The Realism Challenge - Biased VS Unbiased Showdown

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  • ClauDeClauDe Posts: 1
    edited December 1969

    Set in daz studi0 4.5
    Render, lights and texture in Octane Render

    octane01.jpg
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  • Joe CotterJoe Cotter Posts: 3,258
    edited December 1969

    Very nice, and welcome :)

  • natrix natrixnatrix natrix Posts: 0
    edited April 2013

    I've been looking at a lot of Lux renders lately, because I'm considering buying Reality 3 for Poser. But while hard surfaces look great, the skin renders I've seen, apart from a few, are not very impressing. I still think Poser does a great job with skin.

    EDIT: Image removed.

    Post edited by natrix natrix on
  • kyoto kidkyoto kid Posts: 40,515
    edited December 1969

    ...yeah the skin issue with Reality/Lux for Daz is lack of SSS. As I heard, Reality3 for Poser supports it (and the 3.0 update for Daz should as well).

    And what a nice introductory price.


    Strange though, the old PWSurface supported SSS. May have to reset the DL as it has been updated to work with 4.5.

  • natrix natrixnatrix natrix Posts: 0
    edited December 1969

    Kyoto Kid said:
    ...yeah the skin issue with Reality/Lux for Daz is lack of SSS. As I heard, Reality3 for Poser supports it (and the 3.0 update for Daz should as well).

    Oh I see - that explains a lot! I thought once the scene was in Lux, it didn't matter which app it came from. Just goes to show how little I know...

  • Herald of FireHerald of Fire Posts: 3,504
    edited December 1969

    Kyoto Kid said:
    ...yeah the skin issue with Reality/Lux for Daz is lack of SSS. As I heard, Reality3 for Poser supports it (and the 3.0 update for Daz should as well).

    Oh I see - that explains a lot! I thought once the scene was in Lux, it didn't matter which app it came from. Just goes to show how little I know...
    Ultimately it doesn't. You could get the same results out of both Reality as you can with Luxus if they both had the same settings. The real difference is that Reality 2.5 doesn't fully support all of the materials while Luxus not only caters for this but effectively future-proofs it by allowing you to manually enter in your own materials should Luxrender get updated. Since Lux is doing all of the rendering, both Reality and Luxus are just converters that take your Daz materials and convert them into something that Lux recognizes.

    I'd be quite interested to see whether Reality 3 for Daz will offer a similar degree of future compatibility and nut-and-bolt tweaks.

  • 3dOutlaw3dOutlaw Posts: 2,470
    edited December 1969

    ...and then there is Cycles via mcjTeleblender :) Does a pretty nice render in 8 minutes. (CLICK HERE for bigger)

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  • peteVaultpeteVault Posts: 308
    edited December 1969

    Poser Pro 2012 - Rendered with Octane. No post work of any kind.

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  • kyoto kidkyoto kid Posts: 40,515
    edited December 1969

    3doutlaw said:
    ...and then there is Cycles via mcjTeleblender :) Does a pretty nice render in 8 minutes. (CLICK HERE for bigger)


    ...fascinating, and nice image. On the site right now. Bookmarked for downloading later.
  • 3dOutlaw3dOutlaw Posts: 2,470
    edited December 1969

    pete.c44 said:
    Poser Pro 2012 - Rendered with Octane. No post work of any kind.

    I've always liked Octane renders of people the best, or maybe it's just that only really talented artists are willing to shell out the $$$? In any case, would love to try it, but too +$ for me! ;-P

  • SloshSlosh Posts: 2,391
    edited December 1969

    I just got home from work and took a look (hmm, rhymes) at this render that has been cooking all day. I am using Luxus and have spent the better part of the last week tweaking and rendering, tweaking and rendering, to come up with this skin. Overall, I am very happy with it. I still haven't delved into the eye settings, although the HSS eyes in this pic look pretty good. Also, there is supposed to be vein displacement in this image, but I don't see it. Have to up the strength and try again. I used SSS for this guy, so it does actually work in Luxus, but you have to set it pretty high for a thick character like Freak 5.

