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Garibaldi uses the Marchner hair shader. The TRT and TR values are analogous to Transmission and Translucency so I tried playing with those soon after Wowie had made it possible to use Garibaldi.
After an hour of rendering and still no further than about 2% complete, I gave it up as a bad idea. Using pretty much any value in the specular channels blew out the hair entirely.
The only channel that seemed to reliably work was base colour.
I suppose it's possible to make the AWE shader work well on the hair and render in a reasonable amount of time, but I haven't figured it out. Recall that I mentioned it took more than twice as long to render with the hair converted.
Anyway, I used the firefly free render to mask the fireflies in the other render and got this.
Well that's a very nice workaround, looks great!
Ok I found the DAZ troll I made, can't remember the settings (pretty sure I used translucency) I used, but 38 min. is not bad IMO, but yes it looks rather dull, so probably had some problems getting the highlights to look nice;) But that's HDRI lighting, as I said, need to look into this when I get the time. Another thing you can try, to reduce rendertimes, is to decrease the diffuse- and specular/reflection bounce depth, but maybe you already did=)
And using transmission is a very bad idea, I think we can agree on
Thanks. I look forward to not having to use work arounds.
Maybe it's just that my machine is so old (Methusela old in digital time), but I find that there isn't much difference in render time between IBLM and AWE. However, the AWE renders do look a lot better.
By the way, have you been able to get the shadow catcher to work properly? Every time I try to use it, it just renders black even though the plane I put it on says it is using the shadow catcher shader.
Hmm, no, couldn't even get it to show in the content library, lol. Must have done something wrong. I've been working with actual geometry and area lights lately, so haven't really needed the shadowcatcher. Another thing on the to-do-list. Timeoff also mentioned having some issues.
@Gone
So I've spent the last couple of hours trying to understand awe with GB hair, and it doesn't make much sense really=)
This is what I ended up with, she obviously has a bad hair day LOLOL. I really suck at styling those things, should practice a bit more. And should have made the strands thinner.
I used 3 emitter planes + a jpeg with the environmental sphere, just FYI, progressive render, about 30 min. Also made screenshots of the settings, for what it's worth, pretty weird stuff. I'm sure there is a better way to do it, but some things seem pretty obvious to me: Set IoR to 2.5 or more, set the specular BRDF to AshikhminShirley Classic, and use rather high roughness values for the specular lobes. I didn't use SS here, but it would probably look nice (and add to rendertimes).
Ok so I need to test some more, but if someone has a better way, please share;)
Made the strands thinner and gave it a little more randomness and volume, set the GB color to a dark brown, weird that it has such an impact on the final output, tweaked the awe settings a bit, turned down translucency, doesn't seem to work well with GB hair, set diffuse roughness to 0 and changed the specular values, I'm sure there is a sweet spot somewhere, one obviously needs to first get the hair topology right, then find the settings that work with it. Think this is a bit closer to what I had in mind: (unfinished spotrender)
...and the settings:
....seems the rough area is where the hair and cranium meet. With transmapped hair there usually is an underlying cap with its own texture.
I need to watch the video on how Pixar developed the hair for Merida in Brave again. They also used a strand based system (proprietary) which is similar to what Garibaldi uses and did it in layers.
So much to learn, so little time
Well you can use a cap and paint the hair on it, just wanted to see if I can find some surface settings that work;) Not really there yet...
...indeed. I'm just barely getting back up to speed now since the meltdown late last year. Still have most of my Freebie and non Daz store content to manually install and categorise again as none of that has any metadata and naming conventions were likely created by either throwing darts at a board or rolling dice, not sure. Also still need to rearrange my Poser format library in the same manner.
Hehe I know what you mean, one would expect certain things to be logical...anyway, hope to see some awe renders soon-ish;) Would love to hear your thoughts about it.
Well, you seem to be getting better specular results than I ever did. Just out of curiosity, have you tried to make the hair blonde or something other than brunette? This is where I found the diffuse was apparently not doing anything.
