Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2024 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
I understand what you're saying. But since you are complaining about long rendertimes I thought you would try rendering in progressive mode with only a HDRI that is as close as possible to the lightning in your scene to see if it makes any difference. It seems like pure HDRI light renders the fastest;) No need to remove the sky in your scene, just use a HDRI as light source. To clarify, load the HDRI image in the base color slot of the control sphere, then hide the environment sphere.
..again I have no 3DL HDRs other than the ones I mentioned. Three have background scenery (basically the two Yosemite and Recreation ones by DimensionTheory) which really wouldn't fit, and Skies of Economy which is really just a set of skydomes that have secondary HDRs that only work with UE (the latter still has a separate distant light and uses a UE component for the Indirect lighting). The only other HDRIs I have are in the the IBL skies for Iray bundle and one by Mec4D which is just an ambient light which I use for photoshoot rendering of characters in Iray.
I am using one of the HDRs from the IBL skies for Iray, but as I mentioned earler, when I turn off the plane and just use the HDR, the sky comes out with a greenish tint, even without the distant light. Again the IBLM light is set to white (255, 255, 255) and I have no other lights in the scene (I removed the AoA Ambient and Spotlight I used in the original non HDR version) so I don't know why the discolouration is ocurring.
Even with just the HDRI, Progressive mode was taking longer than Default mode. To get a clean non grainy output from the IBL light in either mode, I had to crank the sample rate up to 128. 32 samples (the suggested maximum) still looked terrible, particularly on the interior of the shelter and windows.
I get that you have been repeating yourself.
Without frustrating you further, I would suggest that text descriptions here are not an adequate means of accurately describing the problem or diagnosing it. I would need to see what you see. A screenshot of your render settings, your viewport, a render, and anything else you can show that demonstrates visually what you are describing should help things considerably.
...there are a lot of things I am seeing which don't make sense.
Right. And I don't think I can help you make sense of them unless I can see them ...
...If I turn the environment sphere off, I only get a null (transparent) background which ruins the reflections. Not about to paint these in by hand.
...the one issue I really am having at this time are those pesky shadow artefacts (which are visible on the images I already posted). Everything else is looking pretty good and some other things I know how to improve as they are shader/texture matters.
That's why I suggested to use a skydome.
...the only surrounding sky in the scene was produced by the HDR, I was using no Skydome, just the photo backdrop. I do have teh skydomes from LDP2 and Azure skies which more closely match the photo which I will try later.
You can apply UberSurface to a skydome and hide it with Fantom but have reflections show up in all reflective surfaceswith raytrace enabled. Just a suggestion;)
...I don't realy need to hide it, just make sure the backdrop plane is inside the dome.
This looks really helpful thanks for the link!
This looks amazing.
Your product is causing my DAZ Studio to crash out. I'm using the up to date General Release so not sure what's going on. I just had this happen for the umtheenth time. Never had a light set crash the program before!
Strangely most of the crashes have been when I created a script load of a file that has IBL Master as part of the file. If I load the file right from the Content Library I'm fine. SO not sure what that's all about.
..OK figured out why the sky in the environment sphere was looking so awful. As the HDR I was using was made for Iray apparently it needs to make use of the Emissive channel. Well in 3DL that translates to the Ambient channel. Now from my experience with using Poser content from years ago it seemed for Poser shaders they always had the Ambient value set at 100%. which of course in Daz, made the shaders look too bright. So I simply set the Ambient value to 0 and voila!, the sky looked like a real natural sky. (see attachment). Ufortunately it seems sort of bare without the city backdrop. Now I easly could strip the sky from the photo in PSP or Gimp by making it transparent, but that wouldn't work for the plane as dialling down the it's opacity would also affect the attached photo image.
The excitement was short lived as I noticed another bothersome situation. In the parabolic mirror at the corner there was a reflection of what appears to be a secondary light source (see attachment 2). I closed in and did a test render, and apparently it was produced by the HDRI as the distant light is at a higher angle as well as coming almost from behind while the artefact corresponds with the location of the IBL . Now a few days ago when I was helping someone with creating highly polished reflective surfaces for a 3DL model he was working on I noticed that the AoA ambient light I was using caused a similar effect. That was easily solved by simply flagging the test object to not be illuminated by the Ambient light. However with the IBL light, that isn't an option. I turned off render visibility in the parameters tab for the Control Sphere and IBLM light (The IBLM Master Control has it off by default). I also left the setting on for the Environment sphere as that would have turned off the sky background. Even with those changes, the second light artefact still persisted.
