Need Assistance Converting Sku #17331 Ultramarine Ocean to Iray
jukingeo
Posts: 711
Hello all, a while back and I had purchased I had purchaced Sku #17331 Ultramarine Ocean:
https://www.daz3d.com/ultrumarine-ocean
I have not used it until now. When I load it up and do an Iray render, it comes out all black. I quickly realized that this is due to the fact that the pack has a skydome. While I do know a couple tricks with converting skydomes to Iray, this one has me stumped. After converting the skydome to Iray, this is what I get:
So yeah, it doesn't look anything like the picture in which I want to create that shimmering wavy look of the water surface overhead. I would like it to be less blue and clearer like in the photos for the product. I am curious if someone who has this pack has figured out how to use it with Iray and I could use some assistance it getting it to work for my renders.
Thank you,
Geo
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Comments
The skydome might be blocking the sunlight passing through the gobo. Is it set to infinite sphere? I tried it with an underwater HDRI that might give better results. You can keep pretty much everything, except the Ambient lights, they don't really contribute.
I found that the spotlight for the sun (turn on Photometrics) has to be really cranked up to get the dispersion pattern on the sand floor. Like 150 Million lumens.
Hello,
Yes, I am aware of the skydome blocking the sunlight and I have learned how to make a dome emissive so you can see the results. However, the spotlight for the sun doesn't seem to have any effect, even after I followed what you said above. I have attached my scene tab with the items opened up in it:
Now, a few things. Obviously if I remove the skydome which is labled "Ocean Sphere", I will get the outside light to come in, but I still do not get the wavy pattern on the ocean floor. At any rate, this look is not what I want because the dome has the blue water look and it is very much needed.
Next, the "Water Undersurface" item, looks to be the water surface and I can turn this on and off too, but it doesn't seem to have an effect if I turn it off.
Now it would seem that from what you mentioned above, all the action is happening under the "Wave Pattern Light" item. Under this are two more items, the "Sunlight" item and the "Wave Pattern Gobo". The sunlight item was what you are referring to and I made the settings as per your instructions. Nothing happens. In fact if I click on the visible icon on the left in mid Iray render, it has no effect at all. However, in the "Textured Shaded" preview, it does have an effect and turning it off yeilds the same blue looking view in the viewport like the rendered scene I have above.
Generally when you make ANY change during a render, Daz will automatically stop the render and start it over again, but adjusting anything under "Wave Pattern Light" doesn't do this.
I have tried some tricks like lowering the "Water Undersurface" item and putting a VERY large primative ghost light above it and cranking that up, however, the "Water Undersurface" layer is blocking it. So it would seem that this is for just an effect when viewed from below. I tried to mess around with the settings for the "Wave Pattern Gobo", but it seems like it is an invisible item...even with it set to visible in the scene tab.
I hope that explains better what is going on my end. Any suggestions on what to do next?
Thanks,
Geo
does it need to be in iray?
seems probably more work than it is worth as likely uses other 3Delight features that iray lacks, maybe even volumetrics
if only 3Delight did spherical renders you could render an iray dome from it but sadly that's out of the question too unless you stitch one in a panorama software
I suspect that the Sunlight spot is outside your Ocean Sphere. In the scene tab, make sure nothing is selected, and using the Perspective view (so as to not mess up your cameras) click on the Frame controls (the one with the framed crosshairs) to see where the spotlight is relative to the dome. Attached is the original layout showing the relative position of the sun and gobo w.r.t. the ocean dome. In 3DL, you can make a surface not cast shadows, so it isn't a problem.
To use it with Iray, making the dome emissive will give the blue ambience, but will still block any lights outside unless you make it transparent, which would defeat the purpose of having it in the first place, unless you want to start messing with volumetrics. You need to ensure that the Sunlight spot is inside the dome either by making the dome bigger (> 125% for this specific set, if you change nothing else) or moving the spot and gobo inside. If you are using your new dome image as the Environment image, it won't block the light, since the environment dome works differently from physical domes in Iray. That's why (well, at least one reason) HDRI's are so easy to work with.
The Water Undersurface is used to have an actual surface, since there is no volume being used for the water. It just dims the light from the sunlight and gobo a bit.
