Show Us Your Iray Renders. Part V
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3CPO, that last ship render is fantastic. Did you purchase the ship from the DAZ store? Have you ever thought about doing a render in the night? Here is a painting from JMW Turner. He did some really great ship paintings back in the day.
@ 3CPO: That look wonderful so far! The bloom effect and transparency of the sails adds so much presence. I like that the ship and the rocky outcrop have roughly similar size & shape here, like echoing each other; the composition generally is interesting.
OMG, 3CPO, that is gorgeous. The water is so...beautiful. Are you using one of Mec4d's volumetric water shaders or just a tweaked regular water shader?
-Gen
The big limitation of Iray is whether your scene will fit in the RAM of each of your video cards so you can run it off of GPU rather than CPU.
One big way to minimize that problem is to use shaders that don't use texture maps. This image uses 0 maps of any kind; it's all either basic shader settings or the WTP2 procedural shaders I've been working on. So... hey, it fit on my GTX 970s; it took 30 minutes to render 3480x2160 with a beauty canvas on 2x GTX 970.
@sextino
Actually, for the end of the voyage, I was planning to do exactly that - a night scene in a bay. Hope it turns out just as good. Thank you for the encouragement,glad you like it. The ship is Faveral's Medusa and indeed available at Daz store.
@genaris
Thank you so much. For the first one,I was debating whether or not to add some clouds to the sky.Will see... The water shader on the second image is my own creation. I started initially with the iray architectural shader, but I discovered that tiling on one of the axis is broken. So I tried again with the iray DAZ uber as a starting point and tweak it from there... I was acually aiming to create a general purpose volumetric water shader that looks good from all angles and lighting conditions, including underwater, with rays and caustics and all. For the moment, for the underwater look, I reached the same conclusion as others who had played with it, including Mec4D, in the sense that there are limitations as to the abilities of the iray shader to produce volumetric refracted caustics( and reflected as well). If the surface the rays pass through has any sss scatering at all, they get so very weak that cannot produce the desired lightshafts. All I managed to achieve so far was volumetric shadows and fake the rest of the effects. But even so, as far as the above water look, it turned out quite well.
Your water in the WIP v5 image does look wonderfully dynamic in a way that most ocean surfaces don't with DS renders! Like you, I've really been disappointed with the lacking caustic and especially reflected caustic effects. Yeah, they can be photoshopped in post-render, and or can be "faked" somewhat in camera using light projectors, gobos etc, but it's all extra time-consuming, tedious workarounds. I'm hoping that this is an area that will see improvement, just as we've seen in so many aspects of the render engines and shader/materials technologies....
-Gen
Another no-map test/example.
Ok, her eyes, hair, and the cutout pattern on the lanterns are maps, but everything else is procedural.
(I could probably have gone mapless on her eyes, but I didn't want to try it, decide I prefer it how it was, and then have to put the maps back in)
So, I altered the pose of the warrior so that it no longer looks like she is attacking the demon. I moved the lower arms of the demon into a less natrual pose in order to cover her breasts and then I sent it into Daz moderation and they told me I could post it if I removed the battle axe from the demons head. So I removed it and overall the scene is not how I intended it and it looks off because the demon appears to be running away from a pretty lady with an axe for no reason and she has a spurt of gore floating above her head that doesn't make sense. Also the absence of the axe leaves a hole in the image and some of the gore that it covered up is now visible and unpolished. The demon's hand above her head is supposed to be gripping the head of the axe and pulling it out but now it is just haning around. Normally I wouldn't bother to post something that has been degraded like this but I would like to share it with other daz users who understand the software and can actually appreciate it.
My passion when making a scene is setting up the lighting. I have been slowly improving my skill over the last 3 months and this is the most complex scene yet. I have an uber environment for the sky and a 3 piece character lighting set that I used to control the set lighting and create spots on the character that would blow out once I applied volumetric lighting. I used 6 volumetric lights of various sizes and colors. I used 3 god rays in the scene, one of which is so subtle that you probably can't see it. These come from the philosopher's Epic God Ray package which I would suggest to anyone who is serious about lighting. Getting the day time setting and night setting to work in the same scene with appropriate skin tones on the characters and no light bleeding through was a challenge.
