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Same here.
Thanks, Will. Given your comment about opacity maps and skins, do you think that IRay to 3DL on the consumer end is best served with objects (vehicles, tools, sets) than with characters?
I agree 110% about the lighting levels needed for 3DL. My very first renders looked like they were done with a single flashbulb in the middle of a blackout in the middle of the night at Grand Central Station. There's a real learning curve with 3DL but I think it's worth it, especially if you treat a render as a starting point to be fiddled with further in Photoshop for artistic reasons (i.e. faking a painting on canvas).
Thank you very much for the tip. I will try it and see how it goes the next time I want to convert an Iray prop!
Mighty: Well, if I was going to convert Iray figures to 3DL (which is rare, I have only one figure, Alfred HD, that comes with Iray materials), my inclination would be to start with a skin that is in the shader I want (I like US skins, faster than AoA Subsurface), and then simply copy over textures.
If I understand the question right?
Yep, pretty much. Every G3 character I've bought from DAZ or elsewhere has had both Iray and 3DL textures included although some of the 3DL's look better than other out of the box. I have had hair products whose Iray textures were fine but whose 3DL textures weren't, so I may want to convert those.
I've noticed a number of new products in the store that had 3Delight, Iray and sometimes even Poser textures and shaders in them. I was surprised and delighted to discover that. I use mainly Iray now, but still enjoy 3Delight as well as Poser occasionally. It's nice to know that some of these products can be used for all three. The most recent one that comes to mind is the Momji Realistic Grass Evolution and Extreme Detail Trees. Tango Alpha's new Tangy Apple Orchard has options for 3Delight, Iray and Carrara. So there are some vendors doing that, quite a few. I'd suggest voting with your dollars on those kinds of products and letting the vendors know that's why you bought them so they continue to support it.
I really had been needing a fishing set... like the one that just came out.... but it's Iray only... made me roar then whimper...
That's why we love you guys!!!
Sadly, this sounds a lot like the publishing industry- both traditional and indie. Work hard, need a ton of knowledge, experience and talent to do it, plus the right marketing and you make peanuts. It is certainly a labor of love! Most of the arts seem to have this problem. But we can't not do it. Creating is like breathing. Making a living at it, however, is an entirely different story.
I understand the point about not requiring other products. Though on the other hand, we could theorise that not that many people actually bought UberSurface2 because there weren't that many "obviously useful" products that require it.
Here's a quick render with the free UberSurface - the sphere diffuse is uniform blue, and the reflection strength mask is a desaturated image I just found here. For the environment map, I just stuck the Iray default "Ruins" HDR in that slot and gave it a yellow-ish colour multiplier. Diffuse strength is driven by the inverted reflection strength, as I initially described.
The biggest problem I can see is that for Iray textures, DS has those handy tiling controls in the image editor, and with 3DL in DS all the tiling has to be done on the shader side. So if there is a mix of tiles and textures following the UV map, it will require fussing around in the shader mixer.
Thank you!
In a physically plausible rendering scenario it's easier actually, when you can lookdev your materials under a reference light set, and then they should be able to respond to a wide range of lighting realistically. But this requires following certain conventions based on real-world physics (like not using RGB255 for white, for example), and somehow this practice hasn't yet spread wide enough.
What the majority of PA's are thinking everytime 3DL users voice their frustration.
HAH!!!
One alternative that wouldn't cost PAs much time is for Daz to create a set of basic Iray->3DL conversion scripts, and provide them free of charge to PAs. Conversion is doable as long as an Iray-only product uses the standard Uber Iray shaders, which use predictable settings. The scripts can contain fields and other options to allow for a modest amount of customization. Ideally, the average product could be converted in 10 minutes or less.
Such a script would benefit Daz the most, so the onus should be on them to create it. They're making money on everyone's sales, so they can spread out the development time. For the PA, there must be enough added sales, or at least the equivalent in goodwill value, in ten minutes of time.
The conversion doesn't have to be perfect -- certainly there's no expectation it's going to look as good as a well-done Iray render -- and the product page could even say the 3DL version of materials was auto-converted. Still, it would be a good start for those users still using 3DL, for whatever reason that may be.
