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WOW! impressive render! Yes, I do like 3Delight as well as it does a great job on front side SSS, plus it's more RAM freindly, my only problem is the initial map optimazation...
j cade, i would be very interested to see in depth your Blender skin shader, because as you know it could be translated to Poser11 SuperFly as it uses Cycles too :) (minus the curve not that is not implemented yet).
3delight does a great job in all manner of SSS. Unfortunately, all the shaders with SSS and the SSS shader block in DAZ Studio are like 10 years behind (if not more). Raytraced SSS have been available in 3delight for Maya, 3dsmax, and Softimage for quite some time. Probably Houdini too, but I haven't kept up with Houdini since version 9.
The map optimization process can take a long time and even stopped at some point. What I generally do to overcome that problem is add models (and their textures) to the scene one at a time and just do an IPR render (without SSS). If the process gets stuck (not uncommon if you have hundreds of textures at very high resolution), then stop the render, save the scene, quit DS, wait a bit (so the app fully closes) and then restart DS and open the scene you saved. Most of the time, optimizing maps gets stuck with HDRI images.
Actually...with large HDRIs, it may not be stuck. Tdlmake, for some reason, in Studio will drop to single-threaded mode, and with a single core/thread converting the image it can take a very long time to complete.
Thanks for the correction. Should've said it may 'looked' stuck and takes a very long amount to finish. When that happens, I generally just do the steps above.
So the challenge is rendering the same (whatever) character with the same HDRI in Iray and other renderers?
What Light set you have used here in DAZstudio?
Whoops sorry. I've been outside a lot and not much on my computer for basically the past 2 weeks. I have a new camera, and have decided that, as I do, in fact, live in the most beautiful part of the world, and ought to go enjoy it.
Basically. I wanted to control for as many factors as possible. Same lighting, same textures, same pose, means the primary difference is the skin shader setup itself. (Just to give you an idea I did consider not using textures at all, but decided it was probably a bit too abstract, and wouldn't show factors like how well the eyebrows are handled)
...Aaaand I have another (very basic) test. Its Luxrender! No, not Reality, but instead via blender. which is a: free and b: exposes more of the guts and settings (I have philisophical differences with the way Reality is set up)
First thing you may notice is V7 appears to be missing a body. I'm cheating a bit, way back when I started making my cycles skin I made a Genesis 3 bust and baked textures over from V7 so that it all sat on one map, it's very difficult to edit multiple materials simultaneously for cycles and absolutely impossible for luxrender, so cutting everything down to one matzone was nice. I didn't feel like resetting up the materials on the usual figure, because if I haven't yet mentioned I did not enjoy setting up the luxrender materials.
I'll admit I do like how it looks Luxrender's lighting is just pleasing on some level I've never been able to understand. Also the eyes came out surprisingly well for the very minimal time I spent on them (I didn't bother) with SSS for them... I think I remembered to add the bump map? Honestly by that point I just wanted something rendered
That said is this a workflow that I would recomend anyone ever? It combines some of the most annoying elements of Cycles and 3delight in Studio plus several all its own.Lots of settings floating around in panels that you dont know if using will help or hurt? check. Limited documentation? check. Slow to no progressive render? yeah. No way to multiple materials at once? difficulty with things like strands? (hey thats an Iray problem) I think you're getting the picture.
So.. why would you use Luxrender? Well it does caustics better than just about anything else, and with the new luxcore engine they're even fast. It is also pretty speedy for interiors compared to Iray IMO. But, if your primarily or even consistantly redering portraits, it is... not in its element, its sss setup is particularly painful (and thats not even considering if you're trying to do it with nodes as blender is technically capable, I love nodes in blender, I gave up at trying to use the luxrender nodes in blender) you may notice in the render the spec is rather hard unlike my Iray and cycles renders I tried to get tiling bump, nut there was no way to do it without using nodes, and with the nodes I couldn't set up sss at all, so there was no tiling bump,
Hi I to have grown to love blenders node based shading system after years of viceral hatred of node based systems since experiencing the regressive, lumbering monstrosity that exists in poser.
Having said that I do find the SSS implementaion in Reality/LUX much more user friendly.
