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Thanks mCasual. I watched a few tutorials yesterday and now have a better idea of how Cycles materials work in Blender. A little different to Luxrender materials but at least as powerful. I didn't notice whether skin supports SSS, however, nor did I see a metal material.
You script is fantastic and, like Blender itself, free. I need to spend more time with Blender though because I still get slowed down by the interface and not knowing the keyboard shortcuts. Yesterday, for example, I wanted to stop a Cycles render and started guessing keyboard shortcuts because I couldn't see a stop/pause button in the interface. I thought I had presssed Esc earlier but eventually found that to be the one. Google was no help in telling me how to stop a render in progress. Nor was the Keyboard cheat sheet I had downloaded. I don't think a pause/restart is possible (it is in Luxrender).
Actually, Cycles is more powerful, because it lets you invent your own optics, if you so choose.
Here is a recent example of amazing things you can do with Cycles nodes:
http://community.blendernation.com/t/faking-liquid-domain-material-mix-proof-of-concepts/1896
At the very top of your Blender window, there will be a little progress bar with an x on its end: press that!
Damn ... I didn't spot that! Is there a pause too or does stop mean you have to restart from the beginning?
Oh - just remembered a couple more questions ...
- is there an equivalent to saving a Mat Preset in Blender? (Saving the material/texture, etc. for a particular object so you don't need to go through all the tweaking the next time).
- I couldn't change all of the surfaces to DAZ default shader in DAZ Studio. I see this is recommended but some of the shaders will not change from Uber or AoA no matter what I do. Any advice?
One is in the 3D window; shortcut: capital Z.
That render will restart as soon as you do anything else in that 3D View.
The other way, is by explicitly requesting a render,
and then you get a lot of options, including where you want the image to appear.
If you choose a new window for that, then you can just keep working
while Blender (e.g. Cycles) does its rendering.
Thanks but it still doesn't answer the pause question. I set the preview window to 10 samples so that restarts as expected when anything changes. But if I start a render and, for any reason need to stop it and then restart it from the same point, can that be done? I do that a lot with luxrender but the renders do take hours somtimes. Perhaps Cycles is so quick that restarting from scratch in no big deal. I have to use CPU because I only have 2GB of VRAM on my NVidia GPU which is too small for my scenes in IRay and I guess that same applies to Cycles.
By default, everything in Blender is saved,
and can be copied or transferred within one Blender session.
You can also keep your own libraries,
by setting up a folder structure of your design,
with .blend files in it. Then, from any Blender session,
you can append stuff from inside any of those .blend files.
It’s all up to you how you want to organize your stuff.
Again, I'm not sure this is answering my question, though it is appreciated. I'm not talking about saving the whole scene. Let's say I have the materials just the way I want them for a type of cloyh (a dress, for example). In DAZ Studio, I can save that as a Material Preset. I'm asking whether I can do something similar in Blender. I have tried Google but so many answers start by assuming the person asking knows a lot already which is a little annoying since everyone was a noob at some time.
Another thing I do in DAZ Studio is create a character complete with morphs, clothes, materials, etc., and save her as a Scene subset - i.e. not the whole scene, just that character. Now I could do that for characters before export to Blender but I doubt that it is possible to get the materials perfect without some tweaking in Blender. So I'd like to save a Blender version of her too.
When you start Blender using the scene.bat file which is created by mcjTeleBlender in the same folder as your scene.obj, scene.mtl and scene/.py files
then you can see the Blender "console" which is useful because it gives you hints about what's happening when things go wrong ( Lilo and Stitch )
the other benefit is that the Windows
pause button
works !
you may need to first click on the black console window first, to bring it into focus
but as far as i know, there is no way to resume a render that was stopped
I don't use Windows but maybe my Mac pause button might work too. I'll give it a try.
on the topic of saving materials
If you save your scene as, for example, myskinmaterial.blend
then, later, when you have another scene loaded
you can use Blender's Append or Link menu
it lets you navigate inside your myskinmaterial.blend as if it was a disk drive
and in the "objects" subfolder there's your materials, you can pull
"https://www.blender.org/manual/data_system/linked_libraries.html
now the old materials are in your scene and can be applied to your new surfaces
you have to select the object, go in the materials tab, select a surface, and change the material using the drop-down list
But if you read mcjTeleBlender's manual's sections concerning "use mat-lib" and lib mat, then you can avoid that trouble
mcjTeleBlender will pull each material from your mcskinmaterials.blend files and apply them to the correct surface in the new scene
section of the manual: Using and re-using a (.blend) material library
https://sites.google.com/site/mcasualsdazscripts/mcjteleblender-for-ds1-2-3-4
the other must-read is the section
added june 26th 2012 another way to re-use custom materials (.blend files )
Thank you - that's useful to know. I have no excuse for not reading the Blender manual pages except it is such a big application and I hardly know where to start.
I thought I had read all of your mcjTeleBlender manual though - I must have missed or forgotten the part about mat-lib.
youtube-search for
new boston blender
his video-tutorials for the older Blender are still good
guy's a genius
Thanks again - his website looks like a great resource.
