The Official aweSurface Test Track

Sven Dullah

wowie said:

Sven Dullah said:

Hmm is that why I seemed to have trouble getting proper gamma with HDRI lighting?

Temperature isn't used for ambient/HDRI in the environment sphere shader. I did change how ambient exposure is calculated. Exposure/gain/gamma now works on total ambient (color, texture and intensity).

I've mentioned that I usually have to do some gamma correction in postwork, and so I've tried to increase gamma for the env. shader with HDRIs. Haven't really worked out though. Maybe the blackbody fix for the surfaces will help? For the whitebalance with the above scene I think it's simply reflections behaving differently due to change of BRDF? The HDRI is rather cool.

Will post another test render soonish:)

Sven Dullah

kyoto kid said:

...in the process of rebuilding my library and runtimes. When I have enough to work with, I'll do some preliminary tests.

Very much looking forward to seeing some stuff from you:) Hope you got everything sorted!

kyoto kid

...I actually have the base bus stop test scene saved (sans the older woman and shopping cart in the background).  I need to find and install all the components I used so that when I reload it, I don't get a bunch of grey boxes.  Some of the props are freebies so I need to hunt those down and install them again (as well as re-skin the bus as I lost the texture I made).

wowie

Sven Dullah said:

I've mentioned that I usually have to do some gamma correction in postwork, and so I've tried to increase gamma for the env. shader with HDRIs. Haven't really worked out though.

Hard to say since each HDRI is different. So, if you're changing gamma in postwork, do you do it because it's too bright or too dark? If it's too dark, then the HDRI probably doesn't come with a lot of range and most likely best be used as background. You can always use a 2nd environment sphere with overexposed settings to add more diffuse light.

Sven Dullah said:

Maybe the blackbody fix for the surfaces will help?

I don't think so. The temperature / white balance isn't applied to the envionment sphere ambient output. They only work on diffuse, be it on the environment sphere or any surface with AWE Surface. But you can always tint the ambient if you like.

Sven Dullah

Sven Dullah said:

wowie said:

Sven Dullah said:

Hmm is that why I seemed to have trouble getting proper gamma with HDRI lighting?

Temperature isn't used for ambient/HDRI in the environment sphere shader. I did change how ambient exposure is calculated. Exposure/gain/gamma now works on total ambient (color, texture and intensity).

I've mentioned that I usually have to do some gamma correction in postwork, and so I've tried to increase gamma for the env. shader with HDRIs. Haven't really worked out though. Maybe the blackbody fix for the surfaces will help? For the whitebalance with the above scene I think it's simply reflections behaving differently due to change of BRDF? The HDRI is rather cool.

Will post another test render soonish:)

Doubled shadowsamples. It really seems the new build renders with twice the speed of the old build And obviously I was right about the BRDFs and whitebalance, things are back to normal. Also it seems the blackbody thing has improved the overall gamma! Did an auto adjust for this render and it didn't do much at all! NICE!!!

wowie

Sven Dullah said:

Doubled shadowsamples. It really seems the new build renders with twice the speed of the old build And obviously I was right about the BRDFs and whitebalance, things are back to normal. Also it seems the blackbody thing has improved the overall gamma! Did an auto adjust for this render and it didn't do much at all! NICE!!!

I guess he likes it. That's the reason why I'm pretty confident about comparing 3delight render times on CPUs with iray on GPUs. And I'm taking into account my machine is on a pretty old setup. If anybody has a Ryzen 2700 or better, render times will be at least half of what I'm seeing now at pretty much the same power consumption.

Sven Dullah

wowie said:

Sven Dullah said:

Doubled shadowsamples. It really seems the new build renders with twice the speed of the old build And obviously I was right about the BRDFs and whitebalance, things are back to normal. Also it seems the blackbody thing has improved the overall gamma! Did an auto adjust for this render and it didn't do much at all! NICE!!!

I guess he likes it.

wowie said:

That's the reason why I'm pretty confident about comparing 3delight render times on CPUs with iray on GPUs.

