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Getting all the parts of this outfit to simulate required learning how Houdini does "shrinkwrapping" (and it's not with the Shrink Wrap SOP), and made my own HDA for converting Daz dForce hair to Houdini's hair system. Still some kinks to work out all around, like why the jacket is sticking to her boobs.
I re-read this post, and it reminded me that it's possible to use a normal map for displacement in other render engines, so I wonder if you could do the same in 3DL? Arnold and Karma (possibly Octane, if I'm remembering correctly) have normal map nodes that go in between your actual normal map and the normal input on your shader, and I've used the normal map output for things like roughness and metallic it's before. In fact, most rendering engines I've used outside of DS don't make much distinction between bump and normal.
Yeah I've used normalmaps for bump/displacement and, as long as you set the gammavalue to 1, it will convert the color data to grayscale data internally, probably based on luminance. But it's of course far from optimal, and I rather take them into GIMP and do the usual desaturation and level adjustments;) And sometimes I use them for anisotropy direction to add variance to specular highlights/reflections.
Starting to get a handle on using FEM nodes to create soft body effects.
I'm not sure if the aggressive bounce is a problem with how the animation cycles, or just a setting I need to adjust.
@gordig .. can you take a look at this thread I started on Daz / Cascadeur and see if a problem I'm describing is familiar or if you have any ideas on what the problem could be?
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/659421/daz-3d-and-cascadeur
I thought I fixed the aggressive boob jiggle from the last video, but apparently I still need to track down the cause of that. It took me way too long to get that dress simulated even as well as it is, but hopefully I can apply the steps I took here in other projects. Still need to sim the hair on top of that.
Spent some time tweaking the settings until the jiggle looked believable and wasn't bouncing aggressively every time the animation cycled. Now time to re-simulate all of her clothing and find the right settings for her hair.
Spent a whole lot of time getting the top to simulate even this well, so it might have to do. Not sure why there's a rectangle of her hair that's slightly off-color compared to the rest. Otherwise, I learned a lot of valuable lessons.
I spent an entire month doing almost nothing but converting KitBash3D kits to Arnold and saving them in the Asset Browser so I could stop using Cargo (which is a fairly bad program), but that's finally finished and I can move on. My wife also got me a SpaceMouse Enterprise for Christmas that I haven't spent a lot of time with yet, so now I can get to work putting some environments together. While worldbuilding my Shadowrun project, I decided I wanted to update the fiction and localize it even more. Given that the game was first published in 1989, the heavy focus on Japanese megacorporations and yakuza makes sense for the time, but feels very out of date now. The Sixth World, the reawakening of magic, begins in 2011, so I wanted to make my Shadowrun universe more reflective of what the area is actually like. Tacoma, especially South Tacoma, has a massive Korean population (fun side note: if you get off 512 and start driving north on South Tacoma Way, you see a sign that says "Welcome to International District", then right beneath that, 한국 타운, which translates to "Korea Town"), so South Tacoma is now Korean gang turf. The Western U.S. has largely been reclaimed by the "Amerindians", and while Seattle remains under U.S. control, I thought a focus on the Puyallup tribe would be an interesting angle, and plan to do a bunch of research and maybe interviews with tribal officials. Nearby Spanaway, however, is now the Free State of Spanaway, an anti-metahuman (orcs, dwarves, elves etc. are basically just mutated humans rather than distinct species) and anti-technology fascist micronation.
if didn't unlist that video it would probably go viral
Haha, which one?
the dressed one, YouTube would likely get too many prudes flagging the clay renders
this didn't even get age restricted which is unusual so you never know
Went through all the Daz weapons I own that looked suitable for my current purposes, and have been converting them to Arnold and doing any additional rigging (or re-rigging) needed. Some notes:
Nightshift3D: A lot of great stuff, sci-fi without looking ridiculous, pretty well rigged. I could do without all the text on them, though, and I don't prefer all the atlased textures, but I get it.