If you want to keep the hair count low, you can fill in the bald spots with the Gariballdi version of a skull cap. Load a second copy of the hair and reduce the length to a couple of centimeters. Comb the hair flat and give it a different seed number. This will fill in the bald areas.
Also, at the parting point, make sure the strand segments closest to the head are not laid flat. You can comb the segments closest to the head back to the parting point and forward away from the head to help with the balding look. I hope that made sense.
...first just getting back into re-creating some of my characters. Lost a few freebie morphs as well as many of my presets so have to work around that. Did find a saved copy of the bus stop scene but need to relocate a few items that were freebies which I used. or else it will load with a lot of "grey boxes".
Nah this was the first attempt, need to look at that. And I still don't understand why the GB hair colors affect the end result after conversion, definitely something strange going on.
Tks Gone, nice tips! Yeah I find it a bit hard to control the comb, I'll have a new go at it;)
Yeah I get those too when opening certain old scenes created on my previous computer.
Ok, first version of the blond GB hair
. Progressive render 8x8 pixelsamples, reduced diffuse bounce depth to 1 and specular bounce depth to 4 for the hair, rendertime 32 min
Increased diff and spec bounce depth to 4 and 8, pixelsamples 10x10, nonprogressive render, 35 min. so apparently the bounce depth doesn't have a great impact on rendertimes, and on the iMac, as I have stated in previous comments, progressive is good for fast previews but not for final renders;) (Btw, tweaked the eyes a bit, noticed some burned in highlights that I got rid of)
Ok so I think I got it now. You select the base and tip color in the Garibaldi editor, the awe diffuse color is ignored. Diffuse strength works as expected. Pretty confusing but I can live with that;)
ETA: Actually this is great, the base and top blending works:) Still have to see if the other color parameters work...
Added a light, set the diff/spec bounce depth back to defaults,tweaked surface settings and hair some more, non progressive 10x10 PS render, 41 min.
GB distribution settings:
Currently used awe settings:
Yeah, I noticed that it was picking up the base/tip colour from Garibaldi but was ignoring everyhing from the DS side of the shader. I've gotten used to tweaking the GB settings with the DS settings so wasn't paying proper attention. It also picks up the salting and peppering by the way.
I see your spec colours are really dark - that's probably where I was going wrong since I was leaving them white. With the regular shader, white gives a nice reflection - in AWE, it blows out the hair. Didn't even think to change the colour as I was getting so frustrated.
Now that you've shown me the error of my ways, I'll have to see what I can do with this.
Curiously, I was getting the render slowed down by the AWE surfaces as opposed to the other even though I was useing AWE lighting. As I mentioned earlier, The AWE hair took twice as long to render as it did with the DS shader. Don't know why that was happening.
I noticed the same thing when converting to the DS default shader, only diffuse strength matters, yeah glad we got that figured out, and very happy that it follows morphs that have autofollow enabled:) Have yet to try exporting as .obj and trying to make it conform...
Haha when I started playing with it yesterday I said a couple of things I've never said before, those dark hair settings I came up with are pretty far out
.
And I need to learn all the tools, only looked at the basic stuff so far. Is there a way to erase painted areas btw? I found out you can repaint with grayscale set to 0, but maybe there's a better way?
Hmm only guessing, probably a lot more raytracing going on with awe. I think you should get a better result when you find the right settings. Did you try to reduce the diffuse and specular bounce depth in the surface pane? Defaults are 6 and 16 IIRC, you can probably gain some time by lowering them a bit, too low values will make it look dull, of course. Still, it seems the GB hair renders pretty much as fast as a complex transmapped hair, so I think it's all good:) Hmm...haven't tried SS yet...
. I had some serious problems when trying to use the AshikhminShirleyClassic on transmapped hair, render just stalled. Seems to work pretty well with GB hair.
Just to clarify, when I said DS side of the shader, I was referring to the Garibaldi default that you access in the surfaces pane.
