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Just a tip for those with AWE Shading Kit. Make sure you adjust temperature/white balance for your scene. Haven't seen anyone mention this, but proper white balance is crucial.
https://photographylife.com/what-is-white-balance-in-photography
Like an actual physical camera, you have to set your white balance properly.
https://www.thephoblographer.com/2017/09/06/the-truth-about-how-white-balance-and-how-your-camera-actually-works/
AWE Environment Light defaults to 6500K which is very close to pure white. As both articles show, actual physical camera/film is lower than that. I generally set it to 5900K with a 0.075 to 0.15 boost to saturation. It's slightly warmer (and of course more saturated) than say 5200K.
I always feel dumb when I read this thread, yet I keep coming back for more, lol.
Pretty happy with my AWE shader for Gino. He will have iRAY, 3DL and AWE rendering options. I have to say, my AWE renders almost look identical to the iRAY ones. Says allot about your efforts wowie! :-)
We all started from not knowing anything. Once the update is out, I'll see if I can put up a more through guide to using the kit, the shader or just 3delight in general.
Thanks. But AWE is 3delight.
It's just using what's been there all this time.
Don't laugh, but I've been using Daz since 3.0, lol ... and I'm determined to stick with 4.7 until the last cat's hung. So it will be awesome if I want an iray effect, which I rarely would, but if I want to be able to do it in 3dl, I will be very thankful for the AWE for Dummies video and/or pdf tutorial. I am very much a plug, play, and one-click or two-click kind of person. I know it's a sign of laziness, but to thine own self, be true. Right?
I will use the easiest light sets, the easiest shaders, and the most versatile products and am willing to pay for them if they make my life easier and my job faster. But when it get's too technical, my eyes cross, lol
Well regardless, your efforts breath life in to this old rendering engine! Thank you!
I've actually started on DS 1.8, I think? I still love DS3 ui the most, since it's less clutter and the surface/shader parameters are collapsible. Too bad it doesn't seem to work correctly anymore, last time I installed it.
Probably the same for me. There are some 3delight features that are only available on 4.8 onwards, but I can get by without them. For me, the only interesting feature in 4.9 was the morph editing tool.
Yes, seems like I need to do it some time in the future. Of course, if someone else want to do it, even for a paid product, I'll gladly help. In fact, I've been tossing around ideas with mustakettu about starting a crowdfunding campaign to get a 3delight NSI exporter for DS.
Edit:
Just finished uploading AWE Surface 1.1 and mustakettu's RadiumAreaPT light shader files to the Google Drive folder. I've also finished the shadow catcher shader along with new point/spot/distant light shaders. Both can be found on this freebie thread.
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/277581/awe-surface-shader-a-new-physically-plausible-shader-for-daz-studio-and-3delight/p1
WAIT ... I caught free, the rest I need some explanation on, lol. I know what a shadow-catcher is because my pwcatch only work half the time. What's the "mustakettu's RadiumAreaPT light shader" and are there dummy-proof instruction?
And I'm glad I'm not the only weirdo not iray-crazed.
It's an area light shader. Basically turns any object into a light source. Equivalent to UberArea/omAreaLight or iray's emissive. For best performance, the simpler the object, the less render times you'll have. Best to start with a plane without division.
Mustakettu's light shader don't have all the bells and whistles like my own AWE AreaPT (gel light, opacity support, two sided emission, barn doors etc). But you should be able to set up a complete scene with it. A taste of what optimal use of 3delight path tracing framework can do. The big advantage of using the new path traced area light is that render time should be 50% less compared to point/spot/distant lights.
Since existing shadow catcher doesn't work with these new path traced area lights, mustakettu and I needed to write a new one. A few weeks ago, I already have point/spot/distant light and path traced area light figured out, but catching shadows from a HDRI (via the environment sphere) was a tough one. Plus earlier builds have some problems that was pretty hard to figure out. Shadows from HDRI still looks almost like ambient occlusion, so I recommend adding at least one area light if you want more defined shadows.
