Skin Shaders
whispers65
Posts: 952
Ok I'm minding my own business, working on renders last night and notice that at one point that half the render time is on one person's head. In this case I'm only using Uberenvironment2 for lighting.
Ok long story short, I google it find out some fixes,etc. But in the meantime, I see something mentioned about shaders for skin rendering.
So it's like I never saw that before. And in my current renders, the skin doesn't look the best. I've changed plastic to matte or skin like that and that's about it.
Soo...I guess my question is do I need a skin shader for better results? I saw something about a Genesis Elite Shader or something.
Does it counteract Uber or are they totally independent of each other. I'm getting the sense that apart from lighting you can have shaders for just about anything else also at the same time?
I'm still confused in this area, especially since it hasn't dawned on me before now.
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In 3Delight (the renderer in DS) and most other renderers, everything needs a shader. That's what controls how everything looks. The 'standard' DS surface shader, the one that is present when you load anything that hasn't had custom settings already made for it, is basic, but not too basic. For better results with things like skin, you need a more advanced shader...UberSurface (US) comes to mind, as it is included in DS4.5 and a number of skin textures come with presets based on it (or its predecessor/less advanced cousing Human Surface Shader...HSS). There's an even more advanced version called UberSurface2 (US2) that adds layering capabilities for some of the parameters.
Now, the basic Genesis presets for Jeremy and Lana are an advanced shader preset (it's the HSS shader). That gives a much better skin result than the 'standard' shader. The nice thing is, you are not confined to use only that skin with those settings...they can be used as a starting point for almost any skin texture. Simply load the texture on to your character in the usual manner and then go to Jeremy find the material file (should be under Genesis > Materials >Sample Jeremy/Lana) and hold down the control key and double click on Jeremy...a box will pop up asking Replace...or Ignore. If you choose Ignore, it will leave your original texture in place and just replace the shader.
The principle is the same for other shaders/presets...if you want just the shader, use ctrl-click-click. If you want everything the preset does, just click it.
It's the hair that causes the long render time with UberEnvironment lights...and there are tricks to get it to render faster, but the number one thing is each hair is going to be slightly different and what works for one, may not give the desired results for another (it will render faster, but may look like a plastic bag was put over it)...you'll need to play around with the settings. One of the easiest is to apply Ubersurface to the hair and turn off raytracing (use the ctrl-click to add the US, because that will use the existing texture/transparency/other maps)...also turning off shadows (it's under the hair's parameters) can speed it up, too.
Thanks. I'll looking and see what I have.
As far as the hair goes, I did the Ubersurface trick last night as you had described. The hair that was taking the longest was Jayden Fever hair. I adjusted the settings and it's fine now and really doesn't look worse for the "wear".
Jayden Fever hair is a FiberMesh hair. Any FiberMesh hair will result in slow render times if you are using any ray traced lighting. If you want fast renders, I would avoid using FiberMesh hair.
But oh what lovely results you get. Sometimes the longer render times are worth the wait.
Mark - I had found a post about Fibermesh hair last night and did basically what MJC described above and it cut my render time down from 40 minutes to 10-15 minutes so was quite a savings.
And there's nothing special about that hair as far as usage. Sometimes I have a lot of different characters in scenes...currently working on a 40 person pool party and just didn't want everyone to look the same so trying as many different hair styles out as possible.
FiberMesh hair is a type of high polygon count hair. High polygon count hair is suppose to look more realistic in close up renders. The trade off is it takes longer to render. If you are rendering a big scene with no closeups of anyone wearing that hair, you don't really need high polygon count hair. Using the shader to turn off raytracing is a good work around.
There are other kinds of high polygon count hair that slow down renders too. The V5 Elite Ponytail comes to mind.
HearldofFire - I would agree....it just depends on what I'm going for at the time I guess. Right now speed seems to be preemo but I can always change it back to get the full affect. :)
You know, if you are going for speed renders, to get the scene setup and the lighting in place...just go to the Advanced Render settings and up the Shading Rate to 2.0 or so...also, unless you need reflections turn raytrace depth down to 1. Doing both of those for 'preview' renders will really increase the speed.
