Show us your 3Delight renders
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Oh neat!
I hadn't considered using light control and reflection to get a secondary light effect. Brilliant!
Bah. Didn't work as I'd hoped.
I think when you flag an object any light reflected preserves flag behavior.
However I am seeing promising results from setting everything somewhat reflective.
Ok, overthinking.
If you simply crank up Ambient on a 'light' and all surfaces are reflective... they look somewhat lit. Which is great for dimly lit scenes. Duuh.
Add a little ambient light and bam.
And here we go. I am so SO stoked; this is going to make stuff like Winter Hall WAY more doable.
All those neon tubes and lights? They cast no light. At all. They merely have ambient channel (in some cases cranked up to 400%).
BUT... EVERYTHING is reflective, often with reflective blur. I'm basically switching the specular simplification over to a more accurate reflection (including putting diffuse color in reflection color and adding blur roughly on order of the roughness of the object).
It probably rendered about 2x as long as it would have with normal surfaces, but looks a million times better, IMO.
There is a slight graininess to it that I'm not sure at the cause of... possibly due to reflection blur samples (which I put up at 64) or maybe sampling rate.
That's interesting but a different method than the one I used. I'll try that too.
My problem with A-Deck is that the glossiness (reflection was set to 0) caused a white shine on the screens which I wanted to appear backlit. This is why I set the surface ambient and specular to 100% for that glow effect plus creating an AoA Ambient light to light the diffuse of the screens only to brighten them up more. The linear point light gave the blue glow on Bot Genesis.
Is there a way to have the 3Delight "emissive" effect of lighting another surface without having to place point lights all over the place? It gets ridiculous if you want to emit light in a radius.
There is, but it stinks. ;) Do a search for Arealight. It's cool emissive light... but it's a bear to render.
Another thing to consider with your displays is remember you can go into parameters, shut off limits, and set Ambient over 100%. I often do this, particularly for sky domes.
By the way, re: speckling... yeah, reflection blur sampling is key. I'm doing Winter Halls and finding I need to set reflection sampling at a large number, like 2000+. Which is slow, but looks cool (and still faster than, say, US2 or placing a billion lights or arealight)
Yea...use Area Lights...there's an UberAreaLight included in Studio. Apply it to the surface you want to become emissive and use the diffuse map in the Light Color channel. You could also use a 'mask' in there...black won't light, white will.
One thing to remember is the more 'realistic' lighting gets, the more you are going to get render times like Iray in CPU mode. Because it's doing the same thing.
Now, the nice thing about some of these approaches is the ability to mix things, or to dial in somewhere between 'not remotely realistic' and PBR.
Hmm. I'm not ENTIRELY sure whether 'reflecting ambient objects' is actually faster than 'meshlight'. hmmm.
Though I'm generally enjoying the look of specular converted to reflection.
...I like the softglow effect as it seems to bring the scene elements together more.
New experiment idea.
I have two NVIDIA cards that can process Iray really well... provided I can fit the scene in memory, which can be a problem.
3DL is a lot of fun but when I start making it more and more realistic, the render times start passing Iray in CPU, which... is usually dumb (unless I want realism and stuff like grass shaders or ghosts or whatever)
So... hey, why not do an untextured Iray lighting pass and a 3DL color/texture/diffuse pass? And here you go.
It took about 30 minutes to render (5-10 mins rendering 3DL, ~20 mins rendering Iray)
Used a combination of meshlights and reflective surfaces. This took about an hour to render. I could probably render the same scene in Iray in less than that time, but... it's doable (and, again, plays nice with other 3DL stuff)
Whew. After last two experiments took an hour+ to render I was getting a bit despondent about more realistic renders.
But this one only took 9 minutes. So... yay!
I think the critical factors were surfaces; fewer surfaces reflecting, mesh lights were two simple polygons rather than however many the last bunch had.
So, conclusion: when doing the meshlight/reflectives thing, which should be focused on depends on which involves more geometry. If there are loads of somewhat complex light sources, better to go reflective and skip using meshlights. If the overall scene has LOTS of polys, better to go meshlight and lay off reflective (IE: fewer samples, only max path 1). If both are complex, then throw up your hands.
Will, are you using the "default" 3Delight mode or the "progressive"?
Barefoot: Good, because eliminating it (or, well, reducing it a LOT) is horrible (take 10x as long, most likely)
Mustakettu85: Always progressive
Seeing how good I can push a regular portrait.
I like how the hair came out (it's a little greasy/matted looking, but, well, that's realistic! I've found just making hair a little transparent can help, when I want that effect)
At the very least, it's on par with a lot of Iray renders, so hey.
Thanks mjc1016 and timmins.william. These are things I would like to try.
How do you do meshlights in 3DL? I've got a pretty powerful computer and am curious how it will handle it.
Thanks! I would like to refine this technique, as it's the first time I tried it.
Select your surface then find (Content Library view for me) Light Presets >omnifreaker >UberAreaLight and apply the Base to the surface/item you want to become a light.
The controls are undeer Surfaces > Light.
Note that every polygon emits light, so it's best to use as few as possible (or to apply to objects with as few as possible).
So a 1 polygon ceiling panel works great. An inlaid million poly ceiling, not so much.
Progressive is the way to go with intensive computations *nods*
And that's one cool render, definitely at least as good as many Iray ones around =) You may just want to add more Fresnel to the eye reflection.
Have you noticed how much time on average the transparent hair trick will add?
I haven't tried it in a bit; I was using it mostly with fiber like hairs, where it really helps soften the edges (like Mec4D's beards).
And yeah, I haven't really played with fresnel. I know I should. ;)
Here is the pestky little render that was giving me such a problem and found out it was the trees that was causing the big issues!!!
Edited to add: I made the hills myself with deformers and used snow shaders on the ground.
Playing around with surfaces. I normally avoid velvet, but I thought it worked here. Also trying to tease out a translucent gooey look from US2. I didn't entirely succeed. I think I'd probably be better off using AoA SSS or even doing something with ubervolume, but I liked the result, so hey.
So it plagued me, and I tried it again with AoA SSS. I like both versions for different elements.
So a lot of my recent tests somewhat unfairly focus on 3DL in areas where Iray does very very well.
Here's a test of making a more realistic unrealistic render which Iray pretty much can't do (or can't do without monumental work and multiple renders and compositing.)
It rendered in 10 mins.
Now, mind you, the practice with making stuff 'more realistic' has helped a lot; the concrete is slightly reflecting the subjects, so it's adding some realism that would otherwise be lacking. And since I'm otherwise using normal lighting (rather than wackadoo ambient reflected), it's pretty fast.
I really like this water dragon although I think he is an older model. LOVE the ocean prop but it does only work in 3Delight (which is fine, I like and use both render engines)
I'm really really super excited about Iray to 3DL converter here: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/139326/irayto3delight-conversion-script
Here's an initial test, a perfect example. The I13 Steakhouse, which is 'Iray only.' Well, no more!
Took me maybe 5 seconds to convert, then a lot more time fiddling with lighting (as usual) and deciding how to manage the lights.
Congrats to you and Esemwy =)
Cool! And if you use the "fantom" switch (Ubers all have it, not sure about the pw line), you can have stuff show up in reflections but not in the general render!