Feel free to read the manual
http://docs.daz3d.com/lib/exe/fetch.php/public/read_me/index/55819/55819_awe-shading-kit-user-guide.pdf
http://docs.daz3d.com/lib/exe/fetch.php/public/read_me/index/55819/55819_awe-surface-user-guide.pdf
I haven't had time to write a separate documentation for RadiumAreaPT, but for the most part it will behave similarly to AWE AreaPT. One note though, mustaketty premultiplies Intensity Scale with a very large value. I've promised not to mess with the existing code, but if you want to use with AWE Surface, I recommend dialing down the Intensity Scale to the minimum value = 0.001. Use Intensity Scale EV instead if you need stronger lights. Intensity Scale uses exposure value, with each value doubling the intensity of the light.
The extra point/spot/distant lights are similar enough to existing lights like the built in DAZ lights. Extra features are customizable falloffs for the point/spot lights, blackbody temperature and light linking support.
I never could figure out that UberArea light thing ... I have a handful of ready-to-use lights I stick with because it's easy and makes me look like I know something (which I don't, lol). But it would be cool if I can make things glow, like fire or anything that emanates light. But so far, most of what you are telling me is a foreign language.
Need a little help here. I'd like to have a transparent background to do promos with and well I can't seem to figure out how to get that. All my attempts like removing the HDR file from the Surfaces tab just gives me a white background when rendering.
You need to hide the environmental sphere in the scene tab and render as .png or.tiff to get an alpha channel.
Toggle Visibility Camera to 'Off' on the AWE Environment Sphere shader (the shader applied to the environment sphere). This means the sphere will not be visible to the camera, but it will still be visible in reflections/refraction and contribute to GI. If you do not want the sphere to be visible in the render and reflections/refractions/GI, just hide the sphere. As Sven noted, the resulting render needs to be saved into a format that saves out the alpha channel (TIFF/PNG).
As Wowie said, if you want to keep the lighting but not the background, select the environment sphere, go to surfaces and scroll to the bottom of the list where the visibility toggles are and turn camera off.
Here is the same render with camera on and camera off for the environment sphere.
Thanks so much Guys! :-)
Wowie, has aweSurface in the commercial kit been updated?
Not yet. Still working on some stuff. Current dev build have updated blackbody code and ray tracing bias so glass renders correctly. Any glaring bugs I should know about?
I haven't encountered any yet, though I haven't had that much time to mess around with the new version either.
I'm trying to figure out whether to tell a person to re-d/l from their DAZ account or send them to the freebie release, so freebie release it is as of now, thanks!
Just bought this product and well and it is good, but is there a tutorial and examples on how to use this to its fullest, as following the manuals have so much information that it is hard to follow some of what it can do.. At the moment trying to work out how to do emissive lights with it which I can gather it does but not sure how to do it properly.. Also it says there is a script to use before rendering but not sure what is meant by that..
You can start by opening up the quick start scene.
To make emissive lights or area lights, simply create an emitter object, then apply AWE AreaPT to surfaces on the emitter. That's basically it. The bundled light presets are simply emitter figures with AWE AreaPT preapplied.
The render script basically exposes extra render settings options for 3delight. Once you have it installed, you should see something like this in your Render Settings tab.
Choose either RaytracerDraft or RaytracerFinal, they're interchangeable. The difference is pixel samples used. Raytracer Draft uses the same defaults as DS (4x4 pixel samples), while RaytracerFinal defaults to higher pixel samples (8x8).
Once you have either selected, select the 'Renderer Options' section to access the Renderer settings. It's similar to the default Render Settings, with added options like separate ray trace depth for specular and diffuse. In most cases, you don't have to fiddle with these values.
One thing I forgot to mention in the manual is that you will have to enable gamma correction and set gamma to 2.2 in the standard Render Settings. After doing all the above steps, simply hit 'Render' to start rendering.
Cool thank you for the help and info as I did not realize that it uses Scripted 3Delight, I was using standard 3Delight.. lol
Happy to help. It will still work with standard 3delight, but it will render slower.
