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DOH!
I'll go and swap them over, LOL!
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Ok, I did everything you suggested for Rob and I like what I see. You really know your stuff!
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Last for today, Dave with all gamma values corrected. It's nice that artists use these shaders, but it would appear that not many actually know what they're doing with them. Ah well, you wouldn't have a career if that were the case, LOL!
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Here's a quick effort with Phillip. I ddi cheat on his eyes though, they're all using US2. They're quite difficult to get right and fit the surrounding area. Only the skin use UberSurface.
One dial you can play around with is the diffuse roughness. It helps add that harsh shadows - just don't use it past 0.5.
...I am noticing an odd line just under his left eye (our viewing right) that continues over the bridge of his nose that looks like the bottom of a mask.
Looking good. I always use Spyro's eye settings and he used UberSurface.
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I think that's a shadow.
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...you might want to soften the shadow a bit because it almost looks as if there is some kind of seam there.
I think it's just the pose angle, I used the same lights for the Rob render.
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first of all i apologize for hijacking the thread but i deemed it better to ask here than make another thread just to ask.
ive recently "discovered" lighting and shading, and found one that made my renders look just like those ultra realistic ones ive seen everywhere.
however, its also always like a sunset /ie, everything has an orange tint, i can only make out that it says FMEE_AO...), and when i try any other lighting (from the pre-installed DAZ, cant seem to remember specifically buying lights and shaders at some point), it renders with heavy snow/noise in them, no matter what i do/which one i choose.
if i render without any lights, it renders normally: characters look like resin figures and theres no shadows.
so, aside from that one sunset light, is there any other pre-installed light that lets me render like all others ive seen and without snow?
thank you for your time
It's actually not that easy to understand what you mean. But UberEnvironment is the one light shader that is likely to cause "snow" with quality settings too low. Try selecting it in your scene tab and applying a preset like ExtraHQ from its library folder.
Or you could try clicking on the "freebies" link in my sig and see if you can download my light kits from ShareCG. These should come without "snow". And there is documentation included.
...a yet another test of my shaders. This time, M3.
Render time is 8 mins on my laptop - I used 10 pixel samples, on the high side, to get smoother DOF. Shiny parts are the most difficult to resolve cleanly with DOF in the raytrace hider. What actually helps a lot, particularly with physically based specular and blurred reflections, is not using bump but displacement whenever the relief is anything but really really subtle: see, bump is "fake", it can't be raytraced properly. And when everything is raytraced, any obstruction will lead to artefacts.
The skin is okay with bump. The window glass was not.
Another thing to look out for: fireflies (see the light specks the earring throws on his neck). It's what you get when you do not do the biased thing and do not prune indirect specular paths. To clear this, you need more samples, but I'm lazy. I'm also too lazy to prune those paths shader-wise. In the future, when something like bidirectional light transport gets implemented internally, this should generally take care of itself, I think.
Fun bit: Gen3 eye geometry lends itself better to the new RT SSS than that of Genesis 2. Genesis2 eyes have the sclera disconnected from the iris, which creates a darker border around this sclera edge in the SSS calculations.
Control maps should generally be use in the strength slot and not color. Just make sure they have the right 'gamma' settings (accessible via the image loading drop down menu, under 'Image Editor'). Color/diffuse maps should be set to either 0 or 2.2, while control maps (bump, specular) should be 1.
If the specular color is white (1,1,1), it doesn't make too much of a difference....but if it is anything else then yes, being in color instead of strength is a major faux pas.
Now as to whether or not they are even needed...
I don't think they really are, if you are using more than one spot/distant light. Any environmental lighting, GI in any form and decent 'studio' type lighting should mimic 'nature' well enough that combined with proper skin settings that the geometry of the models should provide a pretty decent approximation of a natural specular response...ie the areas that tend to shine will do so without the aid of the maps. This also will allow an overall lower strength more closely aligned to reality, without getting too caught up into 'physically plausible' and all that. I've always had better luck telling the shader that it was working with skin and letting it work out all the 'eye candy' instead of forcing the issue with a bazillion control maps.
