Strand dForce hair with Iray shader - how to convert to 3Delight?

wargis

Hello! Is it possible to convert strand-based dForce hair with Iray materials for 3Delight? Recently I wanted to try this dynamic hair in the newest beta 4.20 but I haven't Nvidia GPU and so limited to 3Delight only and external software like Blender. The greatest part of such hair products was made for Iray and when rendering several dForce hair in 3Delight, it gives errors - renders completely black or white. There are converters from Iray to 3Delight, like RSSY Converter, but they don'help much for strand hair, it leads to losing material settings, opacity, color etc and hair looks colored in viewport but black in render etc. How to convert such hair for 3Delight in a right way, and recreate their coloring, glossiness etc within a simplified 3Delight shader? Is there any specific converter for hair or clear tutorials?

Richard Haseltine

You can render usign Iray on a CPU, it's just slow (and doesn't have the AI denoiser). Its behaviour isn't exactly the same, but there is a 3Delight shader for the strand-based hair, though I've not really tried it.

Gordig

I think the default 3DL shader for dForce hair/SBH is broken, because there doesn't appear to be any way to change the base color. Have you tried 3DL presets for specific dForce hairs?

wargis

Richard Haseltine said:

You can render usign Iray on a CPU, it's just slow (and doesn't have the AI denoiser). Its behaviour isn't exactly the same, but there is a 3Delight shader for the strand-based hair, though I've not really tried it.

 OK, where is that default 3DL shader for strand hair, can it be applied separately on any hair, if provided Iray shaders don't work? I would render in Iray on CPU, if rendering time wasn't so frustratingly slow, and I can't even render small quiick previews in viewport without waiting for Iray thinking and computing shaders each time. So I prefer old simple 3Delight. But I found that in latest beta DS 4.20 or in latest update of Genesis 8.1 something is wrong with 3DL shaders. It seems to be more Genesis update fault, but updated Genesis 8 works nice in oldest DS 4.6 and gives me render errors in new DS 4.20. So maybe hair rendering issues come from the same source. I remember when I installed DS 4.20 first time, I played a bit with old G3 and unupdated G8 and they looked  in 3DL and test-rendered as always, even faster. Later, literally a day ago, I updated Genesis 8 Essentials to get 8.1 and found them rendered black (Genesis 8 Female) or white (Genesis 3 Female) in 3Delight Mode, though in OpenGL viewport mode they look nice as always. So far I tested some props and found no issues with them, only with Genesis, because they have specific skin shaders.

To test it, I found the easiest and only (so far) hair which looks almost the same in all modes - Iray, 3DL and viewport, and even after conversion to 3Delight (it was dForce Corporate Hair) and I rendered it with a Genesis Female Base in different modes. Here is a  quick collage showing the result of the test - in short in IRay and viewport OpenGl renders all looks OK, but in 3Delight Render mode G8F lost her textures and became pitch-black, and even old G3F (not updated at all) is rendered blank (white). Filament render doesnt works at all on my system. In outdated DS 4.6 with old 3Delight and no Iray, all figures, even Genesis 8.1 keep textures, although new Iray and PBR shader are interpreted wrongly and too glossy. So I feel the problem roots either in new beta 3Delight engine, or in my GPUs working with that engine. How to fix it, what is going on? Can I return old basic Genesis 8 and add support for Genesis 8.1 manually in file folders? What files are specifically related to 8.1? Or it's a bug of the beta release?

wargis

Gordig said:

I think the default 3DL shader for dForce hair/SBH is broken, because there doesn't appear to be any way to change the base color. Have you tried 3DL presets for specific dForce hairs?

So far I've met only Iray-shadered hair, so cannot test ready-made 3DL presets, and as I wrote above, now it seems I have issues with 3Delight itself in Ds 4.20. Does the Studio include this default 3DL shader for SBH, can it be changed or updated in newer releases of the Studio? The last Beta release I kept as backup was DS 4.11 - I don't remember if there were strand-based hair at that time. Maybe old versions of such shaders are usable for newer releases of DS?