IDL Frustration

jergenoman_b33d4209f8

Hello!

I have been away from Studio for some days but now i am back struggling to get the IDL to work for me. I am in the (a bit painful, lol) process of migrating my workflow from Poser to Studio. Most parts has been very smooth and Studio is superior in most areas that i use. IDL is the only exception. I am very short of time to get this to work.

Please someone with IDL experience i am in great need of help! :o@

IDL in Poser is very easy to use. You just have to turn it on, adjust a few global parameters and thats it. Generally the only thing you need to do is to lower the strength of the light sources a bit.

IDL in Studio is another thing and i am quite confused. I have been trying to sort out what is happening in Studio compared to how Poser works:

Poser IDL seems to illuminate everything much more than Studio. When using an IDL camera in Studio i get the feeling that i need to RAISE the strength of the light sources. Why?

Poser does a pre-calculation of the scene IDL before the beauty-pass rendering. This pre-calculated irradiance cache consists of a number of sample points that are distributed so that areas where the geometry changes more, has more irradiance samples. It seems that during the beauty pass (final) render, Firefly does an interpolation between these samples. This means that the result is always smooth, but increasingly inaccurate as you lower the number of samples.

Does anyone know how 3DLight handles this? Is it in any way possible to get this smoothing? I keep getting these grainy renders until i've increased the samples and photon settings so much that the render time is counted in days rather than in hours. I can't believe that 3DLight works in this way. Making good and fast estimations is the base of all 3D graphics. It rather seems to me that many features in 3DLight aren't available from Studio. Or have i just missed something obvious as usual? :P

/Jörgen

evilded777

I am just learning to do this through cameras, so I won't be a lot of help. But you will find the necessary controls on the camera (i think) or in shader mixer. You need to adjust the photon samples ... you can think of this like irradiance caching. bear in mind, NOOB, its probably more complicated and I may have some inaccurate terms.
/edit to clarify, calling ME a NOOB with this

ReDave

Poser and DS compute shadows in a different manner, in my experience shadows on standard lights are darker in DS, so it's at least plausible everything is darker. I don't have much experience with indirect diffuse in Poser, though.
The interpolation of a sampled surface is called point cloud AO or ID in 3Delight (and Renderman). There is a couple of scripts, one AO and one ID, for 3Delight shaders doing that here: http://www.jorgepimentel.com/?p=90 (link points to the ID version)
No idea how to make them usable in DS, though.
However DS 4.5 includes a point-cloud AO script which can be found in Advanced Render Settings->Render Engine-> Scripted 3Delight. I have checked, it's not possible to adapt the AO version to use ID instead, because the core of the shader script is encrypted.
Edit: photons are a different beast from indirect diffuse, BTW. If it's a shader mixer camera you've got, you can reimport it in Shader Mixer get rid of all bricks except for the Indirect Diffuse [Camera] root brick and create your (purely) ID camera.