Show Us Your Iray Renders. Part IV
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After kind of learning what to do with iray I decided to run a few renders on my AMD tower. The time difference is nuts! 2 to 3 hours vs 20 to 25 minutes with the nvidia 980m machine. Close up. http://fav.me/d9a0uuy
Ok, Alien Botanicals 2 are definitely awesome in Iray! :)
Awesome render. I have the first set and always wanted more.
I've been lazy about skin shaders. I've purchased a few new characters that came with Iray shaders, and just apply one of those to the model I'm working with. In some cases, I'll substitute the character's mats in the base color channel, leaving everything else intact.
In the images below, all but one of the models are "wearing" another character's skin. In the portrait on the left, Mei Lin is wearing Tressie HD. I did have to touch up the mole on her cheek in post as it was distorted. In the nightclub act, on the right, the backup singer in red is Vernie HD, I used her skin on the backup singer in purple (Olympia HD) and the lead singer in green (Karina for Olympia.) The singer in blue is Carling for Ysabeau, wearing Tempie HD.
I've spent countless hours trying to replicate the results Cath was getting to no avail. I'm pretty sure she was "cheating..." First by using her own skins for M4, and second by using her original files in her modeling program to create albedo, normals, and so on. Just applying her recommended settings wasn't enough.
Now I just look for newer G2 characters, on sale of course, that include both Iray shaders and normal maps.
(Yeah, I know. The lead singer looks like she's singing into a brick! The microphone that comes with Deco Club is horrid, but I didn't have another microphone. I'm hoping DAZ includes Merlin's store in the PA Festival. He's got a nice mic in his electric guitar product. Other than the b*%$-ugly microphone, I think it turned out pretty good.)
Testing some more.
This is a background image I made in Carrara on a sphere, with Sun and Sky behind it, ocean wide water, etc.
I'm pretty happy with the lighting effect, though I'm finding generating stuff in Carrara unwieldy. (But it costs raaaaaaaaaaaaather less than the other options, so)
That's really nice, Will.
Thank you! Here's another.
It's just the OceanWide skydome, made refraction 1/1, with the color put into glossy, and the sun lined up. It isn't perfect (in the second shot I think you can see some slight resolution-related issues starting to crop up), but I'm pretty happy with it.
The ground is the 'planets' landscape stuff ( https://www.daz3d.com/moonscapes , I think), then Mars Explorer for Genesis. And a sphere.
Good stuff, Will!
Maybe a little bit, with the full sized image. But it shouldn't be an issue with your webcomic... Aren't those lower resolution images? Screen resolutions, not print resolutions.
I love seeing how people make use of skydomes from earlier products. :)
Switching gears, again... I put together a comparison image using FW Sebastian HD.
The images show Sebastian rendered in Iray without applying the Iray Uber Shader first, with just the Uber Shader Applied, with the Iray preset for Base Mat for FW Derek HD for Michael 6 applied, and finally after I went back and manually put Sebastian's original skin mats in the Base Color for Face, Lips and Nostrils skin shaders.
Ah hah, I think I know what's wrong, I still have the normal maps in there. From what I can gather from that thread, I think they are counteracting the HD. I'll adjust that and see what I get.
CHEERS!
Nice renders folks,
Here's another of Hiroshi, my best attempt at a scene till I get some graphical firepower. It's just a backdrop using some old wallpaper I've had kicking around since the very early days of DS.
CHEERS!
Hmm,
I took out all the normal maps on Darius and re-rendered him, and I don't really see that much difference. So much so that I don't really see the need for HD in Iray. It looks like normal, bump and perhaps displacement maps would be the way forward for enhancing detail. HD was kind of a 3Delight thing really, it did make a difference there, but, if that's not how Iray works then so be it. It really is getting to the point where Daz need to decide whether to drop HD and 3Delight, or do a Basic version with 3Delight and a Pro version with Iray. I think Basic and Pro would be a good idea, that way people have choice and don't have to have something that they won't use tacked on with it. PA's can still provide for both when it comes to content creation and everyone would be happy.
CHEERS!
..so the Iray uber shaders are incorrect then?
..yeah, but I really don't care to go back to setting up an array of lights like I had to do in 3DL to "fake" lighting. The big advantage of Iray is the ability to create mesh lights.
No it isn't that black and white. I wouldn't call it incorrect just not what many of us expected. Now I am taking the word of folks that know what they are looking at in terms of the MDL, I don't but in my short testing period found it is more like working in 3DL with Uber Surface in that many of the functions in the Iray shaders seem to be arbitrary.
...so it's not true PBR then.
In some yes but when it comes to doing human skin then no and true PBR also encapsulates PBR texture maps which there are not. So we need to look at both the shader and texture maps when it comes to doing more complex surfaces, like human skin. I personally don't have any issue when doing buildings and and other non organic surfaces as I am impressed with the results so far.
