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Some links;)
awe Shading Kit User Guide
awe Surface user Guide
wowie's free stuff
Oh...I'll have to double check all three DS versions...will report back;)
Thanks Mate!
@wowie
Ok this is getting interesting:) Turned out 4.7 has the hotfix from 28.7 2019, 4.10 has the older build from 8.2 2019, and 4.9, which gives me the problems, has the latest hotfix from 16.8 2019. Maybe I should try the 28.7 version on 4.9 to rule out the 3Delight 11 / 12 factor
@wowie
Do you remember this discussion we had about blown out reflections? Well I think I need to make a confession
...I suspect the camera headlamp was on. Why? Because I used Mustakettu's new radium catcher without the awe Environment light, and it never dawned on me to check the head lamp that I have set to auto. Later I couldn't reproduce the issue because I used her catcher with your environment light. Very sorry for causing all the locomotion! I just opened an old car scene to fix a number of things and re render, did the same thing, just loaded Kettu's sphere with an HDRI, hit render and everything was blown out
. Stupid Noob Mistake=)
...and here's the car, no awe issues...just very low rez maps and mesh. But I'm a sucker for vintage cars, think it looks descent=)
Here's a nice start
http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/read_me/index/55819/start
http://docs.daz3d.com/lib/exe/fetch.php/public/read_me/index/55819/55819_awe-surface-1.2-user-guide.pdf
Since I'm still on DS 4.7, I don't have issues with (auto) headlamp. As far as I understand, the headlamp is generated if you don't have either a spot/point/distant/ambient light in the scene.
I've posted this before I think but here's my lighting workflow.
Start by loading the AWE Environment light and environment sphere. The AWE Env light is an ambient light, so DS wouldn't automatically create those 'fake' lights when you load area lights. It also means the headlamp won't be enabled/visible in renders.
After that, load something like two area lights emitters, or just create a plane and apply AWE Area PT to the plane(s). I prefer to use my own emitter props, since it offers extra flexibility in shaping the light to physically mimic a softbox or an LED lamp with barn doors.
If you use the emitter prop, the pivot point functions pretty much like a spotlight target. Unlike a spotlight target where you can freely move the light around, you manipulate the light either by rotating the pivot point and/or moving the light away from the pivot point. I like this arrangement since I can control exactly how far the light is from the focus point.
The emitter props are 1 square meter, or roughly equivalent to an 8 square feet emitter. Bigger emitters produce softer shadows and vice versa.
By default, 3delight uses energy per unit scale for area lights. That means your 8 square feet emitter emits 8x the amount of light as a single 1 square feet emitter. That's why I made the default distance 250 cm or roughly 9 feet away, mostly so I can set the exposure (intensity scale or intensity scale offset) to 2.
Don't forget to account for indirect light, either from using ambient/HDRI on the environment sphere, or just from ray bounces with diffuse enabled. It's also a good idea to create a ground plane since that will be much closer to your subjects than the sphere.
Depending on how much light you want, you can either raise the exposure value (intensity scale or intensity scale offset) or move the emitter closer to your subject. Alternatively, you can scale up the emitter or make instances of the emitter. Instances works best if you need to use many lights that shares intensity/scale/color/temperatures.
If you want to match up exposure value units to other scales like cd/square m, here's a handy reference. Taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposure_value
Table 3. Exposure value vs. luminance (ISO 100, K = 12.5) and illuminance (ISO 100, C = 250)
Iray's luminance 1500 cd/square m roughly corresponds to EV 13. With AWE AreaPT, an EV value of 13 should be used with a really small emitter (4.25% of 1 square meter). Consequently, for 1 square meter, 4 EV should give you roughly the same light intensity.
Tks wowie! And I have now created a subset with Kettu's radium stuff + your Environment light, to prevent this from happening again
Ok wowie, so that's what I did, rolled back to 28.7 version in 4.9, and that fixes the fireflies issue. I first rendered a scene with the latest hotfix, got fireflies, switched to the 28.7 version, re-rendered the same scene and it was ok.
THanks. I think I've been able to reproduce the issue. The dev build doesn't exhibit the issue on 4.9, most likely it got 'automatically' fixed while I was tinkering with new ideas.
