Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
Cool? Me? LOL!
The camera just samples various points in 3d space to see if those points are being illuminated. The quality setting is really just a frequency setting to tell it how often to sample... which is why you don't wanna go above the limits on the quality setting or it will try to sample at infinitely small steps and, literally, never finish rendering haha.
If Atmospheric and toon aren't cameras, then what the heck is????? I say if it is something I can render through, it is a camera. If it sets an attribute (position, color, strength, quality, etc.) of a camera, it is a preset.
DAZ QA boggles the mind quite often. We have similar confusions and inconsistencies with shaders and shader presets.
This is very kewl news AoA, and I actually downloaded the updates through DIM a few minutes ago.
I look forward to seeing what version 2 brings. :coolsmirk:
The update is working . Easy volume is easy!
I tried it out with a subset of a scene I had set up previously. It has one AAL and one ASL. To try the volume camera, I just added it to my scene and set the volume and quality that I wanted to try. I chose 18% volume strength and 95% quality. I chose to Accept Light Types - Only Flagged Lights - Flag lights with intensity of 120%. My ASL is set to 120%, my AAL is not. I thought I'd try a gobo, I added the AoA_LinesGel to my spot light. That's it. I hit render, and this is what I got. It took 43 minutes to produce the image 2000 by 1589 with a shading rate of 0.1.
Edited to add: I have no illusions that this is a great image. :lol: Or that the volume makes much sense in this scene. I just wanted to try it out quickly and grabbed a scene I already had.
That's great to hear.... But try it again using the category foglight instead of the flagging... I think you will be happy :)
You can do that manually but the easiest way is to simply select the spotlight and the camera ( Hold control while selecting ) then double click the "Ez Foglight On" preset.
Oh and even better, set the spotlight to Htimode - Primitive under the shadow settings.
I completely agree.
It's probably best if I don't say anything more. :(
Edited to add: except that I will say QA has done a splendid job on the actual testing, at least for all my products.
I completely agree.
It's probably best if I don't say anything more. :(
Edited to add: except that I will say QA has done a splendid job on the actual testing, at least for all my products.
And folks wonder why us poor freebie makers put our stuff all over the place?
I really need to get this...save what's left of my sanity.
This sounds great!
Here is one that did last week with 3 advanced lights all on primitive hitmode. The camera was set to see only the one light coming in the window using category foglight.
If I remember correctly it took around 3 minutes... I'm getting old so maybe I am remembering wrong haha.
Because the windows of Studio Paris have a transmap, Primitive Hitmode won't allow light through so you need to remove the transmap and dial the opacity strength down to 10% or so. Primitive hitmode will properly see straight opacity strength, but not transmapps.
I rerendered the image with the category foglight and primitive hitmode, as suggested. That dropped the render time to 29 minutes. It looks just slightly different. There is a little less light on the bottom shelf of the coffee table. The glass top uses opacity but does not have a transmap. The primitive mode sounds like it will be a big time saver. The foglight category will be easier to work with than the intensity flagging. Thanks for that tip, too. I better study the documentation. I was too eager to play before.
So if I want volume light to pass through a transmap, does that mean I have to use shader hitmode and then it will work OK?
love the image
I'm confused. when you talk about the camera only being allowed to see the one light coming in the window
is the image rendered in layers and postworked
or do you render with a camera that can see all scene lights and this camera gets picked up also
or ???
I have been wondering how it would be possible to say render with toony cam and with the engraving cam at the same time without the need for postwork--- is this possible
is it as simple as loading two cameras in the scene or is there a way to make one camera see through the lens of another camera to get both effects at same time or is it just not possible without postwork
Like everyone else, I am eagerly looking forward to this!
I use the daylights out of my volume camera, and getting 'god-rays' to look right is one of the most time-consuming and, sadly, hit-or-miss aspects of using it. (Hey, I never said I was an expert!)
So, yeah...! As they say on the Internet, "Shut up and take my money!"
No, sorry, one camera per render (that's part of what a camera is). If you're hoping to add outlines to the engraver style camera, I will probably have a solution for you shortly.
That said, when ToonyCam Pro makes its outlines, it does save them out to a separate file, and you can designate where that file is in the Render Settings tab. You can then composite the outlines onto your Engraving Camera render in Photoshop or similar. For technical reasons, ToonyCam Pro creates white outlines, but you can switch them to black for this purpose -- the controls are all there in the Render Settings tab.
This camera, in particular, has a feature that allows you to mark certain lights a being a certain type. Then it will apply the effect to the lights of that type and not the other lights in the scene. Also, you will need lights that allow the setting of those categories, too...which, as far as I know of, are only the Advanced ones made by this same vendor.
In general, you can only render those capabilities that a particular camera supports, when using that camera...and only render through one camera at a time. So that means, you can only render the features of a ToonCam with a ToonCam and not add or look through another camera, too.
AoA...would it be outside the realm of possibility to add caustics to these cams?
An untouched test render - scene uses four lights, but only the two central spots are flagged for volume - render time of 3mins 44secs...
arr so we need AoA's lights to take full advantage of V2. Not a problem for me. I don't have them yet but now I have extra motivation to get them...nice. I am really liking what has be discussed here. This was something I wanted since using the Volume Cam in many images but all were done in layers as it was the only way I had full control of the lighting and volumetrics.
thanks for the reply, good to know
Just playing around with Easy Volume camera. Great that the renders take so little time.
