November 2017 - Daz 3D New User Challenge - Materials

MikeDazBro

shaneseymourstudio said:

MikeDazBro said:

Here's my attempt at messing around with some shaders and different things. Been browsing the forums forever and looking and learning. This is a condo set that I added different props from different things to so it looks the way I'd like it to look. I also moved the ceiling back because I didn't like the way it covered the patio which blocked a lot of the light coming in. My biggest thing is lighting and I've seen how important it is. It's a challenge though I think it came out pretty decent in this pic. Can't remember what materials and shaders I changed, possibly the flooring, definitely the concrete on the outside and some other things. Lighting is done by an HDRI that you can see outside, a light dome from the ghost light kit, and a spotlight that I put outside to mimic the sun and brighten things up. Then some tweaking in tone mapping and render settings and I think it looks kind of like the sun is setting. Render took about 40 minutes and I stopped it at 90%, it was really slowing down towards the end there.

Very nice looking scene!

I have avoided doing alot of scenes inside rooms and buildings yet, or at least posting the finished results, because I am having a difficult time with several aspects. One big one is what to use outside the windows. Did that come with the outside grass and shrubs or is there a good 'Build your own lawn/backyard' option available for purchase?

You did a great job with the lighting, which I find to be the other big issue I run into when doing interior scenes. I love the look of deep shadows in areas like yours has and even low lighting but it seems for any render like that it will take forever in iRay! I keep experimenting but feel like I am getting to the point where I need to step away from it for a little while so I get a fresh approach.

Any pointers are appreciated greatly for scene work within buildings/rooms that mixes hdri dome and low interior lighting as well as how to best build up the outside world. It is secondary to the scene/story but such an important aspect that I refuse to do anything looking outside a window until I can figure out how to do it right.

 

For outside the windows you can use a prop background, several are available in the store, or a primitive with a picture on it. I've found I'm not a huge fan of those because I tend to still have to use a sky dome for the sky and they don't look great to me. I think I'll use them if the window is small or far away, but for something like this the dome works better. It's one of Dimension Theory's real life hdri's and that's the background and the building is inside that dome. I set it to infinite dome so there's less of a wrapping effect. The dome itself provides some light, but not nearly enough for an inside scene. The dome itself has everything in it. Everything outdside, other than the patio stuff, is the dome.

The deep shadows are something I like too and that's why I needed the spotlight outside because if I just used ghost lights I feel like it would start to wash out some of those details because it would fill the scene with too much light. I also wanted it to look like the sun was coming in at an angle. It took 40 minutes on my machine (6700k i7, 32gb ram, 1070), but you're right, the low lighting areas and shadows take a long time. I lowered my light bounces to 6 because that takes a long time too.

As for the lighting, the big thing I'm learning is tone mapping is important. You can completely change the look of your image with messing around with the iso, shutter speed, etc. 

Of course, I'm sure there's people here much better than I who could explain things better. This is just what I've picked up on because I too am learning and trying my hand at different things.

shaneseymourstudio

MikeDazBro said:

shaneseymourstudio said:

MikeDazBro said:

Here's my attempt at messing around with some shaders and different things. Been browsing the forums forever and looking and learning. This is a condo set that I added different props from different things to so it looks the way I'd like it to look. I also moved the ceiling back because I didn't like the way it covered the patio which blocked a lot of the light coming in. My biggest thing is lighting and I've seen how important it is. It's a challenge though I think it came out pretty decent in this pic. Can't remember what materials and shaders I changed, possibly the flooring, definitely the concrete on the outside and some other things. Lighting is done by an HDRI that you can see outside, a light dome from the ghost light kit, and a spotlight that I put outside to mimic the sun and brighten things up. Then some tweaking in tone mapping and render settings and I think it looks kind of like the sun is setting. Render took about 40 minutes and I stopped it at 90%, it was really slowing down towards the end there.

Very nice looking scene!

