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Thanks for your comments, Rashad, and your images looks amazing.
There's a lot of great stuff posted here. I especially like the vegetation renders by Rashad.
I haven't done anything recent with LuxRender.
To partake I will link to these:
A sunset test shot of the AVF-35-J Wildhog arriving to escort a Shuttlestar:
http://ndelphi.deviantart.com/art/Arriving-Escort-Closeup-424626990
A very fit and realistic gargoyle:
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/32848/P135/#496083
I have to say, Rashad, those are spectacular. I know I said it before, but Wow!
I can't play in this thread as I don't have the system or software to use an un-biased renderer, but one of the biggest gripes I had about the renders themselves seems to be going by the wayside with the GPU rendering. That is the size of the finished renders. It used to be, that when the plugins various Lux plugins for Studio came out, the renders were tiny! I wanted to see the details, but the renders took so long to clear out the noise, most people did these little low resolution things that honestly didn't look much better than knowledgeable use of the standard biased renders.
Now, I am gladly being educated by renders large and detailed enough to make me have to look several times to make sure I'm not looking at a photo. Great work everybody!
Those look really good Rashad
I am extremely grateful for the positive feedback from you all about my recent renders. I have been working extra hard on it and so far that seems to be making a difference. More to come. Again, much thanks!
A couple of test renders with different camera response functions from IndigoRT renderer, scene created in iClone 6 PRO.
6044 samples per pixel, 300k samples/s
Response function: agfacolor-ultra-050-CD
Response function: Ektachrome-100-plusCD
Default response function: dscs315
Finally got around to trying Reality 4, Not fond of the UI having spent so much time with 2.5 (less intuitive) but I guess I'll have to get used to it.
Tried out InaneGlory's Votive Candle freebie in a room set I designed
Nothing special, 6 hrs, no postwork.
...finally dealt with Daz crashing every time I send a scene to Lux with Reality4. Seems to be related to a camera bug in the plugin. Have a scene cooking right now.
The glass on the candle is particularly realistic. Also like the caustics hitting the table. Any ideas what happened with the wristwatch face?
some old old renders, some rendered via Reality and some via Luxus but I honestly don't remember which was used for which. Well, I guess everything using SSS was done via Luxus :D
Excellent work - that last one looks particularly realistic, like a typical holiday snap!
One more that I thought I would share, being that it is holiday themed and all.
One is a pure, single light source, unmodified Reality 4 / Luxrender.
The other is the same image, but with the rest of the lightsources and some significant post process Photoshop work.
I render with all the scene's light sources active. Then I export a sequence of JPGs with only one light source active per image. I then take these images into Photoshop and layer them. From there I can decide the proportion of light intensity by layer. I can also process each light image individually, if I want to change the vibrancy or hue.
A lot more fantastic renders now, thanks everyone for sharing!! Sorry for my absence, had a family medical emergency.
This was my first attempt at SSS skin and "dramatic" lighting with Octane Render via the DS plugin. I used my own custom figure and texture set. The figure was created by adding a lot of morphs to modify V6. Lit with and HDRI (very low intensity) and 4 mesh lights. I did a slight adjustment to the levels in post, and added the sig, otherwise no post work on the image.
Hey Guys I love your work it looks so real and not like the regular plastic looking imaging I usually see posted. Reality makes DAZ images look so real and not like plastic barbie dolls
You guys do great work, you all are my idols
I finally got Reality 4 to work in my DAZ Studio 4.7, it's really a wonderful program; however, the only setback is the rendering time it takes forever and ever and ever. And if you do not give your image enough light in Reality it will always look very grainy (with a lot of little white specks all over your work). Other than that Reality 4 is wonderful. One of the best for DAZ Studio Everyone should try it.
When you tell Reality 4 to Render your 3D image from DAZ , just go away and see a movie or go shopping and then come back to see the final results.
If anyone is thinking of buying Reality 4 for Studio or Poser. Then you should first look into buying a good video graphic card
Like NVIDIA GeFORCE GTX 980 4GB, trust me you will need the power. Without a good graphic card you're just wasting you time. Your computer will crash! and at times shut down due to your CPU trying to work overtime for rendering. A good graphics card will cost you about $400 but it's worth it in the long run.
