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I really like you skin shaders, great render!
Thanks, dustrider, and thanks for starting this thread. It's nice to have an inclusive thread rather than a renderer/platform specific one.
Here is another Octane experiment of mine. I was trying to work on SSS skin shaders and a somewhat realistic closeup. Render time about 30 minutes (6000 s/p) for the noise from SSS (especially ears) to clear up.
Ciao
TD
Thanks! I should give credit to the Queen song (of the same name) that gave the inspiration for it.
Thanks!
On a related note, I tried to use Octane. I bought hardware for it, bought the renderer, then bought the plug in. But I was so disgusted by the plug in developer that I returned all of the software.
I had been looking forward to trying it out for over a year, but the interaction I had put such a distaste in my mouth that I wouldn't even consider it again until the developer changed.
Dustrider, I have the DS plugin but what I said was I found the standalone coped better with forest superior on my system!
As I said my timing buying it was sadly a bit off just missing the chance at the next build.
I mainly got it to make DAZ useable for animation as 3Delight is abysmal for speed, Carrara it is not as urgent but I do like the unbiased look.
Here is another Carrara>Octane render. I got a request to do a sort-of "making of" post about this render, so I thought I'd share it here for anyone who might be interested. Be sure to click on the image and go to the full sized image - the textures on the Battle Kimono are outstanding!
First - general materials (not the figure):
Everything it the scene, except for G2F of course, and the spell ball, is from the Mage Tower and it’s accessory sets (except for one book, and I think that was from DM’s Dark Rights set, but I could be wrong). I converted most of the materials to octane materials and adjusted to make them look like I wanted. The plugin does an excellent job of converting the mats/shaders, but I almost always fine tune my shaders, whether I’m using DS, Carrara, or Octane. Most of the modifications were just adjusting the specular and roughness values to fine tune the shine/sheen, adding in bump maps that got dropped, and changing from fast mip map to sampling (IMVHO sampling gives better texture detail).
For the figure (all materials for figure, cloths and hair were converted to Octane materials)
The figure is a custom G2F figure using V6 and a lot of additional morphs from the Evolution Morphs, Handspan Studios, and Zevo. The texture set is the V5 Bree texture set using the Octane shaders that come with the Octane plugin (I developed them originally - they use an Octane Mix Material with Glossy and Diffuse).
The clothes are the from the Battle Kimono, available here at DAZ3D. Unfortunately, the textures don’t load properly in Carrara (or at all), so all the textures were set-up manually from the texture set that comes with the Battle Kimono. The texture set is huge, I only used the diffuse and bump maps (running out of VRAM). Again, IMVHO all the textures needed to be changed from Fast Mip Map to Sampling (I really think the results were worth it with these textures - they are amazing), then I adjusted the specular and roughness settings to get that perfect sine/sheen, which was especially effective on the Kimono top. I made a few adjustments with Poke Away 2 to fix the poke through, and I also made some adjustments to the left sleeve in the modeling room the make it fit properly on the “extreme” arm pose.
The hair is Hawthorn Hair, I had to add the hair to the scene, then conform it. Letting it auto-conform by selecting G2F before double clicking on it always resulted with Carrara hanging and crashing. Adding the hair firgure then conforming worked perfectly. I had to make a few adjustments to the hair with the included morphs and Poke Away 2 to get it to fit perfectly. I adjusted everything to sampling, added in bump maps, and adjusted the poser of the specular maps (just the diffuse put in the specular channel).
For lighting. I used the Octane sunlight to provide a “natural” light through the windows, but this didn’t quite work as well as I had hoped. So I added one low intensity mesh light at 6500K near the ceiling (a plane), and one additional mesh light (plane) at 4500K to the left - above - and in front of the figure for mood, and to provide the proper specular highlights on the figure/cloths. And finally a small mesh “rim” light (plane) slightly above and behind G2F.
