3Delight Laboratory Thread: tips, questions, experiments

mjc1016 · April 2015

Mustakettu85 said:

And hey, that's great you are a US2 user =) I was also among early adopters, but it took me some time to figure out how to use it well.
But I don't think there are many character sets outside of Wowie's MATs that use US2, even as an option. And most folks would only use preset materials. Sad but true (tm)

And then complain about the fact that 3Delight lacks those features...

The power of 3Delight is simply wasted, most of the time, in DS, because of limited shaders and a hard to use way of bringing in/crating new shaders.

In another thread, there was mention of the RSL editor in Studio...I don't think I've ever used it. I find it hard to read, because it is just too 'basic'. Your average simple text editor has more features...and a robust text editor, one that may even have a formatting profile for RSL code...let's just say, you'll never go back to the basic one again.

ShaderMixer and it's lack of in depth documentation...there are still bricks that basically have the name as the extent of the documentation on them. Yeah, it's an attempt at a node based shader creator...but it's not there, yet.

ShaderBuilder...limited and mostly 'old school'.

Of course there's the craft all the support scripts by hand and compile the shader outside the Studio UI (either with the standalone or shaderdl in the bin folder in the Studio install directory). But the US tax code may just be a bit more clear than the DS scripting documentation...(sorry Rob....).

And if you can't easily get new shaders into DS, how can you make up a bunch of presets that will be usable by most folks?

Another complaint is that things like US/US2 are 'too hard to understand' is primarily because of all the hacks/cheats and workarounds that were done in the past to try to achieve something the old shaders were not designed to do. And as 'photorealism' is becoming more and more the 'goal', those old ways are being exposed in all their inadequacies.

Something like the fact that Studio was capable of real SSS for ages, before anyone started using it, should have been put to rest years ago. Or the use of 'flagging/categories'...before AoA came out with his stuff, it was unheard of in DS, but 3DL has had it for a very long time. It was just turned off/hidden in the DS shaders. And the ability to use it would have gone a long way to improve the over all 'user experience', because one of biggest benefits is a reduction in render times when you aren't wasting time calculating things that aren't needed...

All those images of the SSS shaders I did last night...they were rendering in seconds. Granted, it was a simple set up, but still...the only ones that took longer were the ones with the area light...and that was the UberArealight. I suspect a different one may have faster results. And that was with the default, not scripted, 3DL render. But why were they so fast?

My guess is because they were not wasting time on calculating a mess of 'extra' lights and other things that didn't matter. Also making sure the settings were 'sane' for what I was attempting to do probably cut down on wasted time, too.

Now, something I just don't understand...

People will spend days selecting the perfect brush, paints, prepping the canvas and think nothing of it...but when faced with 'tweaking' a shader preset or adjusting materials they'll go off the deep end and complain about how it is 'not artistic' to do that stuff. Isn't understanding the tools, their limitations and how to use them part of all art? Isn't knowing how to get the most out them what separates the good from the not so good? So what's the difference between knowing 10 different shades of crimson and the IOR of plain everyday glass and fine lead crystal?

As a side note....I'm not going to be doing any big renders for a while. I need to give my computer a good clean out (dust bunny eradication time), but discovered I'm out of thermal paste, so until the order gets here now heavy CPU use renders are off the table. I discovered that I was hitting 69C...my 'shutdown' temp, during a big render. I thought it was crashing...but nope, just heat related emergency shut down. It's going to be a couple of weeks, because I'm not going to order just the paste...I've got other stuff to order and the paste by itself will be too high in shipping costs.

Mustakettu85 · April 2015

mjc1016 said:

Now, something I just don't understand...
People will spend days selecting the perfect brush, paints, prepping the canvas and think nothing of it...but when faced with 'tweaking' a shader preset or adjusting materials they'll go off the deep end and complain about how it is 'not artistic' to do that stuff. Isn't understanding the tools, their limitations and how to use them part of all art? Isn't knowing how to get the most out them what separates the good from the not so good? So what's the difference between knowing 10 different shades of crimson and the IOR of plain everyday glass and fine lead crystal?

Hear, hear! I basically agree with the whole post, but this is something I am most puzzled about, too.

And good luck with the paste!

-------------

LOL! I was just kidding around. F1 means Formula One and there is a driver called Roman Grosjean and he's notorious for causing accidents.

