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...frosted glass experiment...
Something like this?
Technically, I can just add options to the poly shape. Since it's procedurally generated and can be used as an opacity mask, you can basically use it on a very simple plane (1 division). Alternatively, you can just use an opacity mask, though that will only work with the updated area light shader.
Here's an alternative setup to achieve a similar look. Use a single poly for the emitter, enable poly shape and fiddle with the settings until you get the shape you want. Then parent a cylinder to block the light with enough sides to get a round shape (or make it a subD cylinder) or any other shape you need.
Obviously, you can fine tune the cylinder settings and scale to get a variety of shapes. If you want to make it hollow, just delete the top/bottom caps using the geomtery editor.
Test render of the rig.
Renders pretty quickly since the emitter is very simple (1 div flat polygon) and the light/rays are physically blocked by the cylinder.
Some nice ideas, while (patiently) waiting for the update. Tks! Gonna test blocking the light with a primitive, should be the most efficient way with the current build;)
@wowie
Some more random reflections...
Would it be feasible to introduce separate tiling options for diffuse/height/normal maps in aweHair and/or aweSurface? Or make the opacity map override the global tiling? Would be neat, especially when trying to salvage those older hair models. I know IRay can do it. Also it's possible to make custom shaders in shadermixer, although that's a different story:)
Testing my updated ringlight studio. I replaced the torus with an emissive plane and a cylinder as a mask. Moved the other emitters around a bit, fiddled with the GB brows, think they look a bit better...
Also made the cube/room pure white, turned off all visibility except indirect light. Some minor gamma correction in post...
@wowie or anybody who understands awe trace groups, heeelp:))
I thought this was gonna be a piece of cake, but can't sort it out. We have two emitters, one red and one blue. I want the red emitter to totally ignore the "blue" sphere (not illuminate nor produce shadows) and vice versa. How do I set it all up? Tried pretty much every combination, but must have missed something, because the emitters always affect the shadows on both spheres or there are no shadows at all. This is the best I could do thus far.
The spheres and the plane have the same diffuse color 190.190.190. The plane accepts both emitters, the spheres are also illuminated correctly, but I can't sort out the shadows. Maybe it's not possible?
So basically, you want independent tiling controls for opacity and bump/normal/displacement? Sure, it can be done. Though for 'old hair models' and I'm assuming you mean hair props with opacity, it would just be easier to do the tiling in the image itself. Particularly since some hair props have tiling of their own.
Technically, it would just better to use procedural noise for hair. Something like Hair Strand Designer that's available for UE/Unity.
Something I've been working on for the hair details. I can basically add layers, control the frequency/amplitude of the wave with variations along the root to tip. Obviously, I can also vary the thickness too.
I'll look into trace group and light category.
Looks promising! Also thinking independent tiling would be handy when making terrain materials...
Tks , much appreciated!
Not really. It will lead to obvious repeating patterns with pure/naive tiling. You'll want a randomize UV tiling scheme to avoid/minimize the pattern.
https://docs.arnoldrenderer.com/display/A5AFMUG/UV+Transform
Basically, use a different value for either rotate, flip, mirror depending on what the value was used on the previous tile. I've been wanting to create something similar but never got around to it.
Yeah that's a cool feature indeed.
Camel Mistress in awe shaders
Incidentally, the Environment > backdrop doesn't show up in imges using scripted 3Delight, does it just not work that way in scripted, a bug or did I leave out something i wonder. i had to use a plane primitive as a fill in.
Sweet!!
No not a bug. You can't use environment backdrops with scripted rendering. Using a plane is a good workaround. Or try your bg image on the environment sphere. That sometimes works, just have to fiddle a bit with the tiling options;)
The only way to have a similar function is to make your own camera/imager shader. The environment stuff is actually an imager shader that gets called when enabled.
Unfortunately, the DAZ supplied shader builder code/example lacks the necessary support for texture mapping. It only accept colors. I actually made one awhile back, with tiling controls (scale and offset) along with other stuff (color correction, vignetting etc).
Ahh, that explains that.
Not that I use the backdrops much, but they've been useful on ocassion.
Sven. Multiply specular through opacity = on (on the hedges) didn't improve render time on Maddies maze (this version is a little bigger due to 'wide' rather than 'square'.
worth a try though...
