Tell me why 3Delight is awesome, please?
exstarsis
Posts: 2,128
I came in recently, so of course I started with Iray, as soon as I figured out Iray existed. Everybody talked about how complicated lighting was in 3Delight and (outdoor) lighting in Iray is easy. But a lot of stuff I like is only for 3dl (toon stuff). And more importantly my Nvidia card is dog slow. So I'd like to feel inspired to learn 3dl. Could people who love it tell me why? Maybe show me some amazing 3DL renders? Iray does realistic lighting. What does 3dl do?
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It's faster than Iray if you're doing non-photorealistic renders. Shaders are far less complicated so it's easier to set up your surfaces.
Really? One reason I've been resistant to switching is because I very early on picked up SO MANY Iray shaders. I love being able to change the color and texture of any clothing I put my characters into, and so on. It doesn't seem that complicated, so I'd love to hear more about 3DL shaders. Are there any good packs I should pick up, or is that not a thing in 3DL?
(And yeah, I like NPR rendering. Not interested in duplicating photographs.)
I'm pretty new too (been using Daz Studio for about six months or so). I've tried using 3DL a couple times but the lighting was an issue for me. I too would like to learn how to use 3DL for toon type renders and NPR renders. With Iray it's super easy - add an HDRI and you get some good lighting instantly (depending of course on the quality of the HDRI). I use rim lights and spot lights in Iray but the same lights look quite different in 3DL. With 3DL I'm totally lost. I hear you need something called AoA lighting or something - I don't know what that is or where to get it. There is another thread going on about it but I'm a bit lost.
Iray, to me, is so much easier - but learning 3DL would be really nice.
3DL shaders are capable of doing FAR more different stuff than Iray ones. There are shaders that procedurally generate dirty edges/corners ( http://www.daz3d.com/daz-studio-dirt-shaders ), there are shaders that can create big fields of grass ( http://www.daz3d.com/grass-shader-for-daz-studio ), ground textures and patterns. There are shaders that adjust the texture to 'face the camera' ( http://www.daz3d.com/shades-of-life-nature ). http://www.daz3d.com/pweffect has a bunch of ghost and other weird cool effects.
PWToon and ToonyCam Pro do really nifty cartoon-style rendering effects; I use PWToon a LOT.
Here are examples of what I've done with 3DL:
http://willbear.deviantart.com/art/Undying-Oned-636152957
http://willbear.deviantart.com/art/KappaToon-635854571
http://willbear.deviantart.com/art/Yarnhills2-635223774
http://willbear.deviantart.com/art/TD3-3DL-Grasslands-631478443 (uses Grass shader and LAMH)
http://willbear.deviantart.com/art/BW-spacehunter-624717577
http://willbear.deviantart.com/art/Flameskull-BW-621491986
http://willbear.deviantart.com/art/Patrol-592103749 (realistic 3DL)
My big recommendation is to get the Age of Armor lights (particularly Ambient, but also the Spotlight and Distant light). They run fast and have a number of cool controls.
A lot of folks use UberEnvironment, but I find they just take tooooooooooooooooo long. I prefer just AoA Distant/Spotlight + Ambient light, and the scenes come out great. Maybe not quite as realistic as with, say, UE2 bounce light, but really really darn close. And way faster.
Though UE2 is worth experimenting with, because it's free, and it DOES make stuff more realistic. But if it starts dragging... switch it off. ;)
Poking around at some of my 3dl content, I remember the other thing that made me get frustrated and quit right away with 3DL-- there's no sky! I load the environment set (The Lost Place), find the matching lights and -- yeah, that Uber thing seems... slow?-- and--no sky!
LOTS of sets include skydomes, and skydomes are easier in 3DL -- if you make a sphere or dome and put an image on it (I like using an ambient image so lighting doesn't matter), you can then set the objec to not Cast Shadows, so distant light goes right through it.
You can also set an environmental background map with a static image of a sky, or just add one in in post, or... whatever you want, really.
Some older sets come with skydomes. Pick up http://www.daz3d.com/dystopia-city-blocks-011-020-poser for a free one. :) (My favorite is the old skydome made for the MicroCosm set, which may or may not be still available in the RDNA freebie Archives.) The only thing to remember with skydomes is that you'll need to turn off Cast Shadows.
Another way that I've used a lot is just to render without the sky and then composite with a sky image in post work, or you can set a sky image as the background for the render in the environment tab.