@kyoto kid I relit a large environment set I kitbashed together a while ago (attached img) with IBLM, and the groundplane rendered with a bunch of black spots both in default and progressive mode. Thanks to your comment I lowered the shading strength from 100 to 78% and that solved the problem.
@Parris Can you share some brief information about the shading strength parameter, how is it linked to shadow intensity?
@IceDragonArt Thank you for your kind comment:)
This scene has thousands of instances, 90% of which are transmapped. Also high rez ground + 2 geometry shells with transmaps. AoA distant light for sunlight and IBLM for global illumination. Rendertime 8 min. in progressive mode:
@kyoto kid
The mirror thing looks like a specular reflection. I've found that that highly reflective surfaces should have specular turned off when using IBL.
Ok I run into a bit of a trouble for the first time with IBLM in 3DL, related to kyoto kid's issue. I downloaded some freebie HDRIs so I loaded a character to test them out. Noticed some strange artefacts on her pants much the same as in kk's render with the girls, one of them had a black spot on her skin, in my case it's only on her pants. I first thought it was something with the HDRIs so I deleted everything from the scene except the figure and loaded IBLM again and rendered with the default settings and the default HDRI. Here's the result. I made 3 renders from different angles to show that the spots move depending on angle. I tried default 3DL with shadow rate at 0.1, progressive mode and scripted 3DL (pointbased occlusion) and they all looked the same. I fiddled with IBLM light settings, shadow bias, diffuse samples, shading strength, light intensity, intensity multiplier but the spots remained. Decreasing shading strength makes the spots lighter but they don't go away, and it makes the lightning flatter and more twodimensional. I also upped SubD to 4 on the pants but it made no difference.
So the scene is a figure and IBLM, nothing else. First three renders are 3DL and the 4th is IRay with default settings and dome only. Thoughts or advice?
I figured it out! I looked at the material settings for the pants and removed the normal map and that fixed it. So it seems IBLM can not handle normal maps? Have to do some more testing on that.
That worked. I wonder why the occlusion creates artifacts in the normal render mode. At least progressive rendering is an option we have to fix it. While rendering with progressive rendering on, however, I noticed what looked like a big portion of the ground plane still visible. I changed the opacity to 100% to make sure and it rendered even darker so I knew it was part of the ground plane. Fortunately, setting opacity to 0% still created a shadow and hid the ground plane as well.
...face palm...thank you. It's always something simple. Spent about an hour last night trying to get rid of that.
Right. Specular is faked reflection. So with dull surfaces, you can't tell easily. But with smooth reflective surfaces, you should have specular or ray traced reflections, not both (or the fakery will be obvious).
I never ever use Connect. Always installed using DIM!
Try reinstalling IBLM! I installed it before I installed DS 4.10 beta public build and had to reinstall. After that I haven't had a single error message or anything.
...yep, that did the trick.
...I don't know what it is but Progressive just seems to drag for me compared to the Default mode. 80% complete at 19 min:30 sec min. For some reason after reaching 74% it slows to a bloody crawl taking about 5 min per 1%. that would put the final render time somewhere around 2 hours which is almost as long as it takes in Iray. This is with the photo backdrop turned off and just using the HDR.
My last run in Default mode took 19 min and 40 sec. to complete.
03:00, heading to bed after beating my head over trying to solve that anti aliasing issue on the school bag highlight. The higher I set the pixel rate, the longer it seems to take. It's either that or I get those shadow artefacts on the one girl's collarbone if I use the Default mode.
I've noticed that rendering in IRAY with it loaded, causes scenes to drop to CPU quicker; deleting it allows me to get more renders in.
I'm not returning it, as I find it too useful, just wondering if anyone else has noticed?
@Parris
After further testing I've come to the conclusion that there is a MAJOR problem with your light shader. I posted earlier about removing normalmaps which seemed to fix the problem with black spots. However in this case it did not. The surface with the problems in the attached renders is a DS default shader and I removed the normal maps but it did not change anything. The lightning is pure HDRI and rendered with progressive in 3DL. As you can see it's all about at which angle you view the material so it seems it's related to normals. I'm just guessing of course as I'm far from an expert on the subject but I would very much like to get a comment or suggestion as how to solve this problem. It IS a problem as this makes your product totally useless for animation, as soon as you move the camera this causes all kinds of trouble with flickering.
I love the way your shader handles transmapped stuff but this is becoming a gamebreaker for me.
One more example of the issue with IBLM. 3DL in progressive mode, default HDRI, default IBLM light settings. No normal maps.