"Tested in Luxrender" statement?

marble

I am wondering whether, due to the popularity of Luxus and Reality, the product developers might like to add a disclaimer such as "not suitable for Luxrender" or "Tested in Luxrender"? A while ago I bought the towel set which relies completely on shaders for the patterns and colouring. There is a product on sale today called "Sheer Greatness" which, as far as I can see, is shader only. I would buy it except that, unless I'm doing animations, I almost always render in Reality these days (I also have Luxus but have not got past the black screen stage for interiors yet). From my understanding, these depend upon 3Delight to work and will not render as pictured in the promotions if using Luxrender.

If I'm wrong, I'd love someone to correct my mistake but I did contact one of the vendors and it what I have described above was confirmed.

Khory

Well the first issue is now here are two ways to get things into lux that handle the transport surfaces differently to some extent. So if they say "tested in lux" you wouldn't know how it got there. Second issue is that may translate to some people as "works mostly". Especially since many surfaces get changed in for lux anyway. The next thing is that some shader presets work pretty well and some don't. And then there is the assumption that content creators are going to have one of the lux bridges. Quite a few will but it not everyone will take the leap. I know that many people have been using most of the shader presets available all along. The number that will be totally non compatible is actually pretty limited.

marble

Thanks. I only wish that I understood the mechanism for getting shaders to translate into something that Lux can handle. Also, Luxus seems to handle shaders somewhat differently to Reality with some kind of automatic translation going on. Again, I don't have a clue on how that works.

My dilemma is that I see products that I would like to buy but am now put off because of this:

... add diversity to your renders and basic colors, as well as some "having fun" presets so you can see what can be achieved by mixing the shader settings.

Along with the intuitive base shader interface, this set also includes two great preset loader interfaces with tons of options.

These include 60 different net designs and 99 lace designs, applied from the same type of easy to use interface as the base shader.

(From the Sheer Greatness product description)

Now only experiences buyers will understand from that whether it means 3Delight renders only. I thought I was an experienced buyer but I certainly don't understand.

Khory

None of that is really indicative of it not working in reality or luxus. Both can handle tiling and so on. If this one is non compatible it is probably because of the way the base shader is scripted. That or because of the transparencies perhaps.

Herald of Fire

marble said:

Thanks. I only wish that I understood the mechanism for getting shaders to translate into something that Lux can handle. Also, Luxus seems to handle shaders somewhat differently to Reality with some kind of automatic translation going on. Again, I don't have a clue on how that works.

My dilemma is that I see products that I would like to buy but am now put off because of this:

... add diversity to your renders and basic colors, as well as some "having fun" presets so you can see what can be achieved by mixing the shader settings.

Along with the intuitive base shader interface, this set also includes two great preset loader interfaces with tons of options.

These include 60 different net designs and 99 lace designs, applied from the same type of easy to use interface as the base shader.

(From the Sheer Greatness product description)

Now only experiences buyers will understand from that whether it means 3Delight renders only. I thought I was an experienced buyer but I certainly don't understand.
I think it's fairly safe to say that unless stated otherwise, it's a 3Delight shader. Luxus can do automatic conversions to some degree, but there will naturally be some differences with Reality because 3DL materials don't convert properly which means concessions need to be made. Ambient, for example, is a value which has virtually no meaning in Luxrender, so can't be directly translated. How Reality and Luxus convert the materials differs slightly because the developers took different approaches in those circumstances.

The real issue is that there's no way of telling how a material will convert without knowing how both systems deal with them internally. With Reality you can tell them there are ACSEL shaders available, but it's still down to the individual to actually search for them in the catalog and download them. With Luxus you can distribute specific shader presets along with the product, but as far as I'm aware no one has done so as yet, though it's still early days.

For these reasons, I think putting 'Tested in Luxrender' on a product might cause more trouble than its worth.

marble

HeraldOfFire said:

I think it's fairly safe to say that unless stated otherwise, it's a 3Delight shader.