Personally, I like the toon-ish effect of 3DL, and I'm a big fan of the pwEffect shader. And their shadow catcher (though I usually use it to have something invisible cast a shadow, or for an object to cast the "wrong" shadow.) And before the aoa Subsurface, the pwSurface was fantastic for doing things like Jade. (I find it significantly better than the default Iray Jade.)
This is probably a stupid question, but where do you get those?
http://www.daz3d.com/advanced-daz-studio-light-bundle
It's a little weird to search and find. I always end up searching for 'ambient' and then jump from there. ;)
I'm pretty sure I got it half off at some point, but IMO I think it's worth the full price, given what a lynchpin it is for doing 3DL (IMO)
...here's a sample of what 3DL can do.
This scene rendered in 14 min using AoA's Advanced lights. Characters had SSS skin shaders. When I rendered the same scene in Iray (after manually optimising all surfaces for Iray), it took over 2 hours and most of the surfaces came out flat with no texture detail.
If skydomes are a problem, I can recommend Flipmode's Skyboxes. He has an excellent environment system for 3DL outdoor renders. http://www.daz3d.com/flipmode
Why using 3DL... first of all, the colours that a 3DL render creates are different from the ones of an Iray render. Iray renders are sharp and crisp, 3DL gives a more "homely" feeling.
Except for some of the new sets that only have Iray surfaces, most of the older stuff has a 3DL default surface. Some of the shaders in 3DL do fantastic things, and can't be replicated in Iray.
Light... yes, it is a learning curve. As the other mentioned above, get the AOA Advanced light sets. They are definitely worth their money, and give you fairly simple solutions to most base light problems. What you will learn with 3DL is how to make a scene pop with light, and where you posistion your light. Also a plus is that you can control things like shadow intensity to the T, and generally have a much better "control" over light compared to Iray. The downside of it is that you will have to think about things like light bounces a lot more than in Iray. To get a good result, you do need several lights, sometimes more than in Iray.
So, if you want to give 3DL a try, go ahead, and don't feel discouraged if the initial results don't look as "good" as what you are used to in Iray.
...here's another I did in 3DL with the AoA lights and Uber volumetrics.
3Delight can do many things I use it all the time since for the work that I do, I do not need my rendered pictures to look realistic and I need to do a lot in quick order.. As for lights there used a product on RDNA called SunLIGHT DS but it has since been removed so not sure where it has gone.. It is a very good product as it does a full range of sun angles from Dawn to Dusk and it did include basic skies.. Again no idea where it went as it was a very good product, lucky for me I suppose I bought it ages ago..
The image below is a 3DL render and then run through Moku Hanga to get that fancy toon look and then put into ComicLife 3..
because outside of the limitations of Daz Studio turns out 3Delight is actually a professional rendering engine used in, AutoDesk Maya, Studio Pro, Katana and has been used in a number of motion pictures.
http://www.3delight.com/en/index.php?page=projects
Instead of tapping into the possibilities of 3Dl Daz for offered another choice that to use optimally requires an investment of proprietary video cards that underperforming equally priced cards from other distributors and what Studio has accomplished is luring many users into the false idea that 3DL is an antiquated rendering solution.
I like 3dl. I actually prefer lighting in 3dl, once you get the hang of it it is easier and you can cheat which makes things like lighting up an interior shot quite easy. The problem with 3dl is they just haven't updated the daz software and skin tools to make skin look as realistic as Iray.
Oh, also, another free thing included is meshlights, or 'uber area light.' This essentially gives any surface emission like in Iray.
Now, mind you, it slows things down a bit, but you _can_ have an emitting pattern or jet exhaust or any number of things, if you need to. (On the flip side, it's almost always better to give the item ambient channel, turn cast shadows off, and put a light inside it)
Yeah, but aren't the AoA lights' flagging features [necessary for them to work really well] broken in DS 4.9?
That said, 3DL all the way for me. I like the realistic, yet stylized and unreal, look.
--MW
I dispute 'necessary for them to work really well.' ;)
I almost never bother with flagging, myself, and the only flagging feature that isn't working is the SSS one.
I agree, they work fine without flagging. However the flagging IS necessary if you want to really optimize for speed. The lights are very fast regardless, but the ability to take things like hair and dial down the samples just for it was game changing. Too bad it's broken. But like I said, they still work, look great, and are very fast for the quality you get. Just not as fast as they were prior to the bug.