The Spell Ball took a bit of fiddling to figure out and get right (and of course it needs editing if you change the lighting much). The base model and texture map is from Shadowcaster Spellribbons available here (was PC a freebie years ago) which has a round plane enclosed by two spheres. I set it up with a fairly complex shader combination of SSS for volumetrics and emitters for the spheres to give it a “plasma glow” effect (Octane Mix materials with Specular and Diffuse or Glossy and Diffuse). The plane in the center used a blackbody emitter to give it a light glow as well.
There is no post work on the image other than just a touch of adjustment to the levels, down-sampling the image, and adding the sig.
This is an awesome render thread! Seeing some really great images here! :) I might join in!
The first is my second Reality/Lux render ever made in 2011 - and I was so proud of it at the time. :p
(Michael 4 model/God-knows-what skin)
Lude 6
And this is still my best Reality/Lux render ever.
Svengar
Pretty much my entire dA gallery (see forum signature) is Reality+LuxRender. I haven't had a chance to experiment with Reality 4 yet, but I've been hand editing the scene files generated by Reality 2.x to take advantage of various Lux features for a long time now...
Playing with Blender Cycles.
Wonderful render. I particularly like how the costume has turned out. I haven't had much luck making things like that spell ball work in Luxrender, but now we have access to emitting materials via Reality 4 (before you could only turn a mesh to light, without the materials) I may be able to make the work.
What does work brilliantly well is volumetric glass. In this render I set the ball to "hyperrealistic" glass, which couldn't be easier. It didn't take as long to render as I expected. I used only IBL on this, as any mesh light would have ruined the effect. The IBL is Milkyway by Christian Bloch at hdrlabs.com. The crystal ball and claw stand is a freebie by Luxxeon at deviantArt. The figure is G2M with Saiyaness's Mahala texture converted for male figures. Reality 2.5/Luxrender.
What with the problems I'm experiencing with R4, I would appreciate tips on what to edit in those files. Is it all a matter of reading the Luxrender Wiki or are there tutorials you might point me to?
Could you give more details please?
Are these scenes created and rendered in Blender or did you export the scenes from DAZ Studio? If the latter, did you use the mjcTeleblender script? And what render engine did you use - Luxrender or Cycles?
What with the problems I'm experiencing with R4, I would appreciate tips on what to edit in those files. Is it all a matter of reading the Luxrender Wiki or are there tutorials you might point me to?
This is an extremely broad question. Are you looking to use the cloth material in 2.5 (natively supported in Reality 4), custom volume interfaces (such as for liquid in a glass) (again natively supported in Reality 4 now from what I can see), add emission to a material (natively supported in Reality 4), Mix or Layer materials to create complex materials, use the doublesided material to fix the metal material rendering as a black void when seen from the backface, use ReverseOrientation to make an emitter double sided, add motion blur, etc? The list goes on, and the answers are different for each use case.
Learning the LuxRender scene file syntax is pretty mandatory for any of this. The Lux Wiki includes the scene file definition, but that's more a reference than a guide. And a number of things just aren't documented anywhere other than looking at the Lux source code to see what it's actually doing under the hood (good documentation is the bane of all open source projects). I am not aware of any tutorial sites on creating/editing Lux scene files, outside of the LuxRender Wiki and forums, or what is posted over in the RDNA Reality forums. (There used to be some of this on the DAZ3D forums, such as a writeup on using the cloth material, but that all got deleted with DAZ had their big "not sold here" forum purge.)
As to answers on these, they are probably best asked in the Reality forums as individual questions, rather than derail this thread which is meant to showcase renders created with unbiased rendering engines.
Yes, I'm not at all surprised at your answer. I guessed it wouldn't be as simple as adding a line with RGB values and a material type, etc.
It is just a pity that Reality 4 is not working for me right now. Luxus gives more direct access to the Luxrender materials but I'm not having much luck in getting the quality of output that I was getting with Reality 2.5, so I thought it might be an option to edit the files, as you describe. However, I'm not up for a crash course in Luxrender source code either so I'll probably continue with R2.5 until the creases have been ironed out of Reality 4.
Octane is not an option for me because it is way out of my price bracket and the DAZ Studio plugin is Windows only (I'm a Mac user).
...wow, that looks great.
