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Surface gloss? Please Tell me more.
Er, in the shader... if you are using PBR Metallicity (which is the default), there is Glossy Weight, Glossy Color, Glossy Reflectivity, Glossy Roughness.
Glossy weight is how much gloss effect there is. Personally, I like always setting this to 1.
Glossy color is what color highlights are. Again, purists argue this should always be pure white, for non-metals.
Glossy reflectivity is how intense the highlight is. For most organic stuff, this should be somewhere between .1 and .5. I'd go with .5.
Glossy roughness is somewhat like 'glossiness' in 3DL. It's, sort of, how 'spread out' the highlight is. Mirrors should be 0, dull fabric and rock should be close to 1. Regular skin should be somewhere between .2 (for really sweaty/reflective skin) to .6 (for rather dry skin).
There are other things you can do to get surface gloss, like playing with top coat, but that's fiddly and it's arguable whether you even need to most times.
I only use 3Delight... I can't afford the upgrades to hardware to use IRay/Nvidia and honestly you can get nearly the same quality of renders out of 3DL if you know what you're doing with it. The biggest problem with 3Delight isn't the capabilities of the engine (it's been used in major Hollywood productions for VFX rendering), it's that the version included with DS was never implemented in a way that takes full advantage of what it can do...
You know, that point gets lofted a lot in these discussions, but I'm not sure why it's relevant -- do many (any?) people on this forum get 3Delight products to use on a 3DL render outside of Daz Studio?
I mean, functionally, the discussion isn't 3DL and Iray in theory in their best implementation, but 3DL and Iray as rendered in Daz Studio.
It's relevent in regards to getting results from 3DL. Like any other tool set it takes time and effort to learn, but with a little work (and a chance to actually learn the use of the tools) 3DL in DS is just as capable as IRay of getting high-end images. I've seen some truely amazing and life-like renders in both engines, but I also see a lot of really bad art done with them both as well. The best work has always come from the artists who have truly taken time to learn the tools. The issue with the implementation means that it takes a bit more work to get the results than it might in other engines that are more fully implemented and supported, which will be less atractive to the pose/render crowd which makes up a large portion of our end of the 3D community...
I commented mostly in response to the general idea that 3DL isn't as capable an engine as IRay that some express in threads like this... an idea that is grossly inaccurate...
Personally I like 3DL myself and don't mind taking the extra time to get the results... :)
Yes, but you referred to Hollywood and that Daz' implementation lacks a lot of stuff that 3Delight can do.
That's the part that isn't relevant.
Plus, 'hey, I rewrote all the lights' is a bit more than 'put in a little more work.'
As I see it, the OP just asked this in light of the growing output of Iray items.
As such I think a reaction in the line of "I still use 3dl because of this or that reason" is very valid but "you should use 3dl for this or that reason" is not. And the discussion which render engine is better is not at all relevant for this specific thread... just my 2 cents .....
I'm strictly 3delight at this point. That has more to do with limited free time to learn iray (i'd rather be rendering 3dl than learning iray), inertia, and an obscenely massive library of optimized-for-3delight content. I don't mind iray-only props - it's the geometry and texture maps I can't create. I actively enjoy tweaking my shaders anyway, and I would do it even if the prop came with 3delight textures. As long as Studio includes 3dl, I'm good.
...a number of the light presets for 3DL use UE which on my system renders almost as slow as Iray in CPU mode.
In 3DL I primarily use the AoA Advanced lights and just set up my own lighting as well. For outdoor scenes in older versions of Daz I relied on Dreamlight's Light Dome Pro/LDP2. The newest version for Daz 4.x+, LDP-R, requires multi pass rendering and compositing in a 2 D programme which is a more involved process than the original plugin required.
...in the same camp here. I don't have 700$ for a 1080 Ti and my MB is only PCIe 2.0 (though it has three X16 slots). I have coaxed some "close to real" effects from 3DL particularly using AoA's advanced lights and SSS shaders. In one scene I even was able to produce a proper refraction in water (took a bit of trial and error but finally got it to work).
Scripted 3DL rendering does open a few more of he engine's features, but also may not work with certain plugins (like atmospheric or other effects cameras).
The first image look like... well I don't know. With black and white lines everywhere, no reflections in the floor, no shadows.
The iray render has too much reflection in the floor (more render time) and no bump, but at least look real.
The first image look like... well I don't know. With black and white lines everywhere, no reflections in the floor, no shadows.
The iray render has too much reflection in the floor (more render time) and no bump, but at least look real.