Polish: A little hit-or-miss. Some products, like Urban Tactical Weapons Bundle, are beautifully made and offer extensive rigging and texture options, though they also include muzzle flash props and often magazines that need to be deleted from the base mesh and joint hierarchy to be useable for my purposes. Others, like the Gangster Weapons, are lower-poly and minimally rigged. The reason I keep mentioning the rigging is because if something isn't rigged, it probably wasn't designed to be rigged, meaning that, for example, if I open the ejection port of a rifle, there won't be a bolt behind it. I know details like this won't matter to everyone, but I plan to use these for animation, and want things to look like they actually function. Also, there are a fair number of small topology errors that I had to correct, and things are rarely at world zero, nor are they even consistently spaced in any way.
Shogun: The katanas are gorgeous, as we would rightly expect from Luthbel. The strange thing is that they're only available positioned where a person would wear them, meaning that I had the arduous task of correcting ALL the rotations, made more difficult by the curved nature of the swords.
Dystopian HD Outfit: Gorgeous outfit, horribly disappointing weapons.
Next Generation Rifle: I can't recommend this highly enough. More texture options would have been nice, but it's so extensively rigged that it's basically fully functional.
Modern Military Outfit: The pistol is crap, but the M4 was well-made and easy enough to rig, although I had to disconnect all the various components. The "rigging" built into the rifle consists of joints without meaningful movements, just standard rotations that don't translate (no pun intended) to any function.
Tactical Props: A++, no notes. New and damaged textures for everything, multiple color options for the smoke grenades.
Pistols: I couldn't believe how few rigged handguns were available. I got so many good assault rifles, heavy machine guns, submachine guns, sniper rifles and shotguns out of all the products I own, but was coming up so short on proper handguns that I ended up buying the KillZombie Pistols Collection to fill out the armory, and if I remember correctly, even those required some additional rigging and modification. Even Luthbel failed me with the original Eldritch Seeker and Desperado coming with wholly unrigged pistols (the new Desperado doesn't give me a lot of hope that the pistols are rigged, and the new Eldritch Seeker doesn't even include a gun), and additional outfits that come with non-rigged handguns include Bang Bang Jackie, Colonial Forces add-on, Sheriff Uniform and the (admittedly ancient) Law Enforcement Uniforms.
Rogue Lynx: The pistol is rigged strangely (the trigger isn't rigged, but the slide, barrel and coil assembly are), but the grenade is fully rigged so that you can pull the pin and eject the spoon, and the baton extends. I have no use for the catsuit that is presumably the main attraction for others, but it comes with a nice harness in addition to the weapons.
Tactical Assault Rifle: This was very bittersweet. It's gorgeously modeled and textured, and comes with lots of texture options, and does something nobody else thought to: parent all the add-ons and effects to the gun rather than build them into the base model. On the other hand, the gun itself is not rigged at all, and going back to an earlier point, there is a bolt, but it turned out to only be about 120° of a bolt, and moving it backward revealed a blocked-off cavity. This is especially baffling because there's no ejection port cover, so the bolt is always visible, and yet HH still made the decision to just slice through and block off the rest of the cavity rather than fully model it so that it could be rigged. Harbinger Machine Pistol is also completely unrigged, and for whatever reason I skipped over that in my long project of getting all these weapons ready to go, so I have no idea how useable it will end up being.
Adapted an animation for Coral 8.1 to the older Laguna mertail (which I prefer). The hair isn't moving quite like I want it to after setting the gravity to 0, but I also have a pretty strong wind, so maybe that's canceling it out. I'll probably end up just making my own animations from scratch, because even this one isn't great.
Hmm, maybe this will help?
I'll give that a closer look later, thanks.
Experimenting with underwater rendering styles. I thought caustics through a rippling surface would help me get the sparse volumetric lighting I was shooting for, but I couldn't get those working right, and the solution ended up being much simpler.
Made some slight tweaks to the animation, got a better handle on the hair and experimented with an underwater rendering style. I think there's a mismatch on the surface settings between her head and face, and I still don't really get how to get Karma renders to clean up without exploding the render time yet, but we're getting somewhere.
Reminds me of some water effects I scratched just now. Oh yeah caustic on/off is something I should try.
(Version 2, still in progress on an old computer - rendering is slow - is much better)
I'm getting those godrays by applying selective transmission to an ocean plane above it, but I'm going for deeper sea rendering rather than surface.
