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...did you make sure after inserting the character that the render was done through the Fog Camera? I've made that mistake before.
Yeah. It's weird. It's like all of a sudden the camera isn't accepting US2 'cast shadow: off' flag... but it was before. Now, it's not.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/1840476/#Comment_1840476
....a number of functions of AoA's cameras and lights were broken by the 4.7 update. Something about shader bricks being changed.
I mean like over a time span of 20 minutes. ;)
I had beautiful godrays going through a window. I add a figure from another scene, and... bam, suddenly not working.
I've deleted and readded the camera, still not working. If I just make the window invisible, there's the godrays. Just, apparently, 'cast shadows off' just not working all of a sudden.
Again, this is the bane of 3DL. Is this shader going to function with that light? Who knows! Try it and find out. Is this shader going to work in progressive mode? Who knows! Is instancing going to work right? HA HA!
All I'm saying is that from the time frame of when I started the shift to focusing heavily on Iray happened pretty fast and that if I had started with Studio 6 months later I doubt that I would have even tried 3dl given the very strong focus on Iray and not on 3Delight. So saying that new people prefer Iray is not really an unskewed equation because the focus on Iray is not the same as the focus of 3Delight by any stretch of the imagination. 3Delight is far more intuitive to me and if I had started with Iray I may very well have walked away in frustration. Only knowing that I could still work in 3delight if I couldn't get a handle on Iray kept me from giving up in frustration those first months. And DAZ would have lost a rather large chunk of my money. And of course, there really isn't any way to find out how many people who start don't like Iray and just quietly walk away because obviously when that happens it continues to re inforce the idea that Iray is more popular. And the argument can go round and round and round.
Edited to fix spelling its late and I'm too tired to spell correctly lol
...I feel the same way about 3DL. True, I've been working with it for about 7 years before Iray was introduced but I find, as someone who came from a background in painting and stagecraft rather than photography, it is much more expressive and intuitive.
To illustrate just how powerful the sense of illusion can be, I was in charge of operating the lighting for a two man play that took place on a city park bench. Throughout the show, I had to slowly change the lighting from what was late afternoon to evening to finally where there was only a "streetlight" that illuminated the two actors. I was told afterwards that as the show progressed, people in the audience were beginning to rub their hands and arms, or put on sweaters/jackets they had with them as they if they were feeling "chilled". The temperature in the theatre was a constant 75° to 78° throughout the show.
That is suspension of disbelief.
It is also something much simpler to convey through a non photo real engine like 3DL than a realistic one like Iray.
This also is why a film like Brave visually works for me while one like Transformers which combines real life with CGI doesn't.
I'm also seeing a LOT of people saying that it's not nearly as easy as 3DL to Iray and implementing it might be tricky. If you can get someone to do it, that would be great, but apprently it would have to be someone that really knew what they were doing. I think if it was simple, Daz WOULD have provided it.
Laurie
...well for one it would really require someone who knows their way around the shader mixer/builder far much better than I do.
If it absolutely cannot be done than that basically says a good portion of new content will not be compatible with 3DL which will seriously limit what people can use in their scenes.
At first I was really excited by Iray, however the more I worked with it the less I liked what I was seeing as I realised I did not have the hardware to support its optimal performance, nor the technical expertise and software tools to make characters, look just as "real" as the other items in a scene. It works great for items like cars, planes, space ships, buildings & such, but it where it breaks down is with handling of skin, hair, and eyes.
In your defense your inability to make the Characters
look just as "real" as the non organic items in the scene
is a more a shortcoming of the Figures themselves... not your skill so much.
and a common phenomenon even with "high end Apps" like Maya & Max etc.
Great progress has been made with skin when photobased maps from sources like 3Dsk are deployed with the proper amoumt of Subsurface scattering.
But alas most Hair& Eyes that I see even on the most modern Genesis products are still the weakest element in poser/Daz content on the matter of looking so called"photoreal".
I was scrolling through the website - new items.
I couldn't buy anything 3Delight, so something of a poor comparrison. I can't buy what isn't there.
I want shaders, and some info on how to use them. It's tough to know what to use that I already have, whereas with IRAY there seems to be more info on how to do stuff; maybe because everyone was in the same boat and the info got shared, but with 3Deltight, until recently, there was no threads to read.
