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Jaki, I'll try to explain some of those things when I stream tomorrow. Thanks for suggesting it!
Apologies if this has already been mentioned and I missed it (or just didn't understand the terminology since I'm at best a novice), but I know the single biggest frustration I've had lately has been trying to use all of the environments collected over the years with Iray. I can do some great looking scenes, but when I try to render they're almost all black.
In researching, I understand that it has something to do with Iray processing differently than others, and it's the philosophy that there's a giant "dome" between my actual content and the camera and/or light source so it's just not getting lit in the render, but I have no idea what to do about that. The characters themselves I can render well in Iray without the environments, and they look great, but as soon as I try to add the worlds...pppphhht.
Maybe that's not a full video tutorial worth, but it's definitely the biggest road block I've run into and somewhat has ground my playtime with Daz to a hault.
Where are yous streaming?
I don't know how familiar you are with Photography but the concepts are pretty similar
HDRI Only is like doing natural light only photography: It is very easy (and great for render times too) and can give you extremly good results if the current light (you don't have to worry about this for renders since you can control it) and the scene setup allow for it.
In some situations natural light is not enough and you need fill flashes (Lights) and/or Reflectors (You can use reflective Surfaces outside your camera frame) to light portions of the scene not covered enough by the "Sun".
here: https://www.twitch.tv/snowsultan
I'll be doing it live at noon tomorrow PST, but they're archived so you can watch them any time. Tomorrow I'm going to play around with Faveral's Alsace and the Geometry Editor tool, and I'll also write up some stuff to try and explain using HDRIs a little for Jaki and anyone else. Thanks for your interest. :)
HDRI's have been the bane of my existence. Thank you Jaki for asking the quesion. Thank you SnowSultan for taking the time to try and explain it.
Thank you SicklyYield for starting this thread and your wonderful tutuorials.
OT: SY, if you ever find yourself not knowing what kind of tutorial you want to do next, I would very much love a tutorial on modeling specifically geared toward modifying clothing for DS. E.g., how to take clothing for DS and fit it to G3, how to take a piece of clothing into a modeling package and remove bits you don't like, make it fit better, add a morph, add new geometry, etc. There are a million modeling tuts out there, but something that focused on 1) modifying stuff, rather than starting from scratch, and 2) the DS pipeline, that would be the Bee's Knees. I'm agnostic about which package is used. Well beyond the scope of your thread (or the work you're looking to take on, probably) I know, but this has been on my mind lately. Come to think of it, this would be perfect for a Lynda.com series, or the like. Instead of going thoroughly into a single package's feature set, they could cover all the relevant topics with an eye on how you'd do it in a selection of 3d suites (Max, Maya, Mudbox, ZBrush, etc.).
I'm afraid a clothing tutorial for G3 is basically last on the list of things I would do, because it's such a difficult and annoying process. And I'm not the PA you want to hear that from anyway - I have like two outfits for G3 in the store that have sold poorly plus one freebie that was turned down. At best I would do something very simple, you're never going to see "here's an entire outfit with a skirt."
I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask people's indulgence on the Surfaces video. It will happen, but I'm not feeling well this weekend, and getting our product into testing shape was about all I could handle. I hope to get to it in the next few days.
Hope you feel better soon Sickle. Thank you for your work so far, your tutorials are very helpful and professionally done. :)
Kismet and Jaki, did you happen to see the video I did on HDRIs? Hopefully they could be slightly helpful.
Concentrate on getting better SickleYield. That is the most important.
Yes SnowSultan. I just finished watching it. Thank you.
Get better, SY. I haven't even had a chance to watch the last one yet! Take care of yourself.
I've got a pesky sore throat and am completely useless as regards voice recording right now (dangit), but here's a quickie in text explaining three-point lighting again, since people have been asking me elsewhere.
Just concentrate on feeling better SY.
Thanks for this - you've got a really nice voice for video tutorials, so I hope you are feeling better soon
I do!
Me too!!
