The Official aweSurface Test Track

wowie

Sven Dullah said:

Realized SSS scale is absolute, not relative, correct? Have to look into that, SSS is slightly overdone Buddha is natural size, the game characters scaled down.

If you need to fiddle with scale, there's what the Transmission/Subsurface Scale Multiplier are for. The first multiplies by the value you used ie 1 for 1:1 scale, 0.1 for 1/10, or 10 for 10x scale. The second multiplies by power ie 2^value. For example, 0 will be 1:1 scale, while -1 will be half and 1 will be twice and so forth. You can also combine the two and the main scale value (they're all multiplied together).

Sven Dullah

kyoto kid said:

...that's really cool.

wowie said:

Sven Dullah said:

Realized SSS scale is absolute, not relative, correct? Have to look into that, SSS is slightly overdone Buddha is natural size, the game characters scaled down.

If you need to fiddle with scale, there's what the Transmission/Subsurface Scale Multiplier are for. The first multiplies by the value you used ie 1 for 1:1 scale, 0.1 for 1/10, or 10 for 10x scale. The second multiplies by power ie 2^value. For example, 0 will be 1:1 scale, while -1 will be half and 1 will be twice and so forth. You can also combine the two and the main scale value (they're all multiplied together).

Wow tks! Should have known that, but haven't actually used them yet, perfect for this project:)

timeoff

Very nicely done! Haven't tried anything quite as complex as this yet, very impressive!

Sven Dullah said:

The Nirvana Chess Cafe...an old scene...took on the task of converting it to awe. 18 Genesis1 characters, all except one fully dressed and many with hair:) I made the original using UE2 and the RR3, rendertime IIRC 15 hours or something like that. This took about 35 min. at 10x10 pixelsamples and 128 shadowsamples. This is very much a VIP, just a rough conversion, but very happy that my shaderwork with the grid dude seems to translate well, and render fast

 

Sven Dullah

timeoff said:

Very nicely done! Haven't tried anything quite as complex as this yet, very impressive!

Sven Dullah said:

The Nirvana Chess Cafe...an old scene...took on the task of converting it to awe. 18 Genesis1 characters, all except one fully dressed and many with hair:) I made the original using UE2 and the RR3, rendertime IIRC 15 hours or something like that. This took about 35 min. at 10x10 pixelsamples and 128 shadowsamples. This is very much a VIP, just a rough conversion, but very happy that my shaderwork with the grid dude seems to translate well, and render fast

 

 

Thank you so much for your encouraging words:) Continued working on surfaces and lighting, had to add another emissive to make the characters pop a bit more (close-up rendering...), also set the SSS scale multiplyer1 to 0.2 for every skin surface, think that fixed the SSS issue, tks again wowie, great tip!

Rendered at full HD with that extra emissive added, still at 10x10 pixelsamples, 45 min:)

Sven Dullah

...not sure about this, but after scaling down SSS using the SSS scale multiplyer 1 and rendering with 10x10 pixel- 128 Irradiance- and 256 SS-samples I got more noise, had to up the samples to 1024/512 to get a descent result. Anyway, with full HD, still only 75 min. which is very nice!

Will probably up the samples to 12x12,2048/1024 for the final renders.

Still work to be done but closing in...

Sven Dullah

Question: I made a scene with a snake that I turned into glass, put the diffuse textures into transmission color, adjusted transmission scale and set transmission shadows to 100 %. Looks good. Now, if I want it to cast shadows, create reflections/refraction but not be visible to the camera, like a mirage or something, how do I do that? If I simply turn off the camera visibility it casts colored shadows but there are no reflection/refraction. As I write this I have a render going where I set opacity to 0 and have "multiply opacity with reflections" disabled. Progressive render, veeeery slow, from what I can see it actually creates reflection/refraction but no shadows. Do I need to use trace groups, and if that would work, exactly how do I do that? Or are there any other options around? It's been rendering without progression now for about an hour, so obviously not a good method:)

Maybe it would work if I toggled camera visibility off, created a geoshell sharing the same materials and set opacity for the shell to 0? Would probably take days to render...

Update: With opacity zeroed I get reflections but no refraction or shadows, have to find another way...

wowie

Sven Dullah said:

Question: I made a scene with a snake that I turned into glass, put the diffuse textures into transmission color, adjusted transmission scale and set transmission shadows to 100 %. Looks good. Now, if I want it to cast shadows, create reflections/refraction but not be visible to the camera, like a mirage or something, how do I do that?

So you want it to be visible in everything except to the camera? Turning off Visibility - Camera should do it.

Sven Dullah

wowie said:

Sven Dullah said:

Question: I made a scene with a snake that I turned into glass, put the diffuse textures into transmission color, adjusted transmission scale and set transmission shadows to 100 %. Looks good. Now, if I want it to cast shadows, create reflections/refraction but not be visible to the camera, like a mirage or something, how do I do that?

So you want it to be visible in everything except to the camera? Turning off Visibility - Camera should do it.

No, as I said turning off visibility for the camera will also turn off reflections and refraction, leaving only shadows. I'd like it to still produce refraction even if not visible. Possible?