Yup he's the guy that kept popping up all over google when I was trying to find out more about Grosjean the scientist.

Mustakettu85 · April 2015

3Delight's PhysicalSun - a yet another tutorial for getting an RSL shader into DS.

Here: https://mustakettu85.wordpress.com/2015/04/15/3delights-physical-sun-into-daz-studio-a-yet-another-shader-builder-mini-tutorial

Rogerbee · April 2015

Mustakettu85 said:
Rogerbee said:

When I get LAMH, I'll generate brows for all the textures I most use and then paint them out of all the maps, that way they should look good. Well, that's if LAMH can generate fibres of a convincing thickness...

It can. It's styling the brows that might pose a challenge. I tried once with Garibaldi.

I guess that growing LAMH brows on a transparent conformer may be more versatile now that we routinely work with multi-UV figures. I want to make one and paint some eyebrow shapes I would actually find attractive, but everyone knows that my to-do list is almost as long as the river Volga.

You put it better than I did, LOL! I could never get it looking good, it always looked like soot whenever I did it.

Soot. Exactly. I was looking for a word to describe the effect of overdone AO, and you nailed it. It mostly happens with "crazy" AO trace distances (which is, over a few inches). Meter-wide AO can be made to look artistically stylised (particularly nice when you run some inking/media filters on your image in post), but when the person who does the render is aiming for "photoreal" or even "photosurreal", it does not work.

Back then, when I was rendering in the REYES-based hider on an older computer, I used tinted AO colours as a cheat to approximate full GI.

LAMH is on my to do list for when I know I can afford it. As for AO do we still need it!?

CHEERS!

Rogerbee · April 2015

Mustakettu85 said:
3Delight's PhysicalSun - a yet another tutorial for getting an RSL shader into DS.
Here: https://mustakettu85.wordpress.com/2015/04/15/3delights-physical-sun-into-daz-studio-a-yet-another-shader-builder-mini-tutorial

Now that I like, when I have a cooler computer, I'll have a dabble with that tutorial. Can it be adapted to become a moon? I want to do a moonlit scene when I get my Horde fully finished and I was considering a distant light.

CHEERS!

evilded777 · April 2015

mjc1016 said:

People will spend days selecting the perfect brush, paints, prepping the canvas and think nothing of it...but when faced with 'tweaking' a shader preset or adjusting materials they'll go off the deep end and complain about how it is 'not artistic' to do that stuff. Isn't understanding the tools, their limitations and how to use them part of all art? Isn't knowing how to get the most out them what separates the good from the not so good? So what's the difference between knowing 10 different shades of crimson and the IOR of plain everyday glass and fine lead crystal?

Goddess bless you, man. Same thing I have been trying to say. You have to know your tools, any good artist does, regardless of the medium.

Rogerbee · April 2015

I used Poser for several years because I thought DS shaders were too complicated, then Genesis hit and I couldn't do with DSON what you could natively in DS so I got DS back. I did just recently reinstall PP2012, but only to build .cr2's for things I wanted to experiment with in DS, such as porting over Miki2 and turning her into what is practically a G2M. Not sure if she's exactly Mei Lin 6, but, I didn't have to pay any more for Miki than I already had several years ago.

CHEERS!

mjc1016 · April 2015

Rogerbee said:

LAMH is on my to do list for when I know I can afford it. As for AO do we still need it!?

CHEERS!

If not using a full GI lighting, then yeah, some AO is needed...fewer and fewer textures are including 'baked' AO, highlights and whatnot (finally), so I'd say yes.

ZarconDeeGrissom · April 2015

It's B.C. so there is a flood of post I have yet to read. B.C. What's that you ask, lol. refer to pic.

The scary thing is Kettu, I understood that code, tho my 'c' interpretation probably differs significantly from whatever renderman is doing, lol. As for the article, yep the coffee has not had a chance to get to the brain yet. Oh, your doing that, so what it 'N', 'I', 'P', 'L', 'Ci', and 'Cl', then the article text crashed my brain, lol.
http://renderman.pixar.com/view/light-surface-interactions
Listing 3.2 Illuminance loop implementing the Phong reflection model.