Reality/LUX simply sets up the SSS on your genesis figure skin by default and gets it right.
I have been using the free "teleblend" Export script by "Mcasual" to sent my Daz still scenes to Blender
I tried for months to get a good SSS shader node set up for
My Daz genesis figures and I must say harvesting online tutorials has been like Googling a recipe for Apple Pie.
Every tutorial was radically different from the others
with each claiming to be the best SSS skin solution for Daz figures with blender nodes.
Some used a" scatter map"(how do i make one??)
Some Did not see them as necessary.
But ALL required me to apply a SSS shader node group to every separate surface( Face,head,torso,legs etc etc)
Very tedious&frustrating to be Charitable.
I am primarily an animator and only have the occasion need for PBR Still shots,
I will still use blender for some things but for indoor still portraits I find Reality/LUX the easier option.
Was going to give this a try but the extraction failed
EDIT: Added error mesage
Thats my philisophical differences with reality. Yes it sets up the SSS pretty good, but I love nodes and blender I can contol every element with absolute precision. Reality is the oposite of that in my expirience, and tweaking anything in Reality is like pulling teeth (for perspective before the advent of progressive rendering most of my finished renders had at least 50 test renders beforehand) Thats why I wanted to try Lux via blender. I'll probably go back to it in the future. Its biggest problem for me was that its node implementation is not really finished yet (which is why I gave up) but if they improve that I'll probably use it in the future.
If you're going to be using it for animation I'd recomend this one Technically its not "real" SSS but it makes up for it by being so much faster to render. Actually all the shaders in that thread are genius.
You can work around it by cleverly using group nodes If something is in a group it will change across materials There's still some manual loading on the front end, but I now can tweak the skin settings for a group of materials all at once. (That method didn't work with lux though which is why I used my consolidated head)
I understand, I just wanted to try my hand at something similar, but I cannot use your setup since I don't have V7 (G3 isn't a favourite figure). So I was wondering if I could do, say, a V4 in a few renderers and join the fun in this thread =)
Here's the scenefile for the setup without a figure if you want (still download the dropbox file since that has the HDRI) but use this duf instead.
It'd be pretty easy to stick the figure of your choice in there if you want.
I'f your doing 3delight I'd be really interested to see how the specular compares. I can get a similar SSS feel in 3delight but I could never get the spec to have the same pop.
Thank you J Cade!
In 3Delight, I'll be using my own shaders, though, and they make use of contemporary lighting models built into 3Delight these days, not the "oldschool" ones found in DS shaders. Out of what's available in the store here, Wowie could show what's possible with the UberSurface2 shader, he's the one who knows how to use it best.
PS I haven't yet figured out how to get a 32 bit render out of DS+Iray. Could you please point me in the right direction?
Thank you so much Will! I would've never guessed.
Picturenaut treats the resulting EXR file in a somewhat unusual way, but that's okay.
Yup, it's much easier to render a "complex" scene to EXR and tonemap in dedicated software.
I think I should have my tests and descriptions ready in a few days - been sorta wary of rendering anything in the 30C heat of this weekend, but the weather forecast says the temperatures are going down.
Preferences based on what I have seen posted here would be cycles, iray, octane, lux.
Must concur with putting cycles first a at least
But I would rank Reality/LUX second based on how easy Reality sets up the SSS for me.
I have no personal experience with octane
and Iray takes one look at my hardware and points its finger in my face and laughs derisively.
Also for those with "lesser hardware"I have found that cycles
is the most forgiving as far as speed & performance rendering on the CPU only, particulary in "progressive refine" mode.
I have a cyHairs module for LAMH but no one was even remotely interested in it. And LAMH's FiberHair is SIGNIFICANTLY smaller than any other geometry strand hair out there that I am aware of.
Kendall
So, I'm a 3Delight user who wants to test-drive other renderers and see if it's going to be difficult to match complex materials. =)
I'm also incredibly boring when I get down to writing forum posts. Sorry.
My laptop specs are:
Intel Core i7-4700MQ CPU @ 2.40GHz (quadcore)
8 GBytes RAM
NVIDIA GeForce GT 740M (2 GB DDR3)
The test character is a somewhat dial-morphed and subdivided V4 with Reby Sky skin textures, Steph4 sclera maps and LanaRR iris maps with Steph4 iris bump. The "tear" and "eyesurface" surfaces were turned off for the testing.
