The Official aweSurface Test Track

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  • Sven DullahSven Dullah Posts: 7,621
    wowie said:

    Okay I found the culpritblush, transmission (thin wall) was enabled on the windows. Using only opacity I was able to set samples to 128 (adaptive) on the floor, walls and ceiling without getting noticeable grain:) Also moved the emitters and adjusted light intensity...8x8 PS progressive render 1 h 11 min. (HD size)

    Do you mean thin glass?

    Yes, sorry:)

    wowie said:

    Anyway, I'm glad you found what's causing the problem. 1 hour render time is more inline to what I expect.

    For such scenes, you should stick to enabling opacity and set opacity to 0% and disable 'Multiply Specular with Opacity' on glass windows. Both diffuse and specular rays will have an easier time finding the light or the outdoor environment sphere.

    Yeah, using transmission easily doubles rendertimes with these scenes.

    wowie said:

    The next update will allow adaptive rays to do so without setting those parameters though. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a way to do something similar with specular/refleciton, so it only applies to diffuse lighting.

    Well, sounds like a nice improvementyes

  • Mustakettu85Mustakettu85 Posts: 2,933

    There are some problem areas, yes, as I mentioned. Got most of them sorted by adjusting smoothing angle and/or enabling "use face forward".

    I'd say that when the viewport shows a polygon as clearly black, it's best to flip the normal rather than ask the renderer to put a bandaid on it. And instead of messing around with smoothing angles, I'd try subdivision.

    Sending better geometry to a renderer is like getting a clear recording in a proper environment as compared to a garage source you need to run through FFT noise reduction first.

    I converted those curved glass tables to SubD because they looked a bit jagged, converted nicely. But now I'm confused, you told me a while ago that 3DL is limited to SubD level 1, more than that will only show in the viewport. And after some testing with HD morphs I came to the same conclusion. So are you saying this has been fixed now?

    What I told you is that no matter how far you move either slider, 3Delight will always render the limit surface. Limit surface is the analytical "maximum" smoothness. Not "level 1". Levels are for tesselated meshes. 3Delight renders subdivision surfaces using something like this: https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.20.7798

    You could say there is "one" subdivision level in 3Delight - but it's the highest imaginable one.

    The viewport will show a lower subdivision.

    For instance, with HD morphs, you need a higher viewport sub-d to match the detail 3Delight gives you at "simply subdivision enabled". I needed an exact vascularity preview once, which took a "level 3" viewport at least.

    Cat* subdivisions are both rendered as actual subdivision surfaces. Loop and bilinear - I just checked again, and they are still rendered as mesh, no change. So with loop and bilin, there _will_ be a difference in render when you change the render level slider (HD morphs only work properly with Catmark anyway, plus loop and bilin have quite limited usefulness for props as well). 

    And again, DS has the geometry tool, and it's "the" tool for salvaging content at the highest possible quality. Not only can you flip normals, you can split material zones and assign subdivision weight to edges and/or vertices. 

    If you have geometry that needs rounder edges, for example, and does not fall apart under a Cat* but gets all puffed out and too rounded, a quick fix is to run "select all edges" and assign a mid-range weight (around 5). The "proper" way, of course, is to isolate the edges required for the shape and only weigh them, but that's often too clunky because however nice the geometry tool may be (it does have loop selection, for instance), it's still not what you get in a modeling app.

    Catmark vs Catmull-Clark, for props it depends on the model.

    Actually I have no idea what it's doing in my runtime

    A platinum club freebie, maybe?

  • Sven DullahSven Dullah Posts: 7,621

    Tks Mustakettu, a lot of things I had no idea about. Will eventually have to study all the keyphrases in the link;) Hmm...DS is an amazing piece of free software and if documentation was just a little easier to access ... nah it's me being lazylaugh

  • Sven DullahSven Dullah Posts: 7,621
    edited August 2019

    Something I'm working on...this was rendered with the 1.2 build a while back.

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  • Sven DullahSven Dullah Posts: 7,621
    edited August 2019

    Made a testscene to see if it's even possible to get a clean render using only one lightsource in a fully enclosed environment, and at the same time testing the adaptive sampling.

    So a primitive cube with inverted normals, a light disc with the PTarea light shader. Lightspread angle is set to 45, so only the ceiling is getting hit by direct light. The light disc is visible to the camera but casts no shadows. Progressive 8x8 renders.

