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Lara in the bedroom version 2
I have moved the swan and changed its texture
Thank you TigerAnne. Your commit is much appreciated.
Shinji Ikari 9th, thank you. This one really came together.
I've been working on an entry with a sci fi theme - a first for me. It started because I wanted an excuse to play with FW Octavia's makeup, but it's evolved tremendously from my initial attempt - in no small part because I finally picked up Mec4d PBS Shaders (vol. 1) during the PC+ sale.
I loved the action pose (based off of a set of free running poses for V7), which is probably the only reason I kept working on the picture. The rest of it is a mess. The combination of elvishness and steampunk looks awful, and as much as I I love the outfit (Riverwillow for g3 female, one of my all-time favorites), it pushs the image firmly into the fantasy genre and clashes spectacularly with the building.
Now octavia's wearing the G7 biosuit, almost completely retextured using the Mec4D shaders. I don't really understand how PBS work (so if anyone knows of a really good guide please post a link!), but I clicked around and ended up with this. When you look at the full sized image, though, there's some weird stuff around her breastplate and upper chest plate. The suit seems to be poking through itself. I've continued working on the image, but I haven't been able to fix that.
I've been playing around with her hair, trying to get a more futuristic feel, but at this point I feel like I've lost my focus again. The issues with her suit pokethru are still there, and I can't seem to figure out how to get a more slick feeling to the image.
I've also discovered the major drawback of Mec4D's shaders - you can only see them if you're using the iray preview. I have laptop. It's good laptop, about 2 years old, but it was never intended for this kind of graphics-intensive stuff. The iray preview mode is not my friend. It takes a good 30 minutes for the preview image to switch over to the iray preview under the best of circumstances, and the computer's completely frozen until it switches.
Thoughts/suggestions welcome!
Hi,
I like your work and your attitude that I can see from your writing. Perhaps I can encourage you to keep on working on all these tiny details that seem to make you lose your focus - in the end of the day, they are what makes a difference. Too many people just throw a character and a light into the scene, play with it for 15 minutes and think they "created" something. You definitely are creating something.
If you want to keep some structure in the background but feel that it does not rreally match the foreground, you could use the right amount of DOF to blur it enough to keep some detail but remove the parts of the design that don't fit. I also like the dark sky as it fits in the scifi theme. So I would try the DOF thing and see which one does a better job.
Physically Based Rendering is a method to calculate how a surface absorbs ("diffuses") or reflects light, which sums up to the energy consumption of a material. Of course it is a bit more technical, and to make it more complicated, there are two different workflows (metallic/roughness and specular/glossiness). I know two good explanations (but I am sure there are many more): Basic Theory of Physically-Based Rendering and The PBR guide - 2018 edition.
Version C here. I used the product A Touch of Dirt for Iray to grunge up my characters, and while I was at it I lit the lights along the side of our sidearm.
Happy Thanksgiving all.
Hi,
I compared your current and previous versions, C has become even darker with the reduced / removed reflection on the armor and skin. I would love to see your other changes (also in your previous works) but the pictures are so dark that it is hard for me to see any details or differences. I am not saying that you should create brighter renders - if this is the amount of brightness/darkness you like, thats 100% fine. I would suggest to run a calibration on your monitor though - there is a chance that you can see more than us because your monitor settings are a bit off. At least fairly well adjusted brightness, color and contrast values should help both the creator and the viewer.
Thanks for commenting on things Fisherman_B. For version D I removed the grime from the guy by the door as well as a scar that we couldn't see on his face. Other then that I tweeked the render settings a little.
After taking a break from this image I noticed there was a misaligned plane so I fixed that. I also made a few tweaks to the ivy and the pedestal. I didn't like how it showed through the water. There was also some artifacting along the right side in the water layer so I tried rendering at a larger size (x2) then reducing the image back to original size and it cleared right up.
Here is the new version.
Very first person shooter Shingi. The floor light is very cool. I will have to agree with others that your images do tend to be dark. Maybe get those folks taking down that room some weapon lights.
In my short time using Daz Studio I have found that pokethrough that can't be fixed with the garment/armor/asset setting can sometimes be fixed with a slight adjustment to pose or even a tiny rescale of that part of the figure. (save often!) Your hardware limitation are going to make that a real chore. If you are not already doing so try turning off the visibility of everything you are not working on and see if it Iray loads faster. Also you might try turning the render setting way down and spot render. Keep the draw box as small as you can. Worse comes to worse, post work it. Clone brush is your friend.
You have a good start, definitely has a sci-fi vibe.
That is really cute sueya.
Fisherman_B you have some mad skills. That is a very cool image. I have to wonder what a run or two would look like on the "Welcome".
TigerAnne, that jade glass against the metal is awesome. I have to wonder what a lighter color metal accent like copper on the side pieces would look like.
Very nice image.
TigerAnne, I agree with dtrscbrutal that the glass against metal IS an awesome combination! And along this lines of his/her idea of adding a lighter color metal I would make a more generic suggestion....