All DAZ figures have ears are several times too thick as compared to real-world human ears: human ear cartilage is about 1..1.5 mm thick, and DAZ figures have ears that are 4...6 mm thick (either Measure Metrics or DS primitives can confirm this). With the proper thickness, the ears would "light up" more. A common solution is an SSS strength map, but I don't want to use any for the test. I keep meaning to make thickness morphs anyway.
Changes made to the scene:
a) moved stuff around a bit to accommodate my Vicky;
b) changed environment intensity to 1. Here's why:
Since I wrote my 3Delight shader code myself, I know for a fact that in my setup the map intensity is increased by simple multiplication. But I can't be sure about the "environment intensity" parameters in other renderers: what if they are power operators, or even some custom curves? So I'm going to set the intensities to 1 everywhere, to minimise the possible differences.
Besides, the tdlmake utility which prepares the textures for 3Delight didn't like the HDR map from J Cade's scene, so I resaved it as EXR from Picturenaut. This may or may not have affected the map's intensity balance.
And various renderers can also sample the same map in different ways.
c) made the plane emit some light.
It should allow me to better match the light balance between key and fill: what a non-emissive plane reflects depends on how much light it gets from the HDR, and HDR intensity sampling varies between renderers, likely in a non-linear way, and I've already decided I don't want to tweak environment intensities... and with an emissive plane I can tweak its own intensity.
d) changed the white sphere to RGB192 to match my materials.
My 3Delight setup is "unconventional" for the DS world: it's heavily customised to make use of the contemporary features of the renderer, such as the pathtracer module with diffuse ray caching, fully raytraced SSS and physically based shading models.
With the DS+3Delight combo, I have control over most of the parameters: the shader code (via "shader builder") and the scene options/attributes (via "scripted rendering"). There aren't that many unknown variables.
With the other renderers, it gets more complicated for me because the implementations are different, and the shading language is either not that familar to me (MDL in Iray) or isn't exposed at all (Carrara).
Here is the 3Delight render, which is my preferred look for skin: "perfect", youthful. Some people say it lacks detail, but I wrote the shader so that this is easy to achieve.
3Delight render time (obviously CPU only): 34 minutes 15.21 seconds
Click for full size:
With the pathtracer and RSL in 3Delight, there are many points where you can control the sampling quality. I used fairly high quality settings and rendered to EXR.
To render to EXR from DS, you need to send commands that the basic DS/3Delight interface doesn't have, but the "scripted 3Delight" makes it possible if you write these commands into your script. I use the "scripted" mode 90% of the time, not only for EXR. It has two downsides: a) the Garibaldi plugin becomes tricky to use; b) if you want volumetric atmosphere shaders (which are attached to cameras), you need to explicitly script getting them from the camera - but as a replacement, you can use interior volumes on big primitives.
Oh, and this smaller render shows the specular over a little bit of diffuse, no SSS. The specular is compound, using Cook-Torrance for general reflection and GGX for area lights. There are reasons for this, but they're too technical. Either way, just goes to show how far it's possible to go Doing Stuff Your Own Way (tm) in a production renderer geared towards programmable shading.
Basically, in my experience, SSS is a subtle effect. Even for those who use it as overwhelmingly as I do. Because the primary thing that "sells" the image is good specularity.
I used SSS on the sclera here, but the disjointed geometry of the DAZ figure eyes creates those weird rings around the iris when fed to 3Delight's new RT SSS. To avoid this, I generally use a non-SSS shader, with a coloured absorptive coating as a cheat.
Let's start with the Iray comparison.
It should be pretty obvious that I'm not an Iray expert. It only worked on my laptop in the first couple of DS4.8 builds, and since then and until very recently, there had been bad conflicts between my video card driver and the Iray bridge (in both DS and Substance Designer), so my Iray experience is very limited.
The cornea is just the DAZ refractive water preset.
