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Even when PAs were making "3Delight materials", most of those were rather meh, to put it mildly. And it's not like any random Iray material reliably makes sense. If things look good in promos, they get accepted to the store... there's no universal testing algorithm in place, so no guarantees that things should work in any scenario.
This issue is not limited to materials. Just look at all the threads dealing with the infamous DAZ store toilet seats...
There are so many variables, too. Lighting plays a big part in how a shader looks, after all.
I don't really have problems, by and large, converting Iray to 3DL, as long as there are no weird layered shaders, or at least as long as there are the basics (diffuse, bump/disp, and trans, and specular can be nice). Oh, and as long as the actual model is adequate. It just takes time - of course, I don't expect what I do with the surfaces to look like the promos, because what I want might be rather different and I have neither expectation or desire to be 'out of the box'. It just takes time... which, since this is my hobby, I can give as I see fit :-)
That being said, I absolutely give monetary preference to vendors who still include 3DL materials, and I am very grateful there are still a few. Saves me hours, even though I invariably tweak things.
Toilets aside, I did try Dforce when it first came out... for time and detail, I prefer conforming clothing. The folds on Dforce can be nice, if you can get it to work, but I think conforming clothes have better detailing and are much faster.
This was my stress-reducer for the last few weeks...
Interestig. Looks like it belongs under a bell jar in a *very* strange mansion somewhere...
This is why I spoke about reliability. In professional circles, the process of setting up materials for a model is called "look development", lookdev. There may be multiple lookdev artists working on a single CG animation, and (in a studio worth its salt) they will all be using a standardised lighting rig, so that to ensure that all the models make sense together in a shot and react to dynamic lighting in a coherent way.
No standards are enforced in the DAZ/Poserverse. Every PA in every store has their own ideas of "default lighting".
Which is why I stopped using "out of the box" settings a few years into the hobby, adopted omnifreaker's Uber ecosystem as soon as I could afford it, and ultimately switched to my custom system that gives me complete control without second-guessing. There's enough anxiety the DAZ/Poser scene has caused me over all these years; I'm glad to at least be free of crying over "things impossible to achieve in DS".
I hear you. The quality of maps and meshes is quite hit-or-miss in our scene. Even vendors that one learns to trust may have "bad product days" sometimes))
PS: the usability of the mobile version of the forums is not impressive either ((
My current go-to for lighting is IBL Master for ambient, topped with AoA's lights, with the lights from the Soldiers of Magic set for FX (if I decide to splurge on the render time). I don't care so much how people set up their materials - I never leave them alone. Of course, I don't have to worry about production times or reproducibility, because I am an unpaid hobbyist :-) The only shaders I use out-of-the-box are ParrotDolphins.
Well, I'm not paid for 3D either (being Russian, I'm probably not that much paid for my actual "real job" by Western standards as well XD)
Consistency is super important for me, though. When I'm done with my character building, model conversion etc, I want it to survive anything I will throw at it later, often years down the line (I'm quite slow because of this questionably-paid-yet-demanding job of mine coupled with various health issues).
Wow, I didn't know ParrotDolphin had a stint with 3Delight between Poser and Iray :)
Hey, I'm a part-time, small-town librarian, so I don't get paid much by anyone's standards :-D
I hear you about consistency for characters - I got started to illustrate a writing/gaming project, and it just sort of snowballed into a hobby. It's why I don't care about later Genesis iterations; I build 90% of my characters in Genesis1, and there's no way I'm going to screw up all the previous images by trying to shuffle them forward. I did it for the one character I build on V4... and even with tweaking, the new Genesis version just doesn't look the same as the V4. :-(
The only things I change are my 'techniques' such as they are - lighting, mostly, and certain tools for better effects, clothing fitting, etc. The characters stay the same, until something happens to them in-game, at least!
ParrotDolphin did 2 fabulous 3DL shader sets, which are over in The Other Store - one metal shader, and one fabric shader. I just buy the iray sets and plug the textures back into her old shaders, and often use my own there, too. She has them set up so you can have one part tiled (like your diffuse) and still use a single larger image for bump, displacement, and transparency, which is really handy for converting texture sets without losing all the details. I like how the metals have a toggle between 'real' and 'fake' reflections/shine, and they almost always look good with my lighting.
Im not trying to be contrarian, but I don't think it matters if actual 3DL shaders are included with the product. Those almost always need a lot of adjustment, anyway - Even repainting of some of the maps. As long as the maps are there, bothersome though it is, it's often easier for me to assign the material a 3DL-compatible shader or conversion and adjust to taste.
