Help me with 3DL?
Oso3D
Posts: 15,085
Ok, so I love Iray and want to have its babies, fine. But there are a lot of little things I really like that never made it from 3DL over to Iray -- really high quality fog, LAMH, and a bunch of exotic shaders.
When I had last stopped playing with 3DL, I had been trying to achieve a more 'realistic' look and kept running against issues that blew out render times. For example, I have a fog shader from AoA that can take hours to process godrays. At that point... may as well use Iray.
Now, the two key elements that really made me move was that certain key items made things slow.
UberEnvironment2, which could improve lighting... also takes f'in FOREVER to render. Heck, sometimes I was getting more speed out of Iray.
Mesh lighting, same deal. Looks good, takes forever, may as well use Iray.
Sooo... are there good ways to set up ambient lighting easily without setting up a billion lights in 3DL?
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I found Advanced Ambient Light was faster than UberEnvironment2. UberEnvironment2 may produce slightly more realistic lighting in some circumstances, but I could never see that difference.
If you use the Uber shader on things with transmaps and set Occlusion to off this will speed up render times. And using AoA Ambient lights as mark128 has said helps a lot.
AoA advanced ambient lights are far quicker than UE2 when both are using their out of box settings. I have read (but not tried) that UE2 lights can be configured to be around the same speed as AoA ambient, however they lack the AoA light's flagging abilty which allows some surfaces to be flagged to make them render even faster. This is particularly useful for trans-mapped hair, which frequently can be the main element of render times. With AoA lights then can be flagged to use quicker render settings, and will significantly improve the render times.
I agree AoA lights are much faster then UE2 lights. TBH any in depth scene is going to take forever to render, regardless of engine. Reason I prefer Iray over 3DL is I can make real time render adjustments in preview, prior to final render
Aaah, I don't have AoA lights. So much for that. ;)
(And spending $16 for something that might be good and I MIGHT end up using... eeeeh)
AoA lights were the best investment I made for DS, pre-Iray. :)
http://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/28230
Zero post work outside the watermarked sig. :)
I agree with this, and I use it in pretty much every 3DL render I do. Considering about 90% of the content I have bought has never even been installed, never mind used, then anything used in every render has to be a very good return on investment.
Hmm.
I'm so torn. I might invest in the AoA lights.
The thing is, I love all the cool exotic things you can do in 3DL that you can't in Iray, but I prefer the base functioning and look of Iray, but that might be because I don't have the right tools... argh. ;)
while reading this I did a quick look around came across this http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/31938/age-of-armour-s-advanced-ambient-light
you could skip looking there and just go to Advanced Ambient Lighting for DAZ Studio, which you would/might have, if you went to that first link I posted
No, I don't have the Advanced Ambient lights. I think next time I have cash I'll spring for the AoA lights combo back -- if it doesn't seem to be good, I can return it.
Last night I had a basic 'sewer' scene, with a uber volume for fog. 3delight, one distant light, one uberenv, 2000x2000.
7+ hours in, hadn't finished rendering.
Trying it again without the uberenv.
Iray and 3Delight both have their strengths. :) It all depends on each particular image and your ultimate goal for that image. I often go back and forth depending on my desired look. :) The beauty of DS is that they left us choices instead of yanking 3Delight.
Oh definitely.
I like the easy transparency and lighting of Iray. But man, I miss fog, LAMH, and all the cool shaders of 3DL.
I only started doing this (after 10+ years) last year, so my experience with 3DL was marked by a lot of flailing, then I moved to Iray. I think at this point I've learned a lot and MIGHT be able to make stuff to my satisfaction in 3DL... and it's worth finding out.
Even if I embrace 3DL again, I will certainly keep playing around with IRay, particularly for stuff with emitting light, glass, etc.
my lighting was horrid in 3DL and frustrating because I saw others getting results I could not approach.. That being said AoA has other products I've used and as a vendor his offerings are spectacular and really open up some of the power of 3DL which is potentially astounding when the restrictions DS implements to (and I'm guessing here) not overwhelm the user with complexity.
Mesh lighting (blender, cycles, lux) for me was and natural lighting (lux) was the single greatest thing to ever happen to my renders, but I still bang my head with it when I try it 3DL and 3,000,000,000 lights in a CPU rendering is not a viable solution. If I get the set before you I'll let you know if it was worth it for the "lighting impaired"
Definitely. :) They are both useful to know.
I have rarely done a 3DL render that takes more than 10 mins, but then I don't generally put fog and the like effects in the renders, if that is what is slowing you down. The only time I have had very long 3DL render times are with UE2 lights placed there by 3rd party content I have added. When I spot them I usually rip them and out and replace with AoA lights, and it renders far faster.
I may have to rely on postwork for fog if that's what I end up using, because holy poot it blows out render times.
I'm rendering the same scene with a single distant light and it's still taking forever.
Jabba 101 has some nice tutorials on AoA, if you want to see the lightset in action:
fog from postwork is far more simple, faster and far more dynamic than any rendering method I've found so far.
And I DO have AoA's depth camera, which can help a lot. Depth + material zone renders can give me a lot of control.
I also think part of my render time problem was using progressive -- it seemes to slow some stuff down.
Progressive renders used to be slow for me, but since 4.7 I have found the render times to be similar with non-progressive.
What fog shader are you using?
Uber Volume.
I also have AoA's atmospheric camera, but the render times on THAT are obscene; better off adding godrays in post or something.
Uber Volume is very slow...
Suggested replacements? :)
(No WONDER I didn't have a very positive experience with 3DL -- all the good stuff isn't free. ;)
Yes...AoA one is somewhat faster...and you can whip a fairly simple fog in ShaderMixer (I'll see if I can find an example network) that's a bit faster, too.
There's other ones that are faster, but require working in ShaderBuilder and/or the stand alone 3DL.
I've dedicated the rest of the year for 'experimenting with 3dl again.' I'm attempting to see how well I can manage doing ground fogs with masking and postwork. I have Ideas on how to do that.
(Like, for masking figures, use a volume that has SSS and high transparency, and turn the figures to flat color, so I can get a sense of how 'deep' in the fog the figures/architecture is)
Here's another fog shader...
http://mustakettu85.deviantart.com/art/3DelightFastFog4DS-DAZ-Studio-4-8-recommended-522974250
I like the look of the fog from this product: http://www.daz3d.com/above-the-fog-for-iray-and-3delight. It takes a different approach to volume fog shaders, but I think a number of the promos do look pretty good. As you can see it is for iRay and 3DL. Mostly useful where you want to see visible thick fog, rather than the thin haze created by volume fog that blurs distant objects.
Poking around at 3DL again, one thing I'm finding is that a lot of skin details seem to pop more than they do in Iray, particularly working on 'old people.'
I suspect the problem is that my lighting in Iray is just washing everything out. Hrm.
One of the differencesis the way 3DL does displacement. It will always do much finer displaced details than Iray, unless you up the poly count on the mesh by subdividing it (a lot).