the lighting than Iray has been. don't know why but it is. I am learning as much as I can about textures and shaders and everything else but its honestly very overwhelming in Iray sometimes.
3DL users will have to learn to convert everything apparently. For skins it's not hard... for clothes maybe not so difficult... for environment sets with hundreds of material zones... it's a no go for me. Then take into account the long-term loyal customers who have all the old content that would have to be converted to IRAY if one used IRAY. Where 3DL doesn't need much conversion... specular mainly. The entire IRAY thing assumes every customer wants photorealism. Maybe the majority do. I'm gonna be very picky with my purchases from here on out. Which sucks because all the vendors make fabulous stuff
Yeh, my whole computer has to come in under 5 grand, and that's a big budget for many, not including exchange rates and not possible without help.
Blender started to make sense for me when I started using DS. I tend to progress in bursts between one and the other alternatively. Blenders UI is as comprehensive as everything else in Blender. For me now, it has its panes that equate to those in DS, and a whole bunch besides. I found I only learn the hotkeys effectively when I use them a lot for long enough and make sure they're burned into the brain. Both Blender and DS have menus full of stuff I know nothing about - yet. I guess I'm lucky that when I find a good video tutorial for either application I generally can convert it pretty effectively into useable knowledge. They are just limited in number and hard to find.
I didn't know what a bookmark was before I started all this. I know I'm in the vast minority where things like that are concerned, but perhaps an indication that the obstacles faced by people are many and varied. When I can use Iray, I'm confident it will be no more difficult than 3Delight to learn, and mastery will be relative. I'll just be happy when the render doesn't take a week to complete. :)
I'm hoping to try my hands at a Iray -> 3DL script. But I'm not familiar with the language, and I'm a bit nervous that nobody's done it yet because it's really hard, and, well.
@Will - when you convert an IRAY to 3Dl do you wipeout the full shaders and start fresh or tweak the each setting? In Poser ( that I'm used to ) it's more straight forward... but with all the multiple hidden layer stuff in DS4 I'm not sure how to proceed.
DAZ added that link to your name - not me :P
...skins, yes just apply an old skin (unless you are using G3). I can simply use the SSS skin shader to overwrite the Iray one.
Complex sets like something by Stonemason, that is another whole kettle of fish as you just can't simply convert to a "3DL Base" like you can from 3DL to Iray with a couple clicks as different surfaces will have different properties. The trick when converting to the Iray base shader is to hold down the CTRL key when clicking on the Uber Base Shader then selecting "ignore:" in the pop up dialogue. This will not replace the textures but converts them to Iray format as evidenced by the change in the surfaces control sliders (this is the "quick fix" I mentioned about).
Going the other way is not so simple as Iray also handles bump and displacement differently than 3DL. Iray only has a single bump channel while 3DL has a positive and negative one as well as a Bump Strength channel. One parameter that is missing is the Lighting Model which sets up how shiny or dull a surface renders, there is no translation for this in Iray. So it's not a simple as select surface select Iray Uber Shader and click.
Diffuse roughness kind of does?
I do the ctrl-click, but the specular and a lot of other stuff gets wiped out, which is annoying. Converting to UberSurface preserves a few things, but not many.
Thanks Kyoto Kid. I grabbed Luthbel's G3 Wildlander which is IRAY only. But their work is so fantastic I can live with a 3DL non-bump version of it.
The difficulties in making something unreal look photorealistic are tenfold upon tenfold difficult. I wish the lovers of IRAY the best. You'll have to make sure the skin shader doesn't make the clothing look too fake. Or the great clothing IRAY textures make the skin look too fake. Or the hair. It's hard as hell to get hair to look real. Then if hair does look real... it has a way of making everything else look fake. Then eyes. Most 3d people eyes look fake and that's what the viewer will see first. Most eyes are very very complex with drooping and wrinkles that are very slight. And lips. How are IRAY folks gonna get around the fake lips 3d people have? Even Jolie's lips have a slight slope one part. How to deal with the imperfections that fool the eye? And most clothes have fake looking textures. And feet poses. Will you fool the eye to think the weight of the body can work with the pose of those feet? I wish the IRAY lovers and their vendors the best of luck in their endeavors. That's a ton of work to make fake look real.
..good point. In my railway station scene below I received comments how real it looked...
...except for the characters.