One little interesting bit of trivia on the firefly issue...some of them, if caustics were being included would actually end up as caustics. It's just that without bidirectional and 'on' caustics, the renderer has no way of knowing what it should do with them...at the samples provided. I've let things cook in Luxrender until they were all gone...and some wonderful caustics replaced ugly fireflies...more often than I care to count. It's just those indirect bounces from a secondary light source take forever to calculate, especially without bidirectional tracing.
In general, yes. But if you really want to get down'n'dirty realistic - different areas of skin will tend to have different dryness. And hence, different shininess. Like, the backs of hands will often be drier = less shiny than the palms. So you'd want to paint some rough distributions for roughness, pardon the pun. We're talking physically based roughness here, of course: higher roughness = bigger and duller highlights, lower roughness = smaller and stronger ones. And then you could throw in a "bump-like" strength map to help with relief perception. Or not.
They actually will, that's right. The guys told me exactly that on the 3Delight forums. But you're right, as of right now it will take a long, long time because of a lot of samples needed. And Paolo says photon maps are better anyway.
At least quicker...
It's actually not that easy to understand what you mean. But UberEnvironment is the one light shader that is likely to cause "snow" with quality settings too low. Try selecting it in your scene tab and applying a preset like ExtraHQ from its library folder.
maybe thats whats going on, but would you kindly tell me how to set the quality higher? cant seem to find the option.
and ill definetely check your freebies out!
In general, yes. But if you really want to get down'n'dirty realistic - different areas of skin will tend to have different dryness. And hence, different shininess. Like, the backs of hands will often be drier = less shiny than the palms. So you'd want to paint some rough distributions for roughness, pardon the pun. We're talking physically based roughness here, of course: higher roughness = bigger and duller highlights, lower roughness = smaller and stronger ones. And then you could throw in a "bump-like" strength map to help with relief perception. Or not.
Until we've got 1 TB 10,000 CUDA core vid cards and all pure GPU near-realtime rendering at 32K x32K images, I don't think most images are rendered in enough detail to notice. Besides, most 'models' have perfect skin...it's just us regular folks that don't. So, yeah, a close up render, of respectable resolution would probably need the extras...a run of the mill, not quite so close scene, probably not. But then again, studio photographers make a lot of extra money Photoshopping out what we are trying to render in...so...
That's one thing that is great about 3DL...it CAN break the laws of physics with ease and impunity. It's a lot harder to do some things in a PBR than it is to get 3DL to be 'plausible'...
...given the way the tech curve is heading (and barring a massive solar flare event that sends us back into the steam age and actually makes libraries with books important again) I give it maybe 3 or 4 years to get there.
I wish I had found this thread a long time ago, everyone on here is extremely knowledgeable.
I'm experimenting using HDRI's other than the default daz/omnifreaker ones, and also to comparing the 3Delight/UberEnvironment Render to the Iray Render.
The PREDATOR image was rendered in Iray, Total Render Time was over a few hours, I lost count because I left my desk and it finished while I was away.
The SWAT-COP guy was Rendered in 3Delight using UE2, Total Render Time was about 4 Minutes.
EDIT: Only the Characters were rendered out, the I composited them over the still images that go along with the Environment Maps.
At 4 mintues per frame, that render time is totally doable for animating a scene.
I love the reflections on the helmet and the rim light separating him from the background, but that is some crazy-noisy specularity.
I re-rendered the same scene without my bounce lights, but the noisy specularity was still there. I kept trying different settings, but couldn't get red of it. Anyone have any ideas?
I'm not sure if I'm loading the HDRI Environment maps into UberEnvironment correctly. I basically just reverse-engineered how the Default maps like KHPark load in.
One strange thing is that in UE2, The Environment Maps are flipped Horizontaly when imported into UberEnvironment.
I'm not sure if this is normal, or if I'm doing something wrong. Is there any way to change this?
Here's what I ended up doing:
Under UberEnvironment2.1, I loaded the .JPG that matches the HDRI Environment Maps and selected Occlusion w/Directional Shadows.
