Show us your 3Delight renders
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Yes you're absolutely right, change the environment or sky and it's a totally new deal;)
Well yeah, reflection and refraction needs a lot of processing power, with AweSurface it's pretty easy to optimize every surface in that aspect (limit the number of specular bounces for example), with the default 3DL it's all about fiddling with pixel samples, raytrace depth and shading rate to try and keep rendering times down:) Well progressive is of course an option. And the AoA lights are still very useful in many cases in my opinion.
Was that with the included lighting? UE2 environment light?
Hey that's a good question:) It must be some specular settings I think, will check it out.
Lol, Read The F****** Manual
I hope those spheres weren't subdivided =)))) Well I guess they weren't, or there would have been a lot of noise.
Oh man, I'll need to check again to be sure, but your best bet is to lower specular depth per-surface (shouldn't be that hard to select them using those tricks we spoke about in the laboratory thread). I guess 4 should be enough for metals, and for rough stuff I use just 1.
With all the optimisations aweSurface has going on, though, this may or may not be able to shave off much time.
You could also always try and cap the total raytrace depth in the render settings to something like 4, again, and try excluding metals from GI.
The only other setting that may affect render times is pixel samples. How high was it set?
Water's always tricky. Sometimes you take a photo, and it doesn't look convincing enough...
Are you using absorption on water, BTW?
You're welcome, and thank you for explaining =)
No they were at basic rez.
Tks that's about what I figured;) I didn't try excluding the metal from GI, that may have an impact.
I think 10x10, that's what I usually use, sure, 8x8 should be enough.
Yup, that's just super cool! Experimenting with that and using opacity together with transmission right now, render coming up soon
(read Daz - soon)
Added some stuff, changed the HDRI( still by agent unawares, tks) optimized surfaces, rendertime 32 min
Shallow waters eh? Nah it would fall over the world's edge
Rowboat is a good idea, and then the babes waiting ashore of course;)
If you have that many area lights, your best bet to cut render times is to turn off reflections on parts you can get away with. The base glass and metal presets should already turn off diffuse which also turn off GI for that surface. I actually never tried using trace sets to exclude metal/glass from GI though, since my render times generally falling around 20 minutes with 8x8 pixel samples. That will be around 1 hour when I render with 16x16 pixel samples.
Looking at the render, I would say the culprit are the area lights on the chandelier. I did run into a similar issue when rendering one of the promos. Originally, I used cylinders, but found the render times were really, really long with high pixel samples (at one point, it didn't finish even at 12 hours).
Then I substituted them to single poly planes and render times went down by a lot. In the end, I used a single emitter, instanced the emitter to 'fake' a point light with 360 degree spread. With the instanced parented to the original emitter, I simply populate the scene with more instances organized in the same way.
Finished scene.
Final render time - 1 hour 34 minutes.
I did export the 'Joy' model to Hexagon and hand optimize the model to get away with as low polycount as I can get away with while retaining the shape.
If you do have to use complex shapes on a light source, just use the AWE Environment Sphere shader. Since it's just an ambient surface, it won't have the performance impact of a path traced area light shader. If you need the ambient to 'emit' more light, place a texture on it and use gain/exposure to raise the luminance.
Btw, Sven - that's a wickedly good render.
I hadn't realized diffuse off turned off GI, tks for that! And that scene can obviously be optimized in many ways, learning the hard way as always
You are probably right, 12 spheres with 8 sides each.
Ok so I'll try the planes, thank you! Just love your stuff, will keep me busy for a long time
@wowie
I guess this is a matter of personal taste, but I kind of wish the specular 2 color default value would be mid gray, or atleast not pure white. But I may change my mind when I get a better understanding of everything;)
Darn I somehow missed these, love the interior lighting in that first one! Very nice, mate!
LOL, you should render it out, I can see the whole thing clearly
That would render very dim when rendering metals. Unless you change it back to the proper color.
I think if you apply the 3delight dsDefaultMaterial first, the specular color defaults to grey, which would be retained by the conversion process. There is another alternative, if you don't mind opening up the .dsa Params file in your DS app folder. You can actually change the default shader values.
Find aweSurfaceParams.dsa in this folder - C:\Program Files\DAZ 3D\DAZStudio4\scripts\support\wowie\Surface
Make a backup copy.
Open it up in Wordpad or a tex editor, preferably one that's friendly to writing code.
Go to the end of the file and you'll see a code block starting with - function buildShaderProperties()
Now, it's just a matter of changing the values. For example, if you want to change the color of the 2nd specular lobe, it'll be in this line.
addColorProperty( "Base/Specular", "Specular 2 Color", "Specular 2 Color", "Specular2Color", new Color (255,255,255), undefined, false, false, undefined, undefined );
Change (255,255,255), to the color of your liking. Save the file and that's it.