Really? On CPU, definitely! I've seen people mentioning crazy fast rendering times with rather complex scenes. There's this one guy doing animation with Iray, he's talking about 30sec/frame for quad HD pixelsize I can't match that even with dumbed down vanilla rendering, maybe if I skip ambient occlusion alltogether and use fake bouncelight with no raytracing...but he obviously knows how to optimize things. Haven't seen what it looks like, though. A vendor that makes those large environments mentioned doing promos in about 10min, which is ridiculous.

wowie said:

And I'm taking into account my machine is on a pretty old setup. If anybody has a Ryzen 2700 or better, render times will be at least half of what I'm seeing now at pretty much the same power consumption.

Well after doing a handfull of testrenders I can already see a definite improvement:)

Made some adjustments to the surfaces. Rendered this one in progressive mode and 10x10 pixelsamples. Slightly faster but a little more noise, should have upped shadow samples more. It's a shame that progressive mode resets the pixelfilter. Anyway, I feel the adjustments I make to the surfaces make more sense now. Testing continues;)

Sven Dullah

Couldn't resist picking this up, in the fast grab now I seem to have a weakness for really old and outdated stuff Pleasent surprise, many morphs and nice rigging, easy to pose. Couldn't find a Hydra awe preset so had to convert it manually It comes with diffuse- and bump textures, used the bump for displacement, worked like a charm:) No gamma issues, so your tweaking really seems to have done the trick, wowie! Much easier to find a good balance:)

 

Sven Dullah

wowie said:

Sven Dullah said:

I've mentioned that I usually have to do some gamma correction in postwork, and so I've tried to increase gamma for the env. shader with HDRIs. Haven't really worked out though.

Hard to say since each HDRI is different. So, if you're changing gamma in postwork, do you do it because it's too bright or too dark?

It's like it's missing both low and hi end.

wowie said:

If it's too dark, then the HDRI probably doesn't come with a lot of range and most likely best be used as background. You can always use a 2nd environment sphere with overexposed settings to add more diffuse light.

Sven Dullah said:

Maybe the blackbody fix for the surfaces will help?

I don't think so. The temperature / white balance isn't applied to the envionment sphere ambient output. They only work on diffuse, be it on the environment sphere or any surface with AWE Surface. But you can always tint the ambient if you like.

Hmm I somehow missed your post:( Basically I've increased contrast and brightness a bit, and most HDRIs are from HDRI Haven so should be descent quality, I always look at the specs before downloading any of them. Most of them have "very high dynamic range". I asked you about this a while back and you said gamma adjustment should affect global illumination, did I miss something?

Sven Dullah

The temperature / white balance isn't applied to the envionment sphere ambient output. They only work on diffuse, be it on the environment sphere or any surface with AWE Surface. But you can always tint the ambient if you like.

So when I change the temp for the aweEnvironment light node it only affects diffuse for every surface that uses diffuse, that's what you're saying? So for a true temp change I need to adjust the ambient color as well?

Sorry for all these stupid questions but I need to be sure I understand:)

Edit: After giving this a little more thought, if I want a cooler overall lighting, adjusting the temp of the aweEnvironment and/or arealights should be enough, that should affect all diffuse surfaces and the indirect light that bounces off them. Thus affecting the ambient light in the scene. Only surfaces not affected would be metals, glass, water that have no diffuse active + surfaces with the environmental shader that doesn't have diffuse active. Correct? So what advantage would it be to tint the ambient color for the env. sphere? I've done that many times, just don't really undrstand the difference between tinting the diffuse color or the ambience color, if the ambient input uses the diffuse output:D

wowie

Sven Dullah said:

So when I change the temp for the aweEnvironment light node it only affects diffuse for every surface that uses diffuse, that's what you're saying?

Yes. Specular will not be affected, though reflection will be indirectly affected since any reflection of the diffuse will be affected.

Sven Dullah said:

So for a true temp change I need to adjust the ambient color as well?

