Show Us Your Iray Renders. Part IV
This discussion has been closed.
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2026 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
You know, when stuff renders really fast, I take it as a sign I missed something and start going through and looking for SubD levels.
Anyone else do that? :)
Ok, here's the first project I did (rerendered because I don't have a good initial render), and then the same spruced up in Iray.
Heres another one. Post work for the fire and the glow flow the lighthouse
Heres one I didnt let finish
Here's Gaga
Half storm giant barbarian (D&D) chatting with a human fighter.
...you should post that to the RPG thread as well.
Where is that?
Here's a rerender of an older thing I worked on... a furry dragon. Making use of AtmoCam and a few improvements to textures.
That looks fantastic, I've got AtmoCam but have no idea how to use it.
AtmoCam is, essentially, just an object parented to a camera with various settings set to make the object a mostly transparent haze (using the techniques outlined previously by various people here). What makes it very handy is speeding up the process and including lots of presets; while I know how to set it up myself, I ended up buying it, in part, because it really speeds up the process.
Steps:
Add the camera. You will see MAR Iray AtmoCam. It's a group.
Open the group. Parented to the camera is MAR Atmo Volume. Select the volume, then click one of the materials for the effect you want.
Keep in mind that the effects increase over distance. Where you place your camera in relation to your subjects matters; if you are very close to the subjects, haze/dust is going to be minimal on them compared to the backdrop. If you want them to be more affected without changing the overall fog, pull the camera back and change the frame width to 'zoom in.' Or vice versa.
Thanks I'm going to give this a crack, :)
Experimenting with bump maps vs. normal maps. Someone linked to a wonderful browser bump > normal converter ( http://cpetry.github.io/NormalMap-Online/ ) and I was intrigued.
And whoa. SO MUCH BETTER.
Yeah, I could probably reduce the normal value a little, it looks a little much right now, but I love how much the normals interact with the texture qualities; it avoids the 'I'm a textured balloon' effect of bump map.
Also, this is a Genesis figure with Benjamin skin. I think it shows how useful these figures are, even as Generation 7 rolls out.
This is my first post (I think?) after being a lurking hobbyist off and on for a great long time (Poser 1) and no longer an Internet worker but now in an 18 wheeler supporting a family. Happened to drop back by as the new Daz was released and as an old time photographer am liking the results and process better than ever. My computer (in my truck) is a mac mini with nVidia but alas 250mb vram, running the newest OSX that still supports Adobe CS(1!?) so the renders I attach took up to 10 hrs, though they look pretty good but grainy long before that. Half screens look great in an hour typically.
Anyhow, I came to talk about rendering so would first like to profusely thank all the regulars here for excellent advice and works, which have kept me from having to post so far (RTFM and all that y'know.) I am also very grateful for AJ-Blood-Vessel Textures which certainly help to add that last layer of mind bending realism to an obviously fantasy image. Dunno if it is my system or what but one continuing issue I've not noticed before is that some of my textures have mismatched color profiles so I've had to open them in Graphic Converter and resave them without a profile.
I've been trying to setup my content with iRay and for a long time just stabbing in the dark but there are just so many things to stab at!! My current fave is this character (map only) on the right, derived from Daz's latest default G3 shaders (evolved from you'se guyses work, no?) and pasting it into my G2 gal and working from there. The normal maps I found and tried failed miserably since they try to emphasize things I have morphed away. I then spent another week or so trying to wet her (though oiled is what came about; I'd stll like to find "wet".) Then I tried to get wings to look right, searched all over for iridescence or the like but best I found was car paint references ... so I sprayed them with paint and fiddled a bit and here you see what I got. The black backed one is ony a plane big enough to mask the HDR so the wings would be more visible; they are but not as nice!!
So now my questions: has anyone found a way to actually use iRay physics to create iridescence, and might you please share it?? I like what I got but really want them to stand out better, be more a solid crystalline film like a dragonfly maybe, but iridescent. Perhaps they need to be a thin double surface to make room for the physics to work?
