Lake Village - water looks strange
Taoz
Posts: 10,256
I'm just trying Lake Village in DS 4.9.2.70 (haven't tried it in earlier versions). Looks fine, except for the water, which doesn't look at all like in the promos. I'm using the included lights. Anyone who knows what the problem is?
Post edited by Taoz on
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Well, looks like the default lights may have been Poser light, found some others under Lights which probably is DS lights. Still doesn't looks quite right to me though. I think I recall that there has been some changed to 3DL recently, can that be the cause?
I would expect you need to set up either bump or displacement and would also need to use raytraced reflections to get it looking as water should... You may also need to add some refraction as well...
I'd start by setting Specular Glossiness to 100% and Reflections to 100% in the Surfaces Tab and go from there... to get raytraced reflections you'll need to set your lights to use raytraced shadows in the lights Parameters...
You'll probably also want to set bump strength to 100% and will need to play with the positive and negative bump levels...
Others may have a better idea than I do...
Taozen, Faveral came on my Art Studio thread when this product was first released and answered this very same question. Turn on Progressive. That's all you have to do. I then did gorgeous renders just like the promos! (But with 7 threads full of products showcased, I can't go back and find it, sorry!)
Thanks for the suggestions, turning on progressive certainly did the trick! Looks like the promos were done with the default lights though so I guess the other set in the Lights folder (second render below) must be an alternative set of DS lights? (I don't think Poser light presets will work or even be visible in DS at all now I think about it).
Hi Taozen.
The lights are for the night scene, but they should load right up with the night scene when you open it in DS. In Poser make sure to use the day lights for the day scene and the nite lights for the nite scene.
Poser lights will load and work... well, do something in D|S, they just won't work properly. Light intensity is generally completely wrong, and the two light systems don't use all the same parameters, so pretty much anything can happen when you try to load-and-render with Poser lights.
So the scenes in the Props category have DS lights as default, and the lights in the Light category is for Poser?
OK, thanks. If the lights used on the second picture above is a Poser preset it isn't that much off though.
Just as a side note about Poser lights in DS... In general most Poser items will work just fine in DS and that includes basic lights though you'll need to tweak the light parameters in the parameters tab as you would for most DS basic lights. The key to getting Poser items into DS is that you need to tell DS to read a Poser runtime structure (I wrote a tutorial on setting that up a while back that was featured in DS Creative).
Here's a general list of Poser items that will and won't work in DS...
1) Poser Dynamic Items will not work properly in DS as Poser and DS have different ways of handling Dynamics. Make sure you check the items you buy to see if they are Dynamic and look at the Product Readme files to see if they offer both Daz and Poser versions before buying Dynamic content. If the content is Poser only then it will most likely not function in DS.
2) Weight-mapped Figures for Poser also do not function properly in DS so this is something else to double check before buying for use in Daz Studio. Again this is because DS and Poser handle Weight-mapping differently so these items generally are not cross-compatible between the two programs.
3) Procedural Materials for Poser won't function properly in Daz Studio either. Items using procedural materials may still function as figures or props in DS but the materials may need to have textures or surfaces manually set using Studio's Surfaces Tab. You'll have to decide if you want to use items or not that include Poser Procedural Materials, and again this is something that you can check for in most product readme's.
4) Poser Light sets may work in DS but the effect of the lights may be different than how they look in Poser (I've used some Poser light sets in DS without issue but needed to manually adjust the settings for the lights in the DS Parameters Tab). Of note how-ever is that Ambient Occlusion and IBL light sets may not work in DS from Poser (I'm not certain of this as I don't use AO or IBL Lighting for my renders).
5) PMD based Poser Morphs no longer work in DS, nor do items using Poser Magnets, so you'll need to check any products you wish to use in DS to see if they require either of these.
6) Poser Python Scripts also cannot be used by DS so you'll be unable to add these to Studio.
Now, having made note of those exceptions, most Poser content can be used in DS with only minor adjustments needed to surfaces to suit your rendering needs. Poser Hair (Hr2), Props (Pp2), Poses (Pz2, Fc2 or Hd2), most Figures (Cr2), and most Pz3 Poser scenes will function in Ds just fine. Also DS can now read Poser's Materials files (Mc6, Mc7 etc) so most of these should work in DS as well with a little tweaking once loaded.
Thanks for the info, very useful. Wasn't aware that Pz3 files could work in DS.
My experience with Poser materials btw is that they often work fine without any tweaking, with IRay (depends on what you expect, of course).
Could you tell which issue that tutorial is in?
It was in Issue #11 started on page 32 I beleive :)
https://issuu.com/philatdsc/docs/ds_creative_11
Yes. In studio you can save an entire scene with lights. In Poser you could too if you saved the file as a pz3, but for some reason it's frowned upon. Don't ask me lol
Wait.. I may have got this wrong.... Are you trying to load a poser scene in studio? With Lake village there are native DS files for the set. These are the ones you should use for DS renders.
Faveral, I've been meaning to ask you ever since you helped me with this awhile ago- what is it about Progressive that makes the water work? I was so surprised when you told me that. If it's too technical, ignore the question.
The problem with PZ3 is that is saves, or did save, the UI too so loading a PZ3 could have undesirable affects on a user's set-up. Also, up to version 8 I think, Scenes didn't show in the Poser library
Great, thanks!
OK, thanks!
You're welcome!
A note on the tutorial (I mention this in the tut), if you have both DS and Poser then you can use the instructions from the tutorial to have DS read anything you've installed in Poser's runtimes directly instead of needing to create a seperate runtime to hold your Poser items... I have my DS 4.7 set up to read my content Directories from my old DS 2.3 (which I still use for figure rigging etc) and from Poser 7 and Poser 10 (both of which I use for figure testing and Poser tweaks). In this manner I have access to everything straight within DS from all of those runtimes... :)
In DS I can only find the set under Poser Formats / Props/Lights. I load the set from the Props category.
Just load the sets from the props folder. These scenes already have the lights included. The other lights are for poser only.
I really don't know why there is a difference. I found out by accident, I was tired of waiting for a render and tried progressive, and it worked fine.
From conversations elsewhere, Progressive: On forces an advanced raytrace method of rendering, while Progressive: Off generally uses a more forgiving but less accurate in certain ways Reyes rendering. I think.
Which means a number of things look worse with Progressive: on. But, oddly, some stuff just doesn't work with :off.
OK, that's what I'm doing already, so no problem.
OK. Is there a way to do it the other way round? I prefer to install with DIM so I would be nice if Poser could use the Poser part of the DS library also.
You can get Poser to read your DS library by clicking the + symbol and add a new Library in the content pane in Poser... just navigate to where your DS content is installed (your DAZ runtime folder)... Poser will then reference your DS runtimes (not sure if it will display all of it or just the Poser path items from the studio library though). I've done this so that my old DS 2.3 runtime library is available for use in Poser...
If it displays all the items (even those that are DS only) then you'll run in to the usual issue of needing the DSON importer to use that content, though the Poser type items should function just fine...
OK, will give that a try. Thanks!
No problem... glad I could be of some help... :)