Wanting to make 3Delight look more photorealistic
desfen
Posts: 75
Hi I'm new to Daz and to rendering in general, and my main goal is to try to achieve photorealistic results. And I don't have an nvidia GPU, so i guess i'm forced to use 3Delight.
So I've been trying it out, and I guess 3Delight is known for being kinda primitive lol. I'm trying out the Barefoot Dancer tutorial and I tried a test render with a Max Ray Trace Depth of 32, though the result looks pretty abyssmal.
And I'm hoping to learn more about 3Delight to see if there's a way to make things look more photorealistic. I put aside the human model first, I firstly wanna get the wall behind her looking right. I think its supposed to be a pretty good diffuse Lambertian reflecting surface.
And I don't mind forgoing those types of approximate calculations for "brute-force" ray-tracing, I don't mind waiting longer if brute-forcing can produce good results.
yeah so thanks for reading and thanks for any assistance
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Paging @Sven Dullah to the thread.
hey thanks
Have a look here while you are waiting :)
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/514336/show-us-more-of-your-3delight-renders#latest
First, using the standard DS 3DL, you need to add a GI light that supports bounce light, iti's not automatically calculated. In practise, you're limited to using the OmniUberEnvironment(2) in bouncelight mode or indirect light mode. And, even then, you will get only diffuse ray bounces, the UE2 is diffuse light only. Which is why I use scripted pathtracing;)
Next, not. every shader supports diffuse roughness, for example the dz default shader has no diffuse roughness slider, so probably using a fixed value of 0, which in practise would come close to Lambert diffuse, although just guessing here. The AoA SSS and OmUberSurface shaders support diffuse roughness.
But aweSurface diffuse is Oren Nayar BRDF based, with roughness slider from 0 to 1 (can be overridden). Zero roughness will give you pure Lambert diffuse. And, since utilizing the pathtracer, you get GI "for free", with both diffuse and specular ray bouncing.
Regarding the wall...what you want to do first is probably set specular glossiness to a rather low value and reduce specular strength to make it appear more rough? Or, if using the PT, increase specular roughness and or diffuse roughness...but then again, it all depends on the lighting etc...are you using DS standard lights or maybe arealights...
Hope this helps a bit;)
Copied from the awe manual:
Features Highlight
Physically based BRDF (Oren Nayar for diffuse, Cook Torrance, Ashikhmin Shirley and GGX for specular).
Micro facet energy loss compensation for the diffuse and transmission lobe.
Transmission with Beer-Lambert based absorption.
BRDF based importance sampling. Multiple importance sampling (MIS) with 3delight's path traced area light shaders such as the aweAreaPT shader.
Explicit Russian Roulette for next event estimation and path termination.
Raytraced subsurface scattering with forward/backward scattering via Henyey Greenstein phase
function.
Physically based Fresnel for both dielectric and metal materials. Unified index of refraction value for both reflection and transmission with dielectrics. An artist friendly metallic Fresnel based on Ole Gulbrandsen model using reflection color and edge tint to derive complex IOR.
Physically based thin film interference (iridescence).
Shader based, global illumination (GI).
Luminance based, Reinhard tone mapping with exposure, temperature and saturation controls.
Toggle switches for each lobe.
Diffuse Oren Nayar based translucency with support for bleed through shadows. Can use separate
front/back side diffuse color and texture.
Two specular/reflection lobes for the base, one specular/reflection lobe for coat.
Anisotropic specular and reflection (only with Ashikhmin Shirley and GGX BRDF), with map- controllable direction.
Glossy Fresnel with explicit roughness values, one for the base and one for the coat layer.
Optimized opacity handling with user controllable thresholds.
Since wowie wrote this, he has added Unreal and ACES tonemapping options (the changelog is extensive).
thanks, regarding the wall, i'm just following the introductory Barefoot Dancer tutorial, and its the "Shaded Haven" prop environment
so where do i get awesurface, and install it
and regarding Iray, do you know of nvidia drivers for Intel CPUs
Sorry no! I only do CPU rendering on a MacPro, so...
I had a look at that stuff, and the only thing I can say is: In my humble opinion, the best way of achieving realism is to stay away from those render presets, light presets and materials presets. But, with some serious tweaking it could look nice;)
Only NVidia GPUs can accelerate Iray renders. You shouldn't need any special drivers to CPU render in Iray, though.