My other query is about my homemade HDR (well, it was a rest area in Iowa.) Not sure sized down for here you can see it but I'm getting really bad JPEG distortion pixellation issues even with the image saved at 12000 pixels wide and/or with low compression. I also tried dropping my lens focal length to 30mm; it makes the background scale down. (I always preferred a 28mm for candids anyhow, it feels like you are with the scene instead of standing across the room.)
So ... thanks again to all who've helped me thus far and next time I find a hot spot I'll check back. I do so hope my settings might help someone too; the maps can be identified by tone I think: base, veins, specular and bump in order of appearance and some used again later.
You might try to play with Abbe (rainbow glass shader, for example). For wet skin, Top Coat with Fresnel IOR 1.34, play around.
As for speckling, one thing to check is that you have sufficient light in the scene.
Alas again, GPU powered and I only gots a quarter gig, it fails with a Chrome error about WebGL :( Looks really great though, you're right about that!!
Thanks, will try that!! The speckling tho, no, I mean only in the hdr in the dark areas round the flowers and such, not pixellated but blocky.
One trick for that might be to use depth of field. If you are using the HDR in environmental tabs, you can also blur the environment, I think.
Either method should hide some of the blockiness.
Thanks again, glass looking maybe so far :) I'm trying to use the HDR as a prop as well, prolly a mistake.
Here's the idea... hope the wings reappear after a bit more render time. They're vanishing in the background still.
You might try making them less transparent, giving them refraction index, or increasing Glossy Roughness (which sort of 'smudges' the surface)
Using Bump > Normals, here's a before/after of render from last week.
OMG.. I could just kiss you... thank you so much for this link. What a totally cool thing. NICE NICE NICE!
Looks much better and the original looks good to start with. I have used that converter after I recently found it while searching online. I also use the GIMP plugin filter Normalmaps. It has an interactive interface but only in Windows as far as I know. I have used both and sometimes I like the results of one or the other. Just thought I would add another possibility out there.
Have you used the normal map on the top coat bump and bump mode?
Jack
My experiment with Odelle for V4 iray skin preset (from Renderosity)
applied to http://www.daz3d.com/fw-joanie-hd
A couple figure studies...
Another character study of my own.
I elected to go with a fairly simple character morph -- combination of Brandon and Logan morphs. Though I did add a few morphs to shape the hands a little (making them longer and thinner)
Jacket is Aave Nainen's great http://www.daz3d.com/a-gentleman-s-wardrobe
Hair is Pyrit (I debate if it's detailed enough for this character; probably better if I use LAMH if I come back to it)
Hmmm, I'm seeing a lot of compression artifacts in the two pictures I posted last night. Pretty sure they're not in the originals (I'm at work right now, will have to check when I get home). Something to do with the new forum software? timmins's render looks just fine though. I don't know what's going on here.
OK, I'm confused. Why would a bump map converted to a normal map have a different appearance from the original bump map?
From what I can tell, Bump channel simply adds shadows based on virtual height from the map. This fails to take into account a lot of other texture qualities, like highlights. A bump mapped skin, for example, ends up looking like completely smooth skin airbrushed to look shaded.
Normal map, on the other hand, somehow (??) takes into account all those details and 'acts' like an actually textured surface. So Glossiness looks rougher around each nook and cranny, rather than being overlaid on it.
From what I can tell, Normal map 'acts' like a displacement map without actually displacing the surface. Kinda.
As for why Bump channel can't do all those things or be made to do all those things, beats the frak out of me.
And one of my more recent -- I let it get all the way to 15,000 samples in an effort to reach 100% convergence (I got to 99.7 as I recall).
Why?
Mostly to see what the quality differences would be at different points at the very end.
Anyway.
Bump and normal do much the same job - they determine which way the surface is treated as facing for lighting calculations. The difference, as I understand it, is that a bump map has to be turned into a normal map by the render engine at render time. Normal maps don't have a distance setting, which bumps do (measuring how high the white is, how low the black) so if the bump map uses different values from those used to bake the normals it will produce a diferent result - otherwise they should, to the best of my knowledge, produce the same effect.