Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2024 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
Thank you. Not sure about "great", but 10+ years of experience do help =))
Math is what it all is based on, so - yes, absolutely.
It's exactly that. DS "shader preset" needs you to have the scene nodes + surfaces selected, and non-expanded nodes don't get selected when you hit Ctrl+A. mCasual has a super useful script called "select all my children" for a scene node.
Haha found this buried in the 3DL thread, one of my very first awe renders. Would be interesting to see the rendertimes with the current build AND with the use of some common sense:)))
This image has been resized to fit in the page. Click to enlarge.
Apparently I used an emissive 8 sided sphere for each lightsource...hmm will have to look into this scene again:)
Converted Asian Court, working on the light scenario...here I ended up using 32 emissive planes for the wall lights. Progressive render 2h, first attempt at non progressive aborted after 15h at 35%. See, I've learned nothing from my mistakes
Yeah I set it up using a large ceiling emitter, but it just renders too darn fast for me.
Back at the testrig Sven has managed to create a set of roughnessmaps for the limbs;) He seems to like what he sees and thinks to himself hmm maybe some proper displacement next...
Sorry I miss this.
The fact is, opacity in Renderman specifications is defined to be a color property. The opacity strength value of any 3delight shaders in DS is actually in color, though it is presented as a float to the user. So a 'colored opacity' - basically allowing some degree of color to go through is actually possible. The thing is, raytracing works best if the opacity is either 0 (fully transparent) or 1 (fully opaque). Since AWE Surface (AWE Hair also) uses reflections and global illumination, allowing a gradient opacity (including colored ones) will have a render time penalty. Just like when you render hair with UE2 occlusion/indirect lighting which uses ray tracing.
Right now, what I'm doing is allowing gradient opacity on first diffuse/specular/shadow ray hits, but limiting them to either 0 or 1 on subsequent hits. This is then combined with ray tracing optimizaitons whenever the opacity is enabled and the value (taking into account masks) are not 1. Both the primary light (either from point/spot/distant/area or HDRI) plus the camera sees the gradient opacity. SInce shadows come mostly from primary light, the rendered shadows will use the gradient opacity. Occlusion or global illumination generally will have very soft shadows, so losing a bit of info by forcing opacity to be either fully opaque or transparent won't produce any noticeable differences in the render but helps render time by quite a bit.
Colored opacity is actually is used by AWE surface. This is what happens when you enable translucency shadows. But this is done only for shadow rays (the official term is transmission rays). What I think you're requesting is colored opacity for camera rays. Since this means it must always be visible to the camera, any raytracing results (from diffuse/specular bounces) will need to be multiplied by this gradient opacity, causing render times to basically, sky rocket. As for old school hack like enabling specular but disabling multiply by opacity, this wouldn't produce the effect you're looking for. The effect you want with colored opacity is basically a see through the material effect so the camera must see what's behind the object with the gradient opacity.
Since this can be (and should be done) by enabling transmission with or without thin glass, I don't see much point in allowing colored/gradient opacity to camera rays. In terms of optics, there is no such thing as gradient opacity. It's basically fully opaque with transmission/translucency even on very thin objects ie plastics. Or a mesh with tiny gaps (like fabrics).
If you do want to do this, you can actually dial a bit of transmission though there will be a render time penalty. Generally, you don't want any refraction going on, so also enable Thin Glass. To push the tint, simply dial in the color you want in Transmission Color.
Anyway,
I've decided to add a bit of control the Metalness/Transmission parameters - filtering values whenever a mask is applied. The filter should be easy enough to understand/work with. Everything will be 0 below the first value and 1 above the second one. I'll probably also add a color based filter as well. This will likely be using the hue value of a user selected color as a base to filter out what's metal or not based off the base/diffuse texture. So far, the scheme works well for re-using non PBR stuff (diffuse map and reflection/specular mask) to mimic metal adornments on fabrics. The only limitations is that it's limited to just one color filter, so if you have both silver/gold, you will have to make your own mask.
Hmm, I should probably add a switch to use the diffuse color/texture for transmission as well. RIght now, you have to have to enable 'Use Base Values' to do that. Should be easy enough.
I've also updated the color correction to the base/diffuse mask. Rather than including the color value, this is now only applied to the mask/map. So now you can desaturate the map, then use the luminance with the color you want. Quite handy if you like a certain pattern of a map, but want to use a different color.
Could all this be done via texture editing? Absolutely, but I find it more convenient to be able to do this on the fly.