    As I develop this, I will be happy to share some of my insights and trials. I really, really like Luxus and LuxRender, despite the crazy long render times. Also, the fact that this still has fireflies after 9+ hours is disconcerting, but I think that has to do with the fact that I enclosed him in a box. Going to try the next render with just a ground plane for shadow catching.

    Let me know what you think, please! And ask questions. I have only had the plugin for a week, so it can only get better, right?

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  • agent unawaresagent unawares Posts: 3,513
    edited December 1969

    Keep in mind that box is scattering the light for you so you get the nice ambient lighting effect. If you take it away you may have to compensate.

  • SloshSlosh Posts: 2,391
    edited December 1969

    Keep in mind that box is scattering the light for you so you get the nice ambient lighting effect. If you take it away you may have to compensate.

    Well, you are clearly familiar with LuxRender, be it through Reality or Luxus. Do you think the fireflies will eventually go away? And, do you think if I removed the box and added the supplementary lighting you mention, that there won't be so many fireflies? The image is still cooking right now, so I don't plan to stop it for awhile. Maybe not until tomorrow morning if necessary.

  • cwichuracwichura Posts: 1,042
    edited April 2013

    If by fireflies, you mean the red speckles -- those aren't fireflies. They are a function of the SSS homogeneous volume not having enough samples to clean up. Volumetrics in Lux require a LOT of samples/pixel to go away. From the stats bar in your image capture, you only have less than 700 S/p. That's nowhere near enough for volumetrics to clear up. Normal renders without volumetrics I typically run to 2000S/p, and ones with lots of volumetrics usually require much more than that. I ran King to A5 to 15,500S/p, for example, to get all the chess pieces (which are glass volumes) to clear up. I ran Specimen 479931-85F to 23,300S/p and it still has noise in the water tank (which is multiple volumes for the tank walls and the tank interior).

    Post edited by cwichura on
  • agent unawaresagent unawares Posts: 3,513
    edited December 1969

    Slosh said:
    Keep in mind that box is scattering the light for you so you get the nice ambient lighting effect. If you take it away you may have to compensate.

    Well, you are clearly familiar with LuxRender, be it through Reality or Luxus. Do you think the fireflies will eventually go away? And, do you think if I removed the box and added the supplementary lighting you mention, that there won't be so many fireflies? The image is still cooking right now, so I don't plan to stop it for awhile. Maybe not until tomorrow morning if necessary.
    Well, those light specks look like they're from the subsurface scattering, so I don't know whether changing the lighting would help too much with that. I haven't done anything but play around with volumes so far, but I think it's a different problem from the specular fireflies that turn up a lot. They should clear up eventually. If you use the refine brush to focus on rendering those areas it may help.

    As far as tweaking the lighting, generally fewer lights are better than more for render times. I don't know whether having an extra fill light or two would slow it down as much as the box is, but it might. As long as the material on that box is rather matte [and it looks like it is] it should at least do a decent job of absorbing the light instead of letting it bounce around forever.

    If you wanted a similar sort of lighting effect with slightly faster render times, you could try just having the planes behind and below him. That will still bounce the light some without quite so much geometry to hit, so a ray would only bounce a couple times at most before vanishing into space. It will look a bit different, but should still be pretty close, and if it's significantly darker that can probably be compensated for with a gamma adjustment.

  • SloshSlosh Posts: 2,391
    edited December 1969

    cwichura said:
    If by fireflies, you mean the red speckles -- those aren't fireflies. They are a function of the SSS homogeneous volume not having enough samples to clean up. Volumetrics in Lux require a LOT of samples/pixel to go away. I've only seen you mention how long it's been rendering, but that's not a useful metric as everyone's hardware is different. S/p is more meaningful, and when using volumetrics, you can easily need 5000+ S/p before things start to look OK.