I have avoided doing alot of scenes inside rooms and buildings yet, or at least posting the finished results, because I am having a difficult time with several aspects. One big one is what to use outside the windows. Did that come with the outside grass and shrubs or is there a good 'Build your own lawn/backyard' option available for purchase?

You did a great job with the lighting, which I find to be the other big issue I run into when doing interior scenes. I love the look of deep shadows in areas like yours has and even low lighting but it seems for any render like that it will take forever in iRay! I keep experimenting but feel like I am getting to the point where I need to step away from it for a little while so I get a fresh approach.

Any pointers are appreciated greatly for scene work within buildings/rooms that mixes hdri dome and low interior lighting as well as how to best build up the outside world. It is secondary to the scene/story but such an important aspect that I refuse to do anything looking outside a window until I can figure out how to do it right.

 

For outside the windows you can use a prop background, several are available in the store, or a primitive with a picture on it. I've found I'm not a huge fan of those because I tend to still have to use a sky dome for the sky and they don't look great to me. I think I'll use them if the window is small or far away, but for something like this the dome works better. It's one of Dimension Theory's real life hdri's and that's the background and the building is inside that dome. I set it to infinite dome so there's less of a wrapping effect. The dome itself provides some light, but not nearly enough for an inside scene. The dome itself has everything in it. Everything outdside, other than the patio stuff, is the dome.

The deep shadows are something I like too and that's why I needed the spotlight outside because if I just used ghost lights I feel like it would start to wash out some of those details because it would fill the scene with too much light. I also wanted it to look like the sun was coming in at an angle. It took 40 minutes on my machine (6700k i7, 32gb ram, 1070), but you're right, the low lighting areas and shadows take a long time. I lowered my light bounces to 6 because that takes a long time too.

As for the lighting, the big thing I'm learning is tone mapping is important. You can completely change the look of your image with messing around with the iso, shutter speed, etc. 

Of course, I'm sure there's people here much better than I who could explain things better. This is just what I've picked up on because I too am learning and trying my hand at different things.

Ok thanks so much for that info. I have not tried using the actual hdri image yet for the scene.

My rig is same as yours except I tried brute forcing iRay with a 1080ti but my renders with shadows, much less than whats in your scene, are taking obsenely long to get noise down and look decent. 

I am finding that even using scene optimizer only reduces somewhat. I didnt know you could change the number of light bounces! Maybe that will help out in some scenes I want to render. Thanks again for that i fo!

MikeDazBro

There's a setting in render settings, it's under optimization and called Max Path length. Default is -1 and that's infinite I think, so what I've seen recommended is like 9-10 or so, I set mine to 6 because reflections and things weren't so important for this image. Also, if the window wasn't in frame I definitely would switch to just render scene only and use lights as that speeds things up a fair bit. Also, if the ceiling wasn't in frame and I was doing scene only I'd remove it too as it allows the light to escape easier and speeds things up a bit as well.

Richard Haseltine

MikeDazBro said:

There's a setting in render settings, it's under optimization and called Max Path length. Default is -1 and that's infinite I think,

Unlimited rather than infinite, as I understand it the path will be traced until it reaches a threshold value at which any further tracings are deemed insignificant (the contribution of each step will diminish, assuming the surfaces aren't 100% reflective).

MikeDazBro

Richard Haseltine said:

MikeDazBro said:

There's a setting in render settings, it's under optimization and called Max Path length. Default is -1 and that's infinite I think,

Unlimited rather than infinite, as I understand it the path will be traced until it reaches a threshold value at which any further tracings are deemed insignificant (the contribution of each step will diminish, assuming the surfaces aren't 100% reflective).

That makes more sense I just couldn't think of the right word at the time. Yeah, I'm definitely no expert, just tried rendering different things in different ways to try and find ways to cut down on the time where I could.

barbult

Yikes! I haven't been getting email about posts to this thread. I finally got suspicious and came to see what was going on. I see there has been lots of activity. Thank you for helping each other learn throughout this challenge. We only have one day left. The contest closes on November 30th. Please get your final images submitted before cutoff at the end of the day on the 30th.

shaneseymourstudio

I through this post up with image this morning in a rush before work so wanted to come back to elaborate on what specifically has been done/altered for this entry.

