How does Stonemason render those images?
Oso3D
Posts: 14,892
in The Commons
Consider http://www.daz3d.com/utopia-labs
There's this soft, paint-like quality to a lot of Stonemason images, and I'm wondering whether it's within Daz3d or whether it comes from post-work. Anyone know? It looks really beautiful.
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I've always assumed dark sacrifice and blood sacrifice.
Edit: Oh wait, that's DM...nevermind, then.
Some of these look as if they could have been made with an atmosphere camera that adds mist to the image increasing with distance. There are cameras like that available for Daz Studio, and Stonemason includes one with his Streets of Old London set.
I think he has the elusive MAKE ART button... :p
--MW
Utopia Labs comes with "14 bonus Cameras include volume fog for atmospheric affects".
I've played with volume fogs and never gotten anything like THAT... but ok. ;)
That is definaletly postworked. Stonemason's work has been showcased in other websites. I just can't find them at the moment. Do a search on Google with his real name and they might come up. I also believe he has done professional work and those are out there as well.
http://stefan-morrell.com/
http://stefan-morrell.cgsociety.org/
http://www.artstation.com/artist/stefan_morrell
http://stonemason-daz3d.deviantart.com/
http://stefanmorrell.deviantart.com/
Well quite a few of them have the Daz Studio Render watermark, so I wouldn't be too quick to dismiss them as straight daz renders (the last image is the only one I would see as really hard to do without postwork). Also when you look at his DazStudio specific shader renders (http://www.daz3d.com/daz-studio-dirt-shaders and http://www.daz3d.com/winter-terrains-for-daz-studio) which, as they are specific 3delight shaders that have to be rendered in daz, they don't look all that different, That is again evidence that they could well be straight daz renders.
That said a lot of his recent products feature octane renders (and some of his old renders were lightwave), and I think this is probably because the daz studio ones would take forever and a week to render. As mentioned, several products come with volume cameras, and my guess would be the renders might also use the old uberenvironment indirect lighting, which is painfully slow. So yes I think it it is probably possible to get a similar looking render in 3delight, I just think it would take my laptop a week.
I am not saying all of them are. I have been around long enough to know what is postwork. Just like I can easily tell a Firefly render from a 3Delight render, etc.
as mentioned it's mostly just using a fog camera to add some atmospheric haze, the effect of distant objects becoming desaturated and hazy is important to sell an outdoors render.the light is usually uber-environment with a direct light to simulate the sunlight.the last two images have some volume added in post,and also I'll often put some color into the darker areas using curves or levels in post,maybe some lens artefacts(glare,scratches etc)..add some sharpen and it's done.
S
I've never used Lightwave, maybe your thinking of 3dsmax?..and I've never had any trouble getting uber-environments rendered promptly in DS(unless there's a lot of hair) , then again I've never tried working on laptops either, my promos usually render in 20 minutes, any longer than that and I'll cancel and and try again
Dump to RIB, render in the standalone...with things like volumetrics, the standalone, even with omnifreaker GI is much faster than Studio.
forget how he renders the images, I wanna know how he can model so damned well
Max, thats the one. and yeah I've always tended towards renders with lots of hair. I think at one point I actually did a render with Garibaldi (strand hair) and indirect lighting. That was pretty much the tipping point and I decamped to Cycles.
...you must have some heavy duty hardware.
I rarely use UE even on my workstation as render times are excruciatingly long since I do use a fair amount of content that involves transmaps (hair, plants, atmospheric effects, etc). Turning off the ray tracing gives less than desirable results (particularly for hair that is layered to achieve a sense of depth).
...I've never been able to get more than just a nce quick render of the .objs with no textures.
Not really that high end ,it's an i7, 32gb ram 64 bit system, the utopia set was probably rendered on an older system with half that power.
I often see people talk about very long renders with uberenvironment and it just confuses me as it's always been one of the faster render options on my system,and I'll often force the sampling up to 256 to get a cleaner image, 20 minutes is what I expect from a typical promo render (often rendered at twice the size of the final promo)..but again if your using a lot of hair then expect a slow render, but dont blame the environment for the slow renders ;)
S
I get very similar speeds to Stonemason using Uberenvironment as well and I have a similar machine (except with less RAM) It's important to check your sampling and other settings like he says, they can make a huge difference in speed. Also try using Ubersurface on hair and disabling AO on those surfaces (you can also do that by flagging with Age of Armour lights).
No need to disable ambient occlusion. Just override the Occlusion shading rate to something like 32 or above. I generally set to 128.
I rarely need to render things more than 10 minutes. And that's at 1920x1080 with max ray trace depth set to 8, pixel samples at 8 and UE set to pretty high quality.
As for UE2's indirect light, blame DAZ for not passing the correct ray cache parameters to 3delight. The only problem with UE2's indirect light/Bounce GI mode is that current SSS implementation in most DS shaders includes indirect light in SSS precompute. That's unnecessary since backscatter typically are only seen with very strong, direct light.
Using the Progressive Render option in 3Delight can also help a lot with computationally intensive scenes.
Frankly, Stonemason's results are a good selling point for 3Delight, then.
So are his promo renders in Octane, which look amazing! ;-)
Not to dismiss Stonemasons inspiring abilities but 3Delight is a highly capable engine in it's own right.
http://www.3delight.com/en/index.php?page=projects
Glad you reminded me of this. These are great cams too, and can be used for other scenes.
What kind of computers do you guys have then? NASA stuff LOL?
I've never been able to perform an Uberevn or Uberlight render taking less than 24 hours for me - sometimes longer. And that's on a fairly new and powerful machine.
What are your render settings? Because that is rather unprecidented. I'm on a laptop with 8gb of memory and I can still get renders with indirect light and hair faster than that.
I saw render times really start spiking once I used things like Atmospheric Camera and meshlights. Made switching to Iray not so much of a shock. ;)
Core i7 4770K with just 8 GB of RAM. 3delight Render options are set to pretty much the default except for progressive rendering (enabled), bucket order to ZigZag, gamma correction enabled and gamma set tot 2.2 (for linear workflow). A typical 1920x1080 image renders in about 5 minutes. For a DOF shot, pixel samples were raised to either 6 or 8 and that's when render times reached 10 or 11 minutes. Shadow samples at 16 is fine for fast, preview renders and doesn't really add up much in render time until you hit 64. 48 or 32 is generally enough for final renders, even with soft shadows.
You can find an example of a DOF render that took almost 11 minutes here: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/54913/approaching-realism-in-daz-studio-and-gamma-correction-demystified/p6
The only time renders went up for a test renders is when I had 11 V6 in a test shot I've made to compare skin materials. Didn't try that one with DOF though. It'll probably be longer, around 15 minutes.