Show Us Your Iray Renders. Part IV
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Thanks man the neat thing, unlike something like this http://fav.me/d9fu61q where I have the ground made with props take longer I am guessing due to having more geometry. I am new to using HRDI I used to render subjects with invisible BG and use photos as backdrops. I gots to learn how to create my custom HRDI's.. The only odd thing I have seen from time to time is if the lighting points the wrong way, your subject will cast a shadow against the BG..
Yeah, I find HDRIs extremely frustrating to use. Heh.
Here's a test of No-Suit (and, at base, some of the freebie latex shaders): http://willbear.deviantart.com/art/Latex-No-suit-570898624
Your the freakmaster man cool
Took the no-suit nose bump and then redid the previous with Ultra Bodysuit. Having lots of morphs and adjustments is just awesome, but the no-suit stuff, particularly for the nose, is just perfect.
http://willbear.deviantart.com/art/Latex-Suit-test2-570906477
And, we're back ;-)
Giving DS 4.9 a spin, Faster rendering & the skin SSS is nicely improved (not that 4.8 was bad with the right setup by any stretch)
You can view the HD version in the DAZ Iray Gallery (and give it a thumbs up if you like it hehe)
Beautiful, AlexLo.
Trying out new clothes: http://willbear.deviantart.com/art/The-Travelers-570946537
Heh heh.
Yeah, what choices are good depends highly on goals and workflow.
I like doing lots of weird stuff, like my recent 'victorian lizardpeople confronting a neanderthal,' and, well, that favors the big pot of Genesis/Genesis 2 content.
If I was primarily interested in extremely high-fidelity, nuanced pictures of women, I'd be keen on G3F.
V4 has a huge advantage in a VAST array of content out there developed for it, though the ability to migrate some of that to Genesis makes it less cut and dried.
Debate about how 'feminine' the Radioactive suit got me thinking. I think I showed fairly reasonably that at least 3/4 of the problem was the underlying model (namely, add a little weight and muscle to the figure and it makes a huge difference, and that you can adjust the included morphs to make it even more appropriate.
Well, decided to try the Rectifier outfit and see if I could use it well on a man. (I used the G2F, but added male morphs) It actually ended up more masculine than I had originally intended, so hey. The only thing I just had to drop was the leggings, which look entirely like women's stockings.
http://willbear.deviantart.com/art/Rectifier-Brandon-571031438
(I used mostly Brandon morphs. Originally I was going to use his skin, too, but I wanted more vascularity and the easiest way to do THAT was use Phillip, so, hey.)
I love using Victoria 4 and Aiko4 for animations. there is a lot of tools, and content available for generation 4 items than their is Genesis or g2 items though you can convert over generation 4 items to genesis &g2 items easily with the tools offered. But tools are seriously lacking for Genesis 3 for older generation content to use with it.
My dark elf for G2M.
On G3F. The bodypart region that bothers me the most is the hip crest / linac line region no matter what character, if G3F or V7 or Bethany 7 or any other character, this region looks bad and it does not matter what one is trying to fix this, this region allways looks bad.
Dragon Nest
Rnder details here Gallery93661
Best viewed full size for all the little details
Testing my new adquisition... render is still too grainy but it has been running for 13 hours and I was sick of waiting without my pc :P.
Now that is finished I see I could have done it without the candles and the fireplace lit.
The main Iray feature that's been mentioned as an upgrade in 4.9 is the way it handles SSS, and I wanted to try it out.
There were some SSS skin effects in the past that I could only get in Octane render, which frustrated me because otherwise I prefer working in Iray. Mainly, in Iray I couldn't simulate the phenomena we see in real life when strong sunlight is hitting the skin, and is blocked by an object casting a sharp shadow, and a little bit of light is scattering under the skin at the edge of the shadow, creating a warm glow around the edge. It's a very subtle but dynamic effect that varies a lot depending on many conditions. We could get backlit SSS glowing ear effects with Iray in the past, but I couldn't get this particular effect to work... until now! They fixed it! Here are a few DAZ 4.9 test renders I just did, and in the second image you can see the effect I've been trying to get out of Iray for ages. I particularly like how it came out at the edge of the shadow on her neck, and how the effect varies depending on how hard the shadow is.