The full background is done using Stonemason's Urban Future 5. I didnt change anything for his scene except the lighting preset I tweaked to what I wanted.

For the car I changed the tires/rims/brakepads and headlights using different materials and tweaking the glossiness and other values until achieving the desired effect. This allowed me to keep everything done within daz3d and not have to rely on postwork to merge different effects.

The headlights are just made emissive. I wanted to get them to look more like they would in reality but am not sure how to get that effect in daz3d yet with an emissive.

The body of the car is just using the available glossy coat that comes with the car with only minor tweaks.

For the model I changed her hair to have more reflectivity and adjusted the cutout from the default of 1 to 2 so that it was more full. I also applied the material from the car to the clothing and worked with the tiling to allow the wrapping of the logo on the pants until I had it where I liked. I 'kitbashed', as I've heard it referred to, the boots from another set and applied a different material to try an match with the rest of the outfit because if I used the car material it would have the logo wrapping around no matter what tiling I set so I found a material that matched closely with what the pants and top had and went with that.

For the eyes, lips/nails/face surface of the model I increased the normal maps from 1 to 2 after removing the limits on that to provide a little more detail.

I wanted the lighting overall to represent more of an evening feel so used a light blue color for the spotlights to illuminate the model and try to keep it in line with the rest of the scene color. I cannot think of anything else right now that may have been altered that is of any significance but will update if I think of anything else.

Here is my final image straight out of iRay render with no photoshop work.

Geffe

shaneseymourstudio said:

Here is my final image straight out of iRay render with no photoshop work.

Wow, that looks great, especially the car and the environment.

daybird

Yeah,that was an interesting month. I learned a few new interesting things.It,s nice to have now people here which,have more experience with Daz and share their wisdome with us.

shaneseymourstudio said:

I through this post up with image this morning in a rush before work so wanted to come back to elaborate on what specifically has been done/altered for this entry.

The full background is done using Stonemason's Urban Future 5. I didnt change anything for his scene except the lighting preset I tweaked to what I wanted.

For the car I changed the tires/rims/brakepads and headlights using different materials and tweaking the glossiness and other values until achieving the desired effect. This allowed me to keep everything done within daz3d and not have to rely on postwork to merge different effects.

The headlights are just made emissive. I wanted to get them to look more like they would in reality but am not sure how to get that effect in daz3d yet with an emissive.

The body of the car is just using the available glossy coat that comes with the car with only minor tweaks.

For the model I changed her hair to have more reflectivity and adjusted the cutout from the default of 1 to 2 so that it was more full. I also applied the material from the car to the clothing and worked with the tiling to allow the wrapping of the logo on the pants until I had it where I liked. I 'kitbashed', as I've heard it referred to, the boots from another set and applied a different material to try an match with the rest of the outfit because if I used the car material it would have the logo wrapping around no matter what tiling I set so I found a material that matched closely with what the pants and top had and went with that.

For the eyes, lips/nails/face surface of the model I increased the normal maps from 1 to 2 after removing the limits on that to provide a little more detail.

I wanted the lighting overall to represent more of an evening feel so used a light blue color for the spotlights to illuminate the model and try to keep it in line with the rest of the scene color. I cannot think of anything else right now that may have been altered that is of any significance but will update if I think of anything else.

Here is my final image straight out of iRay render with no photoshop work.

I really would like to see this in a red/yellow light...thing it would look like blade runner pur.

Shinji Ikari 9th

Had one last idea last night. Luckly I'm able to get it posted in time.

