The Official aweSurface Test Track

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  • Sven DullahSven Dullah Posts: 7,621

    That helps a lot, but sometimes going as high as 4096 (from the default 128) doesn't remove noise completely, Could it be the SSS samples (defaulting at 256)? How much does those affect rendertimes, and will increasing them help with noise in shady areas?

    Try pixel samples first - going beyond 12 makes sense only if you have strong DoF and an alias-prone pattern in the background, but if you're under 12... you get the drift. It may be faster than maxing out irradiance and upping SSS samples.

    But of course 512 SSS samples is a value I don't mind using... we have the weight optimisation on anyway.

    I rarely go under 10x10 pixel samples, I'll try the 512 SSS-samples next time I have this issue;)

    Comments or critique is mostly welcome as always...how does that skin look for a young teen? Well pretty strong makeup, that is an easy fix;)

    Y'know, it may be just me, but I totally can't gauge skin quality in "real-world units" when dealing with clearly stylised toon morphs.

    I totally get your point, np;)

     

    All the rock surfaces use normal maps only, no displacement maps, so I used the diffuse maps in the displacement channel.

    I hope you remember that control maps and colour maps require different gamma correction, and hence always make on-the-fly copies via renaming and setting the right gamma in the "Layered image editor".

    Or, better yet, take those colour maps into an image editor and desaturate and further correct them manually so as to get the best result.

    These diffuse maps were more or less b&w and I think they worked well. I have the NormalMap-Online bookmarked, I should test some stuff.

     

  • Sven DullahSven Dullah Posts: 7,621
    edited October 2018

    Hmmm I might be onto something here... I just opened this scene, selected everything and applied the DS default shader, then I went back and applied the awe baseshader and hit render... it rendered in both modes without issues. Then I modified the surfaces again like I did the first time, it still renders lol! I must be doing something wrong but I can't figure it out...so my workflow pretty much is like this: Load props/environments/characters, apply the awe base shader, modify surfaces, try to render, apply some other shader like DS default OR start all over, apply the awe base shader, render, be happylaugh

    So in other words, just going directly from Iray Uber to aweSurface makes DS buggy?

    Nah not the Iray Uber in particular, most of the stuff I have experimented with are either poser stuff or DS 3Delight "optimized" as I have avoided buying IRay only products. The recording studio earlier discussed being an exception. I'm rendering a very simple scene right now, environment/HDRI, a plant a fly and a maggotblush. First I loaded the environment sphere, loaded an HDRI, loaded the props, applied the awe baseshader without touching anything. Rendered fine. Then I did my modifications, after that it rendered with progressive but stalled in the regular scripted. This time I did not panic LOL, copied all the surfaces in the surface tab, applied the DS default vanilla shader, applied the awe base shader again and pasted the materials... it worked, go figure! It's weird but I'm glad I apparently have found a workaroundsmiley

    ETA just to clarify: after pasting the materials I did NOTHING, just hit render;)

    Post edited by Sven Dullah on
  • Sven DullahSven Dullah Posts: 7,621
    edited October 2018

    .. and here comes the maggot...rendered with 12x12 pixel samples, raytracer final, no environment blur only DoF and motion blur

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    Close Encounter awe.png
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  • Mustakettu85Mustakettu85 Posts: 2,933
    These diffuse maps were more or less b&w and I think they worked well. I have the NormalMap-Online bookmarked, I should test some stuff.

    This time they worked, but next time you may run into loads of fiddling that proper gamma correcting would solve instantly.

    So, in the case you have (almost) greyscale maps for diffuse and want to load them into any sort of strength channel, creating a copy via "layered image editor" to have the colour instance at "0" and the control instance at 1 should become something of a good habit...