    Irradiance samples 1024(adaptive):

    image

    Irradiance samples 2048(adaptive):

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    4096 samples(adaptive)

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    8192 samples(adaptive)

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    Post edited by Sven Dullah on
  • Mustakettu85Mustakettu85 Posts: 2,933

    Tks Mustakettu, a lot of things I had no idea about. Will eventually have to study all the keyphrases in the link;) Hmm...DS is an amazing piece of free software and if documentation was just a little easier to access ... nah it's me being lazylaugh

    One thing that being non-lazy won't cover is the difference between Catmark and Catmull-Clark in the DS case: elsewhere it's the same. But in DS, Catmark is IIRC the Opensubdiv Catmull-Clark, while the Catmull-Clark at the bottom of the dropdown is the older subdiv algo (don't know the source) used at least as far back as DS3. Maybe even 2, but I won't lie, I don't remember if you could convert meshes to proper subdivision surfaces back then. I was busy figuring out how to use the dsDefault shader 10+ years ago :)

    The best way to get the feel for these two is enabling wireframe in the viewport and switching them back and forth on various geometry.

  • Sven DullahSven Dullah Posts: 7,621

    Tks Mustakettu, a lot of things I had no idea about. Will eventually have to study all the keyphrases in the link;) Hmm...DS is an amazing piece of free software and if documentation was just a little easier to access ... nah it's me being lazylaugh

    One thing that being non-lazy won't cover is the difference between Catmark and Catmull-Clark in the DS case: elsewhere it's the same. But in DS, Catmark is IIRC the Opensubdiv Catmull-Clark, while the Catmull-Clark at the bottom of the dropdown is the older subdiv algo (don't know the source) used at least as far back as DS3. Maybe even 2, but I won't lie, I don't remember if you could convert meshes to proper subdivision surfaces back then. I was busy figuring out how to use the dsDefault shader 10+ years ago :)

    The best way to get the feel for these two is enabling wireframe in the viewport and switching them back and forth on various geometry.

    I think I've noticed that the Catmull-Clark renders slightly faster...not a big difference, though. Tks, I'll see if I can solve some of the issues using your tips;)

  • Sven DullahSven Dullah Posts: 7,621

    ...speaking of SubD and HD morphs...I seem to have noticed that HD morphs in some cases are causing firefies. At this moment I have nothing to back up my story, though...

  • Mustakettu85Mustakettu85 Posts: 2,933

    I think I've noticed that the Catmull-Clark renders slightly faster...not a big difference, though. 

    Yes it does tend to render a bit faster. So if you are not using a figure with HD morphs but converting other geometry, if the mesh survives it, it might be a more "frugal" choice.

     

    ...speaking of SubD and HD morphs...I seem to have noticed that HD morphs in some cases are causing firefies. At this moment I have nothing to back up my story, though...

    Fireflies like clipping white specular fireflies, or the coloured subsurface noise?

  • Sven DullahSven Dullah Posts: 7,621
     

    ...speaking of SubD and HD morphs...I seem to have noticed that HD morphs in some cases are causing firefies. At this moment I have nothing to back up my story, though...

    Fireflies like clipping white specular fireflies, or the coloured subsurface noise?

    White specular ones, I played with making skin metallic, so had no diffuse enabled, no SS. It was in progressive mode though, will do some more testing...

  • Sven DullahSven Dullah Posts: 7,621
    edited August 2019

    cryingcryingcrying

    I got the Urban Future 5 by Stonemason, gorgeous set. So I thought hmm let's make a nice night render with glowing neon signs and so on...only to realise the conversion will take weeks.crying

    image

    So will probably settle for a standard 3DL render...the most time consuming thing is every (more or less) surface has a normal map, no bump or displacement maps, and they are not carried over with the conversion, so have to load them manually.crying

    wowie did you make changes to the conversion scripts in the new build? I seem to remember normal maps loaded in the older builds, even when the normal channel was hidden? And yeah I know, you told me NOT to use normals:) But that is a problem with all the newer sets, especially the IRay only stuff, as they rarely come with displacement maps, for natural reasonsfrown

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  • Mustakettu85Mustakettu85 Posts: 2,933

    that is a problem with all the newer sets, especially the IRay only stuff, as they rarely come with displacement maps, for natural reasonsfrown

    There's this GIMP plugin that does both height to normal and normal to height: https://code.google.com/archive/p/gimp-normalmap/

    There's also the DAZ-Deals browser extension (works for desktop Chrome/Opera and Firefox, and also for Firefox on Android), which, among other features, creates a link to the product readme on every store page (for older products, the readme is sometimes not found in the wiki, but for newer stuff it works well), and the readmes usually have links to file lists. These help a lot when deciding whether you need something not well reviewed on the forums (oh yeah, the extension will also pull up gallery renders and forum posts linking to the product).