Some of the M4 and V4 characters look more photoreal than G3. Better Skin, more individial faces. Just saying.
nicstt, I've fumbled threw some of that as a n00b to Daz Studio (or anything CG for that matter).
I did manage to make a short intro of a sorts to what dial dose what with the 3DL OmniUber shader included with Daz Studio, mostly as a bread crumb trail for my self.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/947916/#Comment_947916
There is a 3delight thread, however they often end up on wild tangents of other programs and render engines. I think a few of them have free shaders (can't remember whom off the top of my head). There a friendly bunch that have a lot more knowledge about 3delight then me, I'm still a n00b.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/55128/3delight-laboratory-thread-tips-questions-experiments/p1
And if your more venturous with setting up your own surfaces, I know there are lots of maps/images out there for that (Some are even CC0, for example).
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/40627/zdg-the-making-of-paint-and-brushes-simple-displacement-and-texture-maps
I'm about to embark on an experiment of dressing up a gym set with a simple Daz Default surface using AElflaed's Fancy - Shaders maps, a really good commercial 3DL shader set (here at daz3d). Something I need to get motivated and just do it.
In the words of Zathras, "Much to be do-ings not much time". lol.
There seems to be a lot of "what I tell you three times is true" about Daz's lack of support for 3Delight and willful refusal to write a tool to cnvert from iray shader to 3Delight. If you really believe that there are a set of rules that can be used to cvnert most Uber Iray base shader set-ups to one of the 3Delight shaders then write those rules out - if they do work, unabiguously, for most Iray set-ups to give usable 3Delight renders, then I will (try to) turn the rules into a script if that's not in your skill set. But I think you will find that there isn't a manageable algorithm in that direction, using the unmodified maps.
That even applies to many 3DL shaders when trying to convert them to another, lol. I attempted to make a simple spreadsheet to convert AoA values to DazDefault, and ended up with a dozen different formulas that still needed to be tweaked for a single PA (it is the same for many PA's). Truth is, there is no single 'correct' way to set up many surfaces, so it is "near impossible" to make a single converter that will do it all. Iray has many more map slots to mess around with and has multiple layers, it has even more ways to do the same thing. It's just easier to drop in maps and 'eyeball' the settings, less grief as well, lol.
Not to get off on a tangent but this is not generally true.
the HD morph options of G2 &G3 give them much more realistic Detail than the millenium figures ever had
Ivan for the G3 male is the most realistic looking Daz figure in existance...as long as he is Bald and keeps his eyes closed
That said I still use Syyd Ravens Vanilla Sky& Horizon Vicky 4 textures on the G1-G2 females via Vicky 4's UV's
This is because I have yet to see any of the newer female textures that do not look like an Air brush painting.
Also to be fair Creators Like Aery Sol have produced some of the best modern hairs that hold up well in a PBR render
but overall there are way to many old 1990's style transmapped hairs that look quite rubbish IMHO, in a PBR like Iray or Cycles.
There is a good reason for Aeon Soul's hairs looking that way; much of the rendering they do is in Octane, so they understand well how to make a product that will work well in PBR rendering engines.
What kind of shaders? What kind of info? Do you need to know how to apply them, or something more indepth about what all the parameters do? There are so many existing 3Delight shaders/shader presets out there, that I can't think of anything that hasn't been done already at some point in the past. The good news for you is that these still fully functional and excellent "vintage" items may be less expensive than their newer counterparts. 3Delight shaders/presets is a bit like Victoria and Michael 4. For such a long period of time the people who like to make shaders for Daz Studio, only had 3Delight to work with, so nearly every possible thing has been accomplished.
I do understand that the general forum base can assume that everyone has a similar foundation of common knowledge, and this assumption is incorrect and difficult to overcome. Bluebird3D's quick tip series have definately illustrated the point that knowledge taken for granted by one person, can be a real "A-Ha!" moment for someone else. My general advice would be to start your own thread with the specifics of the information you seek. We (the community) can either answer directly, or track down relevant past discussions.
But that's only one comment made by someone that said they only use DS for setup, so I wouldn't count that. It's not most like you claimed unfortunately.