Sven Dullah

Here's the scene with visibility on:

...and with visibility off, (not finished)

 

I'd like it to behave like a black hole that can't be seen but will bend the light

wowie

Sven Dullah said:

I'd like it to behave like a black hole that can't be seen but will bend the light

Hmm, wouldn't that's be achievable by just turning off reflections/specular? Leaving refractions only. Don't have an idea of what you're thinking? Something like that wormhole in Interstellar?

Edit:

Ah OK. Reading your post again, i think I understand what you want. Basically you want something like fog/plasma/volumetrics. If that's the case, it's certainly doable with a volume/interior shader.

https://renderman.pixar.com/resources/RenderMan_20/atmosphereAndInteriorShaders.html

Unfortunately, volume shaders don't work with the render script. At least, that's what Mustakettu told me.

Sven Dullah

wowie said:

Sven Dullah said:

I'd like it to behave like a black hole that can't be seen but will bend the light

Hmm, wouldn't that's be achievable by just turning off reflections/specular? Leaving refractions only. Don't have an idea of what you're thinking? Something like that wormhole in Interstellar?

Edit:

Ah OK. Reading your post again, i think I understand what you want. Basically you want something like fog/plasma/volumetrics. If that's the case, it's certainly doable with a volume/interior shader.

https://renderman.pixar.com/resources/RenderMan_20/atmosphereAndInteriorShaders.html

Unfortunately, volume shaders don't work with the render script. At least, that's what Mustakettu told me.

Tks for the link, interesting! And sorry for not being clear:)

For simplicity, let's say I want to place a sphere in the middle of a room, it can be observed only because light passing trough it will be refracted. It can not be seen directly, it only bends light so that the image of the room will get distorted. Does this make sense?

This is maybe the closest to what I have in mind, maybe without the reflections...pure refraction? As you can see I have a hard time understanding myself, no wonder you have some difficulties

wowie

Sven Dullah said:

 

For simplicity, let's say I want to place a sphere in the middle of a room, it can be observed only because light passing trough it will be refracted. It can not be seen directly, it only bends light so that the image of the room will get distorted. Does this make sense?

Use refractions only and turn off everything else. There's shouldn't be any absorption and you don't want to use thin glass since that will kill any light bending.

 

Sven Dullah

Hmm transmission at 100%, IoR 1.01, transmission scale/absorption 0, diffuse off, specular and reflections off, shadows off...

Sven Dullah

wowie said:

Sven Dullah said:

 

For simplicity, let's say I want to place a sphere in the middle of a room, it can be observed only because light passing trough it will be refracted. It can not be seen directly, it only bends light so that the image of the room will get distorted. Does this make sense?

Use refractions only and turn off everything else. There's shouldn't be any absorption and you don't want to use thin glass since that will kill any light bending.

 

Yep need to experiment some more, tks:)

Sven Dullah

LOL IoR 0.9, obviously not allowed:D

 

Sven Dullah

Ok I got it, guess I'm just looking for new ways of abusing your shader;) Had to convert these birds to SubD to avoid black spots, IoR 1.02...not sure what I'm looking for, just playing around...

wowie

Hmm, it can be something like that optic camouflage in Ghost in the Shell or Predator.

Sven Dullah

wowie said:

Hmm, it can be something like that optic camouflage in Ghost in the Shell or Predator.

Yup:)

Woops:D

wowie

Sven Dullah said:

Any thoughts on dispersion and diffraction?

Update:

Trying something. Naive implementation and nowhere near 'correct'. But it's render very fast. So doing things correctly in spectral space probably is very possible.

Sven Dullah

wowie said:

Sven Dullah said:

Any thoughts on dispersion and diffraction?

Update:

Trying something. Naive implementation and nowhere near 'correct'. But it's render very fast. So doing things correctly in spectral space probably is very possible.

Coooool:) So soon we can make physically plausible rainbows, all we need is 1 000 000 000 instances of a water drop and a light source

Sven Dullah

...so I started working on a cave, first testrender with raytracer final/progressive, 512 Irradiance samples so a bit of grain...two emissive planes. Rendertime just over 1 h. Guess there's a lot of bouncing going on. Modelled it from a primitive sphere using a push modifyer. Seems like the Catmull-Clark legacy SubD algorithm renders slightly faster than Catmark?

wowie

Sven Dullah said:

Coooool:) So soon we can make physically plausible rainbows, all we need is 1 000 000 000 instances of a water drop and a light source

Hmm, did some more work today. Turns out I can basically do this somewhat believably without doing it in spectral space. So I guess this goes into the update.

Renders very fast.

Edit: Sorry. Ran into a bit of a snag. So this will need further work and probably not going into the update.

Sven Dullah

wowie said:

Sven Dullah said:

Coooool:) So soon we can make physically plausible rainbows, all we need is 1 000 000 000 instances of a water drop and a light source

Hmm, did some more work today. Turns out I can basically do this somewhat believably without doing it in spectral space. So I guess this goes into the update.

Renders very fast.

Beautiful:)

Sven Dullah

A question: Is there a simple way of linking the awe environment light node to another object than the sphere? To get additional control over the environment shader?