normal Nf = normalize(faceforward(N, I));
vector R = normalize(reflect(I, Nf));
illuminance (P, Nf, PI/2) {
        float cosr = max(0, R . normalize(L));
        Ci += Cl * pow(cosr, 1/roughness);
}

mjc1016, I spent all night, till I passed out on the keyboard, just trying to make a cylinder of green antifreeze, and the best I managed to get on a 1foot cylinder was a green-pee goop like stuff. The instant I put the same exact settings on a 1.9inch cylinder (to make a 2inch PVC pipe of antifreeze), the more transparent at the edges thing vanished completely.

to top that off, windows had locked up sometime while passed out on the keyboard, lol. So I'm now trying to make the entire thing from scratch again as I type this.
(EDIT added ref pic, and last screen-cap 1foot cylinders, that I'm trying to make from scratch again)

Rogerbee · April 2015

mjc1016 said:
Rogerbee said:

LAMH is on my to do list for when I know I can afford it. As for AO do we still need it!?

CHEERS!

If not using a full GI lighting, then yeah, some AO is needed...fewer and fewer textures are including 'baked' AO, highlights and whatnot (finally), so I'd say yes.

I see, well, when Kettu gets this shader out maybe then I'll look into it.

CHEERS!

Rogerbee · April 2015

zarcondeegrissom said:
It's B.C. so there is a flood of post I have yet to read. B.C. What's that you ask, lol. refer to pic.
The scary thing is Kettu, I understood that code, tho my 'c' interpretation probably differs significantly from whatever renderman is doing, lol. As for the article, yep the coffee has not had a chance to get to the brain yet. Oh, your doing that, so what it 'N', 'I', 'P', 'L', 'Ci', and 'Cl', then the article text crashed my brain, lol.
http://renderman.pixar.com/view/light-surface-interactions
Listing 3.2 Illuminance loop implementing the Phong reflection model.
normal Nf = normalize(faceforward(N, I));
vector R = normalize(reflect(I, Nf));
illuminance (P, Nf, PI/2) {
        float cosr = max(0, R . normalize(L));
        Ci += Cl * pow(cosr, 1/roughness);
}
mjc1016, I spent all night, till I passed out on the keyboard, just trying to make a cylinder of green antifreeze, and the best I managed to get on a 1foot cylinder was a green-pee goop like stuff. The instant I put the same exact settings on a 1.9inch cylinder (to make a 2inch PVC pipe of antifreeze), the more transparent at the edges thing vanished completely.
to top that off, windows had locked up sometime while passed out on the keyboard, lol. So I'm now trying to make the entire thing from scratch again as I type this.

That code looks like it's in an alien language to me. I'd probably copy and paste the lines from Kettu's tutorials then I wouldn't mistype anything.

CHEERS!

ZarconDeeGrissom · April 2015

Rogerbee said:
zarcondeegrissom said:
It's B.C. so there is a flood of post I have yet to read. B.C. What's that you ask, lol. refer to pic.
The scary thing is Kettu, I understood that code, tho my 'c' interpretation probably differs significantly from whatever renderman is doing, lol. As for the article, yep the coffee has not had a chance to get to the brain yet. Oh, your doing that, so what it 'N', 'I', 'P', 'L', 'Ci', and 'Cl', then the article text crashed my brain, lol.
http://renderman.pixar.com/view/light-surface-interactions
(Sniped to save our braincells, lol)

mjc1016, I spent all night, till I passed out on the keyboard, just trying to make a cylinder of green antifreeze, and the best I managed to get on a 1foot cylinder was a green-pee goop like stuff. The instant I put the same exact settings on a 1.9inch cylinder (to make a 2inch PVC pipe of antifreeze), the more transparent at the edges thing vanished completely.

to top that off, windows had locked up sometime while passed out on the keyboard, lol. So I'm now trying to make the entire thing from scratch again as I type this.

That code looks like it's in an alien language to me. I'd probably copy and paste the lines from Kettu's tutorials then I wouldn't mistype anything.

CHEERS!don't feel bad, not knowing what the variables being crunched are, makes any formula useless. To quote an early professor, Professor David Goodstein.
:lol:
I have just made a great scientific discovery. I have discovered that gargle-snap, is equal to quivel-dunk, times distance. You see, your not impressed, and the reason is, I have not told you what 'gargle-snap' is, and I have not told you what 'quivel-dunk' is... (returns to the Newton's Second Law of Motion) the second law doesn't mean any thing if I cant tell you what Force and mass is.
(EDIT)
So back to that Green pea soup, that was supposed to be antifreeze. lol. I'm going to put my shoes on, and go and make a picture, with light behind a glass of the stuff, can't find a good pic online.

wowie · April 2015

Rogerbee said:

Could this make UberSurface2 redundant as the shader of choice for skin!?