     

  • Sven DullahSven Dullah Posts: 7,621

    that is a problem with all the newer sets, especially the IRay only stuff, as they rarely come with displacement maps, for natural reasonsfrown

    There's this GIMP plugin that does both height to normal and normal to height: https://code.google.com/archive/p/gimp-normalmap/

    There's also the DAZ-Deals browser extension (works for desktop Chrome/Opera and Firefox, and also for Firefox on Android), which, among other features, creates a link to the product readme on every store page (for older products, the readme is sometimes not found in the wiki, but for newer stuff it works well), and the readmes usually have links to file lists. These help a lot when deciding whether you need something not well reviewed on the forums (oh yeah, the extension will also pull up gallery renders and forum posts linking to the product).

     

    Tks I downloaded the plugin.

    Regarding UF5, I knew it came with only normal maps, I always read the product page's "what's included" very carefully;) I'm just not up to the task of converting hundreds of surfaces right now...not to mention making all the height maps.frown It would be beautiful, though:)

  • Sven DullahSven Dullah Posts: 7,621
    edited August 2019

    ...so instead of fixing the UF5 I decided to do something simpler and converted a character...pleasent surprise, this rather large size render took just over 20 min, non progressive 10x10 ps.

     

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  • Sven DullahSven Dullah Posts: 7,621
    edited August 2019

    Updated a few things on that character...

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  • Mustakettu85Mustakettu85 Posts: 2,933
    edited August 2019

    that is a problem with all the newer sets, especially the IRay only stuff, as they rarely come with displacement maps, for natural reasonsfrown

    There's this GIMP plugin that does both height to normal and normal to height: https://code.google.com/archive/p/gimp-normalmap/

    There's also the DAZ-Deals browser extension (works for desktop Chrome/Opera and Firefox, and also for Firefox on Android), which, among other features, creates a link to the product readme on every store page (for older products, the readme is sometimes not found in the wiki, but for newer stuff it works well), and the readmes usually have links to file lists. These help a lot when deciding whether you need something not well reviewed on the forums (oh yeah, the extension will also pull up gallery renders and forum posts linking to the product).

     

    Tks I downloaded the plugin.

    Regarding UF5, I knew it came with only normal maps, I always read the product page's "what's included" very carefully;) I'm just not up to the task of converting hundreds of surfaces right now...not to mention making all the height maps.frown It would be beautiful, though:)

    If each surface uses a map set of its own, then I surely feel for you.

    I prefer actual file lists (I think they are machine-generated from the installer) to whatever is manually written on the product page. Seen way too many typos and errors on those.

    There's this batch processing plugin - it allows you to execute at least some of other GIMP plugins, you could look into it: https://alessandrofrancesconi.it/projects/bimp/

     

    ...so instead of fixing the UF5 I decided to do something simpler and converted a character...pleasent surprise, this rather large size render took just over 20 min, non progressive 10x10 ps.

    The guy looks nice :)

    I know the hair, and I think I know the pants as well, but where does the jacket come from?

    Post edited by Mustakettu85 on
  • Sven DullahSven Dullah Posts: 7,621

    that is a problem with all the newer sets, especially the IRay only stuff, as they rarely come with displacement maps, for natural reasonsfrown

    There's this GIMP plugin that does both height to normal and normal to height: https://code.google.com/archive/p/gimp-normalmap/

    There's also the DAZ-Deals browser extension (works for desktop Chrome/Opera and Firefox, and also for Firefox on Android), which, among other features, creates a link to the product readme on every store page (for older products, the readme is sometimes not found in the wiki, but for newer stuff it works well), and the readmes usually have links to file lists. These help a lot when deciding whether you need something not well reviewed on the forums (oh yeah, the extension will also pull up gallery renders and forum posts linking to the product).

     

    Tks I downloaded the plugin.

    Regarding UF5, I knew it came with only normal maps, I always read the product page's "what's included" very carefully;) I'm just not up to the task of converting hundreds of surfaces right now...not to mention making all the height maps.frown It would be beautiful, though:)

    If each surface uses a map set of its own, then I surely feel for you.

    I prefer actual file lists (I think they are machine-generated from the installer) to whatever is manually written on the product page. Seen way too many typos and errors on those.

    There's this batch processing plugin - it allows you to execute at least some of other GIMP plugins, you could look into it: https://alessandrofrancesconi.it/projects/bimp/

    Tks, will look into it:)

     

    ...so instead of fixing the UF5 I decided to do something simpler and converted a character...pleasent surprise, this rather large size render took just over 20 min, non progressive 10x10 ps.

