Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2024 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
I can guess that their self-expression is like that of a photographer maybe? I have a friend who has this knack for snapping a photo of a pre-existing real-world place or object and in her photos these mundane things take on an entirely new life. We literally go for a walk together, then she posts photos and I don't recognise the places we've been to, it's as if she took her shots in a magic world.
And she obviously doesn't tweak textures on all this real-world stuff =D
It's not true about myself, I tweak everything, literally, because I have this vision in my head and it should match exactly (this is why I only post test renders LOL). Maybe I'm that way because I realised long ago I'm not an artist at all, so the only way I could justify my own messing with making images is making them look good in terms of technique (which generally means "photorealistic").
Now, one thing I wish I wouldn't have to tweak are bad normals!! Why doesn't DAZ QA test against bad normals, I wonder... even in "DAZ Originals"...
And quite a number of things from Ivy's list.
...it is, however converting Iray shaders to 3DL is not like just making slight changes to a 3DL shader channel like increasing SS sampling or reflectivity, or converting from Poser shaders as, like I have mentioned, both Poser and Daz shared the same set of surface channels, just with different defaults. Iray and 3DL don't always so it often becomes a guessing game and a lot more trial and error or scripting.
...there are other tools and means for that as well than just adjusting surface sliders, some are add-ons and plugins, others are merchant resource content. Iray being physically based makes the process more involved whereas I find 3DL, which is completely shader based (even the lights), to be much more accommodating for working with different styles in the render pass.
...and again there is the matter of render performance if all you have is the CPU and physical memory to work with.
When I painted in oils didn't mix my own pigments and compound my paints from scratch (well...actually I did, a couple times as an experiment only to find it a very long and tedious process). I used pre existing paints like most other artists, yet my paintings didn't end up look like Joe's or Amy's or whoever's, they were my style and interpretation.
Which is still not true.
...render the same scene same resolution on the same system on only the CPU (optimising the scene for both engines like I did) using content that has both 3DL and Iray shaders without using any Iray "cheats" or using UE for the 3DL one, with render settings optimal for clean results.
3DL will finish first.
What's a 'cheat'?
Just to get somewhat back on topic I have to say I'm pleasently surprised by the number of 3DL users commenting here. Atleast it shows that there ARE people who buy products just because the 3DL mats are included.
...doing anything possible with shaders to minimise Iray's impact on render time. Also as mentioned no UE for 3DL though AoA lights are fine.
Basically both render engines "out of the box" save for basic render settings to get the cleanest results (usually not an issue with 3DL but one that does affect Iray).
... so 3DL defaults to a lot of options flipped off, Iray defaults to a lot of options flipped on, and you think it's 'cheating' to actually compare renders with roughly the same stuff switched on?
Ok so I purchased the recording-studio
It had 3DL mats included (except for the walls which had to be converted) so I decided to do a test on my IMac.
Rendered out of the box with Iray default settings except I set it to scene only and Max path length to 6:
Rendered in 3DL in progressive mode with Area light shader for ceiling lights + AoA ambient light. Just minor surface tweaking, would have done much more to it for a real render:
I admit I know little about Iray and it would probably render faster if I was familiar with it, but the difference in render times still says something.
...PM coming.
The Iray render needs a quick noise filter, but has a richer lighting. (You could probably have dropped max path to 3 or 4, too)
The 3DL render isn't complete, I'd be curious what it took to hit 100%. It doesn't have noise, but it's also a relatively 'flatter' look.
Looks like a fairly even result, given a lot of small variables.
...I just used Iray pretty much "out of the box" back then as it was new and I knew very little about it yet, except to convert the shaders before rendering and making sure the tone map settings yielded an image as bright as the 3DL one. I used the standards for Kodachrome 64 in bright sunlight as my guide as that was my go to film for outdoor shots as a photographer. Before Iray I had worked with Reality/Lux so I already had some experience with a PBR engine. I will say that Iray, even in CPU mode left LuxRender in pixelated dust as with Lux, even after 12 - 15 hours it looked like Iray at about 40% convergence.
...and that was on my 64 bit 8 thread system.