That's good news, for sure:)
Ok so I'm working on a set including the Watts Building by Nightshift3D and some cars and stuff. Using the latest hotfix in 4.9. I still feel there is something weird with specular highlights compared to reflections. First, let me point out that there is NO camera headlamp:)) There is the aweEnvironment with a jpg loaded into the env. sphere, visibility set to camera and refraction/reflection. Exposure is 0.
After tinkering quite a bit with exposure/gamma values for the emissives and adjusting specular/reflection setting and exposure values for surfaces, this is the result thus far. I think it looks quite nice, however, I had to use rather strange settings to get this result.
First, here is the render, non progressive 12x12 ps, 2048 adaptive samples, no postwork appart from blooming the wall light. There was no need for any level/gamma corrections.
The skylights: 2 planes about a meter above the openings in the ceiling, sized to cover them fully. The skylight glass uses opacity to let diffuse rays in.
For the ceiling lights I used an emissive 1 division 20cm cube + instances.
And there are 4 wall lights, one for each wall, a simple plane + instances.
For the Watts building I had to set specular color to a mid gray for everything to avoid too aggressive highlights. Many of the surfaces has a bit of metalness mixed in. The light bulbs and LEDs use the environmental shader with exposure 1. The car body has no metalness but uses the coat layer with 30% strength, 30% thickness, roughness 2.3 and IoR 1.7. Coat specular disabled. It also uses the spec 1 at 50% with specular disabled. Spec 2 at 50% with specular enabled. Exposure is set to -1.
Does any of this make sense?
Edit: So after some more testing, I realize that decreasing exposure for an emissive surface only has an impact on how bright that surface appears in the render, it doesn't address highlights on other surfaces, correct? So if an emitter is hidden to the camera, changing exposure values for that emitter won't change a thing? You need to decrease specular exposure for the surfaces with the blown out highlights, right?
You really should just use a lower IOR value instead of using specular color. In fact, in the next build I will fix the specular color to 1 for dielectrics. So specular/reflection strength will only be adjustable via IOR and specular strength slider. Looking at the scene, i suggest an IOR of 1.3 or 1.4, with medium roughness (something like 20 to 50%). For the glossy surfaces, an IOR of 1.4 to 1.6 with a roughness below 10% works best.
That said, there will be changes to both AWE AreaPT light and AWE Surface regarding diffuse/specular and of course, subsurface. I've also fixed camera exposure controls, they will now work as you expect when you change any of the settings (f-stop/ISO/shutter time). Right now it only affects diffuse, but I probably should revise it so it affects specular as well.
Exposure on AWE AreaPT only affects texture plugged into the light color slot.
Here's a practical example I come up with. Done with the dev build, so it's likely slightly different to the publicly available build. I used a 3x 1 square meter (roughly 3 square feet) emitter at a distance of 3 feet.
I applied the base shader, so everything is at default (specular/reflection at 100%, roughness at 1%, IOR is 1.5). First I vary roughness from 0 to 90%. As expected, the highlights gets noticeably wider with increasing roughness. Since it's more spread out, the amount of reflected light towards the camera is less.
There's very little change in appearance at 50% roughness upwards. Next, I fixed roughness at 50% and vary IOR to 1.4, 1.3, 1.2 and 1.1. Now we're seeing less reflectivity at zero angle with decreasing IOR value. This is what I was talking about.
Re-rendering with roughness 50%, at IOR 1.5, 1.3 and 1.1 at a different angle. When viewed at grazing/gazing angles, the specular/reflection of the surface facing away from the camera hasn't actually changed. It's similar to the old 'velvet' hack, except this is specular/reflection, rather than diffuse.
Compare those to what we get when we lower specular/reflection strength to 50% and 25% (but keep roughness and IOR the same). The look is entirely different.
To summarize:
Not sure I get this... quick test with a sphere with default awe, and your light preset 1
Intensity scale 4 exposure 0
Intensity scale 4 exposure -4
Intensity scale 0 exposure 0
So, exposure also controls the emitted diffuse- and specular strength. IS 4/exp -4 equals IS 0/exp 0 in terms of emitted light strength, but the surface of the emitter is only affected by exposure? Not sure when to use what, but I guess, if the emitter is hidden to the camera, it doesn't really matter?
Tks a lot for those examples, I'll look into changing some things with my workflow. Generally I've had a feeling that the highlights appear much stronger than the actual reflections...