No skin presets were used. I tried to replicate my 3Delight techniques and dialed the skin material from the Uber base to give acceptable results without any translucency strength maps, so that the translucency effect responds believably to geometry thickness only. For sclera (with iris) and teeth, I'm using the same distances, SSS amount and direction, just with different colours.
With the 3Delight SSS, I base my materials on the scatter/absorption values measured by H.Jensen et al (the same values are encoded in the drop-down list of the shader mixer SSS brick, like the one found in the AoA Subsurface network). It's quite easy. I cannot figure out how to precisely replicate these in Iray, so the Iray settings are more "eyeballed".
As you can see, I didn't manage to get a perfect match despite multiple tweaks and re-renders. =( The tone is somewhat different. The ears are more translucent than in the 3Delight version, but the skin in incident light is darker and has less internal scattering. Should be possible with more tweaks, but it's just that Iray is fairly slow on my machine. So this is basically as far as I'm able to go now. Maybe later I'll get to something closer to my 3Delight mats.
Some would probably prefer the Iray look because it's more detailed, but I want the "pretty" stuff =)
The interesting thing is that Iray is more forgiving towards whacky geometry - you can see it by how the scattering works smoothly on the sclera.
The HDR map is sampled quite differently, too. I'm sure it's just the start - wonder how it's going to look in Carrara...
Another difference between renderers is the way they handle bump mapping, which also looks to be different "in a non-linear fashion".
Of course pixel filtering also affects fine detailing to a degree - in 3Delight, I use a fairly soft (but not "too soft") filter setting: Catmull-Rom 2x2. In Iray, it was the default Gaussian 1.5x1.5.
Iray render time, CPU and GPU: 1 hours 45 minutes 52.15 seconds (stopped at the default 5000 samples limit)
Click for full size:
Next time, either Carrara or LuxRender.
Those are fabulous Kettu! (And I'm a fan of boring technical posts, myself) I am completely with you on spec depending on how your light is set up it isn't always that noticeable, (like if there aren't any strong small light sources) but spec always is. Spec was pretty much the stumbling block with me for 3delight, I can get sss I like, but I could never get the spec to pop like yours, color me jealous.
It really does go to show though, Its really more about what the artist can get out of the render engine than which is the "best"
And I'm with you on eyes being a pain, they can be annoying in Iray too, particularly when you're trying to get SSS for the sclera but not the cornea without a sharp edge between the two, I've done all sorts of weird crap including modeling my own custom eyes, and I still haven't found something I'm completely happy with.
Thank you so much J Cade =)
I couldn't really get this sort of specular with generic DS shaders either!
In code, I tried all the built-in 3Delight shading models, and for "delta" lights ("traditional" spotlights etc) and area lights, the GGX model is head and shoulders above all others. It's relatively expensive to shade, but so much worth it.
For "indirect specular" (reflection of geometry) and environment maps the Cook-Torrance model looks good enough, and it's somewhat faster than GGX.
And I also make custom eye models to try and work around this issue! =)
What shader and lights did you use in this wowie? The realism is quite staggering.
Must say that Octane Render looks much better and more realistic, even though it seems to blur out some of the DAZ Studio iRay details.
Looks good but not like you have attempted to compare it directly with the iRay equivalent.
Shader is UberSurface2, lights are a combination of UE2 and linear point lights, set to mimic physical light falloff. There's a HDRI used for reflection (but not for lighting). So, linear workflow, physical falloff, physically plausible settings just like how 3delight devs recommended.
Paolo Berto:
Yes. That's intentional. I was trying to mimic Ismael Fuentes's shot, cause the skin on that Emily render looks more like real skin than clay or hard plastic. Rough but oily, with tiny speckles of specular spread around and more backward SSS.
This one is a more diffused light setup. I changed the light positions and camera angle. With hair, took about 12-13 minutes.
Some great renders here.
I was wondering if anybody using cycles could help me as to why the transparency on my eyelashes are interfering with the sss?
Im using genesis 3 fyi.
One thing I have noticed with blender's SSS is it sometimes doesn't like overlapping meshes within an object I usually go into edit mode and select the eyes and eyelashes and hit cntrl-p>seperate by selection to make the eyes a seperate object
Other thing to always check is that the transparency color is fully white (I've accidentally set it not quite white more times than I care to recall)