  • Mustakettu85Mustakettu85 Posts: 2,933
    Nah not the Iray Uber in particular, most of the stuff I have experimented with are either poser stuff or DS 3Delight "optimized" as I have avoided buying IRay only products. The recording studio earlier discussed being an exception. I'm rendering a very simple scene right now, environment/HDRI, a plant a fly and a maggotblush. First I loaded the environment sphere, loaded an HDRI, loaded the props, applied the awe baseshader without touching anything. Rendered fine. Then I did my modifications, after that it rendered with progressive but stalled in the regular scripted. This time I did not panic LOL, copied all the surfaces in the surface tab, applied the DS default vanilla shader, applied the awe base shader again and pasted the materials... it worked, go figure! It's weird but I'm glad I apparently have found a workaroundsmiley

    ETA just to clarify: after pasting the materials I did NOTHING, just hit render;)

    Hmmm interesting, thanks for the steps. Definitely looks like a DS bug.

    The bugs in the render look great =)

  • Sven DullahSven Dullah Posts: 7,621
    These diffuse maps were more or less b&w and I think they worked well. I have the NormalMap-Online bookmarked, I should test some stuff.

    This time they worked, but next time you may run into loads of fiddling that proper gamma correcting would solve instantly.

    So, in the case you have (almost) greyscale maps for diffuse and want to load them into any sort of strength channel, creating a copy via "layered image editor" to have the colour instance at "0" and the control instance at 1 should become something of a good habit...

    yes

  • Sven DullahSven Dullah Posts: 7,621

    Mustakettu85 said:

    Nah not the Iray Uber in particular, most of the stuff I have experimented with are either poser stuff or DS 3Delight "optimized" as I have avoided buying IRay only products. The recording studio earlier discussed being an exception. I'm rendering a very simple scene right now, environment/HDRI, a plant a fly and a maggotblush. First I loaded the environment sphere, loaded an HDRI, loaded the props, applied the awe baseshader without touching anything. Rendered fine. Then I did my modifications, after that it rendered with progressive but stalled in the regular scripted. This time I did not panic LOL, copied all the surfaces in the surface tab, applied the DS default vanilla shader, applied the awe base shader again and pasted the materials... it worked, go figure! It's weird but I'm glad I apparently have found a workaroundsmiley

    ETA just to clarify: after pasting the materials I did NOTHING, just hit render;)

    Hmmm interesting, thanks for the steps. Definitely looks like a DS bug.

    I agree!

    The bugs in the render look great =)

    Tks!

    I had a go at the recording studio again (while my other DS instance is struggling with the fog I added to the Misty River, hmm looking at a 4 day render here I'm afraidlaugh). Tks to wowie atleast applying the emitter to the ceiling lights works now without them turning red;) Temperature defaults to 2 with limits on, so you have to manually remove the limits and set temperature to 6500. Well no luck, the ceiling and wall panels still render totally black no matter what I do. That's  with no reflections either, nothing;) Applying the base shader with default values does nothing. DS default doesn't help, I even applie the Iray Uber, nada... I mean this is not due to aweSurface, it's something else? Well I made a fixed version using primitives and hiding the black areas, but this kind of bothers me right now. Too late to ask for a refund and btw it comes with Iray and 3DL presets, IRay looks ok, 3DL not so much. With awe I can get it to look descent but that too requires creating new material zones and whatnot. Gotta move on, so much to explore right nowsmiley

  • Sven DullahSven Dullah Posts: 7,621
    edited October 2018
    kyoto kid said:

    ...looks really good compared to the top image.

    Tks, it was a bit of a struggle, but it's working like a charm now!! I'll post another version in a couple of hours, working on lighting and trying to create a fog effect;) Just because it is impossible LOL!

    Ok so DS crashed after 2 days, it was almost done LOL. Ok I was being naive thinking I could render it out and doing testrenders in the other DS instance AND being online at the same time:) Darn that fog sure looked goodsurprise

    So made a version without the fog, rendertime 6 h... will have another go at it later...