Nice work keep up the great art
A good video card isn't going to help you unless you are doing GPU rendering, which I really wouldn't yet. The texture limitations are just too high currently.
What you really need is CPU power. For example, I have one i7 I work on, and a second i7 that I have networked for rendering. So 16 cores to work on each file.
LuxRender 2 (LuxCore) will be much faster than LuxRender 1.3 or 1.4. SphericLabs has a demo version of a plugin for Carrara using LuxCore (see the thread in the Carrara forum here http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/50130/), and CPU only with LuxCore is easily 3X faster on my system than Lux1.4. GPU only in LuxCore has full support of all available Lux materials (including SSS and volumetrics), and the renders clear up with the about the same number of samples in GPU rendering as in CPU rendering.
This means that with Version 2, LuxRender will be a lot faster, and will be able to take full advantage of GPU rendering, which will be a huge improvement!! On my system, GPU rendering with LuxCore is still about 1/4 the speed of Octane (or slower). But for someone with a high end ATI card, or a Kepler or Maxwell based Nvidia card, you should be able to get great GPU render speeds.
In the case of Reality maybe there's something I'm missing, but I'd say that both of these statements are slight over simplifications of the real situation. If you use Octane, and have a good video card such as a Titan Black with 6gb of Vram you will have a hard time running into texture limitations of any kind. Titan Black allows 240 textures, which is a ton. In most cases with unbiased rendering you dont need specular maps and all those million maps we get used to applying in biased renderers. 240 textures should be more than enough for most tasks. If however you are using a 2gb card then you will run into trouble for sure . So I would agree that if you are going to go down the GPU track, you definitely want a very powerful video card. And to this day Octane's speeds are unbeatable for an unbiased renderer of any kind gpu or cpu. Octane is the industry leader by a long margin for very good reason. A few years ago the video cards weren't strong enough but today, that excuse has lost its weight. Don't let worry about textures hold you back, if you can't make it happen on 240 textures then you need to rethink your process at a fundamental level.
GeForce GTX 580 has 16 SMX x 4 Texture units = 64
GeForce GTX 680 has 8 SMX x 16 Texture units = 128
GeForce GTX 780 has 12 SMX x 16 Texture units = 192
GeForce GTX Titan has 14 SMX x 16 Texture units = 224
GeForce GTX 780 Ti has 15 SMX x 16 Texture units = 240
GeForce GTX Titan black has 15 SMX x 16 Texture units = 240
GeForce GTX Titan Z has 2x (15 SMX x 16 Texture units) = 2x 240
It used to be that the only practical way to render unbiased without spending days was to use Octane. That is changing every day however, as LuxRender and some of the other unbiased offerings keep getting faster, there seems to be a tendency toward speed convergence. In a few years we will see cpu rendering keeping pace with gpu rendering, which for most people, will mean they will save a ton of money by not having to purchase a video card that costs as much as the cpu processors doubling the cost of a new system.
And that is why I love LuxRender, and why I suggest going the cpu route as LegionAir suggests, because down the line CPU rendering is likely to still be around. But that doesn't change the fact that for today and for the next few years Octane's gpu rendering will remain the leader and is by far the most mature platform on the market right now.
They are all converging. Textures are no longer a limitation with gpu rendering, and speed is no longer an issue with cpu rendering. You cannot go wrong either way, it just depends on how soon and how committed one is to diving into unbiased rendering. Octane has brought me so much joy, it literally blows my mind and I think I will never go back to biased rendering methods since I can render unbiased in less time than biased, even on the cpu thanks to LuxusCore. Smiles all around. Everyone wins.
HI, I'm a Reality newbie, but wanted to post just for the Christmas cheer of it. Here is my first Reality 4 render. Learned a lot trying to get this to work out, and am looking forward to learning from contributors to threads like this for future renders.