As I said, the 3DL were out of the box Poser materials that I barely adjusted (only on the mirrors, because Poser Mirror settings almost never work in 3DL). The black and white lines were on the original texture, not a fault of tiling. The Iray image used *none* of the original textures or material settings, instead coming from the various Iray presets I've picked up.
And I didn't do those renders for this thread, they were for something completely unrelated that happened to have a slightly relevant point. The test I was running when I did them was to compare render times (and general appearance) of different lighting setups, not realsim. There were two other 3DL tests I didn't post, because they weren't relevant to the comparison of times for relatively "out of the box" renders. I don't try for Realism when I'm using 3DL, so I don't really care if the first image was realistic or not.
3de is kind of a catchall, aoa, omnifreaker, dz defailt, gets complicated when using daz content in carrara, the other daz 3d owned app!!
...yeah the old Daz content works fine in Carrara. Anything with just Iray shaders is a real pain in the behind.
And if you bridge to Hexagon anything with Iray shaders on it are set to invisible.. if it's something with a lot of material zones it's a pain in the butt to change them all to opaque. I do all my morph developing with 3DL shaders to avoid that, but still sucks if making promos and want to bridge to make quick fixed to mangled hair or pokethrough.
I _require_ 3Delight but never "3Delight materials" by any given PAs. =P
Sorry PAs. I honestly love the way your modeling and texturing skills save my time (when I am not fixing bad normals or non-beveled edges... okay doesn't happen all the time, and yet!..), but I'm my own lookdev - and my own TD. So I'd rather PAs concentrated on models and textures and not material settings for renderers they are not intimately familiar with (and I mean renderers on the whole, not "default DS materials").
Unlikely.
I don't have it, but looking at the specs @ the store page, half of what it does 3Delight does automagically - textures are mipmapped and the renderer intelligently selects the right resolution it needs for the shot. As for SubD - 3Delight doesn´t seem to have _that_ much of an issue with those.
Well, for those seeing my other recent threads, the reason for this one has become clear..Market Research :)
My first model (now in the store) just has very basic 3DL support..my next ones have a lot more....I'm adding a lot of Iray tricks to the models I'm working on and trying to have close parity with the 3DL options...BUT as you point out, not all PA's know all about the render engines and tech...that's certainly true with me. I'm using basic default DS to deliver something that I think your average user can plug and play with, but really there's SO much involved with 3DL...to you use default? omni things? AOA based? what kind of lighting? all of that is just way more than I ever could understand. (I prefer iray for development, but to me it makes a bit more sense, even if it doesn't display nicely in the viewport WYSIWYG like). Even before iray came around.. I'd just slap whatever shaders I had that I'd found looked good and let it go, with no idea about what would be best with regards to the light or the settings.
Congrats on the release =)
Have you heard about StemCell, the new standard TurboSquid is implementing for their submissions? It basically takes renderers out of the equation. The vendor supplies a model and a set of PBR texture maps. The user does whatever they want with that. I hope that this direction will be eventually adopted by DAZ and other "hobbyist-friendly" stores - so that the vendors and the store QA teams would be able to really focus on the quality of the mesh (topology, UV efficiency...) and textures (no burnt-in highlights or occlusion, if anything), not on "presets", and the users will finally stop fighting over whichever renderers they prefer.
Given that a lot of people like to just click on a new item and have it instantly ready to render, I doubt this idea would have much success. Not everyone enjoys tweaking shader settings for their renderer of choice, so whilst this idea may be good for people that are skilled in such matters, I suspect the majority would not be happy with it at all.
this is just me but actually when a product comes with 3dl support I do expect quality materials for 3delight. I can get my materials turned from Iray to 3delight alright, but it involves time. Time I am willing to spend when I purchased a product with Iray only support. When I buy a product with 3DL support I don't expect to spend that time! So a word from the user: either get to a really good knowlege of how 3deligth materials work or stick to Iray and be fine with that, but then don't claim to provide 3delight materials. I didn't get your first product ( congrats on that btw) so I am in no place to say what the quality of your 3delight materials are, this is just my general point of view.
Wasn't the whole point of Pharr, Hanrahan and Humphreys coming up with the PBR concept is that you don't need much tweaking? Certainly way, way less than in the "oldschool" model. When you have meaningful maps, of course. So we assume that the vendor knows what they're doing.
