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Yes, sorry:)
Yeah, using transmission easily doubles rendertimes with these scenes.
Well, sounds like a nice improvement
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.
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.
A platinum club freebie, maybe?
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 lazy
Something I'm working on...this was rendered with the 1.2 build a while back.
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):
Irradiance samples 2048(adaptive):
4096 samples(adaptive)
8192 samples(adaptive)
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;)
...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...
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.
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...
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.
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.
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 reasons
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.
It would be beautiful, though:)
...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.
Updated a few things on that character...
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/
The guy looks nice :)
I know the hair, and I think I know the pants as well, but where does the jacket come from?
Tks, will look into it:)
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;)
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.
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.
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.
That's what I thought too:)
Ah, hadn't thought of that.
Wow that's great news indeed
.
Tks a lot wowie, eager to check it out
copied from the freebie thread:
AWE Surface 1.3 hotfix
Some notable changes:
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 :)
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?
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.
The three of us must have roughly the same tastes then. The sweater in that test render is also from Oskarsson.
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=)
Looks nice, you have a link?
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.
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.
Made some postwork just for fun...
Yup I get fireflies on old scenes, confirmed;)
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
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.