Depends on what you want. If you want to retain a neutral white balance, then your light, be it from ambient or light shader, needs to be adjusted. If you want your white to be slightly warmer when you use a warmer white balance, then there's no need to adjust light temperature.

Think of this way. Temperature on the AWE Environment light is going to affect both indirect diffuse and direct diffuse. Temperature on your lights is going to affect (mostly) direct diffuse.

Mustakettu85

Sven Dullah said:

Couldn't resist picking this up, in the fast grab now I seem to have a weakness for really old and outdated stuff Pleasent surprise, many morphs and nice rigging, easy to pose. 

Some of that "old and outdated stuff" is actually timeless. Like the hydra.

The problem is, like, the wheat from the chaff, that sort of thing. Which actually applies to content released in 2019 as well, of course. 

Sven Dullah

Mustakettu85 said:

Sven Dullah said:

Couldn't resist picking this up, in the fast grab now I seem to have a weakness for really old and outdated stuff Pleasent surprise, many morphs and nice rigging, easy to pose. 

Some of that "old and outdated stuff" is actually timeless. Like the hydra.

The problem is, like, the wheat from the chaff, that sort of thing. Which actually applies to content released in 2019 as well, of course. 

I was lucky with this one though:)

Sven Dullah

wowie said:

Sven Dullah said:

So when I change the temp for the aweEnvironment light node it only affects diffuse for every surface that uses diffuse, that's what you're saying?

Yes. Specular will not be affected, though reflection will be indirectly affected since any reflection of the diffuse will be affected.

Sven Dullah said:

So for a true temp change I need to adjust the ambient color as well?

Depends on what you want. If you want to retain a neutral white balance, then your light, be it from ambient or light shader, needs be adjusted. If you want your white to be slightly warmer when you use a warmer white balance, then there's no need to adjust light temperature.

Think of this way. Temperature on the AWE Environment light is going to affect both indirect diffuse and direct diffuse. Temperature on your lights is going to affect (mostly) direct diffuse.

Tks, got it!

Sven Dullah

OMFG! Just started playing with the animateable surfaces...need I say more

I'm on my old laptop atm. and don't have key/graphmate installed, wondering if the keyframes show up and can be edited? Anyways, having loads of fun:) Endless possibilities...

Sven Dullah

The story only gets better, just saw this:

Render script have been updated to support rendering of Garibaldi hair.

Sven Dullah

Copied this from the freebie thread, tks wowie!

AWE Surface 1.2

Changelog

• AWE Surface can now import most of iray Uber shader values. Users should use the newly bundled 'AWE Transfer Uber' script after applying AWE Surface to transfer the values to AWE Surface settings.
• Added camera based exposure limit options (f-stop, ISO and shutter time). Scene wide controls is accessible via the updated AWE Environment light (can be found in aweShading Kit).
• Added support for normal mapping.
• Added support for vector displacement. Depending on the texture and amount of displacement, users will need to tweak displacement bounds manually.
• Added UV Projection mapping with several modes to choose from: planar (screen aligned), cylindrical, spherical, triplanar.
• Bias now takes into account values from displacement textures when displacement is enabled.
• Corrected erroneous bias when transmission is enabled. Added Transmission Bias so users can do manual offsets when needed. Defaults to -1 (minus 1).
• Transmission shadow now renders correctly. Previously, it will exhibit blocky artifacts with path traced area lights.
• Tweaked Russian roulette weights for diffuse rays. The shader will now only scale down importance at ray depth higher than 3 (previously it was 1). With this change, diffuse effectively renders the same as using full weight at very high ray depth ( > 6 ). Performance is unaffected.
• Subsurface filtered strength is now a percentage of actual subsurface strength value (with texture mask taken into account). Previously, this was separate and caused problems of uneven SSS strength across some surfaces.
• Subsurface now will use 'usetopology' and 'smooth'. Together with other improvements, subsurface should be much less noisy.
• Rendering with subsurface now produces the same result both in the built-in 3delight renderer and the 3delight standalone renderer (tested with the 3delight 12.5.9 build). As a side effect, rendering subsurface is slightly faster (around 5%).
• Revised energy conservation scheme for subsurface and diffuse. The new code doesn't produce speckles even without clamping. As a result, diffuse input for subsurface is now unclamped.
• Revised blackbody code. The new code should be more accurate than the previous one.
• Reworked opacity code and optimizations. The new code simply blends between original values in the textures and filtered values depending on optimization level. Optimization to Russian roulette depending on opacity allows the shader to render opacity mapped surfaces with negligible hit on render times (even with the original values without any optimization).
• Changed default Opacity Optimization to 0%