Under EnvironmentSphere > Diffuse Color > I loaded the HDRI Map to matches the .JPG I loaded into Color. I also loaded the same HDRI into the Ambient Color.
I kept DIFFUSE ACTIVE set to the Default OFF and turned FANTOM and RAYTRACE on.
The model is TechSoldier for Genesis with a very old M2 or M3 Helmet.
The Helmet is using Daz Default Shaders.
I mirrored the visor on the helmet by applying a Black diffuse color, a White specular color with Specular at 100% and Glossiness at 75, a White reflections color with Reflections at 100%.
I applied AoA SSS to the TechSoldier outfit, increasing the Reflections to 100%
For the Boots, Gloves, Pads, and Vest I increased the Reflections to 20%.
For the bodysuit, I applied AoA SSS, increased the bump to 100%, and set Reflections to Zero.
I also set up a Spotlight at 100% intensity as a Backlight with Ray Traced Shadows and 2 more Spot lights as bounce lights set to 20%, Specular only, with no shadows.
Sorry for the long post, any advise or feedback?
Looks good, if a little soft focus, I'd like to see a bit more detail in the skin.
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I've never got on with mapless specular, even when I've followed recipes it all goes wrong.
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They look great, only I can't tell the difference between the Iray render and the 3Delight one. I thought the whole point of Daz adopting Iray was that we would. If I can see that something makes a huge difference then I'll check it out.
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The .tiff should be loaded into UE's color channel slot and the jpg into the diffuse/ambient channel of the environment sphere's surface. This is what happens when you double click any of the included HDRI preset.
I do found the included omnifreaker HDRI to be very low intensity. I generally set the HDRI controls to 0 (zero) saturation and contrast (mainly because I always tint the ambient light and i want very soft gradual light/shadows from UE). For the environment sphere's surface, I cranked up the ambient strength all the way up to 400%.
Then your values are too high. Especially the strength value.
Do this...set a typical spec strength value from your average preset and no map...you can do this with a sphere and no texture...render. Then in an image editor create 4 maps...one all white, one all black, one mid-grey and final on stripes of all three colors. With your lighting rig in place render the sphere with each of those maps. Then add a second sphere...but this time no map and try to match, with just adjusting the specular strength to everything except the striped one.
This will help you learn to judge what the differences between the mapped/no map strengths should be.
Thanks, sounds a bit complicated though.
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Adding to mjc1016 response, specular when viewed directly should be very, very low for rough surfaces and low for smooth surfaces. PBR conventions says the highest specular response is 17% for a diamond, 2.8% for skin (dry skin). Water is 2%, so a wet skin should be no more than 4 or 5%. But when viewed at grazing angles, that strength can go up to almost 100% because of fresnel.
So a mapless specular for skin should be set at about 30 or 40% strength with fresnel cranked all the way up to 90-95% (sometimes even more). This is what I did with the MATs I've made in my Photo Studio Kit.
If maps are used, the resulting strength will be much lower and that's not even accounting for very low intensity specular maps. To get around these problems, you need to crank the strength up (i set it at 100%) and then fiddle with the fresnel settings until you have the desired specular response. As noted by mjc1016, it should be on the same level as the mapless one.
Once you have that, it's just a matter of working out the fresnel falloff and sharpness and making it work with 1st/2nd specular roughness and sharpness.
The .tiff should be loaded into UE's color channel slot and the jpg into the diffuse/ambient channel of the environment sphere's surface. This is what happens when you double click any of the included HDRI preset.
I do found the included omnifreaker HDRI to be very low intensity. I generally set the HDRI controls to 0 (zero) saturation and contrast (mainly because I always tint the ambient light and i want very soft gradual light/shadows from UE). For the environment sphere's surface, I cranked up the ambient strength all the way up to 400%.
Thanks, that helps a lot.
I've been loading .hdr files into the diffuse/ambientchanns of the environment sphere, and I thought it was working because the image map is visable in the viewport and the surfaces were reflecting them.
I'm going to convert the .hdr file to a .jpg and re-render.
Ok, put like that I have something to work with and I'll give it a whirl.
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