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    MISTY RIVER NO FOG AWE.png
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    Post edited by Sven Dullah on
  • Sven DullahSven Dullah Posts: 7,621
    edited October 2018

    This is very much a WIP. Still have to get rid of those painted on brows and test a number of things with skin settings etc. So tips and suggestions for improving would be much appreciated, as always;))

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    HRAVNIN AWE.png
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  • Sven DullahSven Dullah Posts: 7,621
    edited October 2018

    Heh not sure what I'm testing here, everything I guess;) Decided to create a character from scratch and start figuring out all the SSS settings, among other things

    And she wanted to become a pilot so I said ok suits me...

    HDRI lighting + 1 arealight, rendertime 33 min with raytracer final

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    Andromeda2 awe.png
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    Post edited by Sven Dullah on
  • Sven DullahSven Dullah Posts: 7,621
    edited October 2018

    rendertime 31 min

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    Andromeda3 awe.png
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    Post edited by Sven Dullah on
  • Sven DullahSven Dullah Posts: 7,621
    edited October 2018

    So everything has worked fine today for a change;) Not a single glitch! Maybe I'm slowly learning to do things the way they're supposed to...

    rendertime 56 min, final raytrace 12x12 pixel samples

     

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    Smalltalk at the Stratos awe.png
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    Post edited by Sven Dullah on
  • kyoto kidkyoto kid Posts: 41,083

    ..those are beginning to challenge Iray renders I've seen.

  • Sven DullahSven Dullah Posts: 7,621
    kyoto kid said:

    ..those are beginning to challenge Iray renders I've seen.

    Hmm...I take it as a complimentlaugh

  • kyoto kidkyoto kid Posts: 41,083

    ...yow are getting so close.  The SS on the skin of the alien character really looks good. Far better than I've ever seen in 3DL before.

  • Mustakettu85Mustakettu85 Posts: 2,933

    This is very much a WIP. Still have to get rid of those painted on brows and test a number of things with skin settings etc. So tips and suggestions for improving would be much appreciated, as always;))

    The brows actually don't look half bad; the texture artist must've taken quite some care creating their relief map.

    So this guy is supposed to be some sort of "Hollywood savage", right? // he does look like some actor I can't recall the name of //

    His skin would probably be more tanned after living in the wild wearing just his hair, with some sort of olive subtone, and "leathery" (not as much dreamy specular - probably lower roughness mitigated by increased relief detail).

    ...and I wonder if there actually exists a ready-made DS-compatible hair model that wouldn't look this glamorous, but rather truly messy.

  • Mustakettu85Mustakettu85 Posts: 2,933

    Heh not sure what I'm testing here, everything I guess;) Decided to create a character from scratch and start figuring out all the SSS settings, among other things

    And she wanted to become a pilot so I said ok suits me...

    I think that technically she looks great in all the renders, but in terms of backstory you would probably need to explain why no hair save for eyelashes =)

  • Sven DullahSven Dullah Posts: 7,621

    This is very much a WIP. Still have to get rid of those painted on brows and test a number of things with skin settings etc. So tips and suggestions for improving would be much appreciated, as always;))

    The brows actually don't look half bad; the texture artist must've taken quite some care creating their relief map.

    Hm yes I've seen much worse, but not working for closeups IMO;)

    So this guy is supposed to be some sort of "Hollywood savage", right? // he does look like some actor I can't recall the name of //

    Haha I really have no clue where he's gonna take me, we'll see... just jamming along. Eventually I will make ends meet. Actually I had a friend of mine ( yeah all my friends really are savages) in mind when I started dialing in those morphs.

    His skin would probably be more tanned after living in the wild wearing just his hair, with some sort of olive subtone, and "leathery" (not as much dreamy specular - probably lower roughness mitigated by increased relief detail).

    Thanks I'll keep that in mind:)

    ...and I wonder if there actually exists a ready-made DS-compatible hair model that wouldn't look this glamorous, but rather truly messy.

    Also good point, maybe I could mess it up a little with morphs and editing some maps?