I don't think we've seen fully what Iray can do in a DS context. It took years for 3DL to really get going (Look how many years there were between DS2 and DS4.) and it may take a couple more generations of DS and indeed Genesis before we really see what it can do. I get the feeling that we're just scratching the surface at the moment.
CHEERS!
Neither do I and the results I've seen using mesh lights look more convincing to me, particularly those in DZ's promo renders. After I get my GPU they will be a must buy.
CHEERS!
Exactly. I see this is terms of how shaders developed for DS and 3DL like Uber Surface (2) and AOA SSS Shader Base. Fo me and as a hobby I understand that sometimes I expect more from this level of digital rendering but at the same time I love the DS/Iray integration and hope it grows faster than 3DL did in terms of more advanced shaders and PBR texture maps. For me this is an exciting time for Daz Studio development.
Oh sure. Plus my webcomic is primarily set in the Oort cloud, and skydomes are only important for virtual reality... so realism isn't strictly necessary.
But I like to render other stuff and work on basic ideas, so coming up with bounds on what it's good for is, well, good.
Note that there ARE mesh lights in 3DL (Uber AreaLights) that might be a good middle ground for some people -- they take a lot longer to render than most 3DL, but you are still using mostly the same core shaders you might be used to.
But I'm with Kyoto, a huge part of why I like Iray is the fairly straightforward way lights are set up. There are fiddly details, but it's... well, sensible. Point lights are sharp, broad emitters make for softer light, backscatter just happens, etc.
(Most of the rest of the reason is how sensible and easy shaders are, the ability to tile texture channels independently, transparency, emission, etc)
The physical realism of the result is almost secondary for me. Heh.
Ninive, I love that skin color.
I'm not talking about mesh lighting for in-scene lighting effects. We need those. I'm talking about using meshes in place of the native light types to light a scene. It makes zero sense to use a mesh panel as a softbox, for example, when the spotlight with a big emitter does exactly the same thing, and produces a faster render. It just comes down to simple math. If you just gotta uses meshes for lighting a scene, at least keep the poly count down. Reduce the number of facets that Iray has to calculate light exitance.
Yeah, I keep kicking myself going 'what am I doing??' when I have an exquisitely modeled emitting CFL lightbulb in a lamp, taking huge processing time... off camera.
One thing I'm thankful for, having spent some time with 3DL as a biased renderer, is laying the groundwork for thinking creatively on how to handle scenes. Because you don't get a medal of honor for doing everything literally and realistically, the point is getting a result you want, any way you can.
Also, I'm finding that while I normally disdain the camera headlamp... it's awfully useful under some situations. For example, I'm doing space shots. And while I could jump through hoops adding ambient lightsources, it's just a hell of a lot easier to set headlamp to a low value.
I don't get this concept of "setting up an array of lights like I had to do in 3DL to "fake" lighting. The big advantage of Iray is the ability to create mesh lights" as if an array of mesh lights was different.
I get the feeling that the "mesh light" school of general lighting haven't understood that the geometry of the Iray spotlight can be changed to be any "softbox" except an umbrella, i.e. pretty much the same as creating a mesh light from a primitive. The luminous flux value needs to be changed becuase it's really in units of lumens/cm2.
Note that as Tobor keeps saying, mesh lights have their place for in scene effects such as lighting fixtures, montior screens, candles and so forth.
If you duplicate the settings and placement of any mesh light with a spotlight of the same geometry and settings, you will get the same render, just a fair bit faster.
Meshlights are geometry based lights that use an emissive (of some sort) shader. To be a meshlight it MUST have geometry.
Physical lights are the other lights...the 'math' ones. These come in two basic flavors...physically based and 'pure math'. The physical ones have things like adjustable size, falloff and in many renderers can have IES profiles attached to them. The 'pure math' ones are just an algorithm that says to the renderer 'Hey, I'm a light source.' These are the most common lights in 3DL and are the kind that most of the Studio lights are. The UberArea shader is just one area (mesh) light shader in Studio. It does have falloff and can be put onto any geometry. It can't accept IES profiles (as that is not something 3DL has). There are also 'physical' spots/points/distant (infinite) lights...but by default they are not easily accessible in Studio or need to be added. AoA's lights actually are 'physical'...(there are a few other distinctions that go along with them in general 3DL usage, but they aren't that important and are probably more to do with which version is being used...3DL for Maya, SoftImage, etc).
Physically accurate lights are only part of physically accurate lighting. Iray does it by default, 3DL does not. Full 'environmental' lighting...bounce, occlusion, etc is the key. Without it, physically accurate lights don't matter.