Richard, 90% of what would make people at least somewhat happy is Cutout Opacity -> Opacity.
It doesn't have to be perfect, but losing all the opacity maps for a scene with hundreds of surfaces is kind of a game killer.
any posts that don't follow the line are deemed as speculation... so I'm deleting them for the daz team
DestinysGarden, one tiny caveat regarding significantly older shader sets from the dawn of pain. Some have maps that are so small or lack enough detail, they just fall apart as soon as render size increases or you get close to an item with them on it. That's why I was so excited about your and fisty's newer cloth shaders a few years back.
The rest I agree with, aside from a good HD denim (genes) I can't think of any thing I need at this moment. And I'm not sure 3DL will let you get the gloss directionality patrons of said HD cloth from a distance without getting dither patrons.
This may have once been the case, but things have changed since then. I suspect that back when vendors were getting that much of the sales, DAZ wasn't yet developing its own software program because of a fear that Poser would disappear and so would the sales of products here.
Perhaps true, but customers need to buy a product that has what they want in enough volume for the vendor to see continuing support for something, and that hasn't seemed to be the case with continued support for Poser materials or seem to be the case for continued support of 3DL from vendors that have chosen to drop it. It doesn't help that Smith Micro has seemed to have decided they won't work with DAZ on putting in support for full Genesis 3 compatibility.
I'll agree with the increase in sales, but that's made no one want to buy unless it's on sale but it's not like the customer is standing against that. But PAs never got 100% of the sales, the difference is more of what is bought rather than where. Also again, what PAs make has everything to do with what customers want, not the other way around. When vendors make what the majority of customers want, then they get compensated for it. Whether it's figures, shaders of rendering engines, customer demand ALWAYS drive that.
I don't care for 3DL anymore and I think that's the trend which is what the silent majority is buying.
I use Daz Studio for characters only. Everything else is done in Cycles of Blender and I find Iray is better for characters in general especially for skin.
The bane of how 3Delight is treated in DS, you mean.
I agree that what we have now is basically three systems (the default shaders, the Uber family and the AoA family) that may or may not be compatible. And these systems are all outdated, to boot. And shader mixer (used for most non-"major" shader addons) is buggy in RSL mode.
It's not fun.
But if you ever run into issues with shaders (shader mixer networks, most likely) misbehaving between hiders, or especially with instancing,
- these are not 3Delight problems, these are DAZ Studio problems. Same as crashes on subdividing a simple mesh too far in certain algorithms.
PS Instancing has always worked fine for me. What trouble did you run into?
I realize they are Daz Studio problems. Unless the thread is specifically about other 3DL renderers, I think it can safely be assumed we're talking about Daz' implementation.
Instancing problem: if you set SubD, instance objects no longer cast shadows. There may be other bugs, I don't know. I've encountered some weirdness with some shaders using instances, but I've pretty much given up on negotiating a mindfield of bugs and outdated stuff with 3DL rendering and have focused on cartoon stuff.
Currently trying to take a whack at realistic 3DL renders again, and it's so frustrating I want to kick my machine.
(Like, it takes 30 minutes to see how the skin looks at all, then I realize it looks horrible, I don't know why, I don't know what to change, so I change some random things and another 30 minutes to find out it still looks like poo)
SubD on the original object? Before or after instancing? Which shaders (light and surface)? I'll see if I can replicate it.
I specifically wrote this free mega-tutorial to help people figure out what could be wrong about their skin renders and what parameters to change in an informed, non-random way. It has a load of "recipes", examples, advice and whatever. Even if you hate the way my "oldschool" renders looked, you could still benefit from studying this document and adapting the knowledge to get exactly the look you're after.
It's a known bug, it's been put in several times, the chance of it getting fixed is pretty close to 0.
Repro:
Take an object. Create instances from it. Put a plane underneath and add a light source, do a quick render. Observe, shadows.
Add SubD to the object (or switch it from Basic to High Def, if it already has SubD).
Do a quick render. Observe, no shadows.
Yeah, you're right. DS misbehaves.
It inserts an unnecessary AttributeEnd before it begins the subdivision mesh.
If it's commented out, all the shadows come back. Here's a snippet...
If anything, it's fixable when you export to RIB. Even if the devs somehow refuse to deal with it.