BTW, there is a native Iray product that will do basically the same: Aguja Undersea Environment. (Marshian is involved with both products, so I don't think he would mind)
3Delight and my system do not get along. I tried it only twice and both times it chugged along like it was a pentium III system. A render that took me 1 hour in Iray took me four hours in 3Delight and it didn't even finish before crashing the system. I tried this twice and both times was the same result, my computer will just spit it right out. At any rate, comparing 3DL to Iray always has me favoring Iray anyway.
Yes, this is correct, the lights and the gobo were OUTSIDE the dome. I am wondering why this was the case taking into account that unless the dome is transparent to 3DL, no light is going to get through the dome. At least it doesn't in Iray.
So if the dome was meant to be non-transparent, why does the package put the lights outside the dome? I ended up moving both the light and the gobo inside the dome and then trying it again. As it turned out, the lights just simple do not work in Iray at all. I can see the effect in "Texture Shaded" mode, but toggling the lights on and off (visible, not visible) does nada...iksnay.
Sure HDRIs are easy to work with, but I don't have one for an underwater setting. Inconvenient...isn't it?
Yes, this was a another layer futher down inside the dome, but it it is pretty high up, so I moved this down so it was noticeable in the distance.
So then I would have to rebuy this again. Further it isn't even on sale right now. I really hate to double buy, so I spent most of the afternoon and early evening trying a few things. Since the lights were not working anyway (for some reason), I made them invisible and I made a huge emissive plane that I placed slightly above the gobo. Both were high up inside the dome. That didn't do much in terms of the effect. Yes, I changed the intensity of the emissive plane.
Having failed that, I lowered both the gobo and the emissive plane down to just above the wave surface. This did make it A LOT brighter and I had to dial down the luminance on the emissive plane. I tried to get a balance between the blue effect and having things looking washed out. I wasn't happy with the result. Then I took a look at the gobo and really it was no different than the skydome with a swirly image on it. So I wondered if I should make THAT an emissive surface instead of dealing with the plane. So that is what I did and the results improved, but it wasn't still to my liking. I then lowered the water surface more and expanded the gobo to nearly reach the edges of the skydome. This looked better yet, but no where near what it looked like in the picture. The blue from the skydome was too bright a blue and I made it more a sea color. I played around with it some more and tweaked it here and there and finally came up with something that is passable, but far from ideal. (Please see attached).
Like I said...passable, but not ideal. I still would like to attain the look that is in the picture (if I can). A big problem is that there are a lack of shadows from filtering through that ocean surface layer. I have not tried to make that emissive and I am sure my shadows would return if I did that, but I don't know what effect that would have on the surface. I doubt it would work and more than likely the detail would just wash out.
The Ultramarine Ocean pack was something I bought early on when I started with Daz Studio, and back then I didn't know that there were some packages that were meant for 3DL and that couldn't work with Iray. But for the most part, I was able to do some tweaks here and there to get it to work. I do this all the time with the DM's packages which were created way before Iray came along. I get them to work reasonably. But this is something I am not sure what to do to get it all to work right.
In addtion to the lack of shadows in that render above, it still creates that feeling the mermaid is floating in air rather than water. I do have other packages with water in it that were meant for Iray such as this:
https://www.daz3d.com/summer-island
While it may seem that I might be able to 'borrow' the water from this, it is something that is meant to be viewed from above and I have doubts whether it would look good from below, even if I use the sand from the Utramarine package.
Well, I am open to other ideas of what I can do to get this to work (outside of just buying the Iray version when it goes on sale).
Thank you,
Geo
yeah it's really a case of if you want to use or only can only iray don't buy 3Delight products
You almost have it. In 3DL, you can set all sort of properties that are not "real" in order to achieve an effect. The dome in the original is set to not cast shadows, allowing the use of a spotlight shining in from outside, like for the sunlight and the wave pattern. Iray uses the actual transparency/translucency/refraction, etc., of any and all surfaces that a light ray will encounter on its journey. It will see the dome as non-transparent and block any light, in effect reflecting it all back on the outside.
Okay, here's what I did:
Ocean Sphere: Scale 125% (just enough to enclose the Sunlight spotlight). Convert to DAZ Uber Iray shader (Ctrl-double-click, Surfaces -> Selected, Images-> Ignore. Yay! Now it puts ambient in the Emissive channel). Set emissive to 500 Kcd/m^2 just to get the blue ambience (should have the blue gradient map).