Also, I'm thinking of adding more controls for the back facing sides. RIght now, it's just limited to diffuse, allowing you to override colors and textures. I'm thinking this should be applicable to specular as well. Though obviously not transmission/opacity.
Though there is a reason to support one way glass windows.
Tks for clarifying! Yeah it was not so much a feature request, simply curious, I was sure you had a very good reason not to go that route, and now I understand a little bit more:) And I appreciate having those tools inside DS, will save me hours and days in the end;)
Testing my displacement maps on the palms etc, Made some bump strength adjustments that didn't work out, need to dial back some, but the maps I think are ok...
A very lovely light in this.
Cheers for that tip.
Worth exploring further;)
Still working on this skin...need to tweak those Displ.maps some more I'm afraid. Other things seem to come along quite nicely. Lacrimals obviously too dark etc...
More Gypsies in caravans.
Romany Comforts in Boundless Journey
Just noticed today, that the Interior sets are no longer instore.
I tried for a disembodied head screaming in the crystal ball, but either the glass or the semi-opaque lit sphere with smoke bump is obscuring it too much.
- I always think of these ideas a moment before I hit render and try to rush them...
Hair this time is just Awe surface tweaked - Awe Hair kept leaving me with Lily Munster hair, and Awe base with something a little like dreadlocks or badly thinning.. Hair is Cuffed tail 2.
Digital Bad hair day maybe....
I like the light scenario, think it works well. And she looks very nice! The hair is simply too grainy, you probably want to check the opacity optimization sliders and zero out things, and increase irradiance samples. Hmm I own that hair, will check it out, can't see why it wouldn't work with AWE Hair...
ETA: Just to make sure...you do know many 3DL hair presets load with the wrong gamma settings for the opacitymaps? Especially old poser content. Need to check to make sure gamma is 1 in the image editor!
Testing some "natural" lighting. One large emitter and the environment, 1h 30m progressive.
Nice crisp daylight. I think I prefer the other image though, 'cause of the interesting light interplay on the columns and the camera on the girl was closer, more personal. It was sort of like you were there with her as she explored.
I've been using Awe Lights 1 (the emissive plane) for lighting the interiors (intensity scale 3-4.) Rather nice light.
I'd prefer to switch back to points and spots though, the planes keep getting caught in reflections
I thought you only needed to go into image editor for Gamma adjustment if you were leaving the Render Settings at default and only wanted gamma on some texture maps....otherwise it'd be applied twice on some....or have I misread a lot of the thread that discussed Gamma on 3DL....?
I seemed to mostly run into opacity problems with this hair - I keep forgetting about optimisation 'cause Uber Iray and the default 3DL shaders don't have it.
I agree more interesting.
That's why you have the polygon shape and opacity to play with;)
Wowie or Kettu can do the long story much better than me, but here's how I do it: In the regular 3DL rendertab gamma correction ON and gamma 2.20. In scripted render window gamma 2.20. As a rule of thumb, only diffuse textures should have a gamma of 0, when you open with the image editor, all other (controlmaps) should have a value of 1. Now I just loaded the Cuffed Tail2 and, as I expected, the opacitymaps had a setting of 0. That results in opaque areas being partly transparent.
If you need to fiddle with diffuse gamma and such, you can do it in the shader.
Quick and dirty render of Cuffed Tails 2, with AWE Hair, with no diffusemaps. Looks like there is no proper bumpmap for the hair. The presets use a gray hairtexture as bump. I suggest swap it for something cleaner like the transmap. I'll test it some more...
I used the transmap as a specular map in the first specularlobe and as the bumpmap, got much cleaner resut. Bumpstrength was 10% on the hair:
My settings FWIW: I used 1024 Irradiance samples.
...nordic style...
...this is how he ended up...
OK. Just tested this out.
You can also re-use the diffuse texture, overriding the value. You'll need to disable the backside transmission override to enable the backside diffuse override to render.
Basically, now it's possible to have different color and map for each side of glass (when transmission is enabled). I've also noticed that in previous builds, the backside of single plane polygon will not render any refraction at all. So this adds a feature and a bug fix.
After this, the one way window/mirror combo.
That's bloody awesome, wowie
Cheers Sven
Those tips have helped.
Managed this - it's a pre-morning coffee effort though.
Progress.
Figuring out how to combine the colors was kinda amusing.
Looks good:)
Sweet!!
Valde got himself a new face roughnessmap, a pair of GB brows and some stuff, so he's happy.
...found his axe...
Tweaked lighting and re-rendered, non progressive 10x10 pixelsamples, 10h
The Matriarch