Not sure why I seem to have such good fortune with 3DL, and I push it pretty hard for someone who doesn't mess with RSL or UE. Most of my highly involved scenes tend to render in maybe around an hour or so whereas in Iray I'm looking at 5 - 7 hours.for a similar type of scene. Crikey, still haven't been able to get decent results with Stonemason's Urban Future 5 even with removing all the "out of camera" elements and turning off most of the emissive shaders. Even letting the scene render overnight it was still going the next morning and still grainy. The really perplexing part of this all, it only had one character.
I tend to have similar luck with 3DL. Hour to an hour and a half is typical. Over 3 is rare these days. I also don't touch Uber Environment, using AoA area lights and the old (ancient, really) MicroCosm skydome.
On the other hand, I average about 15 to 30 minutes for a similar scene in Iray - if I've resarted DS recently. The more test renders I've run, the more time it takes in the setup and wrap up sequences, and the wrap up ones can also freeze my computer while they're running.
Well the 3DL completed in 7min 30sec, and I'm sure I could have made it look pretty descent, the mats were quite off for 3DL. As you can see the mixer is gray for some reason I will figure out later. But the Iray was at 4% after 15 min so I really don't understand how you can call it even. It would probably have taken close to an hour to complete. But we can maybe continue this discussion in another place, it doesn't really belong here.
...well without using Global Illumination (what UE adds to 3DL and Iray does by default) that is where the difference in render speed comes in. AoA's Advanced Ambient Light "adds" this element in to a point but not quite as accurately as Iray does. In 3DL lights are not physically based (they are shaders), while in Iray they behave like lights in the real world, hence why you cannot turn shadow casting off or flag surfaces (like AoA's lights can do) in 3DL.
I used to work in Bryce and if you added GI to the render process, it slowed to a glacial crawl (like days).
When I wish to create works in a more "illustrative" style, I find 3DL suits my workflow better, partly due to having much more experience with it as well as having a good library of different "in render" effects I can call on most of which do not increase the render time significantly. If I wish to create something more "realistic", then Iray gets the nod as that is it's primary strength and I am not into scripting like Wowie or Mustakettu85 are. For myself it is selecting the more appropriate tool for the job at hand. Yeah, I guess I could take the time to adjust Iray to produce closer to 3DL performance, but why go through the bother when I can simply select 3DL as my render engine in the first place? I wouldn't use a pencil to paint with when a brush is much more suited to the job.
Sven: the issue there is the definition of ‘complete’ is radically different between the two renderers.
Complete in Iray is a matter of an algorithm deciding how completely rendered it is. It never hits 100%, as far as I’m aware of.
You simply decide when it’s good enough.
And for unrealistic images that’s one thing I prefer about Iray, being able to eyeball it and go ‘yeah, that’s enough ‘
With 3dl If I want to speed it up I have to change some settings to make it render worse, or render it smaller and blow it up.
Most here kow my thoughts on this matter.. But for myself I have become very proficient at using 3DL and since pretty much all the work I do does not require photorealism 3DL suits me just fine.. And when it comes to buying stuff I always look at whether it has 3DL support and if I need it then I buy it.. As I see it if the PA has gone to the trouble of providing 3DL support for their product, then I support them by buying it..
That's pretty much what I do as well. But I can see now it's a lot more complex matter than I could imagine. When I did that testrender in Iray with the out of the box recording studio even if I aborted after 16 min I could see it would have looked good. Then after loading the 3DL version, applying emissives for the ceiling lights and hitting render I saw a lot of problems with glass and metal, and things that had a glow in Iray had no ambient map for 3DL so you have to make them yourself. The speakers are one mat zone with only a diffuse map provided so you can't really do much to make the foot look like metal and the box more like wood and so on, without creating zones in the geometry editor and making specular-, normal-, bump- and displacement maps yourself. I don't want to point any fingers at anybody, really, but I see that making this product look good in 3DL is a massive work even if it has 3DL presets. I still have to look at what maps are provided with the Iray version and see if I can find some useful stuff.
I'll keep this product as it is useful to me and eventually I will learn something from the process of fixing the materials, but other products with so called 3DL mats that don't include the necessary maps most likely will be returned.