    Ah, I see. I wonder what fireflies look like then? At the bottom of my render, you can see I included the statistics line: At 9.5 hours, I was only at 600.24 S/p, 8.80 kS/s, and 187.52 kC/s with 2132% efficiency. I know that is a very low S/p for this amount of time. The efficiency is high, and I have actually had lower kC/s, but usually it is much higher. What is kC/s? Guess I need to break out the Lux manual.

    I don't know how to quote two replies in a single post, so I wish to thank HeraldofFire for his response, too. I am going to try the refine brush to try to get rid of the few "sparkles?" that still remain, or maybe take them out in Photoshop. I will try the idea with the planes and see what happens. Thank you both very much.

  • cwichuracwichura Posts: 1,042
    edited April 2013

    Fireflies are usually blown out white spots that get larger as S/p increases. With current versions of LuxRender, they are now quite rare, since a lot of the numerical stability/NaN issues have been fixed. Also, you responded while I was editing my original reply, so instead of repeating it here, you might also check back a page.

    Post edited by cwichura on
  • SloshSlosh Posts: 2,391
    edited December 1969

    cwichura said:
    Fireflies are usually blown out white spots that get larger as S/p increases. With current versions of LuxRender, they are now quite rare, since a lot of the numerical stability/NaN issues have been fixed. Also, you responded while I was editing my original reply, so instead of repeating it here, you might also check back a page.

    Thanks, again. And, might I add, beautiful render of the chess board. I can't see the noise in the tank on the mermaid pic, but I would rather not look too hard for them. Rather just look at the sexy mermaid!

  • tdj29_efbd85bc1dtdj29_efbd85bc1d Posts: 1
    edited December 1969

    First post on here in a couple of years, but wanted to join in the fun. :)

    Here's a recent render of mine, using Poser 9. All in all, I'm happy with the look of the skin.

    Check it out at full size,

    Thanks and enjoy! :)

    Tony.

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  • SloshSlosh Posts: 2,391
    edited December 1969

    First post on here in a couple of years, but wanted to join in the fun. :)

    Here's a recent render of mine, using Poser 9. All in all, I'm happy with the look of the skin.

    Check it out at full size,

    Thanks and enjoy! :)

    Tony.

    Very nice (I feel like Borat saying that all the time, but I don't seem to have an original compliment). I really like the softness of the skin around her nostrils and the edges between the lips and the rest of the facial skin.

  • SloshSlosh Posts: 2,391
    edited December 1969

    I've been doing some more experimenting with skin and expanded that to eyes and hair. I think I have finally come up with a formula that works well for me. I don't see my renders getting any more realistic than this one. Also, changing the Sampler to lowdiscrepancy helps a huge amount with the red sparkles I was getting before. And my renders are complete in much less time, even though the S/p are not very high. It doesn't matter to me what the S/p is, as long as my render looks great in the end! Of course, I haven't tried this with non-organic materials yet, except for the necklace in this pic. I have a render cooking right now that has walls, chairs, etc and so far it seems to be good there, too.

    Let me know what you all think!

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  • peteVaultpeteVault Posts: 308
    edited December 1969

    Here is an animation done with Octane Render. Yes, there was a bit of postwork in AE.But a lot of the footage is "as is".


    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Hf0CuzCGok&feature=youtu.be

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  • peteVaultpeteVault Posts: 308
    edited December 1969

    another Octane Render. Plus an Octane Render animation.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0DZy5fXeB8&feature=youtu.be

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  • Joe CotterJoe Cotter Posts: 3,258
    edited December 1969

    Bellisimo :)

  • Herald of FireHerald of Fire Posts: 3,504
    edited December 1969

    pete.c44 said:
    Here is an animation done with Octane Render. Yes, there was a bit of postwork in AE.But a lot of the footage is "as is".


