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I rarely go under 10x10 pixel samples, I'll try the 512 SSS-samples next time I have this issue;)
I totally get your point, np;)
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.
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 maggot
. 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 workaround
ETA just to clarify: after pasting the materials I did NOTHING, just hit render;)
.. and here comes the maggot...rendered with 12x12 pixel samples, raytracer final, no environment blur only DoF and motion blur
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...
Hmmm interesting, thanks for the steps. Definitely looks like a DS bug.
The bugs in the render look great =)
I agree!
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 afraid
). 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 now
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 good
So made a version without the fog, rendertime 6 h... will have another go at it later...
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;))
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
rendertime 31 min
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
..those are beginning to challenge Iray renders I've seen.
Hmm...I take it as a compliment
...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.
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.
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 =)
Hm yes I've seen much worse, but not working for closeups IMO;)
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.
Thanks I'll keep that in mind:)
Also good point, maybe I could mess it up a little with morphs and editing some maps?
Thank you I think it's a good start, will probably experiment with some hair and brows.
Thank you so much, kk:)
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.
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:
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:
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:
And here is the opacity map I used in the light intensity slot:
I want this thing to be really bright so I cranked up the intensity quite a bit, here are my initial settings so far:
Step3, testing intensity:
Pretty close to what I have in mind;)
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:
Rendered with opacity off:
and with opacity on:
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:
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...
how's that?
Reminds me of Johnny Winter! (Sorry Johnny I love your music;) rendertime 22 min
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...
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.
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 insane
Ok geometry shell it is
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"?
I'd try the "Glow" shader found in shader builder (the Renderman Companion folder). It will at least give you plausible edge falloff.
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".