This is great, I was going to ask about it, since I couldn't get the expected results;)
Really? What about glass and metal?
Hmm, how about making the color a hidden property?
From one thing to another...couldn't resist this product https://www.daz3d.com/space-station as it was -80%;) Spent whole yesterday trying to make an as good as possible IRay to awe conversion. I think I came pretty close (except for the whitebalance). Had some problems though. As there is no emissive channel in aweSurface, all those computers and LEDs are a pain in the *ss to convert. Had to make opacity maps from every emissive map, use a geoshell for the glowing surfaces with the opacitymaps to hide everything else. Then for the computers I had to use the same opacity maps inverted to hide all emissive surfaces:) At first I dreamed it would be possible to use the areaPT shader to make them actually emit light...yes it's possible but not worth it. First progressive testrender (HD size) reached 50% in 6 hours. So, after changing to the environmental shader, I managed to render this test in full HD size, non progressive 12x12 PS, diffuse bounce depth 6, 2048 adaptive samples, 5h 30min. Wowie, if you have some more useful tips on how to render this with truly emissive screens etc. I'd be grateful=)) The light panels are the only true light source here, they are 6 poly each. (And, as always, any other tips, comments and critique is most welcome)
With auto white balance: (Need to adjust temperature for emissives)
Colored glass gets the color from either the base color or transmission color. Metals will still use the specular/edge color, though the colors are not used directly. Dielectric reflection/highlights are always monochrome, that is it always gets its color from the incoming light rather than the material color. If you're seeing a slight tint in reflection of dielectrics, its usually caused by thin film interference.
The current build simply extracts the intensity based of the color you have in the color slot (for dielectrics). For example, if you plugged in a color such as 0, 0, 255 it will convert it under the hood to 1 (pure white). Dielectric Fresnel always gets to 1 at grazing angles, so choosing a value such as 128, 64, 64 means the Fresnel gets multiplied by 0.5, so you'll get half the strength. Obviously this is not correct, hence the change in behaviour.
The only deviation where specular highlights gets tinted are hair/fabric. Mostly because the specular is actually goes through the object (transmission) first.
There is a bug when you choose to enable specular but not reflection though. You'll end up with very strong specular, because I forgot to do the proper thing and not add the reflection to the specular/reflection lobe in such a case.
Intensity scale/intensity scale offset have no influence on the rendered emitter look, only on the emitted light. This is because what you're seeing rendered is actually a surface shader. If I made intensity scale also affects this surface shader, then the output will effectively be doubled. Since the surface shader uses ambient, both GI and reflection rays will take that into account but they won't be importance sampled (just like the environment sphere shader) and is very prone to noise.
Ok, tks!
In my opinion, the lighting scenario for that set looks wrong. I know you're trying to get the same style as the promos, but that just looks off. I'm going by shots of ISS interiors and couldn't find images with such high levels of light. Yes,most of the interior are bright white, but it's not that bright. Even shots in Ad Astra, The Martian or Interstellar don't look that 'bright'.
Tks for the input! I'm just rendering a character inside now, and her skin looks ok as far as I can see now, so it must be the interior walls then? The light panels have an intensity of about 4, so nothing extreme. Yeah, for once I tried to mimic the promos and not going freewheeling right away=)) I'll have to check some authentic footage...
What I would like to do is lower those light panels and have the LEDs etc cast some colored light on the character(s), but for that I think I need to fake it with ghost lights to keep rendertimes down.
Ok so I spent some time looking at ISS interior pics, some are actually very bright, but what is really missing is a LOT of STUFF...cables boxes etc, basically chaos
. Interesting!
Here's one idea of a light rig. Four emitter strips angled in such a way that there's very little of the emitted light hits the center of the space directly. Place it just far enough from the walls to avoid strong lights on the walls. I used an 8 sided cylinder, but works just as well with a square corridor.
Here's a nice reference CG scene found on Turbosquid.
Nice tip, might try that one!
Yup that's very nice indeed! Only giveaway is that hose IMO;)
So I had to abort my render, ran into some trouble with those "black normals at certain angles". So will have to fiddle with smoothing angles and whatnot to try and fix it...
Speaking of emitters. Found the bug that causes opacity masks not used with emitted light.
You made my day
Will transparent polys still have an impact on rendertimes?
Only if you have layers upon layers on the same prop. So still true for hair, but less with clothing.