The concept started out as a door on a simple stone slab. Crusted earth went on as far as the eye could see but in the door frame was a beautiful and vibrant world. I did this and I was not happy with the results so I coupled together a set from 3 different sets including this months PC+ freebie. The scene takes place at night in a fallen temple and the door that is open leads to a day time beach scene in another time and place where a warrior attacked the demon and drove it back to the realm it came from.
This is my first attempt at a fantasy render. I have done a variety of renders in the last 30 days and I will include them here as well.. I used Teen Josie 7 and gave her a makeover to turn her into the demon. The body paint is from the Cierra makeup set. I used Zev0's Muscularity and vascularity morphs to create and creepy vibe on such a small character. I then added a 3rd eye, two extra arms and an extra tongue on my own. The warrior is the saphire character in her original design. I love using her because I like the way her skin reacts to just about any environment I use.
All of these renders are raw straight out of DAZ3D. I did resize the demonic scene because I rendered it at 4k.
THIS RENDER HAS A DEMONIC CHARACTER AND SOME BLOOD SO IF THAT OFFENDS YOU THEN DON'T CLICK ON THE ATTACHMENT.
Hi Will, I was wandering, do you run out of video RAM often? What type of scenes cause you to run out of VRAM and how much VRAM do you have? In your experiance, Do outdoor scenes with a bunch of plants cause more problems than indoor scenes? Is the number of characters in a scene a bigger problem? So far I have done a scene that took 5.75GB of video RAM and 22GB of system RAM. According to MSI afterburner both of my cards rendered the scene at 99% utilization to compleation so it must not have run out of memory. The scene I am describing had 2 genesis characters and 5 genesis 3 characters in a small indoor room with a bunch of props. It took much longer to render than a normal scene.
sextino, nice work!
3CPO, your water looks amazing, care to share your settings
I only have, effectively, 3.5 GB of VRAM, because I have two GTX 970s (they each have 4, and a GPU can only be used if the entire scene can fit in EACH card).
So, yeah, the scene you are describing would dump to CPU on my system.
The common problem is figures, because they often have something like 20 maps or something (Diffuse/Bump, MAYBE normal and Specular and maybe translucency plus possible masks, for each of three regions plus teeth and mouth and and and)
If you are going high quality, that adds up FAST, unless you are careful to do things like 'well, the inside of the mouth isn't going to be seen, so I can delete most of this' and similar.
There are also some buildings or other sets where there might be loads of fiddly maps for different things.
..sextino, Love the demon pic. One critique, the only part that sort of spoils it for me is the background behind the open door as the lighting quality and angle don't match that which is coming through the window on the left. Also the Cyclorama has the look of one of those fake backdrops like you'd see in an old television show or low budget film.
Will, thanks for the info, that makes sense.
Kyoto kid, I understand what you mean but I intentially made the light not match. The idea was that the demon lair was at night time in a differant time and place than the beach. The Door is a magic door so to speak If you look above the door it is actually pitch black outside. I also understand what you mean about the beach scene but I kind of like it since it reminds me of those old Raquel Welch movies. That is what I had in mind when I created it.
Oh, and thanks for the compliments, I do appreciate that.
...yeah that makes sense. I just felt the low quality of the Cyclorama seems to detract from the more dynamic and vibrant look that rest of the scene has as the character in the doorway looks like she's on a stage set rather in an actual environment. One thing that might help is using some kind of effect like mist, fog or other special effect in and/or around the doorway to make it appear like it is more of a portal to another world or dimension.
Kyoto kid, is that animated scene at the bottom right of your posts something that you did? I am not up on the latest movies and I honestly can't tell if it's from a pixar movie or something you did. Also thanks for the advice. I have thought about adding sun light comming through the doorway but the effect it has on the indoor scene didn't please me. I do want it to look differant and have an old movie vibe like a scene from Hercules or Conan The Barbarian. To me, it makes the indoor lair seem more supernatural and it gives the overall image a jarring look that may turn off some folks. I agree that the set looks like a set. I don't even remember where I got it. It was probably a freebie.
I focus primarily on animation but I have not released anything because I can only do a half a second each night and it is taking forever to render. Maybe in a year or two from now, Nvidia will release a card that doubles the performance of the 980TI. If I bought 3 of them I could probably render a 10 minute short in a resonable amount of time. Things should get pretty exciting for Daz users in the next 5 years if hardware continues to improve the way it has.
...that's actually a gif from one of the pre release promos.