IM000558192-01_aweHairforDAZStudio.zip
IM000558191-01_aweSurfaceforDAZStudio.zip
IM00055819-01_aweShadingKit11forDAZStudio.zip
Download these 3 zip files and drop them into the DIM downloads folder, after which they should show as ready to install, or do a manual install!
oh i see, i guess they used to be Intel
and Octane is Mac-compatible, but seems like the version provided to Daz need nvidia stuff
oh interesting, cos i've got issues, the pink render, i have another thread about it, and i shared my log file, seems like there's some missing nvidia bits
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/670116/iray-render-looks-very-pink-technical-problem
many thanks, and now how do i do a test diffuse render lol
and i also wanna examine the setting of the number of bounces each ray of light makes
Ray Bounces
I don't know how it works in 3Dlight as I don't use it but in Bryce and Iray if you stand someone between two mirrors and set the bounce to three you will see three image reflections going into the distance in each mirror. Set it to ten and you get ten images going into the distance. If you have the bounce set too high with shiny surfaces it could take a while to render.
oh i see, cool
how do you set the bounce in Bryce and Iray
and check out this video lol
3Delight has a much lower cap on number of bounces 9though, unlike Iray, it counts only some surface interactions - those with ray-trace elements - as bounces). This is why things like a shelf of glasses or bottles can be very hard for 3Delight.
oh i see, how do you control the number of bounces in 3Delight and check if a surface has ray-trace elements
Max Ray Trace Bounce in render settings, reflection and rfraction use bounces - I can't recall if SSS does.
ah i see
so i'm trying out the Barefoot Dancer introductory tutorial, with the "Shaded Haven" environmental backdrop prop, and i set a really high Max Ray Trace Depth, but the surfaces of the walls of the Shaded Haven still look quite primitive, so i'm wondering, how do we check if the Shaded Haven has surface ray-trace elements, and if not, how do we apply such surface ray-trace elements, and in the case of these walls, it would be diffuse reflections, and many thanks
Generally the only reason to up the value is if you have lots of reflective/refractive surfaces that interact - it won't do anything for surfaces in general, and the default value will be fine for one or a few reflective/refractive items that don't overlap or get reflected in each other..
oh i see
though no worries i think i'd still like to experiment with the Shaded Haven or another diffusely reflecting surface, and i'd just like to make sure that the renderer is really bouncing the diffuse light many times over, thanks
If, by that, you mean how to convert Shaded Haven to awe, here's how to do it (provided you used DIM to install):
1) Create a new scene
2) Go to your content library / light presets / wowie and double click the aweEnvironment to load it into your scene. This is a master light control, much like the IRay tonemapping options/render options, where you finetune things like tonemapping, saturation, temperature and exposure. You also globally set sample values, diffuse- and specular bounce depth, metal depth, aweHair depth and so on. If those overrides are unchecked, the values are calculated according to settings in the surface pane for each surface (options). A good starting point is checking the diffuse- and specular overrides using wowie's defaults. Think of Irradiance samples as "shadow samples", 1024 is a good number.
There's an environment sphere parented to the aweEnvironment light. It loads with wowie's Environment shader applied to it, and can serve as a skydome or backdrop, covering the whole scene. You can load any hdri or png or jpg into the diffuse color slot (in surface editor pane) to produce ambient light. In there you also have a bunch of options to finetune the light and appearance.
3) In the same folder, load one of wowie's PT arealights, containing of a 1m x 1m arealight plane, parented to a pivot point that you can move and rotate. To change light intensity/exposure, select the light plane, go to the surface editior pane and dial in more or less intensity (in EVs). Or scale up the plane, which also will soften the shadows.
4) Head over to the render settings pane and choose scripted rendering, from the popup menu choose raytracer final. Use progressive mode for quicker preview, non progressive for final renders. At this stage it may be a good idea to save the scene.
5) Merge Shaded Haven into the scene. Delete all DS standard lights and domes/backdrops, if there are any. (You CAN use standard DS lights and AoA distant- and spotlights, but the PT arealight is highly optimized for speed and I strongly recommend using it for primary light sources.