     

     

    Heh not sure what I'm testing here, everything I guess;) Decided to create a character from scratch and start figuring out all the SSS settings, among other things

    And she wanted to become a pilot so I said ok suits me...

    I think that technically she looks great in all the renders, but in terms of backstory you would probably need to explain why no hair save for eyelashes =)

    Thank you I think it's a good start, will probably experiment with some hair and brows.

     

  • Sven DullahSven Dullah Posts: 7,621
    kyoto kid said:

    ...yow are getting so close.  The SS on the skin of the alien character really looks good. Far better than I've ever seen in 3DL before.

    Thank you so much, kk:)

  • Sven DullahSven Dullah Posts: 7,621
    edited October 2018

    As a(nother) side project I started working on this spotlight to see if I can make it work realistically with awe, godrays and all;) https://www.daz3d.com/godray-portable-spotlight

    As a light source I will use the arealight, perfect opportunity to learn every aspect of it. Here is step 1:

    I made a simple environment with a groundplane and a lowlight HDRI, well it's actually a jpeg, may swap it for something else later;) Loaded the spotlight and converted it to awe. The light bulb uses the awe environmental shader with shadows and indirect light turned off. The mirror is the chrome preset and the lens is glass3 with some minor adjustments.

    image

    To get that gritty metal look I've found that dialing in 50% metalness, turning on "use diffuse textures" and setting diffuse texture strength to 150% works pretty well. I also use displacement on every metal surface.

    Next I loaded one of wowie's light props and parented it to the spotlight. Since I don't want the light source to be square I loaded a texture I've made in GIMP into the light intensity slot. That didn't work. It seems wowie's emitters have some weird uv-mapping so i'ts impossible to align the texture. Deleted the light prop and created a 1 poly primitive plane, applied the arealight shader and inserted my texture:

    image

    image

     

    Next I fiddled with the mirror as it didn't look good (realised that I need to forget realistic and cheat as usual), ended up with something that looked ok and hit render. Ran into the dreaded eternal render bug:

    image

    Ok so I applied the DS vanilla shader to the mirror, then applied the aweSurface base shader, then applied the environmental shader and made it ambient, that did the trick:

    image

    And here is the opacity map I used in the light intensity slot:

    image

    I want this thing to be really bright so I cranked up the intensity quite a bit, here are my initial settings so far:

    image

    Step3, testing intensity:

    image

    Pretty close to what I have in mind;)

     

    THE SPOTLIGHT STEP 1.png
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    SPOTLIGHT STEP2.png
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    SPOTLIGHT STEP 2B.png
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    SPOT ETERNALRENDER.png
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    THE SPOTLIGHT STEP 2.png
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    CIRCULAR OPACITY.png
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    spot lightsettings.png
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    THE SPOTLIGHT STEP 3.png
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    Post edited by Sven Dullah on
  • Sven DullahSven Dullah Posts: 7,621
    edited October 2018

    Ok so I obviously need some help with the spotlight project. Trying to get the  light beam to show. I thought it would be easy, just apply the environmental shader, insert the included opacity map, turn on opacity, set it to show in camera, turn shadows off, turn indirect light off, done. I think the opacity channel in the environmental shader is bugged!

    Looks like this in the viewport:

    image

    Rendered with opacity off:

    image

    and with opacity on:

    image

    Removing limits and brutalizing settings won't help. With opacity on there is no way to get it to show, that's it. I have to find another solution.

    What bothers me is I've used this technique sucessfully, that was among the first things I did when I started testing, here's an example, the exhaust thingy:

    image

     

    BEAM VIEWPORT.png
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    BEAM OPACITY OFF.png
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    BEAM OPACITY ON.png
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    THE WASP ON PATRO 2L AWE.png
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    Post edited by Sven Dullah on
  • Sven DullahSven Dullah Posts: 7,621
    edited October 2018

    Ok partial success, made a gradient map as a png and it started to work, converted to jpeg (the original was a jpeg) and it works, kind of. If I only could get the gradient to render smooth I would be almost happy...

    image

    image

    BEAM LOL.png
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    BEAM LOL2.png
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    Post edited by Sven Dullah on
  • Sven DullahSven Dullah Posts: 7,621
    edited October 2018

    Heh not sure what I'm testing here, everything I guess;) Decided to create a character from scratch and start figuring out all the SSS settings, among other things

    And she wanted to become a pilot so I said ok suits me...

