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Yup, there is a visible difference. In my experience, turning DoF off it doesn't save _that_ much time, maybe a minute or two...
A question about SSS (sub surface scattering): Haven't had time to test this, when rendering with a HDRI if you get a grainy render you can up the Irradience samples both for the problematic surfaces and the environment sphere. That helps a lot, but sometimes going as high as 4096 (from the default 128) doesn't remove noise completely, Could it be the SSS samples (defaulting at 256)? How much does those affect rendertimes, and will increasing them help with noise in shady areas? If somebody has tested, please share, if not... well it's on my "to do" list for now
I don't think this was included in the user guide so I post it here, quoting wowie (from the 3DL Lab thread):
To be honest, you should be able to have the same render times with mustakettu's Radium AreaPT.
One note on the 2x faster thing - absolutely no point/spot/distant light in the scene. Having just one will kill the performance. So if you care about render times, don't use any of the old lights. Build your scene using geometry area lights and (optionally) an environment sphere. The simpler your emitter geometry, the faster the render. That old subway station I used a long time ago renders at 20 minutes with just area lights applied to the existing geo for lights. When I used a simple plane (instanced many times) as a replacement, render times goes down to 9 minutes.
I just LOVE the area lights:))) 26 emitting planes in this WIP:
... and here is that render I had to do in progressive mode, it took forever lol. Basically I just wanted to test some skin&eye settings and the hair of course. I used the transmaps as specular maps (this was before Kettu shared her advice on the topic), but I feel the progressive mode did something to the raytracing, it came out way too metallic, (or I screwed up some settings lol) so will redo it without those maps. Also trying to create a "studio like" environment to test skins and stuff;) That's an HDRI with one hotspot and 3 area light planes;) Comments or critique is mostly welcome as always...how does that skin look for a young teen? Well pretty strong makeup, that is an easy fix;)
Just an FYI on my setup, I'm on a dinosaur - quad core duo running windows vista.
I believe KK was also complaing about progressive a while back.
...yeah, mostly anti aliasing issues I was running into on bright highlights using IBL Master. Bucket mode was still a bit faster as well but that was giving me render artefacts. Most of the slowness was due to an old Nehalem i7 2.8 GHz CPU (only one generation newer than your Core 2 Quad).
Yeah need to hit that Megabucks lotto to get a 32 core Threadripper.
Ok so it's not a Mac issue then. But obviously scripted progressive is SLOOOOW with aweSurface. When I render with IBLM and the regular 3DL with the vanilla shaders, progressive is actually 3 times faster.
But, even if rendering with 2 DS instances naturally slows down each render process (by maybe 80%?) it's awesome that it works=) And rendering in one and setting up scenes or converting stuff or whatever in the other is a huge timesaver;)
Tested upping the rendersettings a fair bit, and can confirm what wowie said.
Compared to the raytrace final preset this took roughly 10% longer. Accordingly lowering those settings won't save you much time. This took 55 min to render:
To cut down on rendertimes the main things you can do seem to be lowering pixel samples, turning off GI for metal and highly reflective stuff,using lowpoly emitters, turning off reflections for things that don't need them or is in the background, and not mixing standard DS lights with the arealights, adjusting Irradience samples for surfaces and the environment sphere, fill me in if I forgot something significant;)
...that looks really good
The opacity issues are likely solveable by playing around with opacity filter values. Again, which is why I'm still on DS 4.7 since it's way quicker to see adjustments in IPR.
Opacity enabled, 100% optimizations, filter 1 5%, filter 2 45%.
As for leaves, you probably should stick with pure translucency without transmission. If you do need that extra boost, use SSS instead of transmission. I find it's easier to think of it like this - for diffuse rays, use translucency. For specular rays, use transmission. From an artist point of view, diffuse translucency is limited to a roughly lit look, while specular transmission allows you to clearly see the object behind the surface/model. Hence why you don't use SSS for murky water or rough glass.
As mustakettu pointed out, specular strength is actually relatively constant for a material. Specular maps is technically a 'cavity' map, a 'cheap' hack/approach to say that parts of the surfaces somewhat hidden (occluded) from the light. With a good bump/displacement, there's less need of it.
If you need variable roughness, the specular map to roughness is somewhat my effort to have some sort of variable roughness without actually using a roughness map. It basically compare map values and reflectivity of the surface based on the IOR value used. If the map values are higher, it assumes you want that part to be very smooth, so you'll have stronger reflections/highlights.
tks @wowie, great tips:) I really did try to find a setting on the fence that worked, but I'll check again. I suppose the distance to the camera also plays a small part? And yes of course, pure translucency for leaves
tks kk, I'm really enjoying playing with this new stuff!
Don't think so. Those shots were done in IPR, so they may be a bit sharper. These are with IPR and the render script (draft).
