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So you think Nvidia wrote a special version of Iray just for DS?
When talking about render engines, biased refers to taking short cuts in terms of the calculations made. Brute force refers to not taking shortcuts.
- Greg
To me it's very clear Iray for Daz and Iray Outside of Daz are different. Not a single render i've come across from Daz has gotten to the same level of photorealism in that PDF.
Like, by all means, but the BMW render and Mercedes render there look really convincing, and just way better then when i look at vehicles rendered in Daz, which have CGI written all over it.
Melvin
The shaders used are vital for the end result, as are the lighting set up. nVidia, as I recall, actually used some of Mec4D's renders with early versions of DS Iray in their promo material.
yup, which is why i wonder for the life of me why you guys just didn't use the Vmaterials from Nvidia to begin with.
Instead we have Iray uber, and a bunch of different Iray uber's that do a different, while VMaterials from Nvidia are much better.
Oh yes, i also forgot, but i can't even figure out what i even need to connect in terms of nodes to make full use of them, because the shader mixer is "Cough" very good. "Cough".
Melvin
A car on an HDRI is like the easiest thing to render and make look passably realistic. Im hardly amazed by seeing that.
Is there a vmaterials that is going to work for hair, skin, every type of PBR texture?
Uber Shader was created as general purpose shader to be both PBR and allow for legacy materials. Earlier in this thread, I believe @Padone had said not to use the Glossy Layer Weight and Glossy Group settings because those are for legacy materials and not "PBR".
I have a few problems with those statements. Im not exactly sure what they meant by "dont use" Glossy Layered Weight when trying to be PBR - do they mean set Glossy Layered Weight at 0 or do they mean leave as default (Default is 1.0, and it loads with raw value of 0.33)? Also, how were people supposed to specify Roughness/Specularity in Uber Shader without using the Glossy group settings? (Dual Lobe Specularity was not added to Iray Uber Shader until after its release)
Also stop trying to pass off subjective opinion as fact.
"It looks biased rather than unbiased" isnt convincing argument.
Ironically, loaded with personal biases.
this is daz3d + ai
the relevance of using daz3d to make in an image like that is somewhat dubious. You could create an image like that just with text prompts without daz.
Have you looked at the renders in this thread?
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/349811/car-and-bike-lovers-thread-mark-v/p1
Just gonna give my opinion, but it's a very mixed bag, some do, while others just look and appear "Fake" in their appearance and are a complete miss.
Lilweep, i think you have to go look then what VMaterials are then, it's a package for free that includes a whole range of PBR Materials going from glass, water, leather, etc.
The difference? A lot of those have exposed options that enable things like rippling, wrinkling etc, all sorts of "Advanced" exposed options.
VMaterials was made for MDL specificly, and not just Iray or a single application, the only difference here, is within daz, it's just self-explanatory how to hook up the basic features of those shaders, but trying to figure out how you are gonna hook up their more advanced settings is like trying to find a key among 1000's of possible keys in the Daz Shader Mixer because those exposed "Advanced" options from the VMaterials require some very specific node setups which i don't even know at this point exist in the shader builder of Daz or not, but since the shader builder in daz is just a mess, who knows?
I'm talking about the fact that it is not even remotely clear what, where, how you even find what you are looking for here, there's no search function, there's no hints at which nodes it even might be, it's a complete manual process with nada, nothing of assistence or streamlined features, so good luck trying to find that correct "Key".
As for the glossy and specular thing, Glossy is what metallic shaders would, Specular is what Organic Shaders would use. Glossy is quite litterly the glossy effects on things like leather, metals, wood if it's smoothed up, etc etc, whereas Specular is for Organic Materials, which aren't Glossy in their nature, but "Wet" or "Moist".
Edit: here you go, this is how "Advanced" their Glass_Optical MDL is, there's a bunch of features you just don't have with Iray Uber, which just simplifies everything.
https://ibb.co/41Bnyp7
Melvin
Of course it's a mixed bag, but you said "Not a single render..."