Wave Pattern Gobo: Tiling to 2x2 to make a tighter pattern. You can play with the height of the pattern or spread angle of the spotlight to get different results.
Sunlight spotlight: Photometrics ON. Lumens 300,000,000 or more. You can hide or delete the UberEnvironemnt, it does nothing in Iray. The other ambient lights are distant lights outside the dome, so, what did we learn about lights outside the dome? Off or delete. You can add some spots or ghost lights near the figure to get better illumination.
The lighting could be improved (too blue), but you get the idea. The promo looks like everything has been brought closer together (sand bottom, water undersurface, wave pattern gobo), so your results may vary.
Wow!! You got way closer than I did! Where do you set the dome not to cast shadows? I know some dome's have the setting, but I couldn't find it on this one. And how does that work from the outside? So in reality the dome is transparent, but to Iray it is solid?
This part I got, but I ended up changing the color so it wasn't so "blue". Still the way you did it looks pretty too.
Ok, so this is something I can try out. But other than the tiling and positioning, you left it as is?
I seem to can't get to the lighting to work even after I put it inside the dome. I had it set to 150,000,000 and nothing. Like I said above, switching the distant light settings even in Iray mode doesn't cause the the render to start over. So if you can get it to work then something else must be turned off on my end. Any ideas?
What I did above was to make the gobo an emissive surface, but it seems to have a drastic effect on shadows and it looks blah compared to your attempt.
Yes, that part I managed on my own above as you see I changed that. Did you keep the sea surface layer, or did you shut that off?
I realized that as well and everything was too far apart. Even the sea surface was way too high, so I brought that down and then put the gobo above it. It seems to be affecting the surface more than creating that nice effect on the sea floor.
So as of now, my main issue is to why I can't get the lights to work.
Thanks,
Geo
Understand that the original was 3DL, and that shader engine has the parameter to not cast shadows, it is not a property of the dome itself. It does not translate to any Iray setting, so you have to do something else. The "dome" in Iray is an environment dome and is handled differently. It is usually a HDRI light source, and can be used as a background image if it has the high resolution image included. Lighting data is quite low-resolution.
Didn't move the wave pattern, didn't move the sunlight spot. The wave pattern gobo should not be an emissive surface, it will just blanket the area with non-directional light. I did not convert any other surfaces to Iray Uber shader, the Iray renderer can handle most simple surfaces as is, but you can convert them to speed up load times. If you converted the gobo to Iray, make sure the Cutout Opacity has the original's opacity map. Test the sunlight/wave pattern by themelves by turning off the other stuff (except the sand bottom) to see if you get something. You are certain the spotlight is inside the dome?
I tried another way that doesn't need any domes or HDRI's. Hide the Ocean Sphere. Set the Environment mode to Dome and Scene, set the Environment Map to None. This will force Sun-Sky mode with working scene lights. Set the Blue-Red Tint towards Blue (duh), and drop the horizon a bit so that it does not show above the edge of the sand. Add a little SS Haze and you should have a pretty close representation of an infinite ocean. If you add a Sundial Control (under Render Presets->Iray in the Content Library) you can control the direction and intensity of the light in the scene and still have the wave pattern from the overhead spotlight.
Ok, I started completely over and did it the way you did. Instead of moving the distant light and the gobo, I increased the dome to 125% and made sure the distant light and gobo were inside. I setup the dome to Iray as I know how to do this already. I then set the gobo to a 2x2 tile, and turnd on the parametic parameter for the distant light and set it to 300,000,000. Expectedly, I still didn't get it to work...at first. BUT for some reason it clicked in that as a creature of habit to set the Environment setting Sun-Sky for the dome. Thus that is why the distant light wasn't working. So I set the environment to Dome and Scene and the light started to work. I ended up buming it to 400mil as it wasn't bright enough, but now I was getting the effect you had above.