    The guy looks nice :)

    I know the hair, and I think I know the pants as well, but where does the jacket come from?

    Thank you! https://www.daz3d.com/hounddog-bundle

    Yeah the jacket is pretty nice, although I think I should do something about the way it fits around the shoulders. Converted to SubD without issues too;)

  • wowiewowie Posts: 2,029
    edited August 2019

    White specular ones, I played with making skin metallic, so had no diffuse enabled, no SS. It was in progressive mode though, will do some more testing...

    Those are artifacts from using progressive refinement. Should clear up when progressive is disabled. Progressive are more prone to those issues do to using the 1x1 box filter.

    wowie did you make changes to the conversion scripts in the new build? I seem to remember normal maps loaded in the older builds, even when the normal channel was hidden?

    No changes. They should load up like any other maps. I'll check just in case.

    As to props/environment with many surface/material zones, try applying materials with the 'Surface' pane hidden. The drawback of DAZ Surface pane is that it tries to create thumbnails for textures, which can be slow if you have multiple textures combined with multiple surface/material zones.

    I've done some additional tweaking to subsurface. Should renders in half the time now.

    8 min 26.72 secs with area lights and diffuse environment sphere and 5 min 46.92 secs with just a HDRI on the environment sphere. 8x8 pixel samples, 1024 irradiance samples. Out of curiousity, I tried using 4096 samples (on everything) - render time went up to around 12 min. Noise is basically gone at those settings though.

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  • wowiewowie Posts: 2,029
    edited August 2019

    Sven, I uploaded a new hotfix build. Should give you more leeway with specular highlights.

    As I noted on the AWE Surface Shader freebie thread, normal mapping isn't working properly yet, but it should render better looking details rather than looking like just render noise.

    Just checked the normal map import. I can reproduce the issue. Should work now. I had to split the normal strength and the actual normal map slot, as that's the convention used by dsDefaultMaterial and omnifreaker's shaders.

    Post edited by wowie on
  • Sven DullahSven Dullah Posts: 7,621
    wowie said:

    White specular ones, I played with making skin metallic, so had no diffuse enabled, no SS. It was in progressive mode though, will do some more testing...

    Those are artifacts from using progressive refinement. Should clear up when progressive is disabled. Progressive are more prone to those issues do to using the 1x1 box filter.

    That's what I thought too:)

    wowie said:

    As to props/environment with many surface/material zones, try applying materials with the 'Surface' pane hidden. The drawback of DAZ Surface pane is that it tries to create thumbnails for textures, which can be slow if you have multiple textures combined with multiple surface/material zones.

    Ah, hadn't thought of that.

    wowie said:

    I've done some additional tweaking to subsurface. Should renders in half the time now.

    8 min 26.72 secs with area lights and diffuse environment sphere and 5 min 46.92 secs with just a HDRI on the environment sphere. 8x8 pixel samples, 1024 irradiance samples. Out of curiousity, I tried using 4096 samples (on everything) - render time went up to around 12 min. Noise is basically gone at those settings though.

    Wow that's great news indeedsurprise.

    wowie said:

    Sven, I uploaded a new hotfix build. Should give you more leeway with specular highlights.

    As I noted on the AWE Surface Shader freebie thread, normal mapping isn't working properly yet, but it should render better looking details rather than looking like just render noise.

    Just checked the normal map import. I can reproduce the issue. Should work now. I had to split the normal strength and the actual normal map slot, as that's the convention used by dsDefaultMaterial and omnifreaker's shaders.

    Tks a lot wowie, eager to check it outyes

  • Sven DullahSven Dullah Posts: 7,621

    copied from the freebie thread:

    AWE Surface 1.3 hotfix

    Some notable changes:

    • Fixed coat BRDF as it was erroneously using the base BRDF for raytracing.
    • Fixed metallic Fresnel for the second specular/reflection lobe erronously using first lobe settings. (first hotfix)
    • Changed adaptive sampling variance threshold to avoid streaks in dark areas. (first hotfix)
    • Rays from adaptive sampling will now pass through materials with transmission fully enabled ie. glass, windows.
    • Fixed first specular lobe not noticeable when both the first and second specular lobe are enabled.
    • Changed 'Specular Exposure' code to allow stronger specular override.
    • Fixed clipping with direct diffuse lighting and very strong lights ie. Intensity Scale (EV) 7 and above.
    • Added distance based AO to boost contact shadows.
    • Tweaked subsurface integration and diffuse. Users can now leave diffuse at 100% when subsurface is enabled.
    • Subsurface is now aware of adaptive information. It will assign higher ray weights and uses more samples in areas where adaptive sampling is used. This should lead to less noise, without having to manually raise samples/weights.
    • Thanks to further tuning of subsurface weights, subsurface is around 80% faster. Renders with subsurface enabled should take up to 70% less render time.
    • Changed ACES curve so it is closer to the full ACES curve.
    • Update the support script so importing normal map will work correctly.
  • Mustakettu85Mustakettu85 Posts: 2,933
    wowie said:

    As I noted on the AWE Surface Shader freebie thread...