I would suspect that with AMD cards one would see much better GPU performance than on any of the nvidia cards because word on the street is that nvidia purposefully handicaps OpenCL on their high end nvidia cards. Nvidia had better gt with the program, because it looks to me like OpenCL is here to stay and that is a very good thing.
Just a quick note - the texture slot/unit limitations for Octane were removed with Octane 2.0. If you are using Octane 1.x (or a plugin based on 1.x) then you are still limited by the number of texture slots available on your card. With Octane 2.x you can have as many textures as your cards VRAM can handle (this was talked about a lot prior to the introduction of 2.0, but isn't mentioned much now).
This is huge for people like me who have older Fermi based cards (64 color texture slots). Now I can do much more complex scenes with my 670M (laptop version of the Geforce 560 for the desktop). As you can see in the attached image, I and using 139 textures in the scene (and almost all my VRAM), something I couldn't have done in Octane 1.x.
Also note that I'm not using a ultra high end GPU, and using a laptop (not some killer dasktop system with a $1,000.00 GPU), and I'm extremely happy with the performance I get from Octane (but I do have 3Gb of VRAM which is a huge plus).
I would suspect that with AMD cards one would see much better GPU performance than on any of the nvidia cards because word on the street is that nvidia purposefully handicaps OpenCL on their high end nvidia cards. Nvidia had better gt with the program, because it looks to me like OpenCL is here to stay and that is a very good thing.
IMHO the whole notion that Nvidia is purposefully degrading the performance of OCL on their cards is just an urban myth. Obviously they are focused on Cuda performance, since that is their own product, but I think that the slower OCL performance is due to them not focusing on optimizing for OCL more than it is purposefully degrading the performance of OCL (why would you "force" people to use ATI cards if they wanted/needed to use OCL and loose sales?). The new Maxwell based Nvidia cards are getting outstanding OCL performance from everything I've seen so far, and Kepler cards due quite well too, but the older Fermi based cards seem to be a bit less OCL friendly. However, the Fermi cards do work, and with Lux 1.4 the raw GPU render speed of SLG (GPU only) is at least 5 times faster in samples/second than CPU rendering on my system.
This is a very very nice render btw! I really like the skin tones and the poses are very plausible. Though dim the scene still feels very festive.
This is a very very nice render btw! I really like the skin tones and the poses are very plausible. Though dim the scene still feels very festive.
Thanks, I appreciate the feedback. I was playing with trying to figure out the Reality mesh lights in DAZ studio, and then stumbled across how to turn the Christmas lights into light sources, and then I liked how it started to come together.
While I'm thinking about it, can anyone advise on when one might use a mesh light versus a regular Daz Studio light, and why?
Thanks, I appreciate the feedback. I was playing with trying to figure out the Reality mesh lights in DAZ studio, and then stumbled across how to turn the Christmas lights into light sources, and then I liked how it started to come together.
While I'm thinking about it, can anyone advise on when one might use a mesh light versus a regular Daz Studio light, and why?
We don't have to be using the exact same application to discuss rendering methods for unbiased renders. Typically all unbiased render engines work off the same principle, which is line of sight raytracing between surfaces. In unbiased renderers all surfaces are technically considered "light sources." Whether the light emitted by a given surface is merely reflected from other sources or originated by the host surface's blackbody spectrum (thermal glow), either way, all surfaces are potential light sources.
99% of the time, biased renderers like Bryce, Carrara, and even DS via 3DLite, employ the notion of a point light source that has no dimensional size at all, like a single photon. Such infinitely small light sources do not exist in real life at all. In real life all light sources have a size larger than a single point, and the geometry of that light source is called the mesh. So in unbiased renderers, all lights must be mesh lights to some degree or they will not function. The larger the light source, the softer the shadows it creates. This is why biased point=like based light sources always provide razor sharp shadows, because the light comes from a single point in space and not from a general area of space as they would if the rays were being fired from a mesh.
Basically, always use mesh lights because that's all that really exists.
I'm oversimplifying a little bit. but this should get you into the general ball park.
Thanks Rashad...I appreciate the insight and am really okay with oversimplifications at this point! :)
an indigo render of my JaguarElla