6) Select everything related to Shaded Haven in the scene pane AND in the surface pane, go to your content library / shader presets / wowie / AWE Shading kit and double click on the aweSurface base icon to apply the shader with its default values. Since this is a rather rough environment, it may be a good idea to find the subfolder containing presets for dielectics and fabric. Doubleclick fabric. It should provide a good starting point, but will probably be a tad too rough for certain surfaces. Or start tweaking surface properties from scratch, whatever you prefer.
7) Now when everything is converted to PT compatible shaders, you can testrender the result. Since I don't know how you want to set it up, it's hard to be more specific. However, if you want the arealight emitter to serve a sunlight, you need to move it far away (and scale it up) from the center of the scene and set light fall off to something like 0.000001 (2 is the default - inversed square law, a value close to 0 will simulate distant light). Also, if the environment sphere is too small to cover the whole scene, scale up the aweEnvironment. Might also need to adjust y-translation.
8) When setting up the arealight emitter it could be a good idea to turn off visibility for the environment sphere, and vice versa. Note that you can set the emitter to diffuse only or specular only in the surface editor, if you want to see your tweaks more clearly.
9) Good Luck, and don't forget to save your scenes regularely
PS Instead of starting with Shaded Haven, consider creating a number of d/s primitives, apply aweSurface to them and play around for a while to get a feel for the whole process!?
PPS Read the manual
There was a thread discussing it years ago, I believe 3DL is limited to 32 bounces while IRay can handle hundereds? 32 should be sufficient for most scenarios, though
Yeah, if you use opacity for stuff like glass it will certainly cost rendertime, however, the pathtracer does transmission easily.
@desfen and whoever might be interested
Made a rough conversion of Shaded Haven. It's ready to render...and to modify, obviously;) I just picked a generic blue for the sky, so there is no texture, just load one of your own. (It will of course alter the lighting)
And I used a PT area light as sunlight, so, if you have installed the AWE Shading kit correctly (and Shaded Haven obviously), it should load without errors, I hope...
If you decide to use the scene and something is wrong with it, let me know!
wow that's nice, thanks so much for the help
by the way for diffuse reflections, is there a way to increase the number of reflected rays for each diffuse reflection
because each diffuse reflection by right reflects out a countless number of rays in countless different directions
Yes of course, but the word diffuse reflection is a bit confusing, I'd prefer to use diffuse depth or diffuse bounce depth. Because with awe you can set diffuse- and specular/reflection- depth separately. Select the aweEnvironment and go to parameters/overrides. Make sure the diffuse depth overide is enabled, set the depth to whatever you want. If you set it to zero there will be no diffuse ray bouncing. A number of 3 is sufficient, due to wowie's optimizing, and you won't see much difference if you increase it a step or two. And going over 6 will be overkill and just make for long rendertimes, in my opinion. But go ahead and experiment:) And use the manual as a reference! These processes are described in detail with render examples in there, along with some tips and tricks.
I'm happy to help if you run into trouble!
oh i see, sorry, i mean when a ray of light bounces off diffusely, it splits into many different rays in different directions, and i wanna increase that number of rays
and thanks man
also i'm currently rendering and the percentage of progress doesn't appear to be proportional to the time taken, it seems to be taking increasing amounts of time to make each additional percent of progress, is that normal
Are you using progressive render mode? If so, it does 4 renderpasses, usually reaching 74% quite fast, but the last pass may take longer to finish. If rendering in non progressive mode (recommended for final renders) it will do two passes, the first uses true ray caching, so will usually be very fast, and the second will be slow, as there's a lot of additional calculating.
What hardware are you using, and what kind of rendertimes are we talking about? 3Delight supports an unlimited number of cores, the more the merrier
AND, are you using the scripted rendering with the raytracer final script? Don't use the standard renderer, it uses a completely different rendering modul (REYES) and is NOT suited to handle pathtracing.
PS The Ivy plants use opacitymaps that will cost rendertime, 3DL is not great at handling opacity, so, while focussing on walls and floor, you can hide them in the scene tab (expand the pergola, there is an Ivy bone that can be easily hidden using the eye icon), and make them visible for the final render!
yeah i am using progressive, i guess that explains it, thanks
and oh i see, interesting, what's this opacity about
is it possible to remove the ivy plants from the scene entirely, and i'm also wondering about increasing the number of rays branching off from each diffuse bounce