    You may want to post a new message in that thread, in case there are folks who are only watching that one (the forum doesn't seem to send out notifications when the original post is updated). And it will also "bump" it :)

  • Mustakettu85Mustakettu85 Posts: 2,933

    Thank you! https://www.daz3d.com/hounddog-bundle

    Yeah the jacket is pretty nice, although I think I should do something about the way it fits around the shoulders. Converted to SubD without issues too;)

    Ooh, Oskarsson :) Love his stuff in general, though missed out on a lot of older ones because, well, the promos didn't look too exciting. Thanks for the link!

    Fit issues... either deformers or dForce?

  • wowiewowie Posts: 2,029
    edited August 2019

    You may want to post a new message in that thread, in case there are folks who are only watching that one (the forum doesn't seem to send out notifications when the original post is updated). And it will also "bump" it :)

    I probably should, but I thought maybe Sven will catch some bugs I missed. I'll do it once he's done testing it out. wink

    Ooh, Oskarsson :) Love his stuff in general, though missed out on a lot of older ones because, well, the promos didn't look too exciting. Thanks for the link!

     The three of us must have roughly the same tastes then. The sweater in that test render is also from Oskarsson.

    Post edited by wowie on
  • Sven DullahSven Dullah Posts: 7,621

    Ok so I'm testing the new build now. Whipped together a new character and render with my 4 arealight test setup. Only tested progressive mode thus far, but we may have a small problems with fireflies...I get them both on the hair and skin. No SS on the hair, both hair and skin use the default specular model with both lobes enabled. The hair uses both bump and displacement, the skin only displacement. Have a non progressive render going to see if it makes a difference. Um...no, I get them with non progressive also. I'll render a version with only bump enabled after this one is finished.

    Yeah the specular behavior really has changed again:) But I think I prefer this one. And SS is faster, no doubt=)

     

  • Sven DullahSven Dullah Posts: 7,621
    wowie said:
     

     The three of us must have roughly the same tastes then. The sweater in that test render is also from Oskarsson.

    Looks nice, you have a link?

  • Sven DullahSven Dullah Posts: 7,621
    edited August 2019

    Ok so I'm testing the new build now. Whipped together a new character and render with my 4 arealight test setup. Only tested progressive mode thus far, but we may have a small problems with fireflies...I get them both on the hair and skin. No SS on the hair, both hair and skin use the default specular model with both lobes enabled. The hair uses both bump and displacement, the skin only displacement. Have a non progressive render going to see if it makes a difference. Um...no, I get them with non progressive also. I'll render a version with only bump enabled after this one is finished.

    Progressive render with only bump enabled on hair and skin - no fireflies.

    Edit: Hm I got some fireflies, but to a much lesser extent. Think I need to render some old scene, this is a skin I just got, and the bump/displacement maps are obviously not very good. Will report back...

    Edit 2: Loaded another set of bumpmaps and still get fireflies.

    Post edited by Sven Dullah on
  • Sven DullahSven Dullah Posts: 7,621
    edited August 2019

    Ok, this is what it looks like. Progressive render with bump and displacement. It got better when I replaced the heightmaps, but there are a couple of fireflies still (her right ear, the chin and chest etc). Easily fixed in postwork, but there seems to be an issue with the new build.

    image

    Made some postwork just for fun...

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  • Sven DullahSven Dullah Posts: 7,621

    Yup I get fireflies on old scenes, confirmed;)

  • wowiewowie Posts: 2,029
    edited August 2019

    Looks nice, you have a link?

    https://www.daz3d.com/manga-student-for-genesis-2-female-s

    Just in case, the pencil skirt is from this set

    https://www.daz3d.com/sexy-librarian-for-genesis-2-female-s

    Yup I get fireflies on old scenes, confirmed;)

    OK. That's actually expected behaviour, which is why I haven't posted on the freebie thread yet. I pretty much revised the output to 12 f-stops. I didn't get any fireflies on my end, but there's also some updated on the area lights and environment shaders. I've changed the f-stops limits to 10 and uploaded the update. Let me know if there's still fireflies.

    Post edited by wowie on
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