Edit: It seems the light node affects every surface in the scene  which has the environmental shader applied to it?

wowie

Sven Dullah said:

A question: Is there a simple way of linking the awe environment light node to another object than the sphere? To get additional control over the environment shader?

Edit: It seems the light node affects every surface in the scene  which has the environmental shader applied to it?

Hmm, what do you mean? The AWE Environment light should affect all AWE Surface and Environment Sphere applied objects in the scene. The environment sphere shader is made really only to be used either as an ambient light source or a diffuse background. If you want more control, use AWE Surface instead on the object.

Sven Dullah

wowie said:

Sven Dullah said:

A question: Is there a simple way of linking the awe environment light node to another object than the sphere? To get additional control over the environment shader?

Edit: It seems the light node affects every surface in the scene  which has the environmental shader applied to it?

Hmm, what do you mean? The AWE Environment light should affect all AWE Surface and Environment Sphere applied objects in the scene. The environment sphere shader is made really only to be used either as an ambient light source or a diffuse background. If you want more control, use AWE Surface instead on the object.

Ummh...I was experimenting with an ambient object(with the environmental shader applied to it) inside a sphere (with the aweSurface applied to it and flipped normals), no other light sources. Just this thought crossed my mind, if it's possible to use the aweEnvironment light node to raise or lower the light intensity independently of the environmental shader settings...but I think I found out, as you say, that the aweEnvironment affects all surfaces, so never mind:) Sorry, just thinking out loud

wowie

Raising the exposure will work, but that applies to the whole scene.

The only way to increase the intensity of ambient surface with AWE Environment Sphere shader is to increase the ambient strength. Exposure/gain is limited to textures only at this point. I can change it so it applies to ambient even when there's no texture.

Of course, you can also use the AWE AreaPT instead since it is the proper shader for lights.

Sven Dullah

wowie said:

Raising the exposure will work, but that applies to the whole scene.

The only way to increase the intensity of ambient surface with AWE Environment Sphere shader is to increase the ambient strength. Exposure/gain is limited to textures only at this point. I can change it so it applies to ambient even when there's no texture.

Of course, you can also use the AWE AreaPT instead since it is the proper shader for lights.

Yup tks! Just exploring the environment shader, will play with ambient strength.

wowie

Just tested out AWE Surface 1.2 on this scene.

FullHD 1920x1080, 8x8 pixel samples and 2048 irradiance samples on everything. 42 min 31.7 secs. At 720p, it took 19 min 7.78 secs. LIt with a single area light, with a single instance. If I don't use the area light and rely soley on a HDRI on the enviroment sphere, render times for the 720p shot goes down to 17 min 8.46 secs (due to disabling the diffuse and solely relying on ambient).

The hair has both translucency and subsurface scattering. Thanks to new optimizations in the 1.2 build, render times have improved even if you don't filter out opacity values. All surfaces with opacity are set to 0% optimization. I didn't used each hair color textures though, since I wanted to see what the shading look like with pure colors, spec and bump/displacement if enabled. Obviously, with proper color textures, the hair will look better.

Used the new AWE Environment Light to set camera exposure controls, but used the defaults : f-stop 1/8, ISO 100 and shutter time 1/60. Then I simply raise the scene exposure to max, letting the camera based exposure do its thing. White balance is set to 5750K.

Materials settings are just the ones used by the reworked presets. All I did was run the transfer script to copy specular textures and apply AWE presets (hair, cloth, translucent cloth).

Edit : The 17 min shot was done in 720p.

Sven Dullah

wowie said:

Just tested out AWE Surface 1.2 on this scene.

FullHD 1920x1080, 8x8 pixel samples and 2048 irradiance samples on everything. 42 min 31.7 secs. At 720p, it took 19 min 7.78 secs. LIt with a single area light, with a single instance. If I don't use the area light and rely soley on a HDRI on the enviroment sphere, render times goes down to 17 min 8.46 secs (due to disabling the diffuse and solely relying on ambient).

The hair has both translucency and subsurface scattering. Thanks to new optimizations in the 1.2 build, render times have improved even if you don't filter out opacity values. All surfaces with opacity are set to 0% optimization. I didn't used each hair color textures though, since I wanted to see what the shading look like with pure colors, spec and bump/displacement if enabled. Obviously, with proper color textures, the hair will look better.

Used the new AWE Environment Light to set camera exposure controls, but used the defaults : f-stop 1/8, ISO 100 and shutter time 1/60. Then I simply raise the scene exposure to max, letting the camera based exposure do its thing. White balance is set to 5750K.

Materials settings are just the ones used by the reworked presets. All I did was run the transfer script to copy specular textures and apply AWE presets (hair, cloth, translucent cloth).

This is very interesting! Very little noise... did you use 256 SSS samples on the skins? Wait, specular textures...you mean for skins or clothing...hair? I think the clothing presets are quite an improvement. Skins too btw:) SSS is much cooler, specular/reflection too. So if you didn't make any adjustments to the skins, does that mean diffuse strength is 50% and SSS strength 75% (or thereabout)?

Looks very promising:) Seems rendertimes with high sample settings have gone down quite a bit:)