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I'm not sure what point you're making...are you saying that 3DL can do that image, but Iray might not do it as well, or as fast or something?
If so, my comments are these:
First, that's not an image I'd do because I don't think it's any look that I'd ever want to achieve. Honestly, I think those "smoke" and "god ray" effects can be done fairly easily as simple gradient layers in Photoshop if that's really all you want to achieve.
But if you're trying to show that the god ray and smoke are something special that you can't do as well or as fast in Iray, for me that's kind of irrelevant. If I want to do stuff like that, I do it MUCH faster and better (IMO) in Nuke, which has far more realistic 3D-type effects for those things. And if I want real smoke I do it in Blender, since IMO a real smoke simulator is necessary to get the detail and variations in real-world smoke, not just a simple gradient.
Honestly, like others have said, I'm not sure where all this discussion is leading. If some are convinced that 3DL is awesome and better than another renderer, then fine, enjoy it. If not, then don't. Personally, I've not seen anything that makes me even consider using 3DL, but that's just me. And it seems clear that the original point of why support for 3DL seems to be fading is that the PA's don't think they got enough return on their investment when they provided 3DL shaders. So unless there's a sudden flood of people buying 3DL shader products, I doubt that will change.
Now if D|S could start to match the Blender Principled PBR shading system of Blender, and a new renderer to support that, then my ears will perk up and I'll be interested. But otherwise, I think Iray and its shader system are pretty amazing, and with my hardware I can get most of my renders in 5-10 minutes, with some amazing realism and detail, so I'm happy.
Takeo.Kensei,
BTW, here's a quick attempt in Photoshop to semi-duplicate the 3DL render you posted, from someone who is TERRIBLE at Photoshop. This is all hand-done in PS, no rendering of anything. Just a bunch of radial gradients and a Blur tool. So no, I'm not real impressed with the 3DL effects you showed.
By the way, for any Gimp users out there...
I originally tried to do this in Gimp, but kept getting weird stuff going on. I'm using the latest beta 2.9 version. Like when I tried CTRL-Z to undo a gradient fill on a transparent layer, it didn't undo but instead it filled it with the solid color. Is 2.9 really flaky like that, or maybe I did something wrong? It's nice cuz it has a ton of gradient pre-sets, but I keep running into issues with Gimp.
Why would they need to add another render engine when either directly or through plug-ins, DAZ Studio supports 3 PBR render engines and the fourth engine can do either PBR or not?
I'm just dreaming of the day when Blender, Substance Painter, and D|S all use the same shader/render systems so I can make something in Blender, export to Substance Painter to do materials, then into D|S to render. Right now it takes a lot of work to match them up. And if you haven't used the Principled Shader in Blender, it's a single node that can be used for virtually any surface. And for a lazy guy like me it's a little bit of heaven.
No the point is to show us how you use Iray + whatever tool to do the same and the time you need to do it.
You miss the rest of the scene
From that we can speculate on time loss and effort for an alternate process and you can judge for yourself if it acceptable or not
Others can also judge if the tool/process you used is worth the time and effort to try/learn
You asked why people don't use iray + post process. That is the beginning of the answer
Now I am going to agree that this discussion is going nowhere if suggestions are about using an other engine, or engine XYZ is better, as that is not the topic
You chose the wrong 3D app then. Buy poser (11 I think). They have cycles now. Not sure about the principled shader but if they don't have it it may come one day or you (or somebody) can build it from scratch
Although I very rarely use 3DL myself these days, I thought I would point out for anyone wishing to give it a try that the advanced lights (mentioned several times earlier in this thread) which make 3DL more usable (IMHO) are currently in fast grab at 70% off. https://www.daz3d.com/advanced-daz-studio-light-bundle
There hasn't been a revolution in CG for quite a while. But the evolution is palpable. Small things that matter. Subsurface sampling, general sampling, all that making-life-easier progress.
Oh yeah BTW, the latest builds have fixed the major slowdown with UE2 bounce light that occurred somewhere between 11 and 12, which Parris apparently managed to report.
MDL is pretty powerful actually. You shouldn't be that dismissive, really.
