Shaders/Iray/Older sets
kksmith6515
Posts: 201
It has recently come to my attention that older environments, perhaps those that weren't originally created for I-Ray can be drastically changed and improved simply by changing the shaders. How exactly this can be done, I'm not totally sure but here is my proof.....go to a discussion that I started the other day regarding FirstBastion's Suburban Shopping Mall. https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/255611/firstbastion-s-suburban-shopping-mall
Clearly a big difference between the two renders he posted. So does anyone know of any tutorials or recourses out there explaining how this can be done?
Thanks!!
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Broadly speaking all you need to do is:
Content Library pane > Shader Presets > Iray > Daz Uber > !Iray Uber Base
Now you can apply Iray shaders to the individual surfaces in the normal way.
Hope this helps.
Tim.
Selecting all of an object and using the Iray Uber shader on it works for a large number of items. I love playing with shaders, though, and it gives me more control when updating to Iray. I have a ton of shaders. The easiest way to change the texture on a particular item is to use shaders. Simply select the item you want to change in the Scene Tab. Then go over to wherever you have the Surfaces Tab. For most items, there will be several materials groups. Each part of an item will have one material for metals, another for glass, and another for wood for example. To find the different materials groups for your particular item, click on the little triangle to open up the item and see what the different material groups are as set by the PA.
Pick the material group you want to change, then under the Presets Tab, find your Iray shaders and select the Iray material you want to use and double-click on that. Do that for all of the parts of your item.
As Knittingmommy pointed out...
Ialso made a short tutorial for updating clothes, but it basically works like that for everything: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/3029641/#Comment_3029641
If you don't have Iray shader presets for wood, foliage or weathered metal, one thing I've tried is this:
-Select the relevant surfaces
-ctrl-click the leather shader option (from Daz's basic Iray shader preset folder)
-in the surfaces tab change the diffuse color from brown to whatever works best (often just plain white)
-make sure *something*'s in the bump slot (sometimes even the diffuse map, aka the primary texture map, will do, if you can't find anything else by browsing to the folder where the textures are located
-crank the bump up to 2.0 (which the leather preset sets as the max for bump).
I bought a bunch of pre-Iray Danie/Marforno sets a while back, and found that this approach worked well for all that carved wood and rugged bronze their products tended to include.
These settings will work on almost everything not glass/metal/skin:
Apply Iray Uber
Check - does it look ok? If so, great, move on. If not:
Glossy Weight to 1
Glossy Color to pure white
Glossy reflectivity to .5 (it's probably there already)
Glossy roughness to .6 or so
For glass, just apply the glass shader. Remember to hit ctrl-click and select 'Images: Ignore' if you want to keep whatever images are already on there, otherwise just apply the glass.
For metals, there's a metalicity slider you can increase. At full Metal, the look will be driven by Base Color and Glossy Roughness. 0 roughness is a perfect mirror; in most cases you will probably want something more like .2 to .3.
Anyway, that's the vast majority of what should work.
For Genesis 2 and later skin, apply Iray Uber and then go to the Materials/Iray. There should be a material named 'Iray Optimized Genesis (whatever) MAT'. Applying that will give the skin appropriate settings for many cases.
Another trick to try for metallic surfaces is to leave the Metalicity slider alone, apply the diffuse image to Metallic Flakes Color and set Metallic Flakes Weight to 100%. I got this trick from here: https://thinkdrawart.com/daz-studio-iray-tips-and-tricks
* does the happy dance *
First of all a big thanks to all of you who responded. I really appreciate the help and feedback. Sadly though, I'm afraid that I am just missing something that is very obvious or I'm just to stupid to understand what's going on here. All of you seem much more advanced then me.
I tried using Cafeteria Eating Area for this experiment. The first render, shows the set exactly as is without any changes.
In the second render, All I did was select the "light bulb" tab in the surfaces window. I couldn't even find it in the scene window. All it shows there is something call ceiling light without anything else beneath it. I'm assuming that "light bulb" effects the surface shown in the bulb itself. In any case, after selecting that, I went over to the shaders window and simply applied "Glass-solid-clear". Well, obvious the effect looks nothing like glass and if anything turned the material in the bulb into something else much darker. So I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. Perhaps DAZ needs to create a new tutorial video on how to address this!
...Yep the Iray to 3DL one just hit the store tonight. Thank you.
Well, to begin with, a flourescent tube isn't clear, they're a glossy white when unlit. Since the fixture in that scene is black, turning the tube clear will just show the back fixture through the tube which it kind of sort of looks like it's doing. In any case, this is kind of a bad subject for a test, as for a lit light tube you'd have wanted an emmisive (light emmitting) shader and that's an extra level of complexity to deal with, especially since it's clear that your doing your render though a camera that still has the headlamp turned on. As it happens, I have that set so I pulled it up and your images actually look more like a 3DL render than an Iray one. Did you apply the Iray uber base shader before applying the glass shader? I've found that a lot of times that some iray shaders won't "stick" if the base material hasn't been converted to Iray already and others will only work if you've got the surface selected with the Surface Selection tool.
Honestly, the best way to learn shaders is to pick something fairly simple, like a dress or a single prop, and play around with that until you've got a basic idea of what all the various settings do before tackling a major project like redoing a room. Sickleyield & Riversoft's upcoming 3dl to Iray product will probably make things a lot easier, but in the meantime DAZ and many of the PAs do have a lot of good tutorials on YouTube starting with this:
I've bookmarked this page, thanks!
Ok, here's my question, not all products by PA's are built the same as a few people here have already indicated. So let's say that your script works, how would it be able to understand all the different ways PA's construct their surfaces? In addition, lets also say that your script makes a mistake converting one of the surfaces over to I-ray? Then what? As an inexpereinced used, I wouldn't have the skill level necessary to correct it's mistake. So while your product maybe helpful, it's hard for me to imagine it really taking the place of somebody doing the job manually if that was really your intent.