I know you want a more subdued look and feel, but atm the image is overwhelmingly....well....green lol. The contrast between glass and metal is obscured because the glass is green and the metal is reflecting green. Adding a complimentary splash of (subdued) color could both focus the eye on the figure and relived the green fatigue. For example, make the glass frosted clear glass instead of jade glass. Or an amber/honey coloured glass. The lighter colour would be subdued, and add some contrast to the figures face adding smooth curved definition as well as draw the eye to the figure. dtrscbrutal's idea of copper is good too! It doesn't have to be shiny new copper, it couple be a hammered copper which would add texture and interest, or an aged copper, or copper with a patina which would add just a touch of turquoise or verte green.
Your entry is lovely! I only mention these because your figure is not what my eyes are drawn to when I look at it. It's such a great pose, it really SHOULD be the first thing you see.
~ Novbre
I got WAY more out of this month's challenge than I expected! I had hoped to do a scene with fur, waxy leaves and translucent fronds and learned that materials can quickly outstrip my computers abilities. I have a decent system 16 gb ram, GTX 1070 video card and an 8 core AMD chip, and I spent most of the last two weeks watching my computer reboot from crashes. Even with scene optimizer, scaled to a factor of 16 (which looks hideous by the way) Daz would crash my computer every time I rendered. Part of the problem IS texture map sizes because most of what I render is large landscapes or architecture, but for this month I was playing with shaders and displacements and surface toys and got a really nice appreciation for just how resource intensive they can be!
Oh and the GTX 1080ti is now on my X-mas list! lol! Anyway, it's not exactly what I had invisioned, but I did learn alot and had lots of fun (between crashes) doing this months challenge!
~ Novbre
That's definitely the best step to increase our creativity. If one has to wait for hours to be able to validate a (perhaps minor) change in a rich scene, you feel disencouraged and progress and creativity do suffer from this. A i9 or Threadripper and a GTX1080Ti can be your best friends, when using Iray or other renderers that support rendering on the GPU and CPU at the same time.
btw multiple GPU's don' hurt - once you got used to a "realtime" render while working on a scene, e.g. in the Aux viewport, you don't want to miss it. The same applies to other renderers like Vray and Redshift etc as well, of course.
This month is slipping away fast! We only have a couple days left to finalize the materials challenge. I appreciate all the help you have given each other along the way. This is a great community of new users!
@Novbre I'm happy to hear that you feel you got a lot out of this month's challenge. Your image looks very nice. Good job!
Edited to add: Some of these topics may not be familiar to new users, so if you need more info about them, ask. It is not necessarily on topic of "Materials", but it helps us manage resources, so we can use our materials more effectively.
I keep hearing mixed signals about multiple GPU's, mainly that it doesn't matter how many you have you can't exceed the memory of the lowest GPU card. So having two GTX 1080Ti sounds lovely with a combined 7k+ CUDA cores, you are still limited to a max of (in this examples case) of 11GB of memory since that is the max memory of that card. GTX 1080's are still hideously expensive even though they are now out of production and I can't quite bring myself buy two and HOPE it improves my render times. Do you actually run a multi GPU system, have you compared render times between single and multi-card renders? I would LOVE know from someone who actually works on a system like that.
Oh how I wish I had known some of this two weeks ago lol! I do have Scene Optimizer and I have used it for complex high-resolution multi-character scene I've tried like this one with "extreme" displacement maps and HDR Lighting. And when I first starting having crashing issues, that was my goto fix. However, in this particular case with all normals, bumps and displacements turned off and the texture maps divided by 16, I still crashed every render. Ultimately it was #2 that let me finally render without a crash, but I'll be honest I don't know why it worked. I thought instances SAVED memory by making the computer only have to keep track of a single item's settings and they just duplicate that where ever an instance was indicated. I will admit I am more than a little hazy on how instances work. They have been the "in" thing in a lot of landscape assets I have purchased over the last year or so, but I haven't really delved into them yet.
I am clueless about #4. This is the first I have heard of it! You mean SURFACE features can be subdivided as well? Any good resources/tutorials you could point me to learn about this aspect of DAZ? Any help would be awesome!
As for LAMH, I agree! I have learned this first hand. It's really beautiful and so much more realistic, but it's not something I will be using in the future. At least not in its current state. The tradeoff between performance and realism doesn't work for me. I'll take better performance, and use photoshop to fake the realism I can't get just with rendering alone lol.
Thanks so much for the info though!
~ Novbre
@LaPetiteVerita
I would add another option that just happens to be in keeping with this months challenge. If you don't like the steam punk look to your background, you can easily change it to something western, something rustic, or something medieval with some basic texture swapping. I do this A LOT when I am working with architecture. Look through your content and look for textures you would want to see in your background and apply those textures to the surfaces of the features you don't like.
For example, using your version #1:
Swap out the surface texture map for the yellow bar she's gripping with something like this wooden beam texture
The swap out the surface texture map for the grey walls behind her with something like
or 
And just those two switches changes your sci-fi background to something western/middle eastern or old world/gothic. Or anything else you want!