MJC - that's a good suggestion. Thanks. I usually do quite a few renders to get things set up because invariably I think things look good at one angle only to change the view and see the character is a foot off the ground. :)
I found the shaders you mentioned on the sample characters and I applied them leaving the original texture. One character ended up with a stripe down his back. Kinda reminded me of a skunk but the other 3 characters did fine and really do look much better so thanks for that info.
Sounds like the UV mapping got switched...look under the Surface parameters (it will either be at the top or at the bottom) for the UV mapping...and if it is V4 for the messed up character, switch it to M4 or even K4...or if it is one of the others, try the other available options. One of them should fix it. (Or you could load the original texture on another figure and see what it was originally.)
I've got a couple of test renders to post...
The first one is using this texture http://www.sharecg.com/v/25825/gallery/11/Poser/Aiko4-Just-Cute-note--V4morphs++-needed-to-use and a light set from Inane Glory. The Lana shader was used. (no adjustments to the lighting or shader)
Rendertime with 'good' settings...3 RT depth and 0.2 Shading rate... 38 minutes
The second image is the same, except RT Depth was dropped to 1 and Shading rate raised to 2.0..it rendered in about 10 mins.
The second pic is what my stuff looks like. I did check and my shading rate was set around 8 and my RT was at 1. On my current project, I adjust the settings and didn't really notice that much of a difference in render times.
Here's one with the RT depth at 2, and the Shading rate at 0.1...
The specular strength and glossiness were both pulled back a little and the light intensity dropped a bit. (cropped because I didn't want to wait until it was finished....time jumped to 1 hr 20 minutes)
If the Shading Rate is greater than 2, the impact on time is going to much less than going from below 1 to 2.
ok here's a question. I've created something like 40 characters. If I go back and set up a shader for each one, will it stay with them? Like each character is saved as its own scene. And then when I need one I merge it into the current project.
There are three ways of doing that...scene, scene subset and character preset. Each one should keep shader settings, textures and so on intact. Presets won't keep hair or clothing, but will keep skin/shader/morph settings. Scene/scene subsets will keep clothing and hair, too.
There are three ways of doing that...scene, scene subset and character preset. Each one should keep shader settings, textures and so on intact. Presets won't keep hair or clothing, but will keep skin/shader/morph settings. Scene/scene subsets will keep clothing and hair, too.
All I have done so far is just scenes so it has the clothing, etc. I haven't done a scene subset, not sure what the difference is but I'll check into it. I probably need to do a character preset though because although I have a lot of characters, they of course don't all have separate skin textures. Some skin textures do repeat and I forget which one I used as I go along.
All I have done so far is just scenes so it has the clothing, etc. I haven't done a scene subset, not sure what the difference is but I'll check into it. I probably need to do a character preset though because although I have a lot of characters, they of course don't all have separate skin textures. Some skin textures do repeat and I forget which one I used as I go along.
Scene subsets let you save particular elements of a scene....you can save the 'set' (room, props, lighting, camera positions) as one subset and then each character as a separate subset. That way you'll load what you need. Or save the complete individual character without everything else. Also the default load option for subsets is 'merge'...so you don't have to go through the dialog boxes to get the scene merged as opposed to overwriting.
Character presets are great for getting your customized characters into any scene you want, with just the 'bare essentials'...but if you have a pre-defined hair and clothing set for each character, a subset may be better.
hai mjc 1016 and whispers 65
can U tell me
- what is a shader
- what is a texture
and the difference between shader and texture while applying to a any surface ( as this is discussed here )
A shader is the whole material/surface, defined by a specialized programming language...it includes all the settings. A shader preset is those settings already set to achieve a certain effect.
A texture is also known as a diffuse map, color map or several other names...it's one of the main parts of the complete material and is plugged into the shader, in the proper area.
To confuse the matter, sometimes the terms are used interchangeably...
hai MJC1016,
thanks for your reply, since I am new to 3d world, have to learn a lot
thnks
gupta sridhar