New Crystal Dragon Has Me Questioning Iray's Shader Capabilities in DS

L'Adair · July 2017

j cade said:

L'Adair said:

j cade said:
(I will also add that the new skin materials for the dragon itself are pretty straight up fantastic, I honestly don't feel the need to tweak the skin at all, which, for me, happens roughly never)

Would you say, then, getting the Crystal Dragon would be worth it for just the materials, sans the crystals? (I assume they will work on Dragon 3...) If so, I may change my mind and grab it for the materials... Now that I know I don't have to use the crystals...

Yeah totally excellent sans crystals... but dont just take my word for it noisy comparison render time!

Now the older textures can be massaged into something a bit nicer (the default conversion shown here has pretty much no spec which is just sad looking) but even massaged I still think the new textures look way better (they look higher res too, and they're not I checked but they really do, right? its not just me?)

No. That really does look hi-rez... maybe it's the lack of large scales, like we see on the older skin materials... But it does look good.

Now I must decide if I want those skins... lol

j cade · July 2017

AllenArt said:

Adding refraction roughness to a nice, clear gem shader can add some realism. What's needed is a way to tie the roughness to altitude or a way to keep the roughness confined to the areas in the interior of the crystals and nearest the rock strata that they are growing out of. I've been working on a more "scratched and cracked" crystal shader on and off but so far haven't gotten anything I'm happy with. I'm sure the above is possible in Shader Mixer; I just don't know how to use it. There's precious little information on how to use it and I was MUCH better at writing out Luxrender shaders by hand. If I could do that with MDL and get it into DS, then I might actually get somewhere. LOL

Laurie

What we really need is the eqivalent of this

Particularly look at that middle bottom image (its a vertical gradient combined with a procedural texture). Procedurally controlled volume density :) so pretty. But, A) I dont know if Iray can do volume scatter with different densities B) if it does I know I'm very, very unlikely to be able to set it up in the shader mixer. DS' shader mixer makes me cry, and I'm the sort of person who likes making giant shader node trees in blender

Llynara · July 2017

@Ivy Here's a render without the crystals, blue skin.

Boy, is he cranky without his horns. I think he's worried I'm going to declaw him next! LOL

Note: I also used @RiversoftArt 's great new pose script to tweak the pose. It's easy to use and fun to play with!

AllenArt · July 2017

j cade said:

AllenArt said:

Adding refraction roughness to a nice, clear gem shader can add some realism. What's needed is a way to tie the roughness to altitude or a way to keep the roughness confined to the areas in the interior of the crystals and nearest the rock strata that they are growing out of. I've been working on a more "scratched and cracked" crystal shader on and off but so far haven't gotten anything I'm happy with. I'm sure the above is possible in Shader Mixer; I just don't know how to use it. There's precious little information on how to use it and I was MUCH better at writing out Luxrender shaders by hand. If I could do that with MDL and get it into DS, then I might actually get somewhere. LOL

Laurie

What we really need is the eqivalent of this

Particularly look at that middle bottom image (its a vertical gradient combined with a procedural texture). Procedurally controlled volume density :) so pretty. But, A) I dont know if Iray can do volume scatter with different densities B) if it does I know I'm very, very unlikely to be able to set it up in the shader mixer. DS' shader mixer makes me cry, and I'm the sort of person who likes making giant shader node trees in blender

Yeeeeeeesss. I was actually studying a crystal cluster shader set up in Cycles so that I could try and do it in Superfly :O! LOL Unfortunately SF is missing some critical nodes so can't really achieve what I want in there either *sniff*.

Laurie

Ivy · July 2017

@ Llynara

Thanks you guy's sold me . I knew that dark texture was awesome without the crystals , now just add some bone white horns you got a new beasty.. . thank you very much for taking the time to demo your renders for me I appreciate it alot it sold me on the set.

" Tra la la going shopping"

Oso3D · July 2017

Here's a close-up of the figure I did before, with a different horn material (default, converted to Iray.) The horns look a lot better that way.

You can also seem some of the other limitations of applying the skin to a figure morph it wasn't intended for... but it still, IMO, looks awesome. The biggest problem is that I had to go up to subd4 to get the HFS horns to look right, which is unrelated to the task at hand. ;)

The second image is my ornery 'what, it isn't for 3DL? HA! HA, I SAY!' and bam, it's a 3dl render. (I ended up using a tweaked Lumina glass for the crystals)

IceDragonArt · July 2017

timmins.william said:

Here's a close-up of the figure I did before, with a different horn material (default, converted to Iray.) The horns look a lot better that way.

You can also seem some of the other limitations of applying the skin to a figure morph it wasn't intended for... but it still, IMO, looks awesome. The biggest problem is that I had to go up to subd4 to get the HFS horns to look right, which is unrelated to the task at hand. ;)

The second image is my ornery 'what, it isn't for 3DL? HA! HA, I SAY!' and bam, it's a 3dl render. (I ended up using a tweaked Lumina glass for the crystals)

He's gorgeous in 3delight as well!

