Strange variation in textures pre-rendering
Hi all,
This will probably seem like a really daft question to the more experienced DAZ user, but can someone explain to me please why there is such strange variation in the way textures are displayed in the scene window before rendering?
I've included an image where you can see 6 different Genesis 2 female textures side-by-side as they appear in my scene window. Here they look radically different in the same light, with some of them appearing plain bonkers (the basic V6 on left and Bambi & Alessa on the right) while others look quite normal (the ones in the middle). Yet when you render them they all appear as fairly pale, even skin textures.
The one on the far right (V6 - Alessa) is the one I'd like to use and it looks fine with these light settings once its rendered, but it just looks metallic and completely different when setting up the scene.
Any idea why this is please? Is it possible to somehow make it look like it should do before rendering, because its hard to get the expressions etc right when it looks like that?
Thanks!
EDIT: Also, does anyone know if Alessa is definitely a V6 model? It says so in her marketing material http://www.daz3d.com/alessa but when I load her up in the scene window she just appears as "Genesis 2 Female" rather than "Victoria 6".
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Comments
While I don't know the exact details of how the preview is calculated and displayed in the viewport, the quick answer is that the preview is an extremely rough estimate and exists only to allow you to be able to arrange your scene prior to render.
If the preview were 100% accurate, there would be no need to render anything, and it would take as long as a render does to display the preview, which would make working in it very difficult.
For the other part of your question, it does have Victoria 6 listed as a required product, and also mentioned in the promo artwork. Victoria 6 is a variation of Genesis 2, much like Victoria 5 is a variation of Genesis 1.
Sean is right about the viewport.
It is handled by OpenGL, and it does not handle shaders at all, they are a product of the rendering engine, 3Delight in this case. If you select any of the models skin, go to the Surfaces pane, and look at the top, it will give you the name of the shader used. Shaders will not be rendered accurately in the viewport view, this is done at rendertime by 3Delight, and involves many calculations which OpenGL does not do.
Yeah, thats what I thought. But I don't get why it shows up as just "Genesis 2 Female" while every other V6 model I have shows up as "Victoria 6". If it is still V6 anyway, then it doesn't matter, but its strange that it isn't identified in DAZ as V6. Its identified the same way my Giselle 6 models are.
Oh, so its different shaders that are causing the massive variations? Gotcha, thanks. So theres nothing I can do about it then.
Thank you both for your comments.
One factor in the different appearance in the preview is what skin shader the character is using. Most of the recent G2F/M characters use the AoA SSS shader. Alessa is using the UberSurface shader. The UberSurface shader always makes skin look darker and more metalic in the preview.
Most skin shaders do complicated sub surface scattering calculations during rendering. To make the preview fast, they produce a very simple display.
Usually when they say a character is a "Victoria 6" character, it means: 1) The character's skin texture uses the V6 UVs. 2) The character uses some of the Victoria 6 head or body shape. One or both of these should be true for a V6 character. In the case of Alessa, she uses 0.3 of the Victoria 6 Head shape. You will not see this if you load the 'Actor', but you will see it if you apply the head and body shapes to G2F and select Currently Used in the shape tab. She is using the base G2F UVs.
By the way, Victoria 6 is a Genesis 2 Female character. DAZ just changed the name of the character to Victoria 6 before saving the actor preset. DAZ does that for most of its major characters, but most PAs do not.
Victoria 4 was a base character that all the other Gen 4 female characters were based on. Genesis 2 Female is the female base character for Gen 6. Victoria 6 is a body shape and UV set for G2F. DAZ continues to market some characters as Victoria 6 characters, but they are all based on G2F.
Ah, so its basically up to the person selling the character to rename the character or not for when it appears in the scene pane. Thats why she appears as "Genesis 2 Female" rather than "Victoria 6".
So you're saying she only uses V6 head shapes, not V6 body shape. Oh yes - I can see that now. Hmm, I wonder if that will complicate matters....
I do totally understand that V6 is a G2F character. But so is Giselle 6, and when someone designs add-ons, morphs etc that are designed to only work on V6 and not the other G2Fs I needed to be sure that she is definitely V6 and not another variant, or those add-ons I've bought won't work. Thats why the question.
Thanks for the info though.
As long as you have V6 add-ons for V6 will work. Shapes may not look exactly as the designer intended if you use other morphs, but that's true whether the other morphs build on V6 are totally separate.
Thats good to know, thanks.
I've got another question thats cropped up suddenly please - I just tried to render a scene that I've rendered before with no problems, but for some reason this time the character was completely white - no textures on the skin, no 3D effect or anything, just the outline of the body shape. The hair, bizarrely, was absolutely fine though.
I tried changing the camera and the lighting, and it all looked fine in the viewport, but nothing worked. Every time it rendered a plain white body outline. Eventually I just quit out of DS and restarted it, opened the scene again and it rendered fine once again.
Anyone come across this before or know what it is?
I've also had issues with trying to render a scene with multiple characters in it - they end up looking grainy, like the render didn't take properly - but I figured that might have been my graphics card struggling with the process perhaps.
Yeah, it's a common issue with the AoA subsurface shader. Sometimes the compile goes awry and it fails to work, so you're left with an empty shell of a shader which 3Delight can't read. You can fix this by either closing out of Daz Studio and reloading or, and the better way, navigate to the temp folder for DS (By default its C:\Users\ [Your user Name] \AppData\Roaming\DAZ 3D\Studio4) and find the ShaderBuilder folder and then the Shaders folder. Delete everything except the folder(s) and attempt to re-render.
Daz will automatically recompile the shaders that were missing and, assuming all goes well, you'll have a rendered scene which looks the way it should.
Awesome - thanks HeraldOfFire!
And the grainy textures when I try to render several characters at once? Is that just a graphics card memory issue? I've got a GeForce 660 GT.
I'm having this same issue with grainy looking character renders, can anyone help with this?
This is in Daz Studio right? What version?
What render engine? 3Delight, Iray, LuxRender, Octane, ....
How are you doing the lighting?
What character?
Can you show us a sample of what you mean? Put a bikini on if there is nudity so you can post it here.