You can find the transfer script inside the file 'AWE Transfer Uber.zip'

AWE Surface 1.1

Changelog

• Fix faulty reference to actual specular BRDF used. Earlier builds would use GGX when Cook Torrance is selected and use Cook Torrance with GGX.
• In terms of render times, Ashihkmin Shirley will be fastest, GGX is slightly slower, with Cook Torrance being the slowest.
• Adjusted Ashihkmin Shirley output at grazing angles so it matches GGX output.
• Lowered minimum roughness values for all lobes. This allows very sharp, practically perfect (mirror) reflections.
• Cook Torrance have a massive performance impact when max diffuse depth of the material using it is set above 1. Set max diffuse depth to 1 for all surfaces using Cook Torrance BRDF to minimize the issue.
• Removed clamp and extraneous code from coat/specular bsdf when using point/spot/distant lights.
• Adjusted Russian roulette weights used with ray tracing. This produces less noticeable dimming of specular highlights and reflection for renders with high pixel samples (more than 4x4).
• Adjusted coat visibility in reflections and refractions. Previously, coat layer will not be rendered on reflections/refractions of the coated object.
• Adjusted opacity visibility in reflections and refractions. Previously, opacity will render fully opaque on reflections/refractions.
• Reworked opacity code to allow gradual transition between fully opaque and fully transparent. Added new optimizations which results in 10% faster render times for opacity mapped surfaces.
• Reworked erroneous exposure limits. Previously it would produce darker areas near the light source when light source intensity/exposure is very high.
• Reworked bump code to avoid mesh cracking do too intense bump strength.
• Reworked displacement and displacement bounds code to avoid displacement exceeding bounds.
• Added a displacement bounds multiplier to tweak displacement bounds. This can be adjusted to optimize displacement bounds usage.
• Implemented additional importance sampling technique for diffuse. This results in up to 90% faster render times for diffuse surfaces.
• The new importance sampling also takes into account irradiance samples. This results in up to 50% faster render times with more than 512 irradiance samples on top of the improvements from the new importance sampling optimization.
• Added dynamic bias based on displacement strength to raytracing shadeops to account for displacements. Previously, GI will not be calculated correctly when displacements are used. With the added bias, GI will look the same with or without displacements.
• Specular and Global Illumination Exposure can now be used to offset exposure beyond scene wide exposure from AWE Environment light.
• The shader now uses DS internal dPds instead of calculating its own. This results in no more artifacts when anisotropy is used.

wowie

Sven Dullah said:

OMFG! Just started playing with the animateable surfaces...need I say more

I'm on my old laptop atm. and don't have key/graphmate installed, wondering if the keyframes show up and can be edited? Anyways, having loads of fun:) Endless possibilities...

I'm thinking it should be possible to support texture sheets for importing short animated loops. Should be useful for fire based light (campfire, torch etc). But it wouldn't show up in the viewport.

Or do a blend between textures.

Sven Dullah said:

The story only gets better, just saw this:

Render script have been updated to support rendering of Garibaldi hair.

Gotta thank Mustakettu and totalbiscuit for that. I just pasted a line into the script.

