Strange things going on with iRAY [SOLVED]
RAMWolff
Posts: 10,343
Richard H, I asked in the Tech forum but I got little help, allot of views but nothing that can help me so I'm posting here, sorry for the double post but I need to reach a wider group for help! Thanks
So as you can see there are two renders here. One is 3Delight and the other is iRAY, both using the same maps, both using default rendering settings, similar lights too. Notice how washed out the iRAY render is compared to the 3Delight one? I'm currently developing this a workout set for Genesis 8 Male but sadly I've had to hault the production as I can't properly test out my textures in iRAY with this crap going on.
I did reach out to DAZ3D tech and they refuse to help me because it's not a product they can lay their hands on to test. I told them this has nothing to do with the product, it's this weird thing going on with the iRAY engine. I've tried to mimic the settings for the Basic Wear shorts to see if that would clear up this but it doesn't. I've redone my Photoshop textures multiple times to see if it's there, it's not, they are crisp and saved out as a 3072X3072 and for shorts that should be plenty big for close ups.
The lettering on my logo is crisp and colorful in the 3Delight while in the iRAY render it's splotchy and you can barely see any red. I thought maybe Red doesn't play well in iRAY, which is stupid but you know when your freaking out about what's going on you think of what ever MIGHT be the issue but rendering the Basic Wear shorts with the red tartan option they render perfeclty so not sure what's going on here.
Oh and I did uninstall and reinstall DAZ Studio. This just started happening the other day. At first I thought it was just my scene file but even new files are giving me these results! I'm at a loss!
If anyone knows some other things to suggest I'm game.
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Comments
Out of curiosity, what are the values in your medium and high threshold in your Iray Advanced render settings? If your settings aren't high enough your textures will look spotty and bleed a little. Failing that, I'd have to look at your shader setup.
Laurie
Hmmm, perhaps that's what's going on, I diddn't think to look there. I have Medium - 512 and High - 1024
Where should my settings be? Never had to fiddle with this area before!
Your Iray shader needs to be adjusted a lot.
There are a couple of utilities that can help a lot, https://www.daz3d.com/rssy-3delight-to-iray-converter and this one from Renderosity. ( not 100% sure about rules, so i will give the name and SKU to make it easy to find)
'Convert It!' SKU is 115089 i do not have the first one, but i do use the second quite often ( sometimes a lil bit of tweaking is required after applying the shader) Applying it does not remove any texture maps
You may have to move some texture maps to other channels, and maybe plug some into empty channels, to get best results.
One thing to check before anything else, might be the Translucency channels
Hope this helps
No, these are native iRAY settings I've made and rendering them in 3Delight gives me better results and they aren't even set up for 3Delight.
I think Allen Art is on to something with the settings in the Advanced area. Just need some info on where my Medium and High should be rather than these low numbers!
mine are low 2048 and high 4096 and textures look good with most everything :)
Thanks so much. WOW... what a difference!
I'm surprised they wouldn't have suggested texture compression after looking at the example. It's seems pretty obvious that is what's going on, Iray can be very agressive in compressing images so that scenes will fit in cards with less memory.
In addition to upping the compression limits in the render settings, try a non-JPG image format. D|S will take most types. I like PNG for a lossless format. With JPG, even at the higher quality settings (meaning less compression) there is still a loss of sharpness. It tends to show up more with Iray than with other renderers.
I like the idea of PNG but they usually export larger than JPG but if there is a lower compression PNG setting you can share that will give me a crisp, clean output at a smaller export size I'm game. Usually compression default is 6 iirc but it's still larger than my 100% JPG export. I don't skimp on my JPG exports, the lowest I will go is 94% for products but that's usually just the internal maps like BUMP and DISP...
PNG files use lossless compression (like TIF) so the amount of compression in the saved file is not relevant. JPEG is lossy, so the higher the compression, the more compression artifacts you get, and that become "baked" into the output. With any image the file is deflated once in D|S, so the memory use in the computer for an RGB graphic of a given size is about the same. You're right that PNG files are not as thrifty on disk space, but you don't need to use them for everything.
There are few user-settable options for PNG in most graphics programs. Most of the options used in Photoshop plugins or external apps move you away from the quality that you're wanting.
That said, you may not need the PNG route if you can find suitable texture compression values in Iray. I don't recall if these are saved in an Iray preset, but at worst if this is for a distributed product you could write a readme about changing it. Most users are not aware of any of the Advanced Iray settings.
Sure it hasn't got something to do with gamma settings? Usually when I render 3DL texture sets in iRay it is those that look washed out in comparison to rendering them in their native 3DL or rendering a similar native iRay texture set.
Nonesuch the rendering issue was solved, see my Thanks so much post a few up, it was under the Advanced iRAY settings.
Thanks for the PNG info Tobor!
Is that file compression? IrfanView has 9 levels of PNG compression, I've always wondered what type of compression that is.
I don't use Irfanview but it sounds similar to Pngcrush, which is a stand-alone commad-line program. These more often than not "compress" by removing features of the file, such as bit-depth, color correction, or alpha channel, or by applying a color palette, than using a more aggressive bit compression algorithm the way JPEG does. As such they refer to programs like Pngcrush more as an optimizer than as a compressor. The things optimizing are used for are more along the lines of reducing an image with a transparency for online content -- the virtual sales person that walks across your browser screen, for example.
I find most colors to be lighter in Iray and lighter colors and whites are often really "blown out". But that might just be my prefered settings causing it. What I usually do as a fix is just add a light gray tint to the "Base Color" color slot in the surfaces tab. That usually fixes the issue. Every once in a while a light gray is also needed to be added to the translucency color slot and/or the glossy color slot as well.
I tried with a DS render saved as PNG, it's 1.88 MB. Opened in IrfanView and saved again with compression level 0 the file size grew to 3.87 MB, with compression level 9 it dropped to 1.65 MB.
Tried to google it and apparently is has to do with compression/decompression speed, but I could hardly notice any difference between level 0 and 9 when saving and loading. Maybe it's noticable with very large files, or batch conversion. The PNG dialog shown on top of the page is from IrfanView btw.
https://www.howtogeek.com/203979/is-the-png-format-lossless-since-it-has-a-compression-parameter/
Thanks for the link. Interseting. So the level 9 is actually fine. I'll give that a try.
Actually, if you notice, when you convert a mat setting from 3DL to iRAY your diffuse will still be white but if you use the Reset option for the diffuse it automatically sets it to a light gray!
I use the light gray in the diffuse color chip a lot because I think most textures look too washed out with solid white in there :)
Laurie
It's hard to know what these "compression levels" relate to since the PNG specs doesn't use this nomenclature. PNG does use a number of filtering methods and prediction algorithms that can improve the compaction of the data (usually at the cost of slower compression and decompression), and perhaps they've "numberized" these rather than provided the nitty-gritty details. Note that none of this is related to how JPEG or other lossy compression works, which is basically tossing out more and more of the actual data to achieve a higher ratio.
Well as long as it's lossless all is fine, you can then choose the compression level/file size you prefer. Could be interesting to have the full range of levels (up to 100), in the example on the page I linked to the file compressed at level 100 is 57 times smaller than with level 0 which is a huge difference, so level 100 might be useful for archiving files if processing time isn't an issue, but I guess the size difference ratio varies a lot depending on file size and -type.