I really, really don't want to sound bad with this .........................
You are at work and really don't make a whole lot of money for all the time and work you put into your job. The boss comes up to you and says:
"This is completely up to you. I would like you to put in an extra day of work each week. No over time. In fact the company will be paying 10% (or less depending on business) of what you make an hour now, for that extra day. This is completely up to you, but it would mean Good Will to the company. What do you say? Will you do it?"
Well, will you?
Good will is earned by a seller establishing a direct connection and rapport with his or her customers. We live in a global marketplace where sellers can have a direct link to their buyers. Daz is a marketplace convenience for automating the purchase of digital goods; many PAs think of it as a firewall, and don't even know who their customers are. The Daz tool could be something you can make money with. Or not, if you aren't good at making money.
Making both 3delight and Iray versions is not always as straight foward as just adjusting materials. Both engines have their qualities and their drawbacks. I really like Iray's lighting solutions. I think Iray renders are way more realistic than 3dl. Iray also renders much faster, given you have the proper hardware. On the other hand, Iray sucks at displacement.
So, to give you some examples of the work that might be involved to create two versions of a set, one for each renderer, that look pretty similar...
Iray is pretty good at supporting high poly models, whereas 3DL isn't.
If you look at Stonemason's latest release, the "Winter Castle" I highly suspect that all the wall stones you see kind of sticking out of the wall, have been modeled and painstakingly put in place one by one to fit the underlying texture of the "flat" wall. This is what you have to do for Iray modeling, since displacement slows your computer to a crawl. On the other hand, having all these extra polys will slow 3DL to a crawl, while having a displacement map would render much faster. However, creating such a displacement map using Z-brush or other softwares takes quite a bit of time as well.
Something like caustics is hard coded in Iray, you have to find all kinds of tricks to reproduce the same effect in 3DL, sometimes having to actually add more meshes to create a similar effect.
Bouncing lights in an interior setting is equally problematic. Iray does it natively, not quite so in 3DL.
Matching results between emissive surfaces in Iray and 3DL is very time consuming...
Matching atmospheres between the two renderers takes quite a while...
Neither renderer is perfect, but trying to match results between the two can be a lot more work than one might think.
Thats why I only render what I need to in 3DL and do the rest in Iray.
Substitute Studio for 3DL above and you'll be accurate.
Just because Studio hasn't kept up with what 3DL can do, doesn't mean 3DL is at fault, nor does it mean that Studio CAN'T do it. What is required is to port the actual shaders into Studio (shaders in the sense of actual code that expands the capabilities of the renderer...not presets). But there are a couple of obsitacles for some of the items. The first is the lack of support in Shader Builder for more modern shaders than those in 3DL version 7 or 8...namely RSL 2. The second is that the default base shader and even the main replacements...UberSurface and AoA's SSS shader, US2 and the pw line, ALL are 'old school' and are NOT 'modern' enough. Some of the problems are simply ones of efficiency all the way up to 'just won't work' (emissive surfaces for example).
any posts that don't follow the line are deemed as speculation... so I'm deleting them for the daz team
any posts that don't follow the line are deemed as speculation... so I'm deleting them for the daz team
any posts that don't follow the line are deemed as speculation... so I'm deleting them for the daz team
Hi guys,just to elaborate on what Faveral said..
The stone walls,rocks & terrains in the new winter castle set were all sculpted in zbrush and then optimized down to a low poly triangulated mesh,those 'panels' are then sent to substance painter to generate texture maps,also top down masks are generated in 3dsmax to aid in snow placement once it gets to DazStudio ..and then I had to commission someone to create a snow shader(Thanks again Will!) that would add on to the multi layer shader I used in Fern Lake.. if I were just doing that set for 3dl then it would probably be made in quads and all the stones poking out of the wall detail would be done via displacement(which doesn't play well with triangulated meshes)..but as we know displacement is terribly slow in Iray, so I avoid that if possible., using Iray displacement on a scene the scale of that would mean subdividing everything up to several hundred million polys.