You would be surprised at the number of textures you can find in your own runtime texture folders. Even the outfit she's wearing I bet has some textures you could use on things other than clothes. And if you can't find what you are looking for in your own runtime, you can fine hundreds of thousands of texture samples free online. If you have photoshop or GIMP or the like, you can customize scale and colour to be anything you want. The sky is the limit really!
~ Novbre
Novbre, that is a nice render. I had a fox run across the trail in front of me just a couple of hours ago! Your piece made me smile.
You did some dense layering, very organic. Nicely done.
Nice one Novbre, it looks almost like a cross between a painting and a photograph to me
It is true that available GPU memory is always limited by the memory of the card with the smallest amount. To me this is not a negative aspect, it is just a part of the technical specification. Multiplying the number of GPUs means multiplying processing power, i.e. render times both for final and interactive ("realtime") renders. Memory problems need to be adressed, as you said there is 8 GB on a GTX 1080 / 11 GB on a GTX 1080 Ti. As barbult said, instancing, subdivision levels and displacement are memory eaters. You can also tweak some settings like texture compression etc. Keeping this in mind, you will be able to finish any render. But it is not a bad idea to have more than one render engine available. That way you can pick the right one depending on your project requirements, like memory requirements / instancing / millions of polygons or thousands of objects etc.
As working on a scene is an iterative process, the time I save by being able to use Iray in the viewport to see e.g. the lighting conditions while moving objects, adjusting textures etc. is priceless. And final renders are quick as well. To have figures, I can run test renders if I find some time in the coming days - one with a single card activated and one with both cards.
I built my machine with a delidded i9-7900x (better cooling), two Asus Strix GTX 1080Ti and 64GB memory, plus a custom water cooling loop that includes the graphics cards. This means I removed the fans of the graphics cards and replaced the backplates as well. That was a clean, silent, powerful and beautiful solution to my problems. I must say though, I notice the necessary 1.2 KW power supply on the monthly electricity bill ;)
Got hit with a third idea this week. Thaught I'd try and share it even though I don't have time to do more with it.
It is not true that you are limited by the GPU with the smallest amount of memory - if you have cards with different capacities Iray will drop the smaller if it/they run out of memory but continue to use the larger.
So here are the figures - I wanted to know the exact numbers myself, so I did a test this morning. I used a scene that is available for free, so people can grab it and do their own tests if they want. It's the default ready-to-render settings in https://www.daz3d.com/sci-fi-warrior-bundle.
The only setting I changed was the render resolution - the default of 350 x 196 was rendered in a few seconds, not producing usable results. The initial standard processing time before the rendering starts is included in the render time reported by DS, in this case 18 seconds. So I cranked up the resolution to 1920 x 1080 to have more useable results. But I usually render my images with twice the final resolution to be able to reduce the resolution to 50% in photoshop which produces crisp images, and the scene here is very basic, so render times are still not typical of real world renders.
The scene uses approx. 70 texture maps from 1500x1500 to 3000x3000. There is no fancy stuff in it, no reflection, no refraction, no transparency, no displacement, I think not even normal maps. Just a few lights.
The i9-7900 x ran with a mild overclocking at 4 Ghz / all cores, both Asus Strix GTX 1080 Ti had an effective GPU boost clock of 1987 Mhz / memory clock 11100 Mhz.
So the answer to your quesion is - Iray profits 100 % from a second Nvidia GPU. If it is the same model as the first GPU, you can expect your render time to be reduced to 50%. BTW what strikes me is how little the i9 CPU matters as soon as one or more GTX 1080 Ti are at play, though all 20 logical CPU cores were permanently running at 100% while the GPUs sat there bored at about 15 to 20%. I knew the GTX 1080 Ti is a beast, but I did not expect such a subordinated effect of the i9. Of course this is completely different when comparing to systems without a powerful Nvidia GPU and a i7 or older CPU.
So if you had two cards with 11GB memory each, once the memory of the first card was used up/full, DAZ will switch to the second cards memory. Effectively giving you 22gb of GPU memory to use? Ugh?!
ON a side note...I have used VUE since the early 2000's. Vue has an addon called Render Cow, that basically lets you set up your own render farm using other computers you may have available on a network. Since some complex landscapes in Vue can take 40+ hours to render, using render cow was really the only way to stay sane. I know Poser has something similar. I can't recall ever seeing anything like that for Daz. Short of sending your files off to a professional render farm, IS there a way to daisy chain computers on a net work to distribute the rendering load?
~ Novbre
Yes, you are right. I mixed up "multiple GPUs" with "SLI".
No - he said that iRay ignores the "smaller" card and only uses the card with the bigger memory if the smaller cards memory is not sufficient. If all cards have the same amount of memory installed - lets say 8 GB - and iRay needs more than 8 GB, or if there is a card with more memory but still not sufficient, it should use the CPU only.