What Iray is currently sorely missing is a curve primitive (like for LAMH hair).
Neither does it have a dedicated outliner ("inker"). But apparently some folks managed to do NPR without it.
Dude! Chill, I beg you! It´s me, Kettu, and my sense of humour. *rolls eyes*
However, vendors should not be encouraged to use DS Default for their 3Delight mats. UberSurface will look miles better if only because its grazing highlights are prettier. And it pwns AoA Subsurface in terms of performance because it does not have this shader mixer bug when it assigns shader hitmode to the surface even when there is no opacity map.
Speaking of standards - it´s 2017. The standard for texturing is PBS. Your renderers may vary.
Dude, you're messing with lurkers' minds here. The features we were talking about are new physically plausible shading models - not in UberSurface because of age; and fine control over RiOptions and RiAttributes. Of which UberSurface cannot do RiOptions because in DS only "scripted renderer" can set RiOptions, and of RiAttributes it only does visibility.
Hmm, I wouldn't say it's so much work. Okay I model in anything but Blender (it's my favourite toy for simulations, but not modeling) and I render in my custom 3Delight kit that I know like the back of my hand obviously, but Substance, well, it does PBS standards automagically, it takes any UVd mesh and then you just plop the maps into matching slots in DS; done. Should be the same in Iray.
"Use the tool that requires the minimum amount of post processing to accomplish the desired goal" sounds like a good way to state this.
From what I saw looking at the blender manual, the cycles principled shader is a cut down version of the DAZ Iray Uber shader, since blender can be set to provide the added details that are usually handled be texture maps in Studio.
It's identical, because Substance uses Iray as it's internal render engine, just like DAZ Studio does.
I know Iray is built into Substance as well, I never used it there though. Their generic realtime shaders are good enough for previews IMO.
FYI, Iray has a reasonably good edging effect for outlines. It’s on par with most normal based outliners.
What it lacks is an innate cartoon coloring system and the ability to simply render flat colors.
Well, it can SORT of do flat colors with ‘render material ID,’ which is awesome... eeeexcept it doesn’t respect transparency
Blender's one is directly based on the Disney principled model, at least, in spirit.
It's all PBS regardless. Should take the same maps. Maaaaybe a bit of moving the roughness/gloss slider back and forth to calibrate between specific shading models.
And this is why we animated filmakers will use procedural
shaders whenever possible.
Our frame budgets (minutes per frame)
go up dramatically when the renderer has to load dozens of ridiculous
4K textures into memory for a long render sequence
and the problem is exacerbated when you have reflective materials
in your scenes.
I export all of my Daz scenes to C4D for animation and to Blender cycle for stills
and replace as many materials as I can with native procedurals.
it can be tedious work but the time is recouped when the render starts
on a 900 frame shot.
In order to move from Substance to D|S, you need to (AFAIK) know that "Glossiness" in SP is "Glossy Layered Weight", "Glossy Reflectivity", and/or "Top Coat Weight" in D|S. Or some combination of them. And you may have to tweak gamma values. And "Specular" is "Glossy Colored" in D|S. And there's a few others. That's a pain. You have to manually go thru and associate the maps from SP to D|S and change values in some cases.
My dream is that is done automatically because they shader systems are identical. They're not.
Theoretically only a roughness/gloss map might need gamma tweaking if your end shader uses some particularly different reflection model. The rest are generated linear (16bit if you want), so there's just no need to mess with them.
It's not really about shading then, it's about a specific importer. You're using OBJ as your exchange format, I guess? Its standard is way older than PBS, those .mtl files are barely usable at all.
Someone could write a new importer that would look for maps (named to some standard) next to an OBJ and assign them automagically to the right channels.
...we need more C coders in this community.
And they never will be...ever.
The type of uniformity
,of which you dream, will never be possible in
the dynamic environment of software development
of 3DCC applications.
This IMHO is a good thing as
too much uniformity stifles innovation.
Although individual entities have to strike the right balance
when competing in Commercial markets and avoid
"closed garden" technologies(unless you are Apple inc)
Daz genesis was/is quite the innovation
in its implementation at least.