Well, that's odd, those look very good. I'll have to try your settings one more time
. Tks for taking the time to render those
@wowie I'm continuing our discussion about my US2 issues here;) First let me post the very first awe conversion I did. Did not notice that the problem is already there, a black "shadow" appearing out of nowhere cross the street:
And for others that did not follow this discussion, this is the render that brought up this discussion, another black line crossing the street:
Now I'm in the process of doing a number of testrenders to see if the camera angle makes any difference, after turning motion blur off.
This is what I have so far: (sorry for the crappy quality)
I deleted the bike and character, applied the base awe shader to everything, tried turning the backface lighting off in preferences (made no difference) and hit render:
Changed the hdr to the default ruins, now I'm kind of running out of ideas of what to try next... better go do something else LOL
Ok so I ended up using 100% optimization, filter 1 at 2%, filter 2 at 45(default)%. Tks again, I felt I had tried everything, I was wrong;) Things really happen when you move those sliders
...aaaand... more problems... I set up this quick scene, converted the stuff, chose raytracer final with progressive, rendertime 6 min
Then I wanted to render without progressive, it stalls, it won't complete the first render pass, screenshot attached:
When I click cancel the pass completes: (kind of)
I have a feeling it would render forever:(
As mentioned I'm on an IMac, OS 10.11.6, Intel Iris Pro Graphics 6200 1536 MB, 8GB RAM. Should I file a bug report?
And I did reboot just to be sure, it renders exactly the same everytime.
So experimenting with the coat layer to see if you could create a nice metallic flake paint. not really there yet, but closing in;)
The coat can use different tiling which is a REALLY nice feature! Very nice I would think for masking tiling on large surfaces like ground planes etc. Here I wanted to use some of the textures included with the vanilla shaders/shader presets I own. I found that the easiest way to do this is to create a primitive and apply the shader to it. Then go to the surface tab and just insert that texture from the pop up list into the slot, instead of applying the shader directly to the car paint and then having to convert it once again;)
Maybe someone has come up with a better method?
Picked up Misty River by Stonemason today (in the fastgrab) and made a testrender. All the rock surfaces use normal maps only, no displacement maps, so I used the diffuse maps in the displacement channel. I used translucency at about 50% and translucency shadow strength at roughly the same for all leaves. It came out a bit grainy, Irradience samples were at default 128. Also there are some black spots here and there, I have made some adjustments and have a new render coming up...
This one rendered with the raytracer final, non IPR in 50 min. And I'm glad it did not stall;)
I really shouldn't have said that
...ok so now it won't render even with progressive enabled, so I re-applie the awe base shader, no, new scene, loaded the set, converted everything to the base shader, DS decided to quit. Re-launched DS, loaded the set, applied awe, now it rendered in both modes, and pretty fast, obviously. Started a new scene, loaded my version of the set (saved as a sub set). Hit render, DS crashed. Re-launched, loaded my set, hit render, nothing happens...
ETA: Tried rendering with IBLM environment&light, same thing... eternal render... need more coffee
UPDATE: Started from scratch and did pretty much the same as the first time, happy to announce it's rendering now in both modes
Hmmm I might be onto something here... I just opened this scene, selected everything and applied the DS default shader, then I went back and applied the awe baseshader and hit render... it rendered in both modes without issues. Then I modified the surfaces again like I did the first time, it still renders lol! I must be doing something wrong but I can't figure it out...so my workflow pretty much is like this: Load props/environments/characters, apply the awe base shader, modify surfaces, try to render, apply some other shader like DS default OR start all over, apply the awe base shader, render, be happy
And here is the final render (with a different HDRI). In the first version all displacement min. and max. values were -1 and 1. In the new one I used that -1 and -0.59 recipe, and the shape of the rocks suddenly started to make sense.
...looks really good compared to the top image.
Tks, it was a bit of a struggle, but it's working like a charm now!! I'll post another version in a couple of hours, working on lighting and trying to create a fog effect;) Just because it is impossible LOL!
Try pixel samples first - going beyond 12 makes sense only if you have strong DoF and an alias-prone pattern in the background, but if you're under 12... you get the drift. It may be faster than maxing out irradiance and upping SSS samples.
But of course 512 SSS samples is a value I don't mind using... we have the weight optimisation on anyway.
Y'know, it may be just me, but I totally can't gauge skin quality in "real-world units" when dealing with clearly stylised toon morphs.
I hope you remember that control maps and colour maps require different gamma correction, and hence always make on-the-fly copies via renaming and setting the right gamma in the "Layered image editor".
Or, better yet, take those colour maps into an image editor and desaturate and further correct them manually so as to get the best result.
So in other words, just going directly from Iray Uber to aweSurface makes DS buggy?