...this scene is a total pain in the bum as my poor 1 GB GPU has a lot of trouble dealing with loading the scene in the viewport and refreshing after something is moved. When I start the render process, it takes around 40 minutes to perform the initial calculation before anything appears in the rendering pane. It also takes over 11 GB while rendering which sends the process into even slower swap mode a I only have a total of 12 GB of physical memory (1 GB taken up by Windows and various system utilities). This is why I need a Titan-X to render in GPU mode.
The trees are the most realistic thing in that render. But the entire scene is awesome!! The camera placement, the characters, the train... it conveys a lot. Excellent scene!!
The most photorealistic product renders usually have hair that cries out 'fake'. If the hair looks photorealistic... it then makes the eye see how unreal the skin shader looks on the character. Most IRAY scene sets look very real... and this is VERY bad for the characters in the scene. You don't want a scene where the couch looks more real than the person sitting in it.
Photoreal is very very very hard to do without the human eye knowing it's fake... or worse... it's crap.
This bandwagon for IRAY can only be for folks wanting portrait work that is HEAVILY postworked
...thanks. The interesting part on your comment is the trees are billboards, not full 3D meshes.
Before I put the characters in one person form the UK mentioned viewing it made him look around for a sweater to put on.
Yeah I guess I've been knocking pretty hard on Iray, partly because of so much content coming out with only Iray shaders and partly because to really make it efficient, you need a powerful (and expensive) GPU otherwise you are stuck in the "slow lane". By itself, it actually is a pretty darn good render engine if you have the right resoruces for it.
When it was first released I jumped aboard excited about not needing a separate UI to set up scenes (I had previously been working with Reality/Lux and finally ditched it due to bugs in the R4 plugin and Lux's geologic render times). Crikey, I even installed the 4.8 beta (and I never bothered with beta releases before).
However as I continued to work with it that "shiny new" feel began to wear off as I was finding interior scenes taking forever to render and realised I could never afford a GPU (along with a system to support it as mine is fairly old, it doesn't even have PCI 3.0 slots) that would support the sheer poly and texture weight of my scenes. Hearing people talking about renders taking days rendering on the CPU (ala Lux) I began to see less and less of an advantage. Furthermore there were a lot of nice effects and styles I could do "in render" with 3DL that were impossible to accomplish in Iray without resorting to postwork (and that is not one of my strong suits).
I actually feel kind of sad for 3DL as that is what I learned 3D CG with. I have hundreds invested in plugins and tools that have sat idle as they are not compatible with Iray. Yeah, it's all "smoke and mirrors" yet it was fun. As you mentioned a couple posts above how "real" can we actually get even with Iray given the meshes and textures we are using? Photoreal has been the "holy grail" ever since I became involved with this over eight years ago. I remember threads that were devoted to pushing 3DL to its limits in this quest ever since the days of the old forums. UE moved us closer but at the price of complex setups and often extremely long render times. Reality/Lux gave us the first taste of PBR rendering but the glacially long render times often measured in days were its downfall. AOA gave us subsurface shaders and a lighting system for 3DL that was more versatile than the default lights yet easier to work with and faster rendering than UE. I feel this is where Daz hit that perfect "sweet spot" (ver 4.6) as everything clicked together so nicely. Yeah it wasn't photo real, but you could get incredibly high quality and stunning results if you knew how and where to push things in the right manner.
The trees were a photo... they shoulda been blurred in photoshop in your final image... because they were shouting for attention.
You can use IRAY or 3DL... it doesn't matter... that's the real frustrating thing. Look at the old Mike 6 promo render... was that done with IRAY? I doubt it. But he looked photoreal in those promos... BECAUSE he was on an empty background.
Approach your shots thinking in layers. If something looks more real than your main character... make that sh@t blurred in postwork.
Your train station scene... I'd render the background with trees... then render the foreground. In photoshop I'd gaussian blur the trees and make the focus on your main character on the train station.
IRAY is for folks who don't use photoshop. And it seems to be easier for vendors... is why they defend it so heartily. The reality render engines don't let you know that your poses and lighting and textures and shaders and camera shots will all screw you over unless you tweak them into high heaven to make a shot look photoreal
If you are working with the base HDRI and no additional lights: In most cases the cuplrit is the headlamp of the camera being turned to "on". If there's no camera in the scene, simply drop in a spotlight and turn it to "off".