The render script is there basically because DAZ Studio don't pass extra parameters to 3delight to make optimal use of the new path tracing hider/renderer. That's why I encourage people to file a feature request to get DAZ implementing/exposing those extra parameters in the renderer settings.
It would be nice and will try, but while the current fad is iRay rendering I don't see that happening anytime soon unfortunately..
I seem to have an ongoing issue with the light set and dome. I had a perfectly good test scene for setting up Gino for AWE 3DL but this morning (this has happened before) I was going to run a render as I'm about done setting up Gino and getting him ready for testing for my beta testers and decided to save out the light sets for all three ways to render (iRAY, 3DL and AWE 3DL).... well the AWE 3DL starts off as expected, nothing in the render but then after 3 minutes still nothing.
In other tests with the very same scene things render out quite quickly and display immediately! Interestingly enough the render, when cancelled, then shows a small portion of what was being rendered but just not anything I could see at first. Usually the entire scene is rendered in about 3 minutes not just a small portion so that seems odd to me as well.
I then tried loading up a new Wowie Test Scene from the Shader Presets folder and merged it into my current Gino set up scene, deleting the older AWE scene.. and resulted in same issue.
If I load up just the test scene it works fine and very fast. So not sure why my Gino and his fiber hair stuff and a simple swim trunk is causing this to happen!
Also, my other little discovery was that if I chose, under the render options in the Render Script options there is a little drop down. I tried various ones, most resulted in the same issue with nothing appearing in the renderer window. This is the Standard Example after 4 minutes... something is not working right or I don't understand what I'm doing or both....
Don't use any other scripts than raytracer! Wowie or Kettu can explain why not:)
It sounds like you've run into what I call "the eternal render bug". There has been some discussion in the awe test track thread about it. Try render with raytracer and progressive mode. The problem may be related to the specular BRDF type you are using on some hair or something else. Progressive mode has saved me a couple of times;) Or I have tried another BRDF and got it to work.
Do all these items use aweSurface? If not, weird things may happen.
Also, what does your lighting consist of? No Uber lights or other vanilla stuff?
The Fiberhair uses simple 3DL shaders and I think I was told they work fine... no iRAY surfaces used in the AWE scene at all. I know the iRAY shaders can even do weird things in regular 3DL renders so I always make sure they are not being used in any 3DL or AWE 3DL scene.
Wowie was gracious enough to allow me to send him my files but as you might have read in the Commons I've hit a nasty Networking issue that I can't resolve. All attempts to upload files via Dropbox or WeTransfer seem to bottleneck and stall! SO i'm just sitting here waiting for my provider to get back to me and have them run a line check on my apt building to see what's up!
I will reiterate because yes it matters, Sven is absolutely right, so for you Richard and for the sake of lurkers: don't.
Those vanilla example scripts -"Standard Example", "Point-Based Occlusion", "Outline" - they are not for production use. At best they aren't really doing anything meaningfully different ("Standard Example"). PBO will perform extra calculations that are irrelevant to aweSurface. Outline, well... it does generate some outlines, but as-is, it's buggy. And, again, irrelevant to aweSurface.
The "Raytracer" script does what makes aweSurface work its best.
So... please =))
...a quick way to see if any of your items may be stuck in a too-deep ray bounce somewhere: in the render options, drag max ray depth down to 1, try rendering, see if anything changes. If the scene renders fast (but it will likely look kinda ugly), then it may be worth it dragging the slider back and going over the surfaces one by one limiting max ray depths (they're in the "Lighting" subsection) to find out which one gets stuck. Wowie set the bounce depths generously high by default, which is all fine and dandy due to how optimised aweSurface is... unless there is a geometry issue somewhere. If there is, I'd say it's most likely to be in that fiber hair. Automatic meshing can sometimes create messy normals and the like.
They may work fine on their own, but - but they necessitate using vanilla lighting. Which isn't exactly conducive to optimum performance with aweSurface.
So what is your lighting like?