Does that mean it is safe to say that it will not work in Reality or Luxus? By work, I mean the following:

- Will the alpha settings (or should that be opacity) work - important for things like lace.
- Will bump/displacement/normal maps work?
- Will patterns show (the towel set I mentioned has lots of pattern designs but I can't get anything more than a plain colour).

I get that technicalities mean that a disclaimer is probably unwise but there should be some help for the prospective purchaser. Maybe one promo picture of a Luxus or Reality render? Or maybe a pre-release could be sent to someone who could try it and post the results to a thread in the forum?

I'm just throwing ideas around here.

Herald of Fire

marble said:

HeraldOfFire said:

I think it's fairly safe to say that unless stated otherwise, it's a 3Delight shader.

Does that mean it is safe to say that it will not work in Reality or Luxus? By work, I mean the following:

- Will the alpha settings (or should that be opacity) work - important for things like lace.
- Will bump/displacement/normal maps work?
- Will patterns show (the towel set I mentioned has lots of pattern designs but I can't get anything more than a plain colour).

I get that technicalities mean that a disclaimer is probably unwise but there should be some help for the prospective purchaser. Maybe one promo picture of a Luxus or Reality render? Or maybe a pre-release could be sent to someone who could try it and post the results to a thread in the forum?

I'm just throwing ideas around here.
1) Opacity maps will convert fine, and opacity in general will convert perfectly. Some items benefit more from having opacity at maximum even when transparent due to volume, but that doesn't apply here.

2) Bump and displacement will also translate perfectly.

2) Patterns will depend on how the material is set up. Textures will function as expected, but procedural shaders won't convert to Lux in the same way as they rely on the 3DL shader system. This product seems to use textures, so it should work fine in Lux.

marble

HeraldOfFire said:

1) Opacity maps will convert fine, and opacity in general will convert perfectly. Some items benefit more from having opacity at maximum even when transparent due to volume, but that doesn't apply here.

2) Bump and displacement will also translate perfectly.

2) Patterns will depend on how the material is set up. Textures will function as expected, but procedural shaders won't convert to Lux in the same way as they rely on the 3DL shader system. This product seems to use textures, so it should work fine in Lux.

Thanks. I've decided to buy the product and have a play. I'll post a render but bear in mind that my skills are low-grade hobbyist at best.

marble

Ok - here are two screen-shots, one is a Reality render (not run for long but you can see where it was going), the other a 3Delight render with a couple of spots and a distant light. You can clearly see that the texture doesn't transfer to Reality very well at all:

willowfan

I can't remember how reality works but that is a tiling issue. You need to increase the texture tiling either in DS pre-transfer or in Reality

marble

And this is one rendered for a few minutes in Luxus. The texture seems to have transferred more effectively but I have not got the hang of controlling shadows or hair yet (obviously).

cwichura

I purchased the stockings as well. The stocking shader appears to be based on DAZ Default Shader, so most of the important settings come across in Reality. It gets all the texture maps in the correct slots. For some reason, however, it does not read the tiling information from this custom shader, despite tiling info working for the base DAZ Default Shader in Reality. So you need to manually set the tiling for each of the texture slots (it's the "more options" entry in the gear icon to the right of each texture slot). The glossiness value also comes in pretty low, and will need tweaking.

But overall, I'd say this set is quite usable in Reality/LuxRender, with just a few minutes time to correct the tiling settings.

marble

cwichura said:

I purchased the stockings as well. The stocking shader appears to be based on DAZ Default Shader, so most of the important settings come across in Reality. It gets all the texture maps in the correct slots. For some reason, however, it does not read the tiling information from this custom shader, despite tiling info working for the base DAZ Default Shader in Reality. So you need to manually set the tiling for each of the texture slots (it's the "more options" entry in the gear icon to the right of each texture slot). The glossiness value also comes in pretty low, and will need tweaking.