Have you ever seen a VUE nature scene that looked so real. Then someone put a 3d person in it and suddenly it screamed fake? Now look at all the character promos using IRAY... empty backgrounds. What's your character going to look like in that realistic nature scene I wonder? Not like that empty background IRAY photoreal character promo
I stopped using Iray ages ago for reasons most here would know by now so won't go into it.. But with a lot of items going Iray only my buying from here has dramatically dropped off the map so to speak.. With only two purchases since April I don't even have PC+ anymore but that is another story..
My main reason I do not use Iray is that the work I do does not require the output it does since I put the images through a image filter so photorealism is no good to me.. In the end if more and more items come out being Iray only the less I will spend since it is too much work doing conversions to 3DL..
Or in TL:DR Iray is pretty much dead to me..
Sorry but this works exactly the same way going from iray to 3dl and there are glass and metal and water etc shader presets for 3dl, and you often do need to alter the settings when using iray, and as you have pointed out in a following post hair often needs tweaking alot in Iray.
Right now PBR is the popular trend particularly for still images. This is the new reality and it will someday be supplanted by something else. It is the way of thing's
I don't see the point here as 3Delight as many others had PBR for a long time now.. PBR is just an abstract that is used to define some principle for shader designer and texture makers. These can be adapted to any render engine.Even between 2 Physically based render engines, wouldn't translate 100% (not in one click). You'd have to manually assign textures in the right slots and adjust some parameters.
The interface is just descent while a bit buggy sometimes. It's not crippled for what I've seen so far, but while DAZ continues to update the 3DL version within DS I didn't see any update of the 3DL function list reflecting the changes added from new 3DL versions in the DLL, and some old useful functions that are there are not available through scripting. You can't use OSL for example and there is also a new API currently in development from 3delight that may not come to DS. I guess that will stay like that since Iray seems to become the standard DS render engine
3delight's render speed has improved and I don't think you need a renderfarm to use it. In fact, with updated shaders it runs at a good speed and you have the comfort of tweaking things and almost immediately see the changes, but you can't see that with actually available shaders for DS. Movie Studios use render farms because their models are way heavier than DS and because time is money. I don't think that it is the same for DS users. I see numerous advantage of 3delight over Iray, and the most obvious is memory. It is cheaper and easier to add RAM to a system than to wait and/or buy a new GFX card.
One of the challenges I see in updating shaders for 3delight is to keep it compatble with existing 3DL shaders. I've written shaders that communicate one with each others to deliver the final picture because I think that is the way to go. But these interface don't exist in all the old shaders, so you could get undesirable effect when you do that sort of mix. That is not like Iray which is new and many thing are already predefined inside the MDL interface which make the whole consistent.
When looking at a character promo, I want to focus on the character, not be distracted by the background.
Honestly, I wished you'd stop bashing users of Iray, your posts are really borderlining to insultive to read. I do understand that you don't like Iray, and your reasons for not liking and using it are as valid as those of the people who do use it, and create stuff for it. But, kindly, keep assumptions as to why people use or prefer to something civil, because I really don't like to read things like "IRAY can only be for folks wanting portrait work that is HEAVILY postworked".
I'm using both render engines, depending on what results I want to get. Both render engines have its merits, and its drawbacks. In the nd, it depends on what look you are striving for in your art. 3D will never be completely photorealist, or completely realistic. It will always be an approximation of real things. That doesn't keep folks from trying, and no one deserves to be bashed for the choices they make - may it be artwise, or job-wise.
I love 3DL for the beautiful, warm renders it creates. And yes, I'd love to have a 3DL texture for all the content that I have, because I never know when I will need item A or B in 3DL instead of Iray. But just like I have to adapt old content to Iray because most of the 15.000+ items in the shop don't support Iray, I am forced to do that same adaption when trying to use Iray-only content in 3DL. It's tiresome and frustrating, and just like with scene sets that have only G3 poses in them, I am putting back purchses for those items that I know will require a lot of tweaking.
But honestly, vendors creating their content because people buy it, and it sells them more than other options. I can only vote with my purse, and buy products that fit my needs better. If that's at a different market place, so be it. If a lot more people decide to only buy content that works with both 3DL and Iray, being shunned out of sales several times in a row would turn vendors back to also support 3DL. However, sales numbers for Iray only products seem to be high enough that it works out for the vendors. Unless there's some dramatic change in that, I don't see how the 3DL support for upcoming products will improve. Which is really sad.
@kyoto kid, love your scene, but I feel it's missing some more wetness. What I mean is that the figures are all dry. There's a lot of fog in the air, and in a real photo, you'd see the fog would catch in the clothes, and they would have a very slight glistening to it.