And to be honest, one of the reasons I dream of "our" market adopting this standard is to encourage development of end-user skills and critical thinking. The "click and render"-oriented market as-is is very handholding; new users are led to believe that the vendors always know best... while they are as fallible as anyone else.
Don't give a hungry man a fish. Give him a fishing rod. That's what I believe in.
Kind of no wonder PAs just shrug and stick with Iray, really -- there's pretty much no amount of effort that's not going to be criticized anyway, folks able to adapt stuff can just as easily adapt stuff from Iray, and you can spend your time doing stuff that will maybe make money.
A lot of materials don't need a texture file, so a product with just geometry and textures is not enough, even with the concept of PBR. I am talking about shiny metals, water, glass, plastic etc, whose material settings are currently highly dependent on the shader system used by the renderer. Naturally it would be nice if there was a standard system they all used, but until (or if) it happens then we need the relevant shaders used by the renderer of choice, which for the majority of current DS users is iRay.
I was a hardcore Poser user and was getting pretty awesome results with Firefly making it really, really hard to start using DAZ when I just couldn't for the life of me get 3DL renders to come anywhere close. Then IRAY happened and almost overnight I was a DAZ exclusive user. I LOVE IRAY! (It floats my boat - on realistically rendered water - ha ha!). I only use 3DL for Look At My Hair renders and wish I could render LAMH scenes in Iray without exporting a huge file first. Aside from that, it is all about that Iray! If I could get models with no 3DL that would be great. If it saved me some coin that would be even more great. Heck, I might even pay slightly more to have IRAY only if that allowed a few more Iray shaders/colors/patterns/textures to be included. ;)
I know everyone has their reasons for what they do and what they like. I know many people, for whatever reasons, do not have an Nvidia video card. But a lot of people don't own cars. Does that mean *I* should walk?
PA's need to cater to their profit bearing base. I do put my money where my mouth is though. And not to put too fine a point on it - the *best* render engine/shader/whatever is the one that gives you the results you want. PERIOD.
Well, the one in the Daz store, I fully admit is just a very basic ones, converted from the Poser original. It's my 2nd and 3rd sets (found elsewhere) that I have what I feel are good 3DL options..but they're not the super extreme a 3DL expert could do. I'm happy with them to be on product, and I think for your basic plug and play user (whcih is about what I am in that realm, They'll do fine...I don't slap them together :)...but I do know they could be much better built and optimized but it's tech beyong me..but also I think beyond what the basic 3dl user would use. Folks like Mustakettu85 are going to do tweaking anyhow, so honestly, it's not worth putting in the time for an advanced user like him.
Why give him a fishing rod, why not teach him to make one himself?
Users have different objectives and different skill sets. I have no talent in the visual arts and I'm extremely non-visual. My artistic talent is writing. I started doing 3D art because the more "traditional" art forms are impossible for me. I'm usually incapable of evaluating the results of different presets, let alone creating them. I'm just happy to have some ability to create visual images instead of none.
And my technical prowess is more on the math/pure science side than the engineering side. 3Delight makes much more sense to me technically than Iray does.
Daz Studio is for all level of people. Those who want to do super detailed customizing and those who want to plug and play.
Speaking as a vendor, I'm gonna make products that have the most reach. Nothing that says an advanced user can't use my texture maps to plug into their own shader formulas.
Also, a lot of folks skip all the stuff you can do to speed things up in Iray and then compare that to 3dl with almost all advanced features off. Well... ... yeah
Sorry, but if shiny metals or plastic materials "don't need a texture file", why are there so many Substances (you know the Allegorithmic Substance line, right?) or even bitmap PBR texture sets out there specifically for these? And I think even in the DAZ store there are Iray materials for those that do come with textures.
Even the most "shiny" material needs detail to look believable. You can't get detail without textures.
Many renderers (most renderers, I'd say even) support procedural texturing, but these are obviously not that trivial to convert. Bitmaps are universal, on the other hand.
Now, when it comes to actual shading, all contemporary renderers are capable of physically based Fresnel computations, which are all you need for reflection and refraction (metals just use a complex IoR).
You could have made a convincing argument if you had pointed out that the current vanilla DS implementation of 3Delight support is missing a shader that would actually be using contemporary shadeops which are sitting there inside the renderer code waiting to be called. It's true. This is an issue.
But in the perfect world where DAZ adopts a variation of the StemCell standard, DAZ will also provide an updated integration of the latest 3Delight module, the OSL pathtracer, which is as cutting-edge as it gets.
I'm not saying either of these scenarios are likely. But anyone can dream, right?