Show Us Your Iray Renders. Part II
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Excellent! The lack of a flexible facial hair option for G2 was really holding back my adoption.
Thankfully most of the next month of comic work uses weirdos (Genesis four arms/cyclops, various creature stuff)
Thanks.
I don't really agree with that point as nothing in the real world is pure black. All metals have impurities which aren't dielectric, which means there's an element of plastic to all metals. Similarly, there's no such thing as pure white, either (IIRC, the albedo of the whitest fresh snow is something like 84%). As far as I'm aware, PBR really does mimic the physical world and 100% whites, for instance, can be the cause of many an unnecessary firefly. It's probably also best to stop using the term 'diffuse' and use 'albedo' instead.
Anyway, here's another setup which I think works much better.
Now I'm thinking I should make my star fields emitting at 33 k. Ha ha
the darkest black color in the world is 8 and the white color surface is 240 to be exactly for the fresh snow
there is a huge difference between base color and diffuse as diffuse is much darker with less luminosity in the opposite to base color (albedo)
I don't really agree with that point as nothing in the real world is pure black. All metals have impurities which aren't dielectric, which means there's an element of plastic to all metals. Similarly, there's no such thing as pure white, either (IIRC, the albedo of the whitest fresh snow is something like 84%). As far as I'm aware, PBR really does mimic the physical world and 100% whites, for instance, can be the cause of many an unnecessary firefly. It's probably also best to stop using the term 'diffuse' and use 'albedo' instead.
Anyway, here's another setup which I think works much better.
Never look directly into the sun in the scene when using Sky Sun environment it can permanently damage your eyes lol
Here's a chart showing the albedo of nature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Albedo-e_hg.svg
Great to hear! Unshaven is one of my favorite purchases -- it covers SO much ground for almost all men (and a few others).
I realize you can't say for certain, but is the project in the weeks/months/years range?
That's awesome! I hope we see some promos soon!
I'll take 299 more please ;-) (Someone had to throw out the Wolfie line LOL)
The skin is very rich & "juicy", the weight of dermal/fatty under layers can be felt in the image, even though it's just mesh. I'm loving the renewed interested in PBR this is spurring in the community. "Light is everything!"
No, scrap what I just said. But I'm still finding it hard to believe any paint has an albedo of 100%.
Mirror paint? :)
Here's a thread about why Unreal Engine went with roughness/metallicity:
https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?30796-Why-did-U4-use-roughness-metallic-vs-Specular-Glossiness
Basically, for performance reasons, and because it's supposed to be easier to get a physically accurate result. The main thing to watch out for, if you're used to the specularity/glossiness model, is that roughness is inverted compared to glossiness, so if you're making a roughness map lighter areas are actually rougher and have more diffuse reflections, while darker areas are smoother and have sharper reflections.
There's also a nice video about PBR texturing linked in that thread: https://vimeo.com/100514711
Thanks. I will be waiting for the materials, then.
Thanks Cath and Pearbear, that information will be helpful. I'll try exporting a more complex material like the lizard skin substance from Substance Painter and test how it looks in Iray's renderer compared to Painters as well.
EDIT: Pearbear, could you tell me where you plugged in the Substance Painter maps? I have the Metallic map in the Metallicity sider (set to 1.00), the Base Color map in the Base Color slider (white, 0, 0, 0), the Roughness map in the Glossy Roughness slider (set to 1.00) and the Height in the Bump channel (not sure where else it would go, but 1.00 is not nearly enough. I have it at 10 at the moment). Glossy Reflectivity set to 0.50, Scatter Only, Glossy Layered Weight 1.00.
Thanks in advance.
Your spartan looks like a live model from a photo shoot. Incredible. And what we are all shooting for.
Since people are talking about hdri, can anyone recommend good quality hdri, free or purchased. I feel like I always use the same three lol.
http://www.hdrlabs.com/sibl/archive.html
Been busy and just got into the beta. Pretty coo! Playing around with HDRI lighting. What do you think?
Cheers!
That's just how I set my Metal/Rough shader up, with the only difference being that I didn't use the height map, and I put the Normal map in the Normal channel. My textures were exported at 16 bit, 4096 px. (Edit - Base Color slider for white is 1.00,1.00,1.00, which I think is what you meant to type!)