But overall, I'd say this set is quite usable in Reality/LuxRender, with just a few minutes time to correct the tiling settings.

Thanks - I'll look for those tiling settings. I'd love to see one of your renders to get an idea of what is possible - would you mind?

willowfan

Luxus does have a problem with some transmapped hair, something to do with the transmaps not being perfect black iirc, it was mentioned fairly recently in the Luxus discussion thread.

cwichura

marble said:

Thanks - I'll look for those tiling settings. I'd love to see one of your renders to get an idea of what is possible - would you mind?

I haven't had time to use the stockings yet, and it will probably be a while before I do. In some regards, I consider this set more useful as a shader set than for the actual stockings themselves.

But all my renders are posted to my dA gallery, and 99% of them are done with Reality/LuxRender.

marble

I found the tiling adjustment setting in Reality but there doesn't seem to be a way to multi-select for all of the many materials for this product in the Reality window. Ahh - things a re never simple are they 8-/

By shader set, I take it you mean for applying to other clothing? Yes, I thought that would be another reason to buy. I guess it would have the same problems with tiling though?

marble

By the way - while looking for some hints on Reality, I stumbled upon this site which has a nice tutorial, in case anyone is interested:

http://takoyakida.webs.com/reality2.htm

marble

Well - I noted that the Hor/Ver tiling in the DAZ Studio surfaces tab were both set to 6 so I set the tiling values to the same (6) for all thirty-one of the materials in the Reality settings. Made absolutely no difference at all. :(

cwichura

I suspect that you missed some of the places to set the tiling. There are five texture map slots for each material, and you have to set each one of them to the tiling size.

However, there's an easy way to do this automatically. Apply the shader to the stockings. (It seems the Having Fun presets are saved using the bumpmap versions instead of normal maps. You'll get better results in Lux if you use the normal map versions. If you run the shader apply script that is included, it has radio buttons at the bottom to select between normal and bump maps.)

After you've applied the shader in Studio, select all the surfaces of the stockings (just click on the stocking header and it will automatically select all the subsurfaces). Now apply the dzDefault shader. This will revert the surfaces back to the plain DAZ Default Shader, but it will keep all the texture map/etc settings. Now when you invoke Reality, it will see the tiling information and automatically apply it to all the correct slots.

I've just done this as a very quick test and I am getting the expected tiling. See attached. I set the glossiness to 8000 and enabled surface fuzz.

Also, these shaders make use of displacement. There are two things to watch for here with that. First, they set the negative displacement to 0. Reality has a bug where it uses the default value of -.001 instead of 0 when it sees 0. So you need to multi-select the surfaces of the stockings and then set the displacement minimum to 0. I would also recomend bumping the displacement levels up to 2. The second issue relates to a change in displacement handling in Lux 1.2, where they fixed a long-standing bug with the inversion of displacement. Reality has been working around that, but now it does the 'wrong thing' when Lux 1.2 is used. The most recent version of Reality has a change to detect when Lux 1.2 is being used and correct the dmscale when detected. However, there seems to be a bug in that as well, where it only remembers that for the current session of DAZ Studio. So if you close DAZ and then re-open it, the first time you invoke Reality, you need to remember to go to the output tab and reselect the location of LuxRender (even if it's in the same place) so that Reality will emit the correct dmscale value.

And yes, when I said I see this set as more of a shader set than necessarily the stockings (though it's nice to have a multi-zone set of stockings for Genesis now), I was talking about using them on other clothing as well. And yes, the tiling issue would apply. But it's easily worked around by reverting the surface to the DAZ Default Shader.

marble

Oh how good it is to have someone who knows. Thank you - I will try out your advice right away. Your results in Reality are (again) better than I could get in Luxus even though the tiling works in Luxus (my fishnet looks like it is made from twine rather than hose). So I'll go back to Reality and start again :)

marble

Much better Reality effort ...