US2 still have an edge in that in can be used for surfaces other than skin. It may still uses antiquated Clay for diffuse and the Glossy brick in Shader Mixer (with non IOR fresnel), but you can do some pretty amazing stuff with layered specular AND diffuse.

Of course, it would be much better having a shader with a proper Oren Nayar diffuse.

ZarconDeeGrissom · April 2015

wowie, I'm impressed with every single one of those. Dare I say, even puts FW Eve's and FWSA Wachiwi's mats threw the wringer. Well OK at least makes them not look nearly as awe inspiring, still incredible tho. "O" I took pics of that pond yesterday, and still need to upload them.

In any case, looks good wowie. Here is a quick test I did, as none of the pics I found online, had Antifreeze back-light.
Before anyone starts going off like a frog in a sock, this was done under rather controlled conditions, and yes I had some coffee in my brain before attempting to pour the 'Substance' into the 'Test containers'. As you can clearly see, from the grime on the glass, it has never been used for food or drink items, and is soaking in detergent as I type this.

I probably should have looked at the camera angles a bit more before closing it all up, still good enough to see what I'm looking for. And I think I will do this again, with a light under a board directed at that backing panel, with the 'Test containers' on the board above the light... Tho I need to make a solid support for said board first, so not today.

I had expected the stuff to be far more opaque then it turned out to be, must be the mix or something. Still after this, and looking at my former tests, both the AoA and Omni shaders had nailed the effect, they just were not transparent enough.

ZarconDeeGrissom · April 2015

OK, this is just wrong. I've applied all the same settings as my former experiment, that worked, and as you can see, nothing much at all.

Now what I did figure out last night, before falling asleep at the keyboard, is that I am able to get far more light threw the cylinder with AoA, then with the fewer settings in the Omni version pegged at max. When it works on the AoA one.

I just tried to 'RebuildFromScratch' the test scene (and saved it this time), tho the AoA shader on the cylinders are just not cooperating.
(EDIT)
Yep, the same exact settings that made them cylinders of Green pee soup, just are not doing it this time.

mjc1016 · April 2015

At this point I'm not sure what to say...I've rebuilt my scene, too and it still works like it did last night.

There's definitely something odd going on, on your machine if you can't get the same results with the same settings.

Also for a true liquid, starting with a glass shader may be a better starting point.

My son did find some thermal paste, so I'll be doing that tonight instead of testing this out...then I've got another shader to play with...thanks Kettu.

ZarconDeeGrissom · April 2015

mjc1016 said:
At this point I'm not sure what to say...I've rebuilt my scene, too and it still works like it did last night.
There's definitely something odd going on, on your machine if you can't get the same results with the same settings.

Also for a true liquid, starting with a glass shader may be a better starting point.

My son did find some thermal paste, so I'll be doing that tonight instead of testing this out...then I've got another shader to play with...thanks Kettu.

It's all good, I'm sure it is a 4.8 Beta thing, has to be. I worked, and then it didn't, lol. I'm off going threw stuff purchased from Daz the beginning of the month. I am so behind, on so much.

so we are both exempt from looking at that 'Green goo' any further, :lol:

JonnyRay · April 2015

Just wanted to say it's nice to see people trying to get the most out of the 3Delight engine. I've always been a fan of this and similar to some of the thoughts here have tried to help people understand what's going on in the rendering engine when they tweak their shader settings.

My 3D Tutorials on my blog are primarily oriented toward just that.

wowie · April 2015

zarcondeegrissom said:

I had expected the stuff to be far more opaque then it turned out to be, must be the mix or something. Still after this, and looking at my former tests, both the AoA and Omni shaders had nailed the effect, they just were not transparent enough.

Close enough?

As noted by mjc1016, since it's a clear liquid, you should used something like a glass preset. I simply used a green opacity color combined with yellow translucence color. Liquid's opacity is at 35% strength combined with diffuse roughness to control the spread of the translucence.

mjc1016 · April 2015

JonnyRay said:
Just wanted to say it's nice to see people trying to get the most out of the 3Delight engine. I've always been a fan of this and similar to some of the thoughts here have tried to help people understand what's going on in the rendering engine when they tweak their shader settings.
My 3D Tutorials on my blog are primarily oriented toward just that.