    I think that technically she looks great in all the renders, but in terms of backstory you would probably need to explain why no hair save for eyelashes =)

    how's that?   laugh   Reminds me of Johnny Winter! (Sorry Johnny I love your music;) rendertime 22 min

    image

    THE PILOT awe.png
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    Post edited by Sven Dullah on
  • Sven DullahSven Dullah Posts: 7,621
    edited October 2018

    Question: How do I make emissive surfaces reflective? I mean a simple TV screen will reflect light;) Only thing I can think of is to use geometry shells...

    Post edited by Sven Dullah on
  • Sven DullahSven Dullah Posts: 7,621
    edited October 2018

    A WIP of the Vanguard... draft render... had a rough time trying to get the window glass to reflect the interior. Figured it out after 2 good hours of testing, had to enable "use face forward", probably one of those normal issues again. Lol at one stage the windows were transparent but did not reflect, and the stars in the background showed through the wings outside (rough preset), don't know how that is possible. I figure I'll have to disable the use face forward when doing external shots, hmm...oh I got tired of the stars so I blurred the environment.

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    VANGUARD awe.png
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    Post edited by Sven Dullah on
  • wowiewowie Posts: 2,029

    Question: How do I make emissive surfaces reflective? I mean a simple TV screen will reflect light;) Only thing I can think of is to use geometry shells...

    Yep. Probably the only 'sane' solution right now.

    It was a design decistion I made - NOT enabling ambient on AWE Surface. People tend to abuse the hell of ambient.In theory, I could add a specular/reflection to the ambient surface shader that accompanies AWE AreaPT. It would make sense on sume surfaces (display screens and the like), particularly with very dim lights.

  • Sven DullahSven Dullah Posts: 7,621
    wowie said:

    Question: How do I make emissive surfaces reflective? I mean a simple TV screen will reflect light;) Only thing I can think of is to use geometry shells...

    Yep. Probably the only 'sane' solution right now.

    It was a design decistion I made - NOT enabling ambient on AWE Surface. People tend to abuse the hell of ambient.In theory, I could add a specular/reflection to the ambient surface shader that accompanies AWE AreaPT. It would make sense on sume surfaces (display screens and the like), particularly with very dim lights.

    Y'know in some countries I would be legally insanelaugh Ok geometry shell it isyes

  • Mustakettu85Mustakettu85 Posts: 2,933
     

    how's that?   laugh   Reminds me of Johnny Winter! (Sorry Johnny I love your music;) rendertime 22 min

    I was thinking actually that aquatic creatures don't need eyelashes XD Or are you going for a Homo Sapiens Sapiens-like "mystery", which IIRC most researchers like to explain away as "sexual selection, nothing else to look at here, move along"?

  • Mustakettu85Mustakettu85 Posts: 2,933

    If I only could get the gradient to render smooth

    I'd try the "Glow" shader found in shader builder (the Renderman Companion folder). It will at least give you plausible edge falloff.

  • Mustakettu85Mustakettu85 Posts: 2,933
    Also good point, maybe I could mess it up a little with morphs and editing some maps?
     

    In theory yes, but this looks like one of 3Dream's models, either Gregoria or Marja, no? These remain looking this perfectly straight-ironed and combed-out piecey way even in their wind morphs, as far as I have seen. Let's not forget that most of the hair models we have were designed with female pin-ups in mind.

    Off the top of my head, Neftis' styles tend to be more "plausibly messy".

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