One can play with settings any amount of spare time :) Anyhow below is my DS 4.6 Pro test render.
2 x ASL Light Intensity 40%, 1 x AAL Light Intensity 70%
Camera: Volume Strength 90%, Volume Quality 95%
Rendering Time: 54 seconds
Yep, exactly.
The difference in the two modes is that in Shader hitmode the shadow rays run the whole surface shader code of anything they hit to determine if they can see through the object. This is done on every sample so if the light is using 16 shadow samples then it has to run the shaders of everything between the surface which is receiving a shadow and the light 16 times.
In Primitive hitmode, when a shadow ray runs into an object on the way back to the light, It simply looks at the base opacity strength once (without parsing the object's shader code) and says "Humm... Opacity Strength is set to 100%, that's good enough for me! I guess I'll make a shadow."
See, surface shaders output their base opacity strength to the rendering scene file as a set value that doesn't change at any point during the rendering of a single frame. But, most of the time when you use a trans map the base opacity strength is set to 100% but then additional internal surface shader code is run to see which exact pixels should be opaque and which pixels shouldn't.
The true (shader hitmode) surface opacity calculation is pretty fast but remember it is being run again and again for every shadow sample and for every camera sample and every volume sample. It adds up! Or at least that is my understanding... Shader and Primitive hitmodes are built into the renderer. I didn't invent them, I just told the lights to use the different modes :)
Great render Artini! Now that's the kind or render speed I like to see! :)
The render was done in one pass. That's what makes the Easy Volume camera better than the old version, you can tell it to only calculate volume for certain lights. The camera renders everything, like a normal camera, but also adds volume effects for just the lights you want. But to clarify, it is all done in one render - no postwork.
All the atmospheric cameras work with any lights but the Easy Volume Camera in particular can be much much faster when using the Advanced Lights. This is because of speed optimizations in the lights themselves and the category label.
__category is a built in feature of RenderMan based renderers, such as 3delight which DS uses. This function allows certain illumination code to be completely bypassed if the category label does not match. So when in the category foglight mode, the volume portion of the Easy Volume Camera code is skipped except in areas where it sees a light with the label of __category "foglight". Because category reading it is built into the renderer it is very fast at deciding where it needs to run the volume code and where it doesn't.
Because the default lights, and other available DS lights, don't have a category label, the camera has to use a different method to determine which lights it should have volume effects. This other method is very simple and similar to using a category but is no where near as fast. It has to do a check multiple times for every pixel to see if it should run the volume code or not. This takes almost as long as actually calculating the volume but at least it allows the user not have the scene flooded by fog from lights which they did not want to have fog.
Even though it is a great marketing device for me to say "Hey, buy my lights too!" that was not intentional hehe. I did try to make the volume as fast as I could using the default DS and OmniFreakers lights. I believe is possible for the category field to be added to the default DS or Uber lights and I encourage DAZ and Onmifreaker to do so.
Shouldn't it be just a matter of adding a spot for it in the UI and defining it/where it goes...and recompiling them?
Shouldn't it be just a matter of adding a spot for it in the UI and defining it/where it goes...and recompiling them?
Yep, I believe so. Well, and adding
to the .sl before the compile... If it isn't in the source already. It may very well be.I went to my Product Library of my Account to download the new version and only the older version installers can be downloaded from it.
So will the update be available in Product Library for download or did DAZ forget to update the Product Library version for those of us who don't use the DIM?
Strange... You don't have any other buttons like "Atmospheric Effects Cameras (Win x64)" or the other varieties?
I've got download buttons but when I download the Windows version it downloads the old 1.0 installer version. (This is the version I had installed months ago.)
I have 5 downloads in my Product Library:
32 bit PC installer
64 bit PC installer
32 bit Mac
64 bit Mac
And a separate zip of Camera presets.
The 32 & 64 bit PC versions are both the old 1.0. I'm not on a Mac but the files say 1.0.
These are the names of all the files that can be downloaded:
13926_AtmosphericEffectsCamerasMacx32_1.0_trx.zip
13926_AtmosphericEffectsCamerasMacx64_1.0_trx.zip
13926_AtmosphericEffectsCamerasWinx32_1.0_trx.exe
13926_AtmosphericEffectsCamerasWinx64_1.0_trx.exe
IM00013926-02_AtmosphericEffectsCamerasforDS34.zip
I'm seeing only the new ones in Product Library -- the last one labeled DS3-4 is for DS3 or 4.0, the ones that specify Win64 etc. are for DS4.5 and include the Easy Volume.
ETA: Ah, I didn't download the installers to compare, so I don't know if they're the updated versions.
It would seem that these are the updated files, I have just downloaded and installed the 64 bit windows version and the new 'Camera Presets' are now showing up in my content library, along with the old 'Cameras' that I have not uninstalled yet.
The 1.0 version number on the new files is a little confusing I must admit, but I guess this is just a typo.
Not tried the new version but I have I have something I want to try with them.
I was just noticing that too. The 1.0 does make it confusing huh? haha! Not sure if it is a typo or if QA has a reason for that.
Thanks for testing and confirming it is updated Jay_NOLA. Sorry about the confusion.