I don't consider the images I do photrealistic its not what I'm usually aiming for anyway, but I do prefer most of the time the way Iray looks so I put up with the length of time it takes to convert a scene to Iray surface settings and the great length of time it takes to render on my machine.
When I first started using DS there were no shader preset availble for DS and rarely any DS settings, everything was set up for Poser. As for the whole hardware thing well thats just how things are, I doubt I'll ever be able to afford a computer that is fast or powerful I except that and learn to deal with it and find workarounds.
...first, I do not have Photoshop as I couldn't afford it. Gimp is close but does not have some of the features or tools PS has that simplify the process.
...second, as I mentioned, I am terrible at postwork and compositing due to stiff and unsteady hands.
I rarely use DOF (which would achieve the same effect as blurring would) as I feel it is most useful in close ups/portraits (which I rarely do) than wide shots. At the cinema when you see a wide shot on the screen, everything is pretty much clear distinct as the focal range is set to infinity. Only in close ups does DOF blurring of the background come into play. Or look at some of Ansell Adams (one of my influences) incredible photographs, everything is distinct and clear.
Actually I find it is the other way around with 3DL in that I can do much more in the render pass thanks to all the different plugins and utilities I have at my disposal, thus reducing the need for compositing and postwork other than maybe overlaying text, using a filter,, or changing the overall tone mapping for say, an old photo look.
I have to disagree with you, people do not have to do anything they don't want to. For you to say that is rather brash considering that you do not use iray yourself.
...years ago I was involved in similar discussions and pretty much held up my hands said saying "that's it" What you are saying is what I and others pretty much said back then. There is no way to get a total photoreal image with the meshes and tools we have.
The pros can get extremely close as they have the high powered software and hardware to do it. Most, if not all, meshes they use are either custom modelled for the project/purpose or purchased from pro level vendors. Did you know that some adverts on the telly and in magazines are actually created totally with 3D software rather than being a real photo? Most of those pics of those lovely models in fashion periodicals and adverts as well as of celebrities are heavily Photoshopped. Crikey, even the the pics on pron sites. It is getting to the point of what really is "real" anymore?
This is why I really don't worry about it that much. So what if the characters in my scene look a bit "unreal"compared to the background. I know that, and I know there is no way to make them look any more photo real unless I had the same resources and expertise someone in a pro design studio has.
Even then the pros can get it wrong as well. I cannot watch a film trailer for some big action or Sci-Fi blockbuster without the effects screaming "CGI" at me (I often use the term CG-Eye-Candy). Most often it's the lighting on the model which doesn't sync with the lighting in the scene, other times it's just bad physics or, poorly done effects like smoke or flame. These are studios that throw hundreds of millions into a film project and yet it sticks out like the proverbial sor thumb. This is why a I feel film like Monsters University, Brave, or Frozen is, visually speaking, more successful (and appealing) than say Transformers or the recent Independence Day sequel because the characters, setting, props, lighting, etc, are all visually consistent with each other.
My paricular issue here is that 3DL appears that it is being pushed to the back of the bus in favour of Iray. It centers around the fact that I, and many others, do not have the resources to buy or build a new machine around a monster GPU so we don't have to wait days for a render process to finish in Iray. All I and others are asking is for someone who knows scripting, knows the shader language to create a script that translates/converts from Iray to 3DL. Again myself, and from what I hear, others would pay for this were it in the store.
...agreed though something pretty much impossible to do without wet skin and hair shaders. For clothing, most of the wet effect would be concentrated on the shoulders with it being more "streaky" on the front and sides which again is difficult to do given the structure of the mesh and mapping. I was able to get the wet effect on the brollies however that was pretty straightforward.
The one part that bothers me is the track ballast which looks too smooth and uniform. I tried increasing the bump and displacement but to no avail. Short of actually building ballast with individual stone props (an extremely tedious process I wouldn't want to wish on my worst enemy), I'm not sure what else to do. I find that I have a lot of issues getting the roughness of textures to come through properly in Iray..
..as I mentioned above, there are channels for 3DL surfaces which have an effect on the rendering which do not exist or have a compatible one in Iray. How are we supposed to fix that?
With Poser the channels that usually needed adjusting were Ambient (which for some reason was always at 100%), Specular, and Reflective (the latter often also included a reflection map). These same channels existed in Poser as well.
...+1