Setting greyscale to 0 is how you set the eraser. Quick caveate, sometimes, when you change the settings in the paint panel, nothing seems to happen. If that happens, just close the Garibaldi window and reopen and everything will be fine.
Did you notice the symmetry setting? If you set it to U, then it will paint both sides of the head at once. You need to be mindful of the UV layout however. To work properly, the UV map must be symmetrical. If you try to use symmetry on the arms or legs, for example, it won't work the way you expect because the maps are not symmetrical. Some older maps aren't properly centred so they will also give odd results.
Now that you've pointed out some areas where I was going wrong, I'll need to play some more with the settings and see how it goes. I guess it's just a matter of getting used to a new shader. I've been doing things a certain way for so long, I forget I need to do things differently for a new shader.
Tks for the tips! Yeah I used the symmetry settings, didn't know about the uv maps though;) I know what you mean by doing things a certain way, that's why I converted to the DS default for some testing, didn't have the energy to learn the Garibaldi version=) Let me know how you're doing, you may well find a totally different approach than me
Good to hear the fireflies issue sorted out. I figured it was something to do with the use of point/spot/distant light. If I remember correctly, the default Garibaldi hair shader also uses ambient so that might also add to the fireflies.
Here's Future Biscuit's Pony Tail Blonde Female with the new hair shader.
No fireflies.
The paint panel uses the UV map to let you paint. That's why you can't paint an unmapped object and why you need to collapse the UV's for G3 and G8 figures. Garibaldi uses the old UV layout method and doesn't understand the new UDIMS method. If you don't collapse the UV's, the only surface you can paint is the face since that is the only surface in the UV space that Garibaldi understands.
Wowie: yo're confusing me - the Garibaldi author called himself Futurebiscuit not Totalbiscuit.
So, when do we get to play with the new hair shader?
Oh yes I remember we were discussing this in some other Garibaldi thread last fall. Well, I still mostly use Genesis 1, and ocasionally M4 for my characters, so not a big problem;)
@wowie
Looks real nice. I'm very curious...what's the main difference between awe and this new hair shader? Does it render faster? Different specular models? Will it work for transmapped hair also? Or is it only for Garibaldi hair? Any helpful hints about using awe on GB hair, while we're waiting?
So, I was mucking about with spec settings similar to what you had and was getting nowhere enjoyable. The hair was either flat, washed out, or blown out. I finally dropped the spec and used reflection only.
Got much better results but the right side has light where it should be shadow. Presumably, that's reflection from the face???
Anyway, it's still taking twice as long to render with AWE shader hair than with GB shader hair.
Reflection only? On the bangs too? They seem to have stronger highlights than the rest of the hair. Did you use an HDRI and/or other lights? You're probably right about the right side reflecting something. How much specular roughness did you use, and did you use both lobes? What happens if you make the strands much thinner and increase the amount instead? Could help with scattering the reflections or highlights.
Wowie mentioned that the Garibaldi shader uses ambience, any way of disabling that? Maybe that would fix the firefly problem, just a though...
Anyway, that looks actually quite good, very clean, except for some noise on the skin, which should be an easy fix by upping the Irradiance samples and maybe SS samples too. Have to try turning off specular and see what happens:)
...meanwhile, the last one in my presidential campaign series;)
I use AWE environment with an HDRI and an AWE distant light. I messed with the spec quite a bit but I think with this render I only used spec 2 with default roughness and strength around 50%.
Garibaldi does have ambient, but it is turned off by default.
Skin seems to be a real problem for me. I've had irradience and SSS maxed out and still gotten noise. It depends on the texture I use - some render clean, others, not so much. This one is about middle of the road. HDRI's also play their role in noise so it's a real balancing act to get everything to play nice together.
I'll likely come back and play with this some more in a few days but there's only just so much frustration I can take in one sitting.
Fun story by the way. Saw the sequence in the other thread. I thought Trump was the US president.