Bottomline is Iray will always look more photorealistic with the tools currently available to 3DL users, but with proper materials you can get a descent result, not rocket science really, wonder what the Iray version would look like with only diffusemaps or whatever they are called?
Now shoot me!
Sven: That sounds like a suboptimal product, regardless of rendering engine.
If you are curious, you can easily make your own surface zones: Go into Geometry Editor (alt-shift-G, the icon with the pencil and grid, or Tools> Geometry Editor), open Tool Settings (Window> Tool Settings)
Put the display in one of the wireframe styles for ease (I like Wire Texture Shaded), select the object you want to divide.
Now you can click and select a series of polygons (ctrl-click to click additional polygons or it resets every time you click, alt-click to remove polygons).
Then, in tool settings window, right-click Surfaces and select Create Surface From Selected.
You now have a new surface zone, which you can tweak. It will start blank, so you probably want to start by copy/pasting the original surface.
Yep, thanks Will, that's what I will do next!
Plus, some models aren't easy to divide into tidy material zones so there are some limitations for creators.... The kitbashers and people who are buying a specific product fall into two separate camps and I don't think most artists start out to create a product that will toss out their original creative vision... the utility to alter it comes later...
You mean stuff like when metal shows out from underneath chipped paint?
But when you make something like a speaker that was discussed here, which IRL consists of clearly defined parts made of separate materials, it would be wise to model it in a realistic way structure-wise if you intend to have it rendered realistically. So that metal could be easily swapped for another metal material, wood for another wood or plastic.
That is a perfect example. If the creator created the console out of discrete elements (console, knobs, trim, lights) then the uv's are relatively easy to make. If components are modeled in or there are limitations of the PA's texturing skills or time, then messier uv's results. it is hard, however, to tell the PA that you don't care how the product looks or costs as long as it can be be remodeled. All of the products that are sold are compromises and it is never clear what to make the priority.
I just wish we could at least see the topology (a number of "wireframe renders") and the UVs among the promos. To make better-informed decisions, so to speak.
Sorry for the long post
In fact I already have a few of maya's shaders. Would be lot of work to implement them all but I'm not sure that would be the best adapted to the DS PA crowd since the Iray implementation. That doesn't solve the PA sayinf it's double work as they don't have the same interface as Iray Uber
I think there are two ways : reproduce the Iray Ubershader with 3delight. Or better (but very unlikely to happen) would be to get MDL to work with 3DL since the architecture of MDL should be able to manage other renderer. However the endresult is having about the same look as other pathtracers and losing diversity ( aren't there enough path tracer actually ?)
Two years old doesn't matter. Most development for that time went to the OSL. You don't miss a lot of thing. Thats not as if anything revolutionnary has been made. I guess their goal was the integration to Katana or inside other VFX tools. Thinking only the lastest shiny dev is worth is a mistake. Especially if people don't want PBR but rather DS Mats for actual 3delight. Otherwise if you want shiny, switching to Iray would be better. I actually don't use Iray that much but that may change in the future with GPU/AI assisted denoising
And that the features have to be accessed through coding is nothing new. It's the nature of any renderman compliant renderer.
With actual version and even older version (the v9 included with DS3) you could already get some pretty good thing with some minimal coding
3delight 8 already had PBR inside in 2009 and RSL2 must have been there too
Personnaly I see a lack or bad implementation of actual available features.
3DL has IPR render.
It's not gimped. Just a bit buggy for a few features
3DL is a full featured production render with programmable shader. Iray shader programming is very limited and whatever some people can do with it in term of SFX that is nothing compared to a Renderman Compliant Renderer. BTW you can do good thing with what is included from DS out of the box. You just need to understand how it works. The only thing that make my eyes unhappy is lack of fresnel in the base shaders. Iray only seems better and easier because of the 100+ page thread where lots of people exposed tips and tricks and has a few more features inside DS out of the box (ex tonemapper and a pixar derived PBR shader). Featurewise 3DL has nothing to envy to Iray.