By the way, do you have any comment about whta I asked about DAZ Shaders. Some AoA and Uber shaders wont change to DAZ when I select them and apply the DAZ shader. Most others do change.
to change shader you must make sure the object is selected And the surface is selected
so you can select Genesis in the scene tab, then in the surface tab, select all her materials, then in your content tab, apply the DS Default shader
note that there will most probably be things to adjust, for instance some shaders have the subsurface color map to the ambient color
also, if you hold down the control key while double-clicking on the "DS Default" shader , or any shader, you'll have a panel pop up with more control over how the shader replaces the old one
i think the width of your logo/banner is busting the forum's layout
in the beginnings i had some of my image size modified by forum admins
but now i take great care of keeping them at 800 pixels maximum
since your banner is like 1000 pixels wide, it possibly stretches the whole thread layout to that width
and that's what admins dont want .... i gather
Any why when I use certain skins (FW danika and V6) my bump maps have artifacts? If I use Olympia6 or G3 the bump maps come out normal.
Im fairly new to cycles so any helps appreciated.
the Multiply Node which gives the bump map strength is at 1
i think that translates to 1 meter bumps
normally i use very small values like 0.01
the Multiply Node which gives the bump map strength is at 1
i think that translates to 1 meter bumps
normally i use very small values like 0.01
it's not directly related to this
but using imagemagick and converting/blurring images using a command like
c:\imagemagick\convert mybigbmpimage.jpg -depth 16 -blur 3x3 mybigbmpimage.tif
will convert a jpg image into a 16bit tif image and at least for Daz Studio 3, those tif images can be used as bump/displacement maps
usually this improves the result, there's less "stair steps" in the bumps
i discussed this here http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/29672/tip-improve-bump-and-displacement-renders-by-using-16-bit-versions-of-your-maps
but last time i did a test with Daz Studio >4 i vaguely recall it didnt look as good as in Daz Studio 3
OMG! I finally got this to work for me. Now I'm just trying to figure out Cycles lol. I'm attempting to make the lips more glossy and I can't get a lamp to become emmisive - yet. I'm super excited now because I've seen the power of this render engine and the post work possibilities are endless!
Thank you mCasual for making this a possibility!
In Cycles, you don't need lamps per se; it suffices to say that some surface emits.
when you're in daz studio, if you apply any image (doesnt matter which) to the Ambient color channel of a surface
mcjTeleBlender should make that surface emissive
then in Blender, if you select the object that owns this surface and open the material properties panel
and select the specific material by name , then you'll see a "strength" parameter in an Emissive BSDF section of the selected material
--
or you could select the material in question
click on the [X] button to destroy the existing material and revert to the basic material which is called Diffuse BSDF
click on the word "Diffuse BSDF" and from the drop-down-list, select "Emissive BSDF" ( or is it Emissive? )
you'll have an emissive surface, you can change the color and the 'strength'
Thanks all! I was able to figure it out just after I posted about getting it working. Now to figure out making things Shiny-er - my models shoes and lips should be very glossy but they only come out with a matte gloss look. Time to Google and see what I can find!
I love Cycles...the colors are rich and it doesn't look washed out. The node system seems a bit more intuitive than I first thought it would be.
I'm slowly getting the hang of this render engine. One thing I'm stumped about so far is light strength - if I change a value on one light it does so on all of them. I've searched and I see nothing about this happening or how to fix it. Any idea's?
If you are using mesh lamps , or an emmisive material you need to click on the properties tab - materials (little pink ball) and press the little + sign next to the material to create a new version of the material as multiple objects can use the same material slot....
This creates an iteration of the existing material , you can also select mutiple materials and affect a change on all of them at the same time , Let me know if you need that , but im in Fallout land at the moment. .. 8 )
Thanks all, I'm getting the hang of it now. As soon as I can afford it Ill be switching to Poser 11, it uses the Blender Cycles renderer and every tutorial for Cycles is usable with this new version of Poser.
i'm reposting an answer i was giving in a private message because it restates important point
in the nearish future i hope to improve documentation and the script itself
-------------------
Hello
The manual for now is the web pages for the 3 versions
- https://sites.google.com/site/mcasualsdazscripts/mcjteleblender-for-ds1-2-3-4
- https://sites.google.com/site/mcasualsdazscripts3/mcjteleblender2
- https://sites.google.com/site/mcasualsdazscripts4/mcjteleblender3
In general, mcjTeleBlender works best if you use the DS Default shader, instead of the complex shaders used with Genesis 1,2,3 figures
On my PC in one of the Daz Studio Content folders i have the "DS Default" shader available
so i select all the surfaces with non-standard shaders and replace them with that ... sometimes ... but ...
... but i was able to render the Genesis1 and Genesis 2 figure without too too much trouble with their non-standard shaders
---
for transparencies, or opacities rather, as is the case for eyelashes
if the opacity map is applied to the Opacity Strength channel of a DsDefault shader, normally it works fine
maybe maybe if the opacity map is not in JPG format ( .tif or .png ) ... then you could try converting it to jpg format
you could also try mcjTeleBlender's "collect maps" option, turning it On or Off sometimes helps
if there's many gigantic image maps involved in your scene, ( ex: 6000x4000 maps) then Blender cycles may not be able to load them all on your video card so this could be a problem
so you could swap those gigantic images for smaller ones
----------------------
for animations, it's explained in the manual
but just understand that mcjTeleBlender doesnt export animated objects
it exports snapshots of your scene, in a frozen, non-re-posable state
each animation frame is exported as an obj file
once all the frames are exported you launch/run a batch (.bat) file which renders one by one the .obj files
if materials need to be tweaked, for an animation, then you'll need to read and understand mcjTeleBlender's "Use mat-lib" option
if the lighting and environment need to be tweaked for an animation, then you need to understand the "Render engine" option named "Scene File ( Blend )
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