Age of Armour is on sale today, the 3DL Advanced lights bundle is at a base discount of 40%, making it $14.97 at the moment.
EDIT: I'd also recommend this shader bundle by AOA: http://www.daz3d.com/rock-grass-bundle
Flagging is useful for people with less powerful machines, and I did use it a fair bit before I upgraded my PC to something better. It allowed you to use seperate lighting options for heavily transmapped objects like hair, which significantly speeded up the rendering of those items. It is also good for deliberately lighting up one area of the render without lighting up surrounding areas, but as Will says, you can still do this if you use the diffuse for flagging (which is what I always used to do anyway).
I personally do not feel these lights are broken, as the flaws do not affect me at all, but I realise others feel differently. Same as Will, I think these lights are essential for working in 3DL, and if I was recommending just one product to someone wanting to use 3DL, these lights would be what I would recommend.
When you say "fast," are you talking seconds or minutes? I become fidgety if something takes over 2 minutes to render. Thus I've been sticking with my mediocre self-created system of 3 spotlights per person in the scene plus a dozen ambients to fill the rest of the area. I would love a more even way of lighting up the whole scene, though.
--MW
I love what folks do with 3DL; some great examples posted and linked here.
I just suck at using it; I was constantly struggling to get something acceptable before IRAY. Yet some of the possibilities with 3Delight open up all new styles.
It depends on the complexity of your scene. "seconds", certainly not. But a simple scene will render in under a minute. For more complex stuff, 3DL will need time, i.e. if you are dealing with hairs and stuff.
But honestly, unless your PC is in danger of getting fried when it goes beyond the 2 Minute mark, it's worth waiting a bit longer.
This render here rendered in about an hour, due to shadow settings:
While this one took just a few minutes:
That's an amazing stroke of luck, AoA stuff being on sale today! I just need to rearrange my budget some so I can leave money for the PC+ sale....
Why is 3Delight awesome? I shall tell you why I feel 3Delight is awesome then, dreamfarmer.
I've upgraded my video card recently to jump in on the Iray bandwagon. Things move faster... .meh... but the renders aren't as awesome as I had hoped when comparing to 3Delight. For one thing, a card without enough OOMPH will leave pixelation all over the screen - no matter how long you allow Iray to process. Heck! If I had wanted those kinds of results, I would have just swiped a low-resoultion image from Google Images and claimed as my own. (No. I really wouldn't stoop to that level)
3Delight is TOTALLY capable of rendering in Photorealism. As with any kind of photographic and film session, your final results all come from the lighting. If you really play around with the lighting, you can get some lovely, lovely results.
Not counting the bird, I rendered this in 3Delight mode. Took only 5 minutes on a computer with 6GB of RAM. I used Raytracing lights - they were custom ones that I created within the scene as well as the lights that came prepackaged with the Easy Environments Tree of Life.
I used the freebie pre-packaged Alchemy Chasm lights that came with DAZ Studio for this render/build in 3Delight. Take out my sand and light flare effect at the bottom of the screen, and the rest of this work is relatively untouched.
I tweaked the lighting and the shadows to emit more yellows, oranges, and set the Raytrace shadow to violet. I repositioned the lights above the Sphinxes' heads between the two of them and played around with intensities until I got everything to line right up. Although I do admit to color-balancing/contrast fixing the final composition in Photoshop (because my monitor tends to make things render brighter than they actually are - I can't fix this) - these are two of the non-toon works that I have where 3Delight really sold me that more could be done if I just take the time to play with the lighting.
In conclusion, Iray is nice. But Iray is IMO kind of over-hyped. My only true love of Iray is the emissive lighting that 3Delight lacks. Other than that, I'd rather use 3Delight to save on time. (I won't mention that I mostly use 3Delight because I do comics with toony work--- LOL)
Oh, yeah and there is this, but it took me 12 hours to render in 3Delight. So, no time saved there, but end results were nice.
This has happened often enough that I'm pretty sure someone on staff keeps an eye on discussions and pokes things behind the scenes.
Same here. I prefer the look of Iray and Firefly as the lights and shadows tend to actually embrace the figures when rendered instead of landing flat. Gives a more dramatic look in my opinion, and although I do not really render realistic, I like to have a look that with 3DL I cannot achieve.
Aiijuin Graphics: Well, actually 3DL DOES have emissive surfaces!
Though they do tend to be a bit slow, but it's a fair trade off.