Tks wowie, good to know! As I said this is all new, I'll give it some more testing before doing anything "radical"=)
The water looks right closer to the horizon, but closer to the shore it seems to retain the same high reflectivity and ends up almost like mercury. What about the Fresnel settings you're using there?
Yes you're right, don't recall the settings, but the mercury effect is kind of cool
. Tks for pointing that out, will have to play with fresnel a bit more;)
It is, so you may want to save that for an alien planet... =))
Ok so I revisited an old scene and followed wowie's advice when converting it to aweSurface. There are two emissive planes for each light in the scene, 24 in total. Rendertime 1h 35min. Awesome
Sweet =)
Noticed some black spots on the jacket, maybe some bad normals, added some translucency to mask it a little;)
Oh I forgot there is a "force face forward" option to force normals to face the camera, should have tried that, but translucency was a nice touch anyway;)
And regarding the opacity settings, wowie said this in the user guide:
So 90% optimization is pretty aggressive. So if I got this right with the filters, if an opacity map is properly done and is not causing any artifacts, the filters are not needed. As I understand the Opacity filter 2, if I increase this, it causes otherwise transparent areas to be visible, making strands look thicker. Please correct me if I got it wrong! And too much of all that will make the hair look like casette tape
...and close-up...46min. No depth of field, blurred the HDRI a bit...
So, what exactly are you doing with the hair? Every hair I've converted comes out looking like plastic.
Nice ones, Sven!
For this one I think I turned off the opacity optimizing and the opacity filters completely, with the default settings it looked terrible. I also increased specular2 roughness a good bit. Made spec2 color a bit darker than 255,255,255. Yeah hair seems to be something you need to tweak a bit before you get it to cooperate, personally I find the 90% opacity optimization default setting to be too aggressive for the small number of hairs I've tried to convert so far. Still learning about all this new stuff;)
Tks mate:)
So --- turn OFF optimization. Going to have to try that. I've been going at it the other way around.
And, yeah, all your pics look great. Maybe someday I can make something that looks decent.
Hehe yeah this is still a gray area for me too, it's been mostly trial and error thus far, I really need to take a closer look at the filters and what they do, although wowie's documentation is very good and I know it in theory I still need to actually see what's happening when moving a slider. So spotrender is very useful atm;)
You're way too kind but I appreciate it
. I by no means consider myself an artist, more of a monkey in front of a typewriter, you know the story, maybe if I render a zillion images... and so on...
The defaults works best on 'generic' surfaces - mostly clothing and similar items. I posted this in the other thread but here goes. What you want to do is fiddle with the filter values, but actually raise optimization rate to 100%.
I've been using these values recently and they work pretty nice on a variety of hair I have. Opacity Filter 1 50%, Opacity Filter 2 72.5%.
Default values - 2 minutes 32.17 seconds
100% optimizations, Filter 1 50%, Filter 2 72.5% - 1 minutes 53.18 seconds
No Optimizations (filter values are ignored) - 15 minutes 13.81 seconds
From the renders, you can see it produces a much softer, similar to what you get with less or no optimizations. Since optimizations are at 100%, it actually renders a bit faster than default values. Especially if you use reflections and/or subsurface with hair.
Each opacity mask also tends to vary from one hair prop to the next, so you may have to tweak those values from hair to hair. As you can see, the scalp actually does looks better with zero optimizations. I'd recommend tuning the filter values in IPR. Since you probably need faster render times when doing so, turn off reflections and SSS on the hair. If you have any lights, you can probably turn off global illumination too. You can still toggle them on/off during IPR.
Really? Hmm, it was at 90 and looked really bad, I set everything to zero and it started looking the way I had imagined. Ok now I'm confused, back to testing...
Tks wowie for the heads up! I'll report my findings over here for sure;)
So I apparently got it wrong all the same;) Optimization at 100 seems to be the word, you were on the right track then, Gone:)
@wowie
Did some testing with your settings, it seems to work quite well, as you said;) What obviously does NOT work is having optimization at 100% and the filters at zero.
This is with no filters and optimization at 100:
And this is with your settings, optimization 100 filter1 50 and filter2 72.5:
Still think this one looks the best, the original with everything at zero, personal taste maybe, I dunno.
Well this is interesting, so many possibilitys with your stuff, to be continued...
Yeah, it is pretty complex. Sometimes even I have a hard time understanding exactly how it works.
Works for hair, but I did run into problems applying those values to cloth. Hence, the default values which results in very solid output.