Yup, but then we are also here, while i said the car looks very convincing on it's own, i didn't say it looks as if they took a photograph from it, i don't get that feeling because the HDRI is a give-away.
This though, is what real photorealism is: https://static.chaos.com/images/assets/000/015/430/full_width_original/03_AOA_RS6_Shot006_final.jpg?1652284967 ;
The point where you cannot make out anymore whether it is 3D Rendered or an actual Photograph taken by somebody.
But here is the final showcase i will do, because there is 1 artist that litterly showed me how far behind Iray really is.
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/14P3X - Photorealistic humans, skin and all, were already possible 8 YEARS AGO, this is even before i assume Daz got Iray to begin with, and if that doesn't look convincing enough to people to realize that clearly struggling with Skin etc in 2021, 2022 and 2023 is something that shows how far Iray is behind, then i do not know what else to add or say.
I was asking for skin solution though.
That is something that not a single render engine has "Defined" really, not even Vray etc has shaders that define skin, Blender doesn't have it either, octance doesn't.
Skin is a complex manner you need to define with what's already there. Daz has their PBR Skin Shader, but it's not like it's unique in that sense because you can replicate the process of what the PBR Skin shader does in any engine, including the Micro-detail, and then we aren't even scratching the complexity of what skin is.
For a fair comparison, you would have to use the same model in iray.
Also iray doesnt have the ornatrix or xgen quality hair you will see in most professional likenesses done by industry professionals. Hair does a lot of the heavy lifting in photoreal portraits, especially compared to the hair on Daz Store.
Go download a Vface mesh with 32k textures, and then lookdev it in iray to see comparable realistic results.
Most of the disparity you see between 3d industry professional photoreal likenesses and daz models is not iray, it is bad morphs, bad hair, poor lighting, bad shader setup, rather than inherent flaw in iray.
so why would using vmaterials help, which was your premise?
For Skin, you don't use VMaterials, VMaterials was just to show how over simplified Iray Uber is, to a point where Iray Uber can for example render the basic Idea of Glass, While VMaterials has "Defined" Glass beyond a Refraction value of 1 and IOR Value of 1.5, and also "Defined" several different types of glass to resemble what actual Glass would look like.
Go back a few post, and see the image please where i was talking about that massive custom shader i had going on, that's one way of approaching it and creating a custom Skin Shader with what is already there, which also would allow you to go as far and complex with it as you like, But not a single render engine has "Defined" skin as a shader in all it's complexity, and us usually just simply done by using what's already there.
Iray Uber is like the Principled BSDF and Universal Shader from Both Octane and blender respectively, which all can do skin, but is a very basic manner.
Okay, i (mis)interpreted your comment to mean that Daz should have used vmaterials instead of Iray Uber or PBR Skin, hence confusion as that wouldn't make any sense.
You can easily use vmaterials in Daz Studio. Omniflux releases packages of shader presets for them. Or you can just drag/drop mdl into shader mixer and connect it. It's not like Daz is forcing people to use the Uber shader. I do also think sometimes the vmaterials settings can be unfamiliar, whereas with a Daz Uber or Blender Principled BSDF, the settings are very familiar so easy to tweak.
Blender's Principled BSDF seems perfectly fine for skin (and most other materials). I have used the more complex 3-layer SSS skin shader from Blender marketplace, and despite being more complicated, I found it is imperceptably different from principled BSDF for skin realism. Blender handles SSS different from Daz Studio, but my point is that sometimes a general purpose shader is fine, provided the features align with a skin model approximation.
If someone can make a better shader for DS, I would love to see it though.
Not that hard, the PBR Skin Shader is one example. and yes, it does things differently, it took some time to realize that as a start, but if you really use the PBR Skin shader as it should be used, it's results are better then the Iray Uber one.
For one, it handles Translucency differently, which acts more like how translucency works like with skin. Secondly, the Ambient Occlusion section, is quite litterly for an Ambient occlusion map enhancing the look of how skin behaves under light. (and also the only feature i don't quite understand how it was done, but it cannot be remade for Iray Uber so far as i know from the shader side of things inside Daz itself).