If you're using Substance Painter to make your textures, I recommend using the Normal map output in the Normal channel, which should eliminate the need for a bump map. Reading some articles, and getting more into a PBR workflow, it seems that bump maps are not commonly used in PBR. If the Normal map is doing its job, it makes sense that there wouldn't be need for bump. The Normal should have all the interesting surface micro variations and scratches in it. The height maps from Substance Painter don't really look like bump maps to me. (Maybe useful for displacement?) I believe that bump maps have classically been derived from diffuse maps in Photoshop by turning them black and white, applying the high-pass filter, adjusting the contrast. There's an art to bump maps and it doesn't seem too scientific, more like messing around with the color texture to suck some texture info from it as looks best to your eye. Seems like they might become a thing of the past in the near future. Though they do have the benefit of being easy to visually interpret and hand-paint, so it's nice to still have the option to use them. Not to mention all the legacy DAZ items that rely on them!
Edit - I should also mention, since you're using Substance Painter, that the tarnished copper material I used in that test render is one of the default Smart Materials that comes with the program. So you can test that exact same material out and see if you get similar results in DAZ.
Not so sure the "Envy" jacket is really that enviable when you subject it to iray ... even with SSS and other leather like settings. I must say I am a little disappointed. Just goes to shown that you need a good asset to start off with.
Thanks for clarifying. I did export a normal map, but it gave very odd results when placed in the Normal map channel. The small scratches I added did not appear at all, and the large details seem 'offset'. Normals should be OpenGL and not DirectX for Studio use, correct?
The height map actually worked well as a bump for me, except it's impossible to set them to the same values as in Painter so the results are unpredictable. I'll try experimenting with other Normal exports (did you use the default export method or did you choose one of the other specific ones?) and try to post comparison images when I can. Thanks again for your help so far.
That's just how I set my Metal/Rough shader up, with the only difference being that I didn't use the height map, and I put the Normal map in the Normal channel. My textures were exported at 16 bit, 4096 px. (Edit - Base Color slider for white is 1.00,1.00,1.00, which I think is what you meant to type!)
If you're using Substance Painter to make your textures, I recommend using the Normal map output in the Normal channel, which should eliminate the need for a bump map. Reading some articles, and getting more into a PBR workflow, it seems that bump maps are not commonly used in PBR. If the Normal map is doing its job, it makes sense that there wouldn't be need for bump. The Normal should have all the interesting surface micro variations and scratches in it. The height maps from Substance Painter don't really look like bump maps to me. (Maybe useful for displacement?) I believe that bump maps have classically been derived from diffuse maps in Photoshop by turning them black and white, applying the high-pass filter, adjusting the contrast. There's an art to bump maps and it doesn't seem too scientific, more like messing around with the color texture to suck some texture info from it as looks best to your eye. Seems like they might become a thing of the past in the near future. Though they do have the benefit of being easy to visually interpret and hand-paint, so it's nice to still have the option to use them. Not to mention all the legacy DAZ items that rely on them!
Edit - I should also mention, since you're using Substance Painter, that the tarnished copper material I used in that test render is one of the default Smart Materials that comes with the program. So you can test that exact same material out and see if you get similar results in DAZ.
There is a conflict between the automatic texture compression in DAZ Iray and the use of Normal maps which causes Normal maps to get all crunked up. I caught a reference to it in another thread, and the solution for now is to disable Iray's automatic compression. I haven't found any documentation on this yet, but what worked for me was to go to Iray's Advanced Render Settings tab, and change the numbers in both Medium Threshold and High Threshold to 4096. Restart DAZ, try your Normal maps again with these settings, and hopefully it will look right. I'd forgotten to mention this, because luckily once you change those Threshold settings they stay that way, so I haven't had to think about it since then. We were told in the other thread that DAZ is now aware of this issue and it will be addressed in the next update.
For exporting my textures from Substance Painter, I chose "Export All Channels" and the Config: "PBR MetalRough" (or PBR MetalSpec for that test)
That was the first thing I did to fix the issue when I started working with iray, my all Zbrush normal maps based on 3D space working fine ... normal maps created in ndo from photographs not really and most need to be reduced on the values as I am getting sort of blocks formation but I assumed it is a bug
There is a conflict between the automatic texture compression in DAZ Iray and the use of Normal maps which causes Normal maps to get all crunked up. I caught a reference to it in another thread, and the solution for now is to disable Iray's automatic compression. I haven't found any documentation on this yet, but what worked for me was to go to Iray's Advanced Render Settings tab, and change the numbers in both Medium Threshold and High Threshold to 4096. Restart DAZ, try your Normal maps again with these settings, and hopefully it will look right. I'd forgotten to mention this, because luckily once you change those Threshold settings they stay that way, so I haven't had to think about it since then. We were told in the other thread that DAZ is now aware of this issue and it will be addressed in the next update.