Early on - I had a lot of confusion about models. First there was Genesis based modes and a variety of those, then some v3's, v4's, v5s and teen 7's… then Gen 2's, Gen 3s, Michael 7’s, Karen 7’s... On and on… For a noob; this not very intuitive. Then, I heard about a guy who naturally thought the highest number was the newest version and best place to start. After spending a ton of money… Well, needless to say, the marketing department won that round.
As for the guy? Jumped off cliff and died. I know... Tragic... Really makes you think.
What I’m trying to say, (if I’m saying anything at all) is that; lives are at stake here and the children are our future. Treat them well and let them lead the way.
Me three!!!
I just wanted to pop in my thanks for these videos - I've only watched the first one so far, but will be watching the rest of them during the day to try and get from my current skill level (Enthusiastic dabbler) to something better! I've been a long time user of Poser, who is now in the process of moving over to Daz 3d, and even the videos of the simple things (like setting up the interface in the first one!) are exceptionally helpful!
I love your tutorials. Just one little thing: Non-native-English-speakers often prefer pdf to movie, written language ist easier to understand. I don't expect you to do double work and make a pdf yourself, it's just something to think about.
Another text quickie from Sick Brain World over here.
One challenge I face as a novice is relying too much on default settings that are provided out of box for Iray. This often causes long render times which in turn locks me out of the studio. I believe most of the default settings are chosen based a tradeoff between novice, intermediate and expert users. If your tutorials are going to be focussed for novice users, I would suggest highlighting some of the parameters which can be tweaked to get fast renders. New users often do not have high-end dedicated hardware and tend to experiment a lot. They also do not need pixel perfect renders everytime. Helping them reduce render times would be a major catalyst in their learning process.
There are only three ways to reduce render time in Iray that I've found, and they don't really need an entire tutorial. This is assuming a constant scene and not art-dampening things like "use fewer transmissive objects" and "don't put a bunch of big-textured assets in the scene."
1. Check OptiX acceleration in render settings.
2. As much as your needs allow, keep the number of mesh lights low compared to photometrics - you can add dozens of photometrics and if you don't render with headlamps on it speeds UP render with every light (in my testing the headlamp imposes a bottleneck, I don't know why).
3. Buy an Nvidia graphics card with more CUDA cores and VRAM. This engine is Nvidia's and it was built to sell graphics cards, I'm afraid.
Finally finished watching the series and now I'm waiting for more! Thank you so much for doing these videos, they're unbelievably helpful for a bumbling amatuer. Now to go and fiddle with my settings with what I've learnt so far!
Edit to try and answer the question of "what would you like to see?"
I'm not sure what I'd like as other video tutorials - the thing that I've got is that I need to play around a lot and try different things, but not sure exactly what I can do with it yet, so no idea what questions to ask. You've already answered a lot of questions I didn't know I wanted to ask (especially around camera set up, light set up, and the nifty trick of arranging terrain around the figure, rather than vice versa.
I've got a couple of things that I want to play with myself to try and learn how they work - one job I'm toying with is trying to build a texture for an item of clothing (which I guess just means downloading the template, throwing it at an art package and splattering colours at it until I get the desired effect ;)), so possibly a tutorial on custom content creation or editing would be helpful - for me at least!
A thread on Texturing is that away ===> http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/74272/texturing-with-destinysgarden/p1
Oh thank you :) Hadn't seen that one!
First tutorial I would like to see is one on Geoshells, how to use this to add scars, underwear, help fit clothes. The second is one on using deformers, push modifiers, and clothing fixes. The last is a video on how to use iray lights simply. No high tech info just do this to get this. I think too much information goes over our heads and I start to tune it out. I think we need a table with setting on what to set stuff at to get certain kind of look in Iray. For example I took a sphere primative and made it huge and used a iray emitter shader to make it cast dark purple light so I could simulate a night scene with only one light. The only other way is to to use a HDRI night scene and use a dome.
Thanks so much for taking the time to do this. I would LOVE a good tutorial on character skin settings for iray.