I had to totally rebuild my skin shader to get this to work, and it required custom textures. This is working with a skin where the Base Color is a deathly pale grayish green as if the skin is drained of blood (or like a callus), the Translucency Color is a very hot orangish red to simulate the blood under the skin, and there is a third map in Translucency Weight to help control things. I believe this is a somewhat common approach to simulating skin in other renderers, and I'm very pleased that Iray is capabale of it now. I definitely couldn't get this look with default DAZ texture images, I had to readjust the colors of them heavily in Photoshop first. If DAZ can get a really robust RGB color balance control built into the Iray shader, we should be able to do this all in Iray without having to doctor the textures first in Photoshop. That would make tweaking the skin shader a lot more responsive too, rather than having to keep going back between DAZ and Photoshop when adjusting the textures.
Gonna still have to play and tweak it to get it as natural looking as I can, but I'm really happy with this improvement. Now if Iray had a camera that could do equirectangular panoramic renders, I wouldn't ever need Octane Render again...
I create panoramas with an equirectangular projection the same way I do with photos - with the help of PTGui. I wrote a script that rotates the camera precisely every time, and renders all shots sequentially. I do this once for a scene designed to make aligning/optimizing work perfectly.
Basically, PTGui allows you to align/optimize once for the known rotations in the script, and after that, you just save the project. Loading the project and replacing the individual shots with whatever scene you just rendered makes the creation of future panos even simpler (not requiring aligning/optimizing). Plus, the resulting files can be HUGE.
- Greg
I've considered doing something like that, needing some equirectangular renders recently for a VR project. Since I've gotten used to working in Iray, I didn't want to go back to Octane just for the equirectangular camera option... Buuuut for that specific task, it's so easy to just hit the "equirectangular" option on Octane's camera and have it come out perfectly with no need for stitching software. I think Blender has an equirectangular camera option too. Would be a very nice addition to Iray. In addition to VR applications, it would be useful for making custom lighting HDRIs in Iray.
But like you mentioned, if you stitch your panorama together instead, you can render something really, really big. That script you wrote for rotating the camera and rendering each angle in sequence sounds very handy, nice one.
Pearbear,
You've done excellent work on this shader in Iray. I think it looks exactly as it should. Seeing as how you are both an Octane and Iray user well versed in each, maybe you can answer for me a few important questions I've been tossing around lately.
1. Firstly, are you entirely certain that the results you attained in 4.9 are not possible in 4.8? This is because I'm not in any hurry to upgrade to 4.9, but I also don;t want to spin my wheel working in 4.8 if the SSS is bugged out in some tangible way.
2. What you stated about the diffuse map being bluish and colorless really stands out. One of the things missing inIray is the option to control the Gamma of image textures. Octane allows this easily. In my own Octane recipe I must lower the Gamma from 2.2 to 1.4, which removes most of the color leaving a greenish blue dead zombie looking skin. Like you I then allow the SSS effects to warm the skin back up to acceptable "living" parameters. So the control I think you guys should be asking for in Iray is Gamma for individual textures.
3. Iray is also missing an Absorption node, something Octane provides. Scattering nodes are avaialble in both apps, but I miss the Absorption in Iray. Is there something in Iray that already behaves in a manner similar to Absorption in Octane. What I'm looking for is a slider for slider breakdown of how these tow applications relate. Example: Octane Absorption = Iray Translucency Weight. or Octane Gamma = Iray ?
There should be some sort of equivalence between the two applications, maybe you can help me to make sense of that.
4. You say you prefer working in Iray to Octane. I'd be very interested in knowing a few of the reasons why this might be. I'm convinced both applications can produce equivalent images, but the workflow is the real difference between them. What is it about the Iray set-up that appeals to you more than the Octane set-up. Tools such as absoprtion and Gamma per texture are just a few areas where Octane seem indispensable to me. I suspect Octane is overall a more mature and robust render engine with the advanced material nodes but also with the Render Target and post processing options which are many beyond what Iray offers. Still Iray manages to attract Octane users all the time which means there is more to Iray than at first meets the eye. I'd love to hear your insights on this matter.
I'm trying to become more familiar with Iray. Like you, I have certain skin effects I've produced in Octane that have been impossible to recreate so far in Iray, at least for me. But you Pearbear, may have found the secret. Any feedback you can provide will be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance, Pearbear.
"One of the things missing inIray is the option to control the Gamma of image textures."
Gamma can be edited on a per image basis by clicking on the image slot in the substance tab. Third option down is "image editor". Select that and you will have a variety of options presented including gamma, image shape (from square to lat lon), scale, inverted and offset. A second tab adjust tiling. Changes made will be made to all instance of that texture.
AlexLo, those renders are truely amazing! Great job everyone!