I've been working on a gun store scene for probably a couple weeks by this point, and the last several days have been nothing but trying to figure out why renders are taking so long. It's not all linear progress, either: a few times I found some setting that seemed to make a huge difference, but then when I go back to the full render, it's just chugging endlessly, or in some cases worse. I just thought I had everything worked out, but the last render I attempted was off to a very bad start, so I'm back to hiding certain objects to isolate which on is causing the most trouble. Anyway, here are the renders that actually completed in a reasonable amount of time. You can see small differences in what's visible and not, to give you some idea of how thorough I've had to be with this accursed scene. The irony is that the scene is based on a repurposed KitBash3D scene, which renders pretty quickly using exactly the same render settings, and the things I had to hide to get even a single render in a decent amount of time is something that's in the original scene.
25:37
24:04
24:18
Disappointingly, this turned out to be the biggest culprit causing my render times to stretch on unto infinity. I may put a little more time into simplifying the topology and reducing the poly count, if that's the reason why, but for now I've replaced it in the scene and am rendering out what will hopefully be my last test render.
Went on a final scramble of making small tweaks to see what's causing all the render bloat, and got somewhat confounding results.
37:00
1:50:01
2:01:38
48:39
And the penultimate render, which is going to have to be the settings I use once I start animating this scene: 32:27
What are the options for the glass shells? Opacity, transmission with thin glass or something else? Possible to (further?) reduce raybounce depth between those parallell reflective surfaces?
I can spot some differences but hard to pinpoint:)
The differences are mainly hiding and unhiding one or two items at a time, so I certainly wouldn't judge you for not noticing every single object in a fairly dense scene. The glass is transmission, although it hadn't occurred to me to play around with thin wall, so I'll give that a shot. Reducing ray depth even a little bit made the glass more opaque, and clamping indirect samples darkened the glass. In retrospect, I should have thought to make the back pane an opaque surface like the display cases where I used to work. I was originally trying to use an armored glass with a honeycomb pattern, but I couldn't figure out a combination of settings that would get that to render in any acceptable timeframe.
Tks for the info, very interesting for a nerd like myself:)) Was thinking maybe thinwall would eliminate a lot of refraction calculations?
I set that scene aside for a while to work on other things, but I had to come back to it. No matter what I did, specular indirect was taking forever to render, so I started with fresh render settings. I turned my attention to the lights, which I often neglect for far too long, and did things like limiting max bounces, reducing indirect weight, and cutting out specular and indirect for certain lights that I thought could do without them. Finally, I tried rendering out specular indirect with all of the light sources turned off, and it was still taking an absurdly long time. That's when I noticed what I thought might be the ultimate culprit, and I was furious.
A single emissive surface.
None of the PBR render engines I've used seem to care much for texture emission. Arnold and Karma have the ability to convert surfaces with emission into light sources so that they're calculated more efficiently, you have more control over sampling, and they also react to things like volumetrics, which emissive surfaces don't. I disconnected the emission from that surface, and specular indirect seemed to be moving a lot faster. That potential breakthrough turned out to be the beginning of the next phase of frantically changing things to see what helped, because it was still taking a really long time for specular indirect to resolve. I tried converting texture maps to .tx format, Arnold's native format, when it occurred to me what had really been wrong all along, and I was furious again, but this time at myself.
All of the textures for Daz assets were being referenced directly from the runtime, which is on my NAS. I haven't bothered to wire directly into my NAS, so there's a fair amount of lag in read time. I copied all those textures onto a local disk, and now I can crank all the lights back up to their original quality settings and it renders in under 10 minutes. So here's the scene in its finalish state at 4K, which still rendered in a mere 46 minutes.
Jimmy Chang's Guns
Brought one of the characters I've been working on to populate the gun store into Houdini. Karma has a weird way of resolving opacity, so I thought I'd project the haircap texture onto the figure itself. I really hope there's an easier solution that bypassed my normal overthinking, because what I ended up having to do is:
My first attempt had the bleed factor at 0 in map transfer settings, and it left a noticeable gap between the two surfaces.
I map transferred again with standard bleed factor settings. It closed the gap, but there are still some artifacts left over. Fortunately, I'm at, if not well past, the "eh, good enough" stage of this process.