For exporting my textures from Substance Painter, I chose "Export All Channels" and the Config: "PBR MetalRough" (or PBR MetalSpec for that test)
http://www.hdrlabs.com/sibl/archive.html
I second this suggestion. I used their Riverside Park in this re-render as the only lighting in the scene.
This time it's a comparison of a old LuxRender render vs conversion to Iray. I didn't use any presets and went through and adjusted each surface's material one slider at a time until I really understood what they did. Reading SickleYield's tut: http://sickleyield.deviantart.com/journal/Iray-Surfaces-And-What-They-Mean-519346747, while I did so made a huge difference.
Once again the render completed in 1/4 the time. So for me, Iray is working way faster than both 3Delight and LuxRender.
I am in love with how much better her skin is and how much simpler it was to get such a lovely result. However, Luxrender has cloth that I can specify things like thread count and such while still using a trans map without having to change the tiling... I see someone is already working to get procedural textures working in Iray. Do we think it can handle something like procedurally applying a bump/displacement to the surface like the weave of cloth without affecting the tiling of the surface? Or is DAZ working on giving us some presets with that built in? I would prefer the latter as it would speed up my work-flow even faster than having to mes with programing a shader myself - something I have no confidence in at this time.
Oh, another awesome part of this re-render was that at 4 mins it was alredy better than the LuxRender version... only 4 mins! =O
System specs are still the same: 1 gtx690 & i7-3770
Thanks for the compression tip, it made a huge difference. For some reason, using the PBR MetalRough export insists on exporting the normal map as DirectX, so I used the default "All maps + Normal" or whatever that is and it exports the normal correctly.
Here are two renders of a ball with the crocodile skin preset, slightly edited. The green flat area on top is a test of maximum Roughness. Scratches were painted on new layer, relief is only from normal map. Top render is in Substance Painter, bottom render is in Studio, PBR Metal/ Rough shader. Both use the same HDRI. Fairly close I'd say, but maybe not close enough? Not sure what else to try...
Thank you very much for the help!
Someone on this thread recommended the sIBL Archive at http://www.hdrlabs.com/sibl/archive.html
Might not be the best of all possible, but they are free and easy to download. If one comes out weak try setting the Environment Map weight to 1 and Gamma under Tone Mapping to 1. This might result in your models coming out a bit dark, but what the hey?
Bob
(Oops. Someone beat me to it.)
Looking cool! I see something in your render which has been an issue for me as well - a sort of artifact at the glancing edges of objects with heavy Normal mapping. The Substance Painter render shows light reflecting around the edges of the skin ball in a lovely natural looking way, but the DAZ render shows that something is off there, with the artifacts increasing as you get to the edge of the ball. I haven't found any sort of workaround for this aside from turning down the strength of the Normal map. I have a model of a sidewalk with a lot of Normal map texture that looks great, except all these dark spots appear if you look at it from a glancing angle. Maybe this too will be fixed with the next release (or we'll learn something new about creating Normal maps that shows we've been doing it wrong!).
Have you tried inverting the green channel on the normal maps? Some programs want it one way and others want it the other way....
Someone on this thread recommended the sIBL Archive at http://www.hdrlabs.com/sibl/archive.html
Might not be the best of all possible, but they are free and easy to download. If one comes out weak try setting the Environment Map weight to 1 and Gamma under Tone Mapping to 1. This might result in your models coming out a bit dark, but what the hey?
Bob
(Oops. Someone beat me to it.)
Bear in mind that those are under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License, which is why I don't use them (I'm not going to download an HDR I can't use in commercial promos). It's on the page there if you scroll down and right.
Ah, so that happens to you too...yeah I could not figure out what was wrong there because I had the HDRI lined up almost exactly the same in both programs (using a background truck as reference). I wonder if we might need to turn up that relief scale (can't recall the exact name) in Substance Painter to better preview how it will look in Studio if the normals are being calculated differently somehow. At least we're making progress, and I thank you again for your help with this. :)