Reality 4 Render. 168 S/p. Photoshop lens flare. DAZ Studio 4.7
I take it she just spotted the costume designer?
I take it she just spotted the costume designer?
LOL. Yeah, or she's going after that piece of fruit cake that's making it's rounds.
Just a test render from IndigoRT renderer, scene created in iClone 6 PRO.
Rendering time: 2h 4m 30s
6407 samples per pixel
1124k samples/s
Response function: agfapan-apx-400CD
Are there any guidelines for choosing response functions in unbiased renderers?
My latest render using Octane:
Nice one Atticus Bones!
Here is another Octane render from me. Also for those of us that use Octane, there is a new update out for OcDS 2.1. Fixes a lot of issues and so far works nicely for me.
TD
Some really terrific images already in this thread! Here are a couple of mine, using Octane for Carrara.
WOW! That is one impressive render!
Some really great renders here!
I thought I'd post a render I just completed with a new plugin in development for Carrara using LuxCore. It's being developed by SphericLabs and includes an IPR. It's called LuxusCore (more information here: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/50130/)
This is my first real render with LuxusCore. It still needs a lot of work to fine tune it, but I don’t think it’s too bad for a first try for someone who hasn’t used Luxus much (i.e. I really don’t fully understand the materials yet). It is lit with just the LuxCore Infinite Light (HDRI). Rendered to 1000 s/px and took a little over 1hr 40min at 0.35M samples/second, 1440x1600, using the PATHGPU kernel (GPU Pathtracing).
LuxCore is quite impressive, and something to definitely look forward to. Even in CPU only mode, it's A LOT faster than LuxRender 1.4, and GPU is over twice as fast as CPU on my system (not as fast as Octane for me, but still quite impressive). Plus, unlike SLG with LuxRender, I think GPU only mode with LuxCore supports all the same materials as CPU or Hybrid modes!
Edit: Be sure to click on the image and view at full resolution to see the great details.
Curious, was this a Path / PMC render or was it Direct Light? I'm trying to see if my eye has become trained enough to recognize render kernels.
This is excellent. I like that there are absolutely no hard shadows anywhere. Very nice!
Ideally yes, but it depends greatly on the software. One of the more useful feature of Octane is the Imager Tab, which allows user input for F-Stop, Exposure length etc. There is also the brilliant Post Processing tab which allows for adjusting bloom, glare, and other parameters at any point during the rendering. You will find that very little post work is ever needed on Octane Renders. If I remember correctly LuxRender has some options as well but not quite as many as Octane. Indigo RT is brand new to me so I don't really know if it has Imager and Post Processing tools but I assume it must have them someplace.
In the render you submitted I would increase the exposure up from 1 to about 3, it will remove the look of silhouette, that is if there is indeed a wall back there and not some non specific black space where the wall is missing.
Looking at the download page for Indigo RT it is really exciting! Wow. There are a few things the RT version lacks compared to the full version, of those things is SSS which many would die if they didnt have, still, I'm quite impressed with what it has to offer and the speed at which it can do these things. Written in both Cuda and OpenCL, In some ways I think Indigo RT might be in a better position than either Lux or Octane to weather the storm of GPU accelerated rendering.
Here are a few of my own wanderings into Unbiased Rendering. Feedback is greatly appreciated. Thanks all for your time.
All renders are performed in Octane Render for Carrara (OR4C) in PMC Kernel (Populated Monte Carlo). All render times are under an hour.
Vegetation is a study all it's own, performed in Carrara and my new favorite free procedural plant generator...ngPlant.
I've also included a render of an interior I made in Bryce years ago and have remade in Octane. Clearly, Unbiased rendering is far more realistic than biased rendering and faster too. Better in every way.
Feedback is greatly appreciated. Thanks all for your time.
And the interior I was talking about. The first is a Bryce 6 Render which admittedly could be much better in Bryce 7 but that isnt the point really. The Octane version by comparison just looks so much more natural than anything I could have come up with using biased methods. I'm really excited by this current age of CG computation.
Wow those are amazing Rashad O_o