    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Hf0CuzCGok&feature=youtu.be


    I don't even want to think how long that took to render. Evening doing a simple unbiased render on Lux took me nearly a whole day for just a few seconds of footage.
  • DustRiderDustRider Posts: 2,691
    edited December 1969

    There are some really amazing renders here, especially those in the past two pages. It makes Octane look really appealing :)

    I looks like Cycles might be a good option as well, I'm really impressed with the last image posted by 3doutlaw.

    I've been playing with Reality 3 and Lux the past couple of weeks, but I'm not even close to what y'all are doing yet. At least I'm finally getting some use out of Poser 2012 (never bee able to get along very well with Poser lighting). I'm getting closer to the results I can get with Carrara now, but my focus isn't photo realism, just realistic 3D.

    The link below is to my second render using Reality3, not as good as the images posted here, but I thought I'd share as I learn. Warning, the image has "nudity". I really like the way Reality3 handles the conversion of the skin shaders. Lux is great render engine, just sloooowww.
    http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2434136

  • Joe CotterJoe Cotter Posts: 3,258
    edited May 2013

    It's a nice image, but I would consider either doing some work on the background textures or using a DOF on the camera to blur them out. The DOF would be a nice effect and would be easier. The focal point (the girl) is nice so the other should be a quick fix :)

    Post edited by Joe Cotter on
  • kyoto kidkyoto kid Posts: 40,515
    edited December 1969

    dustrider said:
    There are some really amazing renders here, especially those in the past two pages. It makes Octane look really appealing :)

    I looks like Cycles might be a good option as well, I'm really impressed with the last image posted by 3doutlaw.

    I've been playing with Reality 3 and Lux the past couple of weeks, but I'm not even close to what y'all are doing yet. At least I'm finally getting some use out of Poser 2012 (never bee able to get along very well with Poser lighting). I'm getting closer to the results I can get with Carrara now, but my focus isn't photo realism, just realistic 3D.

    The link below is to my second render using Reality3, not as good as the images posted here, but I thought I'd share as I learn. Warning, the image has "nudity". I really like the way Reality3 handles the conversion of the skin shaders. Lux is great render engine, just sloooowww.
    http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2434136


    ...worked with 2010 on the old system. Ran pretty well in 32 bit compared to S3Advanced. I particularly liked the ability to render in background mode the Queue Manager as it made best used of the limited memory resourced I had. I could also use Occlusion and Ray Tracing which in 3Delight would be a quick trip to a crash.

    I do hear you about Poser's lighting system. I find Daz to be much more intuitive and more like working with actual stage lighting. Then there's the ability by one click to view though a spotlight like a camera for fine tuning.

    I have Reality 2.5 for Daz which will mean an entirely different learning curve with lighting as it approaches the task more from a photographer's, rather than theatrical lighting tech's angle. I messed around with 35mm photography but not at a truly professional level and most of my work was out of doors usually photographing events like airshows, races, kite festivals, etc. Also going to need to learn a lot more about surface properties, something when I worked with oil paints or picked up the old Richo SLR wasn't much of a concern other than if I could see it, I could paint or shoot it.

    Waiting for the Daz version of R3 so we can get SSS to help with skin tones (and make rendering go even slower).

  • DustRiderDustRider Posts: 2,691
    edited December 1969

    Gedd said:
    It's a nice image, but I would consider either doing some work on the background textures or using a DOF on the camera to blur them out. The DOF would be a nice effect and would be easier. The focal point (the girl) is nice so the other should be a quick fix :)

    Gedd - Thanks, I actually tried to use dof on the image, but it's obvious from the results that I didn't quite get it right (never used it in Poser before), plus I got impatient and wanted to move on to my next image which is baking right now. I forgot to try DOF on the new image, guess I'll have to give it a go again, cause as you suggested here, I think it will improve the one I'm working on now as well.
  • Joe CotterJoe Cotter Posts: 3,258
    edited December 1969

    Well you can always fake it with a Blur in post ;)

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