Thanks Rashad! I appreciate the kind words! Let me see if I can answer your questions. I have some images here too. Before I get to the questions, I should explain a little bit more how the shader is set up.
Image A here is the texture view in DAZ to show how I've made my Base texture's skin color a dull green.
Image B shows a render of it with the Iray Sun/Sky environment.
Image C shows how I set the shader up when I was first creating it with no texture maps, but just playing with the color sliders. This allowed me to keep tweaking colors in Iray until I got the SSS effect I wanted. Then I looked at the RGB values of those colors in the Base Color and Translucecy Color fields and adjusted my skin texture files in Photoshop to be similar to those pure color values. This made the Base Color texture a pale green, and the Translucency Color texture a fiery orange/red.
Now for your questions:
1. As an experiment and to answer this question, I wanted to see how this setup would render in DAZ 4.8. Those are renders D and E, both done in DAZ 4.8. As we can see, the shader works perfectly fine in DAZ 4.8 too... as long as there are no textures in it! It's in utilizing the texture maps for transluency that DAZ 4.8 had a bug or incapability, which they have fixed in DAZ 4.9. So images C and D are the old and new versions of DAZ rendering the same shader with no texture maps and they look indistinguishable. Image E shows what happens when I try the shader with textures in 4.8 - we get She-Hulk. It's actually kind of cool looking I think, and maybe there is a way to keep tweaking the texture map in Photoshop to get the desired human skin effect in 4.8, but I've never been able to do it (and I've spent a crazy amount of time on it). The way it works in 4.9 is predictable and therefore great - an RGB value for Translucency Color replaced with a texture map of that same RGB value are treated equally. In 4.8, crazy unpredictable things happen with texture maps in the translucency channels.
One other thing I noticed when trying out DAZ 4.9 is that it can render higher subdivision levels than DAZ 4.8. This is great for me, because I like to make highly detailed displacement maps in Z-Brush. I can render the Genesis 3 figure on SubD 5 (!!!) in DAZ 4.9, which is subdividing the mesh to around 17 million polygons - enough detail to see skin pores. Sub D 4 was the highest I could go on DAZ 4.8. Anything higher would crash it. DAZ 4.9 handles SubD 5 on my machine much quicker than I would have thought.
2. They actually fixed the gamma conrols on individual textures in the latest version of 4.8. (though I feel like the settings sometimes reset themselves to default on loading a character, but I could be wrong). So that can be helpful if all you need to do is adjust the gamma of your textures. I found that I needed to be adjusting the RGB values a lot though for this shader, so just the gamma adjustment wouldn't be enough. In addition to gamma, Octane has color balance and many more image adjustment controls available for each texture map, and it would be lovely to see that worked into the Iray shader.
3. My understanding of how the different sliders for SSS in Iray work is very much based on trial and error, so I can't say for certain what controls are equivalent to what in Octane. One thing I've only recently come to undrestand better is that in Iray "Scattering" is the effect of light traveling under the skin and coming back out at us, creating a glow, while "Transmission" is light passing through the geometry and out the other side (like in ears). These settings also interact with each other and with the "Scattering Direction" slider a lot. Also, I should mention somewhere that the "SSS Reflectance Tint" control is a marvelous tool for balancing the skin if you're getting too much red everywhere.
4. My main reason for preferring Iray to Octane is that Iray integrated with DAZ is so much more usable for building and lighting a scene. With Iray in DAZ, I can keep moving lights around, tweaking poses, etc. and see what it looks like in realtime with the preview Iray render. In Octane, my options are to either set up the scene in DAZ and export it to Octane, or use the Octane DS plugin. The exporting to Octane option is a pain because if I want to do a tweak, like moving a light or trying a different pose, I have to reimport the geometry from DAZ again. And the Octane DS plugin was an incredibly frustrating pain because it is underdeveloped and extremely buggy. It seems the dev who was working on it completely abandoned it while it's still in its beta phase (shich it's been in for like two years at least). Reading the Octane DS plugin message boards, its a total joke. Customers complaining about the lack of progress, or even basic communication about the plugin, and Octane representatives coming in every two weeks or so saying they expect to be able to deliver good news "soon". That has been going on there for like six months. It's totally absurd. I think Otoy's horrible lack of developing the Octane DS plugin is the main thing that has turned many people from Octane to Iray. We Octane users paid several hundred dollars for the beta version of Octane... and years later it's still in beta, and the dev is completely MIA!!! I think it all went downhill over there when Iray was released, since it directly competes with Octane but is free instead of hundreds of dollars. Even though Octane can do some cool stuff that we can't do in Iray yet, the Octane DS devs saw that they were going to have major trouble attracting new customers to the Octane DS plugin, and it seems that they abandoned ship. Their comunication with Octane DS customers wasn't good even before Iray came out, but since then its become a completely sad joke. At that crucial time when Iray was released, Otoy could have shown that their DS plugin users were important to them, and that they were just going to make Octane even better to compete with Iray. They chose not to do this, but instead chose to pretty much disappear and cease communication about developement of the Octane DS plugin beta. (which, I gotta mention once again, is beta software they charged us hundreds of dollars for!!!) So yeah, to a lot of us it looks like there's no future in Octane for DS, while Iray has a vibrant userbase and active development team.