HighElf

Frost-Fee

Software used: 

- DAZ 3D Studio (Scene, Lighting, Rendering(IRay))

- GIMP (Postwork: Effect Layer for Fog, Snow and Shadow; Highlighting Hair and visible Eye)

 

 

 

Chameo

Wow - some really, really great information and renders posted in the last few days! I've been caught up in my day job work and computer problems, so I'm just catching up with my own render. If I had a little more time, I'd run this one more time with some DOF added, but.. here it is as is. No postwork. Nearly every surface has been tweaked in some way. The background is a photo of my hometown - and I even did my first ever transparency map so I could apply it to a plane and have the HDRI sky show behind it. (I know... my 2D work leaves a LOT to be desired!)

Title: Hometown Justice League

Shinji Ikari 9th

Chameo said:

Wow - some really, really great information and renders posted in the last few days! I've been caught up in my day job work and computer problems, so I'm just catching up with my own render. If I had a little more time, I'd run this one more time with some DOF added, but.. here it is as is. No postwork. Nearly every surface has been tweaked in some way. The background is a photo of my hometown - and I even did my first ever transparency map so I could apply it to a plane and have the HDRI sky show behind it. (I know... my 2D work leaves a LOT to be desired!)

Title: Hometown Justice League

Not bad, like you said, the 2d part could be better, but that comes with experiance. I should know, I've created a few transparency maps to use in DAZ, and trust me it can be tricky getting all the nooks and crannies to get the effect that I'm after. Just keep practicing and you'll get there.

 

P.S. I don't know why, but the lady on the right (our right not theirs), lady looks like a dude. (Yes I went there. And I ment it in a nice way.)

Chameo

Shinji Ikari 9th said:

Chameo said:

 

Not bad, like you said, the 2d part could be better, but that comes with experiance. I should know, I've created a few transparency maps to use in DAZ, and trust me it can be tricky getting all the nooks and crannies to get the effect that I'm after. Just keep practicing and you'll get there.

 

P.S. I don't know why, but the lady on the right (our right not theirs), lady looks like a dude. (Yes I went there. And I ment it in a nice way.)

LOL! No offense taken. Like I said, the faces of all the women in this were done in FaceGen Artist Pro, and they'll all women who are local activists in one way or another. The lady on the right that looks like a dude is wearing my face . Broken nose, strong angles, and an unfortunate trick of lighting in the original photo that looks like a five-o'clock shadow add up to one ugly dude.

barbult

Thank you all for your hard work during the challenge.

This challenge is now closed.

sueya

This is my final submission for this contest.

DAZ_ann0314

November 2017

Showcased Participants for the November Materials Challenge

How Did You Do That? - For this showcase we chose the person who changed a material in such a way that it made a big difference to the image.

For those reasons we have selected shaneseymourstudio to showcase


Color Me Between the Lines - For this showcase we chose the person who used/changed coloring in such a way that it created a wild and interesting effect to the image..

The New User we felt best showed that this month was Chameo


Materialize - This showcase was given to the person that changed a material in a way that added to the images overall realism.

The New User we felt best showed that this month was Fussel2107


New User - Welcome

Geffe

Chameo

Wow! Thank you and congrats to the other winners - and to everyone else who entered and kicked in their knowledge. This particular challenge really got me digging deep and I learned so much from everyone's suggestions, not just on my own renders, but on the others posted as well.

shaneseymourstudio

Very cool!

Thanks for all the input from everyone. There is so much knowledge to sift through online and having a centralized place where you can get direct answers/feedback for your render is awesome!

daybird

Congratulations to all the winner and thx for all the new technics I read and learned in this month. :)

HighElf

congrats to all winners. :)

ricswika

Congrats to the winners! Nice work!

Tynkere

Woah!  Should check in here more often.  November ended up being real zinger!

Congrads to winners & best wishes!

Geffe

shaneseymourstudio said:

There is so much knowledge to sift through online and having a centralized place where you can get direct answers/feedback for your render is awesome!

I agree. And with so much to learn, having a smaller area to focus on (e.g materials) makes things seem a bit more manageable.

And congratulations to all the winners.