I don't work with animation myself as my system isn't really up to the task and I'm not about to have it unusable for days (weeks?) while it renders every frame.
I have actually been working at creating the character. Attached is my best one so far (and yes it is Iray):
Ha! thats awsome, I have never tried to re-create a character from a film or pop culture. If anything she looks more real than she does in the Gif which makes sense since you are using a realistic backdrop. I take it by promo you mean a Daz 3D promo? Sorry I am a noob to this community. BTW what is the little blue character in the background? Is it also from the promo or something you added in? I thought it was some sort of blue flame at first but then I looked a little closer and it almost looks like a ghost.
..no, not Daz. There was a series of teaser videos released by Disney/Pixar before the cinema release that centred on each of the main characters as well as themes in the film.
For my work I actually used Teen Julie as it was easier to get shape of her face and had down better than any of the straight toon characters I have. If I had ZBrush I probably could have done some sculpting to get closer to the actual character model used in the film. here is another pic that gives more detail of her face and head (warning, 3DL)
For the hair I used to instances of 3Dream/Mairy's Bolina Hair. I also now have a Merida dress texture for the MFD.
I recently picked up the Dolly character from Rendo (also a G2F character) so I'm hoping to try and work with her and Belle6 to see what I can come up with.
It looks nice. Have you experimented with some of the anime shaders that are available? I wouldn't know but you might be able to get one step closer to recreating that character with a more anime style of render.
I disagreed with your suggestions for improving my render because I have a certain style I am sticking to. However, your point about the beach set looking like a set rather than a place was spot on. I decided to go back and take a closer look. The problem was not the quality of the beach set. The problem is that the beach set has a curved background and it wasn't meant to be viewed at the camera angle and set scale I was using in the scene. I built the set head on with the door frame, not the camera angle I was rendering at. What I ended up doing was rotating the set to the same angle as the camera and then expanding it a little. Now it looks more like a real place and the lighting doesn't react improperly to the set in the top left corner of the door frame anymore. It still has the same lighting and style that I am interested in so it's a welcome improvement.
I also added a thick wall of vines on the right side of the door because the camera is closer to the wall on that side of the image and the textures for the wall were not holding up at 4K resolution. The arch pillar I used for the main wall was a freebie that came installed with DAZ 4.8 I believe and it is so large that the textures don't hold up once they get to a certain distance from the camera.
On the master copy I am working on, one of the demon's breasts are showing and I forgot to add nipples so that needed to be done. I think I am just about finished with this piece for good now. Thank you for the constructive criticism.
I am rendering the scene now but it is not allowed on here. I could re-edit it and repost it a little later but I am not sure I want to. Reason being that it was rendered at 4K resolution with 15000 iterations with 100% convergance and a render quality of 100. It takes about 4 hours to render even with my cards overclocked 25%. I increased a yellow volumetric light that is lighting the beach independintly by 75% after I repositioned the set due to it's size. The lighting of the original prop is almost compleatly drowned out at this point. The backdrop is now a warm yellow and you can't see the sun. Maybe I will re-edit the scene a post a lower quality version just as a reference so you can check it out and let me know what you think.
I don't have an account with deviant art but I might set one up on Friday night and post a link over the weekend. I am going to render it when I leave for work in the morning because I just noticed some things I still need to tweak before I sleep tonight.
There is one texture map in this image, the cutout opacity of the far hills. Everything else is surface detail or procedural.
..cool looking forward to it.
Funny, I'm working on a similar concept as we type. This was the first test render with everything pretty much in place. The idea has evolved somewhat, but I hope to finish it this weekend. Just learning to use the Fit Control app, and still working on the balance of a transparent helmet that lets you see the expression clearly enough, but still has some reflection. Love the retro space suit though; the one for men is way better, but tends to morph really weirdly around the breast area when you apply it to women. I'm using the planet X-2 HDR backgrounds though which are taking some going use to as you can't see the background unless you're in Iray texture mode. This one was a bit tougher than I expected.
im testing out my fibermesh hair, i did not let iray finish it. hopefully you like my character and hair in progress.
The hair looks promising. Not enough of the character to really make any sort of value judgement.
I like immensely !!!
Realistically proportioned facial features and normal lips; what's not to like!
One thing I find hard to do is render metals in Iray I'm never happy with the HDR image.