Third, the PBR Skin Shader can get much closer to the Matte appearance of how human skin looks like.
Fourth, the make-up layer, it can't be added from the shader mixer's standpoint of things, but it can be re-made when you go custom with shaders.
Fifth, the Micro-details, it's the ONLY thing that you can actually also add on Iray uber, minus it's Roughness setting which is bound to the PBR Skin MDL Itself, but furthermore, you can also make Iray Uber Blend normals etc.
It's when you really begin to see the bigger picture of it all that things become clear.
Melvin
There's just also one final thing here that i want to say here about Iray in General, because it's Clear that Iray Should be a Unbiased Path Tracer, but what Greg said, and what was said on the Iray Blog of "It is not unbiased in the mathematical sense", it actually makes it perfectly clear what Iray does.
A True Unbiased Path Tracer, like Corona, is gonna need hours to render, it takes it's time because Realism or Photorealism isn't rendered in 30 minutes, but that is what makes Corona Render engine such a great engine, because the results it renders are truly renowned as the best possible looking results for 3D.
Then You have V Ray, which is known as the fasest engine on the market, but, it doesn't produce the same result as Corona Render engine.
Then you have Iray, who tries to do both things at once these two i mentioned are doing, but ultimately, since it's "Brute Forcing" it, fails to get anywhere close to either, both in Speed and Produced result.
I hope this is also something that actually is gonna make sense to people.
Melvin
Also from the Iray blog post
and
I still don't like the PBR skin shaders. There seem to be no way to get convincing light skin. Every PBR skin I've seen, turned out way to dark (EDIT) and to red. The most realistic results are with very dark skin types.
So for light skin, there is nothing more realistic by far, than ISourceTexture's DAZ Uber skin shader, despite the fact, that those shaders are set against any advise.
In fact, I'd be happy to use PBR skin shader, but there is no shader set availeble, that is useful to me.
Still don't know what you are trying to proof or show really.
Here's another fact, but Mental Ray, the actual bigger from Iray that was also the reason why Iray even exists, is discontinued since 2017, it got quite litterly obliberated by the rest of the industry to the point where even nvidia didn't see any point anymore to continue it.
Iray is apparently this popular that when you search for the "Nvidia Iray Wikipedia" page, you instead get the Mental Ray Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_Ray
Also, how could Iray be Path Tracing if Mental Ray is clearly classified as a Raytracer. Also yes, i know what Full Raytracing is, but then we are referring to the term Path Tracing instead.
Since the fall of Mental Ray, Nvidia is not trying to compete anymore with Render Engines, instead it's powering different things now that will make their old competition benefit from that. That's just the truth, but since the fall of Mental Ray, That ecosystem just fell flat, Iray only still exists because you guys are relying on Iray, but the number of applications still using Iray, or needing it as a standalone is small, Very Small, even read Rhino has cut ties with Iray since January of this year. which is normal too since Omniverse is actually eliminating the need for the stand-alone iray plugins from existing.
Hence why i hammer so much on that SSS Stuff, my character is pale skinned, but light and skin behave in such a way that she only looks pale in neutral light or strong sunlight.
It's really not about materials or textures, but about how you use them, and the PBR Skin shader relies on translucency more then it does on a Diffuse Map, since what you will actually see the most is your translucency map.
This is not a Daz model, it is just one of those 3d scans like Digital Emily etc, but it is rendered in Iray.
Shader set up is merley Daz Iray Uber shader using only 3 maps:
I did not spend much time tweaking the shader parameters, as after several minutes i began to start questioning why i was doing this just to post it on a forum.
The hair is one of my SBH hairs. Genesis 9 Eyeballs and Hairstyle were roughly placed into the face, so there are likely some problems there
Ha! Right now, like on command, there is iray uber to pbr shader converter in the store.
great timing.
FYI, you always had that option to begin with...
Just Apply the PBR Skin Shader on the Material fields of your choosing, and voila, textures and settings carry over...