However Daz was wise enough to include the ability to export
Daz figures to more "uniform" industry standard formats.
Sony ,on the other hand is infamous for failing spectactularly
to find that balance.
And here's a side-by-side showing the Blender Principled BSDF node settings on the left, and the D|S shader settings on the right. Much different.
Try the metallicity workflow on the Iray Uber, should be closer.
Either way, it's all just terms.
Yeah, I wish it was as easy as waving my hands and saying it's all just terms, but it isn't. Somebody has to wade thru all of those terms and figure out how to export and import it. Blender to SP, then SP to D|S.
I'm hoping we get to the point where the market agrees that a single, simple shader system is the way to go. It's better for PA's (they don't have to worry about designing for different shader systems), and it's certainly better for customers not having to work with 30 different nodes just to set up a surface.
Like we agreed to drive on the right and that electricty should be 220V everywhere and that metric makes a lot more sense than imperial and...
These types of "agreements" on uniform standards
are in direct contravention to free market economies.
and who gets to decide who's shader system will be the
standard??
The one framers or the filmakers??
the coding TD's or the "Artists"
As soon as you try to forcibly reconcile all of the variables
someone will have to surrender an option they implemented based on thier target market
and someone else will have feature imposed upon them that they feel unneccessarily
complicates thier end usage.
So you guys would rather have a bunch of different shader systems and renderers so you run into issues like the one that brought up this thread in the first place?
And it seems like the market has agreed that 3DL isn't preferable, in favor if Iray. So at least that worked.
Only speaking for myself ..yes I want options
and if that means different engines with different shader
system so be it.
How is this any different from any other technology?.
Have you ever lost the AC Adapter for your Model brand of laptop?.
Why are those "universal " AC adapters so bloody expensive?
As an animator utterly I loathe unidirectional brute force path/ray tracers like
Daz Iray & Bryce.
I demand the options to tell my engine I dont need your "standard number of bounces/samples for
my reflective'refractive surfaces in this particular scene
I have a frame budget for this project.
Blender ,with its many nodes, gives me this flexibility
I love having the option to tell My MODO
hybrid engine to use Monte carlo only on my fur materials
for speed and final gather for everything else.
"The Market" has made no such decsion that 3DL is not preferable
DAZ inc, has chosen IRay
Autodesk has chosen Arnold etc etc.
Now we end users have to choose which rendering/shading solution
will acheive our individual creative objectives.
Yes, I want options. I don't want someone developing a shader to have to make it the exact same as every other shader. Rigid adherence to the status quo is really bad for innovation. Think where we'd be if DAZ still used cr2s because that's what everyone used, and changing it would break things.
Okay, but a PBR shader is, by definition, "physically based", unlike the older ones which took a bunch of shortcuts to make surfaces look kinda real but not quite. So if you have a shader system that mimics real life, then that's about as real as you can get. Not much reason to change that unless the technology improves so any shortcuts they make now would be improved. And there's no reason a single, common shading system can't also improve in the future.
And even with a standard shading system which is "physically based", you have a zillion choices in the settings and textures and colors and maps and so on that you apply. So if you're worried about creativity, I assure you that you can apply a gazillion different inputs to a principled BSDF shader. All it does is mimic real world surface properties based on your inputs.
But I get it..."choices" sounds good, and we all want choices
I assure you a physically based shader that actually covered all options would be unusable due to the number of parameters required. Look how many there are in the Iray Uber shader, that doesn't even have the ability to change color based on angle. A very simple very necessary parameter just for fabric. So could every shader work exactly like the Uber shader? Sure. Would I be happy with that? NOT A CHANCE.
This was one of the goals of MDL - to define materials that could be rendered similarly by any engine.
- Greg
I guess I'm just not skilled enough to really understand the existing shaders, so I'm happy with just one shader for now. It'll probably take me years to just figure the principled BSDF out. And stuff like the "dual lobe specular" and "backscattering" in the uber shader? I'm really impressed at those who have become experts in all of that, but for me it's gonna be a long time. So yeah, if the existing shaders have some limitations it doesn't matter much to me. In the stuff I produce the limitation is ME, not the shader and renderer.