Shader _presets_, you mean ;) There have historically been very few actual new DS-adapted 3Delight shaders in all the stores.
You're still lucky you're not a Russian librarian :) If you're curious about comparing statistics, we could take it to PM so as not to derail the thread further.
I'd stayed with oldschool Gen3 and the original Genesis for as long as I could, but the rigging limitations of older figures have done me in at last... I'm not particularly looking forward to actually doing those conversions - but I dislike fixing issues in post even more.
The V4-to-Genesis conversion has lots of pitfalls... from geometry resolution mismatch to the default DAZ V4 UV for the Genesis face being kinda... messed up. There's a fix for that UV in the store, but still... V4's eyes are so much better mesh- and morph-wise. There was barely anything comparable on the market till Chevybabe's eye enhancers for 8 and 8.1.
Thanks for clarifying :) An "intermission" for PD indeed :)
Speaking of tiling textures, I hope everyone knows (and maybe even supports) PolyHaven. I have Substance (thanks to former Allegorithmic's willingness to allow regional pricing on Steam) - but I will still find a use for "Greg Zaal and friends' " materials, they're awesome (same as anything else there).
ParrotDolphin did some outstanding shader packages, and I was very jealous of poser users who could use them. I snapped up the 3DL versions as soon as I saw them.
But, I find I rarely use them, because they only show up when rendered. Yeah, sure, I can do spot renders. But I do prefer to be able to see what I'm doing while I'm doing it.
On the other hand, hers are about the only shaders I know of which can be rotated inside of the program rather than haveing to go into Photshop and edit the texture files.
...hmm they even have a "Lime-O".
Most models are in Blender format which which would need converting..
Yes. Thanks.
Nomenclature actually matters, I suppose. 
Hermione and Captain Snape discuss their situation. It turns out that as a child Snape had often escaped into his books. The only way to leave is to follow the story to its end.
Until now, he had felt he had no reason to leave the story. Now, if they return the Darling children to their home (and Wendy *wants* to go home) they will be able to return to their own world.
My entry for LLs Render a Month challenge: ceramics
Sure, that would be educational! Sorry I didn't respond right away - it's been one of those weeks. :-)
They cannot return to their own reality unless they take the Darlings home. Wendy wants to go. Peter does not want them to leave.
The impasse is borken by a furiously jealous Tinkerbell who says she will see that the Darlings come to a meeting place. Of course she changes her mind and betrays them all, and there is another fight. Under cover of the fight, Wendy and Hermione start making their way to the ship. (Mr Smee has to capture and bring John).
And then the crocodile turns up.
Hermione takes one look into the creature's eyes and realizes that this is not a crocodile. It is Nagini. It is up to *her* to vanquish it.
Which she does.
IBL Master
corel paintshop pro ultimate 2020
Nik tools
Oh I like that a lot, well done! Gotta love the USL
...would make a beautiful book illustration. That is the one thing aboput 3DL I like you can render in so many styles.
..yeah there's where something like a Threadripper would come in handy. I only have an old Westmere based 6 core Xeon so I would expect it to take some time to complete .
I have the AweShader but have not yet used it, Was going to do a conversion of the girls at the bus stop scene (attached) as a test to see the difference between just using IBL Master and the AOA distant lights as well as gauge the render time, but the file was lost in a drive crash a couple years ago and I've been hesitant to rebuild it from scratch particularly since a couple freebie elements I use I don't have and have been unable to find.
...apparently anything that involves UE tends to bog down the process. For example I had Reflective Radiance, which turns surfaces into emitters (similar to Iray) to, as the description mentions. "simulate(s) real-world lighting" that includes bounce light.
It was incredibly sluggish particularly on my old hardware and fortunately I was still in the 30 day window to get a refund. When I purchased AweShader from the Store, a few days afterwards I had my library drive crash which wiped out all my scenes along with runtimes and the Daz content library. By the time took the drive to a specialist for recovery (discovering it was totally dead), get a replacement, and reinstall everything, the 30 day period had expired. so I'm stuck with it. Probably won't bother using it until I can get the funds (yeah, right) for building a workstation with at least a 64 core Threadripper.if not a 128 core Epyc processor when those come out.
That image I posted above used just the IBL Master and 2 AoA distant lights (one at low intensity to provide bounce light from the pavement) took about 14 minutes to render.
The Darling children are duly returned to London. As always, Peter comes to try to talk them out of staying and extracts a promise from Wendy to come and do his spring cleaning. But that does not compromise the fact that Severus and Hermione had brought the story to it's traditional conclusion.
...
Niceee