I followed this as well and managed to duplicate what you did above without using the skydome and while it works, the dome color was too blue. Sadly there is only one tint slider for red and blue...there is no adjustment for yellow and as such I couldn't add yellow to the blue to give it a greenish tinge. So I went back to using the emissive skydome method and I adjusted the color and intensity and this was the result:
WOW! So that was 100 times better! Naturally I have added more to the scene to make it more interesting, but this is certainly FAR closer to what I wanted to achieve with the Ultramarine Ocean package. In fact seeing these results certainly means I do NOT have to buy that Iray package. However, there are a couple of things keeping this from being nearly ideal. The main one is an issue in the foreground. Can you see those lines in the sand? I want to get rid of those.
Next, I had recalled in playing with the lighting settings on the dome emission that lowering the lumens actually makes the ocean darker, which is what I was after. So this had me thinking that if I tried the Environement dome settings again and altered the Environment Intensity, I might be able to achieve a similar result without having the need to make the dome greener looking. I have that render cooking right now and will post that later on.
Finally, this render took a VERY long time. Over 2 hours and more than 8000 iterations. Since that was my set limit, the render ended itself before it fully finished. So whatever I was doing here certainly ate up my GPU power big time! I do admit adding the boat to the scene might have been the culprit. It is a big boat and If there was a way to lower the resolution on that perhaps it will render faster. But I think there is more to it than that. As it is, I had to turn on the headlight on the camera as the front of the mermaid was too dark as all of the light is coming from above.
For the Environmental Settings Dome, I tried to find the sundial controls in hopes of changing the 'sun' around, but couldn't find them. However, there is a "Dome Rotation" control even under Dome & Scenes, so I will play with that and see what I can come up.
Edit: I did a quick peek of my render with the Ocean Sphere skydome off and using the Enviromental Settings Skydome. It looks like the idea of reducing the Environment Intensity is working. I had set it to 0.1 and that made the dome dark enough to give me that dark bluish-green look exactly like the image above. So I decided to stop the render and see if I could rotate the dome so the light was more on the mermaid. Well, that didn't work out so well as the dome is set for too low of an intensity to cast enough light on the mermaid. If I increased the intensity of the skydome than the rotation will work, BUT now the light is mostly blue. So I put it the intensity back down to .1 and put the camera light back on.
While the render is cooking now, the background color looks good. So it looks like I may not have to use the Ocean Sphere dome even though I think the overall look is a bit better using it. So all I really have to do is address those lines on the sand and I think I should be good!
Edit:
Ok, about 1:45 hours later and 8000 iterations later, I have added the second render. Now this one is with the Ocean Sphere skydome turned off and I am using the Enviroment Dome within Daz Studio. I have set the Environment Intensity to .1 to lower the light level to get the color I was looking for:
Other changes I made here is that I convered the sand layer to SubD in the hopes those lines would go away, but they didn't. So I don't know what is going on here and hopefully someone could help me out with fixing that issue.
In comparing the two renders, it seems that the version with the skydome looks a bit more detailed in the distance. Naturally because that is an actual image, where as the image was removed from the Environment Dome for the second render. Still it is overall negligable. I would say that even the render time didn't improve much. Still it was finished in 1:45 instead of 2 hours. So it was a smidge faster. All in all both renders are using three light sources; the skydome (either what came with the package or the Environment one), the distant gobo light, and the headlight on the camera. I guess with being a plain flat surface and not an image, using the built in Environment skydome ended up being a bit faster.
Looks like I am getting there as there is NO question now that my mermaid is under water! I just need to fix the lines on the sand, add some bubbles and I am set!
Thanks for your help,
Geo
Excellent! You are making great progress.
The lines look like pixelation from the gobo being projected by the sunlight spot. Now, maybe you could bring the gobo closer to the surface to reduce the spread, or tile it some more. Do you have Pixel Filtering set to something (default is gaussian, radius 1.5)? Post Denoiser might also help, and will clear up the render a lot sooner. I set mine to kick in after a couple hundred iterations so as to not blur everything too soon. Details continue to progress with the render, so you can stop it when you think it is good enough. (I get the same blocky pattern if I turn off the Post Denoiser, and it takes much longer to render a clean image).