Johnny, I was wondering if you'd show up...feel free to join in the active discourse.

ZarconDeeGrissom · April 2015

wowie said:
zarcondeegrissom said:

I had expected the stuff to be far more opaque then it turned out to be, must be the mix or something. Still after this, and looking at my former tests, both the AoA and Omni shaders had nailed the effect, they just were not transparent enough.

Close enough?

As noted by mjc1016, since it's a clear liquid, you should used something like a glass preset. I simply used an green opacity color combined with yellow translucence color at around 35% opacity strength combined with diffuse roughness to control the spread of the translucence.That is perfect, thanks in advance. I'll try to replicate that after the current onslaught I'm under with another Face-plant time figure.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewreply/804583/
Times, I get the full brunt of just how slow and inadequate this computer is, ugh.
I so wish Daz Studio ran on the Power8 processor :lol:

wowie · April 2015

Interesting. Most interesting indeed.

mjc1016 · April 2015

Physical Sun is a great little addition to the lighting toolbox...thanks Kettu. That one had been plaguing me for a while, I couldn't figure out where I was going wrong...it's the damn convoluted coordinates that DS is using that was throwing me. That little insight may help with some other light shaders I've been looking at, too.

As to the light, itself...it looks good and renders fast. Couple it with a hi-res backdrop and it really looks good. Of course with a full geometry type backdrop, like a set piece, it looks even better.

ZarconDeeGrissom · April 2015

"O" is that good looking, as far as appearance is, not as in appetizing, lol.

I forgot to mention, the part of the SSS that I thought was close, was not the substance per say (green-pee soup, lol). It was my misconception that I thought the fluid would be more transparent the closer to the edge of the cylinder, almost like a negative of how it would appear if it was opaque and light from a single point light at the camera of sorts.

So, in reality, as my photos showed me, because of the refraction of light threw a cylinder, the substance (Whatever it is) is almost uniform almost to the edges of the cylinder from the center, then it drops off rapidly, because of the glass jar (or cup).

I think I'm ready to try to figure out how to plug those numbers into the Omni shader, it's not giving me the same grief that AoA is on studio 4.8 beta.

As for my other reason for wanting to have something like that, was so I could visualize the total thickness of a group of items (total mass excluding empty space between parts), looking threw them from one side to the other, without any refraction at all. That clearly is something none of the current Daz Studio shaders can do, and something better suited for a slide rule, calculator, and graph paper, lol.
(EDIT)
I take that last bit back, I think some setting in the next post was what I was looking for, for that 'total mass' thing.

ZarconDeeGrissom · April 2015

WOW! recalling a skit from Star Trek, lol. It's, [sniffs] it's, [looks closer] it's, it's green. :lol:

ZarconDeeGrissom · April 2015

A bit more fun with Opacity color vs Translucency color, lol.
I did end up increasing the Uber Area Light panel to 200% intensity, the dzSpotlight is only at 100% intensity.

mjc1016 · April 2015

Well, hopefully I've got the temperature spikes under control...now I'm out of thermal paste...used the last of it tonight.

But when I said the physical sun was fast, I was just doing tiny renders...here's one at 800x800 scripted. All reflections are environmental. PhysicalSun is the only light.

1 min 6 seconds.

Rogerbee · April 2015

wowie said:
Rogerbee said:

Could this make UberSurface2 redundant as the shader of choice for skin!?

US2 still have an edge in that in can be used for surfaces other than skin. It may still uses antiquated Clay for diffuse and the Glossy brick in Shader Mixer (with non IOR fresnel), but you can do some pretty amazing stuff with layered specular AND diffuse.

Of course, it would be much better having a shader with a proper Oren Nayar diffuse.

They look great, what were they all done in US2 or yours? I'm guessing your shader will have this Oren Nayar diffuse then?

CHEERS!

mjc1016 · April 2015

Here's a better one...more appropriate background and a shadow catcher. Render time jumped to a whopping 1 min 23 seconds...

Rogerbee · April 2015

@Wowie: Ok, I want to have a crack at physical sun but something you said has confused me. I know which lines to take out and add in the lightphysicalsun( bit, but, what do you mean by 'edit the body' what command do I want here!? I'm using Notepad++ but am not familiar with the menus yet. I really want to use this light!

CHEERS!

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3Delight Laboratory Thread: tips, questions, experiments

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