BJ Wicked - Realtime Raytracing/Pathtracing in Daz Studio
bluejaunte
Posts: 2,271
Gauging interest again, but don't wanna re-post everything here so please check this: find it on Patreon.
Feel free to discuss here of course. Does it interest you at all?
I have edited the post to comply with forum rules, as I have now launched paid tiers.
Post edited by bluejaunte on
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Comments
Interesting. If you can make sure to include a "guide for techno dinosaurs", I'd buy it.
Very very interesting!
Something that renders mid or high quality/PBR stuff quickly as compared to Iray definitely interests me. Doesn't have to be realtime as long as it is notably faster than Iray. Would be ideal if it runs in the Daz viewport and doesn't require switching material settings to bounce between Wicked and Iray. A few use cases include rapidly iterating on lighting for eventual full Iray render, rendering frames for animations, rendering 'good enough' with enough cues for ai post processing/enhancement. I suggest spelling out Bluejaunte Wicked for the project title since BJ Wicked may be overloaded with other meanings in web searches. <.<
Is this the same as the Cycles plugin you were working on, or is this a separate product? Toward the end, you compare it to Eevee.
Nah this is a different renderer based on WickedEngine, a full blown game engine. Real time ish as Eevee. Or Filament if it was good
Are both projects ongoing, or have you shifted focus?
Looks interesting - especially if it's not tied to Nvidia hardware (I've got an RTX card, but who knows what's next?). The features look good and being able to (or at least mostly) use it without having to convert shaders would be a huge bonus.
Wicked or cycles, both is fine as long as DAZ studio Iray skin materials convert nicely and any GPU will be supported.
Love the idea of getting another choice for rendering.
Aside from render option, we will also need a way much better alternative to dforce, that could do cloth simulations in real time.
"But I digress" ;-)
However: BJ wicked looks very promissing to me.
All depends on interest. Both, one of them, none
Ooh, this is interesting.
I'm a lot more interested in this than I would be in cycles. I like filament, though it's limited. I like fast rendering. I should also say, Iray materials usually need a lot of adjustment to work properly in Filament. Even then, layered transparency is a problem. Your test renders look pretty good.
Wonder how the renderer deals with poorly constructed, long, skinny triangles. See that a lot on Daz products when using the geometry editor.
I'd be very interested in these projects. As Masterstroke has said, a critical thing is how well materials are converted, and how similar they look to the Iray material. So far as I know, none of the alternative render engines, or bridges to other programs has worked well enough to make using them a pleasurable experience for rendering scenes from Studio. It probably doesn't help that every vendor seems to use their own shader setup. Just doing a basic 'Diffuse, Bump, Normal, and Opacity conversion ' isn't going to cut it.
Yes I tried for months to use Octane render via the plugin. There were some sucesses, but almost every material had to be adjusted. If the purpose of using the alternative render engine is to save 'time', then having to spend hours adjusting materials makes it a no-win situation. It's quicker to wait for Iray to finish rendering ( at least for me )..
1:1 exactly like Iray probably not. That would be boring anway. Looks pleasing enough that you don't wanna change anything? Absolutely I think that can be done. I have access to the whole engine code after all. In Iray you're stuck with whatever NVidia is doing. Or not doing.
@bluejaunte FWIW, I end up fiddling with materials for most everything, even for Iray. It's rare that an asset loads and it's right where I want it. If you get close and the results look good, that's already going to be a win. My hope is that your project will deliver fast renders that are a bit more feature rich than we've seen from filament.
That said, I've already been told I should consider export to Blender or even to unreal engine to get what I want. I find there are still good reasons to play with my Daz assets in DS, though.
Main viewport is probably not going to happen. All experiments to hook into that have failed so far. It's probably not exposed enough for plugins.
^So this is 'Render to New Window/File'? Still good if it's quick enough.
There's a separate preview pane. Full render goes through the regular Daz Studio render pane same as Iray.
Check Patreon for video.
I guess animation would need a script much like animated textures, LAMH catalyser or particles, VDBs etc do
Doubt that. Animation is just rendering multiple frames. Preview probably wouldn't be able to keep up but that's no different in Iray right. Regular render should work.
Ah, now I see. That actually looks really good. Having a separate pane for preview isn't an issue (even the main viewport is a pane really).
I assume we can't interact with objects in the preview (thus we still need the main viewport open to click on things).
Yeah no interaction.It's the way I've been working for ages. Interaction in main viewport, preview rendering in Aux viewport. It's faster/more responsive than interacting with Iray preview directly. But I understand when people don't like that, you kinda need muttiple monitors. Or maybe 4k or ultrawide or something.
Please vote here: Wicked or Cycles? | bluejaunte on Patreon
And of course if you're interested at all sign up to the free tier if you haven't already.
It's not practical for me to start up with a patreon acct now. So I'll tell you what I already told you: Wicked could be just the ticket. You can count it or not.
Not an issue for me - I'm more than happy to switch between things even on my 16:9 (27") monitor - currently only 1080p but getting a 1440p soon. Even in Blender I might have more than one viewport open when doing certain things.
Edit to add this here as it would otherwise be hidden at the bottom of the previous page:
Edit2: I voted for Wicked - confusingly, you specify Cycles as "Offline renderer" but isn't Wicked also offline (as in it runs on your local machine with no internet connection required to use)?