Zev0

Wicked results guys. I am learning alot from this thread as I just bought Luxus as well as having reality..

agent unawares

Could someone who has the stocking shader give a rundown on the features? What does it add to/simplify from the default DS shader?

Zev0

I'm looking for Draagonstorm..She is M.I .A but she will be able to tell you since she made it:)

agent unawares

Thanks very much. :)

DraagonStorm

Sorry for being late to the party... My husband need emergency medical care that my small town couldn't provide... So had to go to Reno (70 to 80 miles away)

The shader...

My favorite(and I think what really gives this shader the difference) is being able to select an outer color and an inner color, along with the diffuse... This can basically be used to give a 'deeper' (for lack of a better word) effect on rounded objects when you select a darker color for the outer color then the inner color... Or you can select two extremely different colors for some cool/different colors. It really is fun to play with. And by changing the Attenuation value you can change the amount of outer to inner color.

There is a value for 'Sheerness' that you can set.

And a big fix to the standard DS shader.... The normal textures will tile along with the other textures.

The interface of the basic shader makes it easier to apply the shader over an existing texture set...

Here's an example of The Queen Of Ages dress. The left dress is the default where the one on the right is using the inner/outer color and * * SPARKLES * *

agent unawares

Awesome, thanks. I'll pick it up tomorrow. :)

marble

DraagonStorm said:

Sorry for being late to the party... My husband need emergency medical care that my small town couldn't provide... So had to go to Reno (70 to 80 miles away)

The shader...

My favorite(and I think what really gives this shader the difference) is being able to select an outer color and an inner color, along with the diffuse... This can basically be used to give a 'deeper' (for lack of a better word) effect on rounded objects when you select a darker color for the outer color then the inner color... Or you can select two extremely different colors for some cool/different colors. It really is fun to play with. And by changing the Attenuation value you can change the amount of outer to inner color.

There is a value for 'Sheerness' that you can set.

And a big fix to the standard DS shader.... The normal textures will tile along with the other textures.

The interface of the basic shader makes it easier to apply the shader over an existing texture set...

Hi and welcome. I hope your husband is recovering and feeling better.

Would you care to comment on the Luxrender/Reality issues we have been discussing in this thread, please? Particularly the tiling. It seems we have to revert to the standard DS shader in order for it to work and, admittedly not knowing precisely how shaders work, I'm still confused about what is and is not possible with anything other than the 3Delight engine.

I have to get ready for work now but I'll try to keep track of the conversation as the day progresses. It is probably late in the western US now anyway (I'm in the UK).

Kerya

-willowfan- said:

Luxus does have a problem with some transmapped hair, something to do with the transmaps not being perfect black iirc, it was mentioned fairly recently in the Luxus discussion thread.

http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/19380/

Luxus 1.0.0.4 is updated and available in your accounts.

Here is what this fixes:

* Gamma - Colors are now properly linearized. This is important, everyone is encouraged to update and to click on Reset To Default at the bottom of Render Settings.
* Depth of Field values are now passed into LuxRender and work.
* Accidental resuming when overwriting is fixed
* Autotranslation of UberSurface tweaked in regards to the Gamma changes and to favor subsurface color.
* Transmap issues improved
* Extra Command Line for passing command line arguements to LuxRender. This allows advanced control of number of threads and even theoretically master/slave rendering control.
* IES lights files belong on the area light(in the material light section) and work.

3dLux

DraagonStorm said:

Sorry for being late to the party... My husband need emergency medical care that my small town couldn't provide... So had to go to Reno (70 to 80 miles away)

Just popped in to say I hope your husband's feeling better and you're less stressed. :-S

DraagonStorm

banditcameraman said:

DraagonStorm said:

Sorry for being late to the party... My husband need emergency medical care that my small town couldn't provide... So had to go to Reno (70 to 80 miles away)

Just popped in to say I hope your husband's feeling better and you're less stressed. :-S

Thank you... We think we got his meds for his heart just about right now.