Ok, but they sure look much better:) With multiply disabled there will be reflections on the areas that are meant to be transparent, so you don't want that;) Well those hedges are rather complex (several layers of opacity), so I'm not surprised. Maybe wowie has some tips, all I can think of right now is you can try tinkering with the opacity optimization filters. That could speed up rendering significantly, but apply too much and the leaves will render totally transparent. Spotrender a small portion, make adjustments etc. I'm guessing you can cut rendertimes by 30% with the right settings.
Progressive mode is actually designed for fast previewing, it resets (or bypasses) the pixelfilters so increasing the risk of getting jagged edges, and you'll get a whole lot more noise. But I use progressive also if needed, although always try to find ways to make things work without it. If you make two renders of the same scene, one with progressive and one without, you'll notice the difference, especially when it comes to reflective and transmissive suurfaces like water and glass.
Found yet another product I've had in my runtime for ages and never used, the pit, made a quick conversion...looks quite useful:)
I've done a few tests with progressive on and off (regular shaders on regualr 3Delight though), and really didn't judge the differences in most cases (which seemed mostly slightly better shading) worth the extra time - for hobbyist non-production usage anyway.
Opacity opimisation filters sound interesting. This hedge is pine, but those sound ideal for adding translucency to more deciduous (hope that's spelt right) leaves.
I'll post this scene when it's done (might be a few days, it's now at 18 hours, and only a few lines further down - and I think it has another whole pass to do :/ going by the orange bar).
Thanks for that bit of info @wowie. Another piece of the puzzle...
I've gotten hopelessly tangled and confused trying to use Shader Mixer (didn't help that my initial forays were hampered by mixer being hopelessly broken when Render to Rib is on), and Shader builder looks more esoteric. I'm just not ready just yet.
In RPG terms, I'm not leveled up enough to tackle that Boss yet.
From wowie's aweSurface user guide:
Opacity Optimization
You can find this in the Opacity section of the shader. The slider controls the level of optimization used by the
shader. Only applicable when a texture is used. Defaults to 90% for aggressive optimization. A value of 0
(zero) uses minimal optimization, while 100% will use very aggressive optimization.
The Opacity Filter values allows you to fine tune the threshold values for determining opacity values to be
discarded or used. Generally, values below the values chosen will be regarded as fully transparent. The
Opacity Filter 2 value determines the minimum amount of opacity to be used.
awe Shading Kit User Guide
awe Surface user Guide
So The Pit turned out to be one of those "try to fix the black areas" projects. Did the original render overnight (4h rendertime, not that bad) with the usual insane 12x12 ps and 2048 adaptive samples
. Then fiddled with smoothing angles, "use face forward", spotrendering etc. and actually fixed most of the stuff. Only one problem area left that I can't fix. Will have to settle with that for now. (Darn I hate when this happens). Interesting that the original smoothing angle for all surfaces is set to 34. For most of the problematic surfaces I had to simply turn off smoothing, or lower it considerably. Oh well...
I'll attach both the original and the fixed render, incase some nuthead wants to compare them.
I myself find it quite entertaining.
Minor gamma correction on the fixed one
To be honest, to my untrained eye, they both look good.
One just looks like the client took the cheaper construction tender...
Haha, tks! Maybe I should try to dForce the lot...I managed to destroy Stonemason's US2 in less than 10 min.
Testing my new light rig
, was prepared to wait a day or two, but behold, 1h 30 min
, no postwork.
This will change in the next build.
The new build uses a new opacity value filter scheme (for opacity masks) I'd outlined a few posts back. By default, opacity optmization will be 0 or disabled. You'll have to manually set them to 1. Opacity Filter 1 will be the midpoint, while Opacity FIlter 2 will be between 0/1 to the midpoint. When opacity optimization is set to 1 (fully enabled), the original opacity values below 0.5 will be retained, but values above 0.5 will use the filtered value.
This opacity optimization will be in AWE Surface and AWE Hair, but not on other shaders ie Environment Sphere or AWE Area LIght. This feature is only relevant if you're using opacity masks. There are under the hood optimizations for raytracing/path tracing under the hood that will work regardless if you're using a mask or dialed down opacity strength.
Below are example renders with AWE Hair (fully path traced, physically based Marschner hair). This is a recent dev build, so very different to what was shared awhile back. 1024 samples in DS 4.7.
