Raytracing off on just hair?
Lissa_xyz
Posts: 6,116
I'm working on a scene with only one figure, she's using the PH Catwalk hair. Due to the reflections and windows and arealights and all that jazz, I have to bump up the raytrace depth to 3-4 for everything to come through properly, except the render takes absolutely forever on trying to do the hair. Any ideas?
/edit
I'm also using AoA's fog camera on the haze setting if that makes a difference.
Post edited by Lissa_xyz on
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Comments
You can try UberHair, or try a geometry shell as used in this thread: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/4949/
You can turn Occlusion and Raytrace off if you apply ubersurface on the hairs.
You can also speed up the renders by using point cloud render script
Thanks, I'll try the link and ubersurface stuff. Will rendering with a point cloud remove my effects from using uberarea lights and a UE2 on bounce? I also have a glow surface using the renderman shader from the shader builder, and water.
Can't say anything about the uberarea with point cloud, but it shouldn't remove any effect or light. I've only had problems with Glass shaders using point cloud.
I may test it. I am using glass shaders, though, as one of my lights are on the other side of a set of doors with windows.
If your glass shader is not based on Ubersurface with refraction it may work.
Tofusan's free glass shader was giving better results but I didn't test it very much
I may also release a simple plastic shader I've written in RSL 2.0 if you want. It gives some speed up to hair renders althought less beautifull as it has no reflection and other fancy effects
Do the settings in the point lighting follow the same setup as normal? I've never actually used that in a serious manner. I know Hellboy swears by it, but I think he does more portrait type stuff. I'm lost on the simple occlusion and point based areas of those render settings. Hit sides? Clamp? Uhh.. say what now? lol
The glass shader I'm using at the moment is based on the Daz Default shader.
Don't use the occlusion light. You've already lighted your scene. It's an aditional light
For the cloud parameters you can try the default settings. I'll explain later
A question: is the character and/or the hair supposed to show up in the reflections? If so, turning off raytracing on the hair with Ubersurface or anything else could be deeply problematic; if the hair isn't raytraced, it doesn't reflect. You're effectively turning off the ability of light to bounce between the hair and the mirror.
Depending on how you're working the image, you can always fake the reflections in post, but it sounds like part of the point of your image is to show actual reflections.
Yep, you're right but it's her choice. I would at least disable occlusion on the hairs and use point cloud for speed up
For the quick explanation on DS point cloud render script, the script transforms all geometries into sparse points where many informations are baked for each point (light color, normals etc...) and calculations are made on these points instead of the whole geometries and everything else is interpolated. Thus the speed gain.
In the control panel, you have standard rendering parameters that I won't explain, A basic Occlusion light that adds a light to your scene and gives occlusion and that I won't explain too
Lastly you have few parameters for the point cloud generation which control the quality and effect
Shading rate : controls the quality of the cloud generation. The higher rate, the lesser points are generated. You usually use a rate > 4 so that not too much points are generated
Hitsides : controls if the calculated effect comes from front, back or both sides of the point cloud. With glass shaders I'd use just front
MaxSolidAngle : Quality Vs speed control. Higher values will give quicker render time but lesser quality in theory.
Clamp : If Occlusion should be clamped or not so that there is not too much occlusion if using occlusion light
Maxdist : average distance of surfaces which contribute to the occlusion
You can try Shading rate 8, Hitside front, MaxsolidAngle = 0.5 and see if the render is at your liking
The Clamp and maxdist should affect UE as I've read somewhere it was optimized to use pointcloud
I've rendered a test scene with 2x uberarea , 1 reflective plane, and 2 glass shaded objects (1 with Tofusan's on the left and one with DS default on the right) No problem with the glass but reflection and refraction is quite time consuming with 4 bounces.
Well, all in all this is the jist of the scene. Don't mind the opacity differences in the windows, I'm still working on this (looking for a good percentage so they're still see through, but so her reflections don't look like 2 other actual girls). Basically I'm just looking for a way to speed things up for some semi-decent quality preview renders. I know the final render is going to take a substantially longer amount of time. This version was also rendered through AoA's fog cam set to haze.
Takeo, thank you for that explanation. Much appreciated. :)
Yep, you're right but it's her choice. I would at least disable occlusion on the hairs and use point cloud for speed up
Oh, yes, I just wanted to make sure she wasn't taken by surprise. I once did a scene with Ubersurfaced hair with no raytracing, and a mirror, and that rendered beautifully, I thought. I was about to post and then I suddenly realized that this character with a magnificent huge afro had no hair at all in the reflection.
And thank you for the quick explanation about point cloud. I knew it worked, and I kind-of sort-of knew how to make it do what I wanted, up to a point, but I had no idea what it actually did aside from the occlusion light and effects.
You're welcome guys.
@Vaskania : If you want quick preview you can set UE to just ambiant, so that you don't have the occlusion penalty.
I'm rendering the same scene as above but this time with occlusion and IDL. Yesterday's render took 1h45. With these additional calculations, I'm already at 9h and the render is only halfway
Thanks Takeo!
And holy crap.. I think I'd run out of patience by the 2nd hour. lol
What are your cpu/ram specs? Just out of curiosity.
I don't just wait in front of my screen when rendering ^^ just do something else
My spec :
AMD Phenom II X4 955 3,2 Ghz
12 Go RAM
Nothing very powerfull but enough for my needs
The render finished after 24 h. That's what you can expect with multiple bounce reflection and refraction.