There's no substitute for learning.
A product like this can help you potentially figure out how things work, and save you enormous time even if you DO know how things work; I can totally update materials without help. But going through and updating 60+ surfaces in one scene?
That's horrible. And I've done it many times before. I'm happy not to do so again.
The biggest difference between the two renders was the interior lighting on the lamp posts. That influenced the reflections and the specular type highlights more than the shaders themselves.
Some sets are older, from before pre - Iray days. They are optimized for the DazStudio engine of those days, namely 3Delight. If you render the scene with the optional 3Delight render engine that still ships with DazStudio, you will see how they look with that engine. It does NOT make them inferior because they don't have iray shaders by default. It like comparing a playstation 3 game than can't work on playstation 4. It's simply a case of technoogy constantly evolving and moving forward.
Now if there was evidence that updating the shaders of an older product to iray would garner a spike in sales to justify the time it would take to do the work, maybe but that simply is not the case.
You can use the Iray Emissive shader for the light bulbs in two different ways here, here's a couple of samples. In both cases first apply the Iray Uber shader to everything, as usual.
First render (day):
As a general light source for the room I've added a flat (plane) mesh light covering the ceiling, but you can use any light source you want.
Then select the light bulb under Surfaces and apply the Iray Emissive shader. This will turn the bulbs into light sources (emissives), but they won't have any noticable effect as lights with the settings used here. It will just make them look like real light bulbs. Change the default settting for the bulbs to:
Metallicity: 1.0
Emission Temperature: 6500.0
Luminance 6000 (Luminance Units: cd/m^2)
Render time about 5 min. with a GTX 1070
Second render (night):
No general light source, use the light bulbs as room light instead.
Again, starting from default emissive shader settings for bulbs, change these to:
Emission Temperature: 5000.0 (normal for fluorescent lamps)
Luminance 2200000 (Luminance Units: cd/m^2)
Cutout Opacity: 0.015 (this will make the bulbs look less bright themselves, but without affecting the light they emit)
Render time about 10 min. with a GTX 1070.
I really like the first render a lot! How did you create the flat (plane) mesh light covering the ceiling?
Well it's getting there thanks to all this great advice!!
Now I just have to figure out how to make in light plane invisiable in the render without turning off the light all togther!
Looks like you have figured out how to make the ghost light. To make it invisible just set Cutout Opacity to 0.0000001.
You can also use the Iray Ghost Light Kit - https://www.daz3d.com/catalog/product/view/id/36389 - it's basically the same thing but a bit faster and easier to work with.
If you can keep them out if sight in a render, then don't make them invisible. There is a discussion about them in this thread:
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/3443536/#Comment_3443536 and a couple of pages forward
and here https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/3465216/#Comment_3465216
Thanks Taoz! The Ghost Light Kit sure does look interesting but the promos images don't make clear exactly what it does. They keep making references to HDRI and emissives so does the product contain all three or just the ghost lights?
No, it doesn't include any HDRIs, basically it's just an emissive plane mesh light with some additional presets which makes it easier and faster to set up. An emissive is just an object with an Emissive shader applied. So the ghost light itself is no different than the one you made yourself.
In the promos they're just comparing scenes using HDRI with scenes using ghost lights. The ghost light scenes are better lit indeed, but HDRI is still a better light source in general IMO, just not so easy to work with indoors. I'll suggest reading the posts I linked to, there is some good info about these things.
There was a thread last year where people took old sets and converted them to Iray. You can find it here, alongside explanations:
https://direct.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/173251/hidden-treasures-fun-with-older-sets/p1 ;
Well, I debated whether or not to purchase the Iray Ghost Light Kit while it's on sale. At 40% off, it seems like quite a bargin! The problem is, although it's great knowing that ghost lights or a light plane can really illuminate an entire room, to me it doesn't seem very natural. In a real room with windows, the lighting would never be that uniform. This is something I really struggled with because I'm trying to make my renders look as realistic as I can. A couple months ago I was putting together this scene (see below). Now granted I'm just a beginner, but using just TreeScapes Backdrops and adjusting the exposure setting, I was able to produce this which in my opinion looks much more natural and realistic then if I had used the ghost lighting. I especially like the idea of light coming in as through the windows. I would have loved to have gotten the fluorescent lights to be on but oh well.
Ghost lights are unnatural. You know, being ghosts and all.
More seriously, they are useful to bring up illumination levels but not as the primary lighting (IMO). I prefer them to be the lowest illumination contribution in the scene, but keeping the scene from being completely blank in many spots.
Will is right, you want ghost lights as the fake ambient light contributor that brings the darkest shadows to a uniformly dim fake amibient light. After you got that step done add in your accent lighting.
Ambient light is bounced light so right away you know a giant ghost light evenly lighting everything equally at once is going to be a poor substitute. Instead choose a ghost light value so small as to just get rid of the darkness and add your normal lighting as usual which will create you real looking ambient lighting and converge faster (or a least reach your goal faster). Ghost lights are not a substitute for normal light placement ans usage.
If you iRay scene looks like a '3DL' render that means your light is too strong (well unless it's a render outdoors in bright sun at noon).
Μore lights = more render time.
Other render engines to speed rendering with many lights use Adaptive Lights.
(Adaptive lights in Vray: VRay chooses only a specified number of lights to evaluate based on what light sources are most likely to affect a shaded point).
Hope one day we have it in Iray.
More lights == more render time is certainly true in 3DL, but it is more complicated in Iray. Often additional lights (in particular large flat emissives) can reduce the render time. However if you add a huge number of lights, for example making a high polygon sphere emissive, this will increase the render time.