A 3dl version of Winter Castle would probably mean new geometry,new textures and new shaders...
the biggest issue I have with 3dl v Iray versions is the texture maps themselves.if your taking advantage of Iray then your probably using PBR textures made in something like substance painter/designer,they look great in Iray but look terrible in 3dl,we can't force the end user to use a specific lighting setup in 3dl so need to make textures that'll work good across a broad range of lighting conditions,this often means baking some lighting/shadow info into the maps so that even in the most basic of lighting scenarios it still looks acceptable,something you would never do with pbr textures
with the Venezia Suite (an environment released a few months ago) I could get it looking great in 3dl using ubersurfaces on everything and uberlighting with settings maxed out,most of the texture maps were tweaked to suit 3dl, it looked great but was infinitely slow to render, so I just gave up on the idea of doing a scene like that in 3dl,If customers can't render it then it's pointless to offer it, no matter how cool it looks after half a day of rendering,the argument would then become "why can't I render this set in 3dl" instead of "why isnt this available in 3dl."
there's also the struggle of everything just looking so damn good in Iray,it set a bar that 3dl probably will never reach,yes you can maybe get close with ubershaders and lighting but then it just takes too long to render, as content providers we're always aware of whether end users even can render something...and not just render the environment..but environment plus props,plus clothed characters,plus vehicles or whatever else they may add.
so it's never a simple case of just applying a 3dl shader and then your done, we test render and tweak every surface from multiple angles, it takes hours not minutes to complete the surface settings,
Cheers
S
edit,I should add that I will support 3dl wherever possible, but there may still be the odd set that is specific to a render engine,
Hah! It's working in game development at a salaried position!
..thank you, both.
...a good solution to that would be AoA's Advanced Ambient light which ambient produces fill lighting that is fully adjustable. UE does too but it can bloat render time pretty badly particularly if you use full GI, and you have to mess with the sampling rate to get a clean crisp image.
Time to put this in a little actual perspective...
Comparing Iray to the 3DL shaders in Studio is like comparing a modern UHD large screen TV to a mid 70s portable.
The simple fact is...3Delight IS capable of that SAME thing with more modern shaders!
...so Venezia Suite basically will not work in 3DL at all no matter what one does then. Sad because it is such a lovely set that would have worked well for my story.
For those like myself who look to achieve more of a "storybook" or "painted plate" style of illustration (or any other effect like engraving, Noir, comic book, etc), it is far simpler to do so in 3DL directly in the render pass with all the shader effects sets available. As I do not have a steady enough hand, digital painting in post is pretty much out of the question. About the only post I do anymore is applying global filters, adjusting overall tone mapping, or adding text.
I rarely use UE but instead rely on the AoA advanced lights which keep render times more manageable. True it means I have to set up my own bounce lighting and simulate GI, but that is less time consuming than the hours it takes for an Iray render to finish. At first like everyone else I was excited about Iray until after a while, I was seeing issues like extremely long render times using emissive lights and characters not visually blending in with the rest of the scene. As I don't have a powerful enough system (at least for Iray rendering) I do not use any HD textures, and in Iray, that really shows as the characters' skin tends to look like it was made of rubber.
In 3DL with SSS I have little issue with making characters look like they are part of the scene.
any posts that don't follow the line are deemed as speculation... so I'm deleting them for the daz team
The PAs can only use the capabilities of the software that they are supporting. Whilst it may be that Studio does not use the full functionality of 3DL, that is a moot point for the PAs and the DS using customers, only DAZ can make that improvement. If they choose not to, then the PAs have to live with what 3DL can currently do inside studio, and on that basis choose whether or not they wish to support it. When PAs mention issues with 3DL, they are refering to 3DL in DS, not the standalone 3DL renderer, no one is critising that.
any posts that don't follow the line are deemed as speculation... so I'm deleting them for the daz team
I will say that, when it comes to anything OTHER than photorealism, 3DL is incredibly more useful. For all the drawn or cartoon styles, bam.