Thanks again for the encouragement!
edit - one additional note, the renders here are a bit noisy, because I wanted to render them quickly for this discussion. They each rendered for only three or four minutes each before I pulled the plug. The renders done in DAZ 4.9 beta were done at SubD 5, and the renders done in 4.8 were done at SubD 3 (since 4.8 can't do SubD 5 in my experience)
Khory,
Much thanks. I feel silly not discovering that for myself.
Pearbear,
Thanks for your answers to each of those questions. It is nice to know that it was a bug that was affecting the way Iray handled SSS in the 4.8 version. I will install 4.9 and see where it leads. I suspect that simple fix will as you say provide predictable outcomes. I do not think it should be much of a challenge to get the effects I need now.
The Octane DS plug-in seems to be quite reliable and stable for some people. But I suspect the moment will come soon when the issue will arise again as when Octane version 3 comes out there will need to be an update to the plug-in to utilize it. Hopefully you all will get it. I can indeed understand your frustration with the way that all developed and it is unfortunate because Octane is otherwise a fantastic product.
Yeah, I agree that Octane standalone is an awesome renderer. And I really love its ability to build shaders from scratch. If you want to simulate skin with seven different layers, you can. Just keep adding more and more nodes to the mix! I love playing around with that. Also, Octane does displacement without requiring subdivision, which is incredibly powerful. So both of those (easy to build flexible shaders and lighting fast hyperdetailed displacement on a low poly mesh) are things I hope Iray does one day.
For any potential future Octane DS users, the most important difference between Iray and Octane DS is probably that one is free and native to DAZ and one is 379.00 euros and by nature of being a third party plugin will always be less well integrated into DAZ. Any other differences probably seem like esoteric details to a new user who already has access to Iray. So it will be admirable of Otoy to actually keep developing the DS plugin, and Octane 3.0 looks really cool, but I can see why the dev for Octane DS 2.2 seems to have lost heart and more or less given up (he hasn't posted or responded to anyone on the boards since June for cryin out loud, and that was just four comments coming off of an earlier three month long disappearance).
The latest news from Otoy on their DAZ plugin boards is that they do plan to make OcDS 3.0 and they plan to "make neccessary changes" (which I assume means not relying on t_3, the current DS dev) for the developement of OcDS 3.0 to ensure that it comes out at the same pace as the other Octane plugins. That would be cool if it's true, but with their track record they will probably have a hard time getting users to sink money into another beta release. :)
Sorry Double post
"Ha hah , Into the water you go".
Custom Made HDRi with Phtotoshop
g2f &g2m characters
Part of my entry in Contest Entry Thread Because I Said So! (November 2015)
Skreek! You *****!
Wednesday means webcomic update: http://thefarshoals.webcomic.ws/comics/43
(man, gotta get some more in the queue, been slacking)
I'm really starting to pick up on the nuance of Iray's texture compression. I've been keeping Task Manager open so I can see if my render is dumping to CPU (it's obvious when CPU usage goes from 26% to redlining 99%).
When it's a problem, I start playing with resolutions, too... I find a lot of times, for larger scenes, I'm using WAY more subd than I can really notice, and it's just wasting resources.
Great Job everyone. I hope to one day understand SSS and be able to apply it. Until then, here is a render of Monique, with Type3 V3 skin texture in Iray with specular maps.
@magnumdaz " Until then, here is a render of Monique, with Type3 V3 skin texture in Iray with specular maps"
IMO, still seems to be too shiney. However the tone and tonal variation across the face and shoulders look wonderful. Most skins whether stock or "tweaked" seem to have to much shine as if oily. I'm a photographer and rarely if ever see that kind of shine unless wet. Ivy's recent beach render seems to have a more realistic level of shine/sheen (to me).