Disabled - 3 minutes 37.44 seconds
Enabled - 3 minutes 6.49 seconds
If you flip between the two, you'll see there's a slight difference in appearance. The difference in render time is small, which is why opacity optimization is disabled by default. The new scheme should be much easier to work with and better retain some of softness between fully opaque and fully transparent areas (even with Opacity Filter 2 set to 100%). Specific to AWE Hair, you generally wnat this disabled for most of the time to have that 'translucent' hair look. It's there if you want to optimize your render, maybe when the object is fair away or not in focus. Obviously, it should be possible to automate that, but I haven't looked into it.
I do have another idea about allowing a gradient opacity to mimic what you see in mesh like objects like stockings (opacity fades into fully opaque at grazing angles). It might make it, it might not.
Does this mean it will be difficult to use gradient opacity maps with aweSurface? But they will still work with the arealight/environmental shader? Yeah I know we've been through this before, but this is important to me;) And being able to use the environmental shader for effects like, say, lightning, clouds and haze, flares etc. is even more important.
Looks really nice! The optimization looks like an unsharp mask, or whatever it is called. I'm guessing there are no diffuse maps here? So you did sort out the hair detail stuff?
I'd love to see this feature, fingers crossed!
No. Just turn off the opacity optimization if you want to stick to the original texture. I think the Environment Sphere shader has some optimization with hard coded values. Should be easy enough to remove those.
Still on the Environment Sphere shader, I've just finished working on the exposure/gain/gamma adjustments. You can now make adjustments separately to diffuse and specular output, independent of the adjustments visible to the camera. Right now, the additional offsets are placed in AWE Enviroment Light, but I'm planning to move it back to the surface shader. Or I could leave it in. That way you can change all surface with Environment Sphere shader applied (rather than doing the adjustments per surface).
The basic workflow goes something like this. First, make adjustments (in live IPR) to get the background you want. Once that's done, place some metal/dielectric objects to gauge the specular/reflection contribution. These will also affect diffuse but you can make extra adjustments with a third set of controls that affects just diffuse rays. In most cases, you'll only be playing with exposure and gamma. Saturation/desaturation is only available for the main and diffuse controls.
No diffuse maps for the hair. I also haven't worked on the hair detail stuff. You can still use textures, but I generally don't.
Fixed this annoying AWE Surface bug. Using base/diffuse color and texture with Metalness enabled now works properly. Before, it will just render black. I've also made changes so when you enable color correction, it affects both diffuse and metalness when you enable 'Use the Base/Diffuse Textures'. Turned out to be quite easy to fix.
Wow that's really nice wowie:))
This will also be most useful! May I suggest having both, with an override function in the surface section? I assume having it in the environment light will work globally for all surfaces?
Third set
. Well I'm all for it
.
Happy also to hear this! If you happen to have some testrenders of how it works after the fix, feel free to post:)
The future looks bright, very inspiring news:)
Worked a bit more on that glowing crystal...non postworked version:
And playing with postwork:
https://www.daz3d.com/space-living-room-01, converted...first testrender
After posting, I've decided to add it on both the AWE Environment Light and AWE Environment Sphere shader.
Adjusting the value from within AWE Environment light will apply the adjustment to all surfaces with the AWE Environment Sphere shader applied.
Here's one example.
First, I rendered out the item with the default DS material for reference.
Applied AWE Surface and make sure everything is set to 100% metal and then enable the 'Use Base / Diffuse Texture'. Tweak the texture strength to get something similar to reference.
Unfortunately, in this example both the diffuse and spec textures have baked shadows in them.
So, I removed them all, going to use just the shader parameters to mimic the same look. Turns out using Nickel values for Specular/Edge Tint values works, along with dialing down the specular strength to 87.5%. Throw in a bit of occulsion as well.
Then I play around with roughness, glossy Fresnel, roughness at grazing angles and anisotropy just to have variations across each surface/part. Also added (base) thin film and a bit of a colored coat (without enabling coat specular/reflection) to add slight tints to the metal. Not 100% the same as the reference, but now I have a physically based material with no baked highlights/shadows.
In the process, I've been able to work out some problems with occlusion. I think the same thing can be done to properly have a shadow catcher that works with emissive surfaces such as the Environment Sphere shader.