Sven Dullah

wowie said:

Sven Dullah said:

OMFG! Just started playing with the animateable surfaces...need I say more

I'm on my old laptop atm. and don't have key/graphmate installed, wondering if the keyframes show up and can be edited? Anyways, having loads of fun:) Endless possibilities...

I'm thinking it should be possible to support texture sheets for importing short animated loops. Should be useful for fire based light (campfire, torch etc). But it wouldn't show up in the viewport.

Hey, that  would be truly awesome.

kyoto kid

Sven Dullah said:

The story only gets better, just saw this:

Render script have been updated to support rendering of Garibaldi hair.

...JOY!!!!!!!!

Sven Dullah

wowie said:

Sven Dullah said:

OMFG! Just started playing with the animateable surfaces...need I say more

I'm on my old laptop atm. and don't have key/graphmate installed, wondering if the keyframes show up and can be edited? Anyways, having loads of fun:) Endless possibilities...

I'm thinking it should be possible to support texture sheets for importing short animated loops. Should be useful for fire based light (campfire, torch etc). But it wouldn't show up in the viewport.

Or do a blend between textures.

Sven Dullah said:

The story only gets better, just saw this:

Render script have been updated to support rendering of Garibaldi hair.

Gotta thank Mustakettu and totalbiscuit for that. I just pasted a line into the script.

Thank You Mustakettu&totalbiscuit

 

Sven Dullah

Trying to create some underwater ambience.Simply instanced the fish to get a sense of depth. Lighting is an environment sphere with a black to white gradient + a very large  horizontal emitter plane on top. Fiddled with the diffuse and ambient color for the env. sphere along with temperature for the aweEnvironment. In the absence of volume shaders I had to come up with something that kinda works, using transmission absorption. Rendertime with 10x10 pixelsamples still only 15 min. Feel free to tell me this is not the way to do it

kyoto kid

...ooh tuna. I just picked it up with a bunch of other fish in a PC+ special deal.

Sven Dullah

I'm beginning to think this is actually working

Sven Dullah

Hmm after two days with the new build I have to say everything looks much cleaner, specular highlights, shadows, less noise, adjustments to surfaces make more sense, rendering is faster, wow...now I just need to find that hidden "make art" button

wowie

Sven Dullah said:

Hmm after two days with the new build I have to say everything looks much cleaner, specular highlights, shadows, less noise, adjustments to surfaces make more sense, rendering is faster, wow...now I just need to find that hidden "make art" button

Thank you. That's exactly how I felt after finding out the subsurface absorption thing. What we have with AWE Surface, aweShading Kit and 3delight now is a very fast, robust, powerful, consistent tool.

khorneV2

Is it me or all types of lights, shaders, setups now works with AWE surface ? And it is faster

 

Sven Dullah

Hmm, found an issue...animated surfaces won't save with the scene. So if you do something more complex, be sure to render it out and don't close the scene until you're certain i'ts a keeper!

wowie

Sven Dullah said:

Hmm, found an issue...animated surfaces won't save with the scene. So if you do something more complex, be sure to render it out and don't close the scene until you're certain i'ts a keeper!

Here's an easy workaround. Create the loop with your animated properties. Once done, save shader preset(s) for each of the keyframe. That takes care of settings for each keyframe.

Next, use the pose preset to simply mark frames. Create a puppeteer dot for your object. At each keyframe, click on the dot so DS timeline will save settings for that object transform properties for that frame. Save that out as an animated pose preset.

With a new scene, you can simply apply the animated pose preset to add marked keyframes on the timeline, then apply the shader settings per each created keyframes.

It maybe possible to actually save out an animated surface properties preset, but that means creating a new preset type for DS. Probably via a script. But right now, the above process works.

wowie

khorneV2 said:

Is it me or all types of lights, shaders, setups now works with AWE surface ?

Just curious, what kind of lights/setups didn't work with before?

khorneV2 said:

And it is faster

Yes. Like I said before, it is actually possible to get it rendering even faster (at least for diffuse/global illuminatio), but I haven't figured out how to do it properly (yet).