L'Adair · July 2017

Well... I broke down and bought the new dragon, in spite of disliking the crystals, for the four iray material sets. Here is a quick scene testing it out on Dragon 3, without the Crystal Dragon morphs. Quick, and a bit of fun.

Did Someone Say 'Ice Cream'?

I used the original black dragon materials for the claws and horns, with my home-brewed normal and displacement maps. The eyes are those I used in Power, an entry in last year's It's Raining Men competition. I also upped the bump on the skin to 10 from 3, for a bit more definition.

Singular Blues · July 2017

AllenArt said:

Yeeeeeeesss. I was actually studying a crystal cluster shader set up in Cycles so that I could try and do it in Superfly :O! LOL Unfortunately SF is missing some critical nodes so can't really achieve what I want in there either *sniff*.

Laurie

What nodes are missing, out of criousity? I looked into it at one point. I have a bud who used to work for SM, and we'd talked about porting my Cycles toon moethods to Superfly. I know SmithMicro's definition of Color Ramp is nothing like Blender's which has implications, but I'm still lost in the woods as far as where their nodes systems diverge.

I'm too used to Blender nodes. I find Daz and Poser nodes disturbing. Daz is too colorful and Poser is backwards to my mind. (Also Daz has covered all the I/O with initialisms, so I've no idea what anything means.)

ben98120000 · July 2017

Not bad for some random maps and 10 minutes of tinkering.

xyer0 · July 2017

I know I can replace the crystal shaders. My issue with Daz's dragons and Reptilian 6 is that I am not convinced by the skins. I need to spend some time pumping up the bump and glossiness to see about achieving the effect Hollywood has ingrained in my mind's eye.

Nyghtfall3D · July 2017

ben98120000 said:

Not bad for some random maps and 10 minutes of tinkering.

Oh, that's much better. Very much indeed.

Oso3D · July 2017

Another note about crystals -- if you want more realism, remember to have Caustic filtering on.

Oso3D · July 2017

In this render I replaced the crystal shaders with one of my WTP shaders (the Mirk crystal preset, with a little tweaking).

I was impatient and stopped after 40 mins, I really should have given it more time to clean up noise (I used despeckle in Photoshop, but that degrades quality)

Llynara · July 2017

Loving the renders! Neat to see all the different looks this dragon has! I'm going to play with making the crystals emissive and see what happens.

Has anyone purchased the PB Black Dragon textures? I'd be interested in seeing some user renders of that one.

nicstt · July 2017

drzap said:

nicstt said:

drzap said:

Similar to Singular Blues' comments, we need to keep in mind that this is free software distributed with the sole purpose of selling you figures. If Daz3D could figure out a way to sell you the figures without the software, I'm sure they would. Since we are not paying for the software and they still have to support it, you can't expect too much in regards to documentation and so forth. And since this isn't really professional software, you are not going to see a lot of third party training either. This is what free gets you (and I admit it's a lot, all things considered). There is a lot of ways Daz3D could have gone with their resources, but this is the business model they chose. There are drawbacks with every choice and overall, I think they filled the niche well. Just as long as you don't expect the same support that the industry professionals receive. They pay a lot of money for that support.

Actually, the fact it is free in this case is irrelevant. ....

The fact that Daz Studio is free is quite relevant to Daz3D, the company, I assure you. If it were a paid for product like 3dsMax or Maya, there would be sufficent income to hire documentation writers and such. There would be more funds available for support and training. But there is no direct income from Studio, thus every hour they invest in developing and supporting it is a cut into the profits they receive from the figures. So the motivation for providing supporting materials to the degree that professional tools have is greatly reduced.

Would they?

You are presuming there would be enough sales to support all this. Studio used to be a paid for product, and no longer is; that suggests to me that this is better for Daz.

I would love to know what you are basing your assurances on; what sales data for Daz products do you have access to that supports your claims?

Mistara · July 2017

would need to see iray in other spftwares to really compare

AllenArt · July 2017

Singular Blues said:

AllenArt said:

Yeeeeeeesss. I was actually studying a crystal cluster shader set up in Cycles so that I could try and do it in Superfly :O! LOL Unfortunately SF is missing some critical nodes so can't really achieve what I want in there either *sniff*.

Laurie

What nodes are missing, out of criousity? I looked into it at one point. I have a bud who used to work for SM, and we'd talked about porting my Cycles toon moethods to Superfly. I know SmithMicro's definition of Color Ramp is nothing like Blender's which has implications, but I'm still lost in the woods as far as where their nodes systems diverge.

I'm too used to Blender nodes. I find Daz and Poser nodes disturbing. Daz is too colorful and Poser is backwards to my mind. (Also Daz has covered all the I/O with initialisms, so I've no idea what anything means.)