I think you are still mixing concepts about the "domes" in the scene. The Ocean Sphere is an object in the scene and is not manipulated by any Environment Render settings, it has it's own set of Surface properties that you must use. The Environment Render settings come from a different background "dome" that provides image-based lighting (when using HDRI) or the Sun-Sky simulated environment. The different Environment Modes are just different combinations of the various elements (you should get by with Scene Only). The dome referred to in the Environment Mode will not directly affect the Ocean Sphere (or any other Skydome object) in your scene.
When you add the Sundial Control, there is a control widget added to the scene. Expand it to get the the Sun Chain, and there are controls for elevation and azimuth (heading) in the Parameters tab. Of course, it will only have an effect if you hide the Ocean Sphere. I tried setting the SS Night Color to be something other than pure black to keep some residual light if you put the Sun below the horizon, but it didn't seem to do anything.
Thank you!
Ok, I have brought it closer, made it a bit larger to compensate and tiled it to 3x3.
Yes, it is set to those settings. I did a test render and it looks like the lines are gone now.
I have turned on the denoiser, but have a few questions here. First, I started it at 300 iterations and it still seems to be removing too many details on both the Mermaid and the sea floor. Given that I have noticed that this render goes very high for the number of iterations (8000 before it finally shuts down), I tried the denoiser at a much higher and have it kick in at 1500 iterations, but I could still faintly see the pattern again at about 1000 iterations, so now I am going to try it at 750 and see what happens. It is cooking now so I will report back with this setting when the render is completed. Oh! What about the Post Denoiser Denoise Alpha? What should that be set to?
Yes, I know it is an object and it isn't manipulated by the Enviroment Settings. Perhaps just my working isn't clear as I often refer to the Environment Settings as a skydome as well.
Yes, I have even said when I was using the Ocean Sphere Skydome, that I have turned the Environment settings to "0" since I know that anything outside of the Ocean Sphere wouldn't be relevant and probably would increase rendering time.
Yes, this part was needing some explaining as I have not used this control widget before. I have used sun positioning controls before, the ones with the green circle and white dot, but not the Sundial control. So I don't know what I am doing with it. Perhaps I will play around with it a bit more.
Thank you,
Geo
The render continues to add detail after the Post Denoiser kicks in, but you can change the value on the fly from the normally collapsed control panel on the left side of the Render window. Look for one of those almost-invisible-you-won't-see-it-if-you're-not-looking-for-it buttons in the middle of the left window border to open it. There are a several render settings that can be adjusted live, the Post Denoiser Start Iteration is one of them. If it kicks in too soon, just increase it and the render will resume without filtering from where it would have been without it (i.e., it won't start the render over from scratch).
Post Denoiser Denoise Alpha: not a lot of info about it, but here is what was described when it was added: Daz Studio Pro 4.11 - Highlights, and a brief discussion about it: Post Denoiser Denoise Alpha...Come Again?.
I ended up doing the render a couple times over as lower values seem to really reduce the detail level. So I had it at about 2500 for the last go through and this is what I ended up with:
You can still see those lines, but it is MUCH better now. Naturally putting the denoiser to around 750 will pretty much eliminate the lines, but it also removes much of the detailing on both the ocean floor and also on the mermaid herself.
I guess I would still have to play around with the gobo height and make it lower yet? One thing I didn't try was to remove the Ocean Surface. I was curious if that might have something to do with it.
Hmmmm, for the most part it doesn't seem like it is something critical.
So I am going to try to play with the gobo height some more and also remove the Ocean Surface to see what happens with the sand.
Thanks,
Geo
I think a better approach to getting rid of the pixelation of the wave pattern is to remove it at the source. Any decent graphics program can resize and resample to get rid of any aliasing in the image for the gobo. The original is 1K x 1K, which is kind of lo-res for the task. I have made it 2K x 2K with some sort of resamplng algorithm (Paint.net's "Best Quality") and replaced it in the Wave Pattern plane. Since it stretches to fit the plane, no need to re-tile the texture, it is just higher resolution.
I made a couple of renders to show the difference it makes. Both are identical (about 1000 iterations, no filtering), the only difference is the wave pattern image resolution. You can clearly see the banding/pixelation/striping at 1K, not at all at 2K, even if it is grainy. It might start to show a bit after more iterations, but then you can lower the de-noising (or rather, raise the starting iteration), or make the bitmap even higher resolution, like 4K. It's only one image, and will have the most impact on the quality. A worthy expense, I think.