I think it's more about workflow rather than the engine capability. The beginning point is Pixar's opensourcing it's PBR shader making it a starting point for standardizing shader interface across many apps
Then you have many 3D game engine following with adopting a similar interface or shader and describring a standard workflow for PBR.
Following that you have the emergence of tools to create textures for these interface (Substance Painter/designer and certainly others I don't know)
The existence of that workflow which is compatible with Iray Ubershader make it easier to author textures. And there are a lot of tuts for these workflow you can easily find on the web
Tools + standardization + Tuts make a wider adoption as the workflow from one app to an other make is easily adaptable
In it's actual state, inside DS, I think 3delight texturing is becoming marginal. And really, 3DL is more suited to be used for VFX by an army of programmers to create unique shader/look. Iray is better suited for individual workflow
Not if you think in term of exports. What is more standard ? Obj/FBX with equivalent channel or Uber/whatever ?
And what about products that are designed with these shaders? Are you also going to abolish them too ?
Deleting these shaders will prevent from loading and rendering products using these shaders. Leaving them doesn't harm
Iray in it's current state is an unidirectionnal Pathtracer. 3delight can do Reyes, Raytracing and also unidirectionnal Pathtracing. So despite being coded differently, you can compare them and with other pathtracers too
The speed difference is mainly due to core implementations and optimization philosophy. Ex Luxrender used to do calculation in spectral space but now does it in RGB only. Less calculation, quicker results
Math for a GGX-specular or Oren-nayar diffuse are the same and don't change from engine to engine. The difference I've seen in PBR Game Engines are quite minor difference like for roughness calculation in relation to IOR but that won't dramatically change the render time
There are things that have to be experienced instead of read.
It's like for Iray. DAZ provided a base uber shader but some users implemented a NPR shader. Features are there, just not easily accessible
What you say is not correct. 99% of 3delight features are acessible. ex Ubersurface has all these features. These are juste not PBR though but could have been. That gives you the freedom of not beeing physically correct.
And 3delight has some PBR shaders. These are just not available out of the box inside DS.
I'll finish with some quick renders. Don't really know what to show but...
Test for you
Simple scene. G2f, one plane, five cylinders, a sphere receiving a spotlight to create a God Ray. A second sphere containing the whole. A bit of smoke to give some atmosphere. And a spotlight illuminating the "big sphere" with some light passing through
Do it in Iray with the process you describe and show us the result and how much time you needed
It took me 15 min from creating the scene to finished rendering for the following pic only with what is included in DS on a phenom 955
I don't know what you want to achieve but a new material zone may not always be necessary. Depending on your goal a mask could be a better a quicker way. Eventually coupled with LIE ?
That's very informative, and those renders are quite amazing.
As I work on 3Delight (didn't even know about it until stumbled on this debate) some questions about the UI. Not out to stir up any trouble. Just curious. Maybe good reasons for the following:
1.) Why is gamma correction disabled by default? I had shared a test render & everyone said it was too dark. Checked everything monitor & card related that I could think of. By accident I saw "Gamma Correction - Off" in render. I would think it would be enabled by default, but maybe not for technical reasons, so I am asking.
2.) Same might be true for shadows. A technical reason why are they off by default?
Just my opinion, but as a novice seems like the tutorials & UI are slanted towards IRay at the expense of 3Delight. This makes very little sense to me from a business standpoint. The store still has *plenty* of product I'm going to buy for 3Delight as I learn both engines.
1/ I think it's a reminiscence of the time when DS didn't have that feature. It came around the beginning of the DS4 era. Correct Gamma workflow was unknown to most DS users (and certainly remains so). Some old product were not designed with that in mind and that changes the final look of the render. Not sure it wouldn't provoke some complaints if some user load old scenes.
2/ That must be a reminiscence of Reyes rendering. Before having global illumination lights you could use a lot of lights in the scene to simulate light bounce but only need few lights for shadows. You have the possibility to have also diffuse only or specular only lights to compose your lightning to your liking. And raytracing was very very very expensive in term of rendertime. Shadowmapping was preferred. So the type of shadow must have been a conscious choice too
For both features, you have to know what you want/do. Total freedom