I actually believe it was a color ramp that was the culprit. But honestly, that was months ago and I don't really remember anymore since I dropped it as soon as I figured out I couldn't do it. Also, it was really difficult having to work backwards as Poser nodes hook in from the right while Cycles hook in from the left ;).

Laurie

3Diva · July 2017

Fisty said:

Very dark scene, but you get the idea.. I like starting with the flint glass shader from the nvidia examples for solid colored gems/crystals, it's simple and easy to adjust but looks really good.

Ohhh That looks GOOD!

CypherFOX · July 2017

Greetings,

Gah. I hadn't intended to get it, but folks who've made the crystals look better than plastic have convinced me it's not terrible, and the shots of the underlying skin make it something I kinda feel like I should own, now.

Bad, bad, evil people. I like you all. ;)

-- Morgan

Storypilot · July 2017

I just want to add to others... get it for the skin, use the crystals if you like that. I probably will not be using the crystals much. The underlying morph and skin are great and for me give the Dragon 3 a pretty nice new & improved look (I also picked up 3D universe's Mythical Dragon for its iray skin since with the sale it became quite affordable).

I got to try it today and here's an early test of how it's looking for me with the blue default skin, no crystals, horns added that i'm still figuring out textures for, and eye textures from Mythical Dragon. Helpful to switch the horn UVs to another set (one that uses horns) if you bring the horn morphs out of hiding. At some point I might go into my image editor to fix the gray area on the top of the nose, but with the little horn nubbins I added there, I'm not too bothered by it.

I'm really digging the tail texture details and scale variation in the leg areas.

Storypilot · July 2017

[double]

drzap · July 2017

nicstt said:

drzap said:

nicstt said:

drzap said:

Would they?

You are presuming there would be enough sales to support all this. Studio used to be a paid for product, and no longer is; that suggests to me that this is better for Daz.

I would love to know what you are basing your assurances on; what sales data for Daz products do you have access to that supports your claims?

You are right of course. I have no idea what their financial situation was when Daz was a paid for product. But we can assume it failed because of lack of sales. My point was that Daz Studio doesn't bring in any direct revenue. That fact isn't lost on the company. They will put as little effort as they can get away with in supporting it, thus, incomplete docs.

scorpio · July 2017

drzap said:

nicstt said:

drzap said:

nicstt said:

drzap said:

Would they?

You are presuming there would be enough sales to support all this. Studio used to be a paid for product, and no longer is; that suggests to me that this is better for Daz.

I would love to know what you are basing your assurances on; what sales data for Daz products do you have access to that supports your claims?

You are right of course. I have no idea what their financial situation was when Daz was a paid for product. But we can assume it failed because of lack of sales. My point was that Daz Studio doesn't bring in any direct revenue. That fact isn't lost on the company. They will put as little effort as they can get away with in supporting it, thus, incomplete docs.

It was Free, then they produced an Advanced and a Pro version both paid for but even then there was a free sandard version, it was about six months later that they then returned to all free again.

Llynara · July 2017

CypherFOX said:

Greetings,

Gah. I hadn't intended to get it, but folks who've made the crystals look better than plastic have convinced me it's not terrible, and the shots of the underlying skin make it something I kinda feel like I should own, now.

Bad, bad, evil people. I like you all. ;)

-- Morgan

Welcome to the Dark Side, Morgan! LOL

Leana · July 2017

scorpio said:

It was Free, then they produced an Advanced and a Pro version both paid for but even then there was a free sandard version, it was about six months later that they then returned to all free again.

DS 1 and 2 only had the free version. DS3 has standard (free) and Advanced (paid) versions. DS4 initially had standard (free), Advanced and Pro (paid) versions. Standard versions were 32-bits only, and DS4 standard didn't have autofit or content creation tools included (though you could purchase them as plugins).

Part of the reasoning behind making DS4 Pro version was IMO to help with Genesis adoption: giving pro version to everybody meant everybody could use autofit (making them more likely to try the new figure since they could reuse part of their V4/M4 content) and produce content for Genesis if they wanted (before that creators had to buy either the pro version or the creation tools).

Mistara · July 2017

http://mdlhandbook.com/mdl_handbook/index.html

Oso3D · July 2017

You know, I realize it isn't 'intended' but I really wish this and other winged dragon projects had skin options for the wingless anatomy. Ah well.

scorpio · July 2017

timmins.william said:

You know, I realize it isn't 'intended' but I really wish this and other winged dragon projects had skin options for the wingless anatomy. Ah well.

Can you not just apply the body mat to the Wingless zone this works with some but not all.

Oso3D · July 2017

Huh, I hadn't tried that... worth a shot! And worse comes to worst, if it's CLOSE I can probably healbrush it in Photoshop.

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