Hi there, I've been giving a try to the POV Ray rendering engine, and the results were quite amazing. As many of you, I'm embarked too on a personal "quest for photo realism", and POV Ray is making things a bit easier with some "quite real" renders... However, I'm having problems with my materials. Any piece of clothing with a UV texture renders fine, but I can't seem to find the way to simulate textures created by using nodes in the material room, such as reflections for example. Any ideas on getting them into Poseray or simulating them? Some of the most realistic renders I've seen, were done by paulwillocks,( http://www.renderosity.com/gallery.ez?ByArtist=Y&Artist=paulwillocks ) this guy is a genius! Any ideas on how to get similar results? Type of lighting, render engine, or others?... Thanks in advance!

Attached Link: http://user.txcyber.com/~sgalls/

Since I do not have Poser 5 I do not know how the nodes and material files are structured in Poser 5. Thus I could not implement that in PoseRay.

In PoseRay for a material where you want reflection just increase the reflectivity for that material to 100%. If the material in Poser 4 had reflection mapping it will be reflective in PoseRay.

Also you can play with the POV-Ray material tab in PoseRay. You can apply POV-Ray specific materials there instead of maps and colors.

If you can you can email me the material file from Poser 5 and I can see if I can update PoseRay to take at least some of the settings from that file. Are these contained in the scene file or are they separate?

later,

FlyerX

Attached Link: http://www.this-wonderful-life.com/download.htm

***"Some of the most realistic renders I've seen, were done by paulwillocks,( http://www.renderosity.com/gallery.ez?ByArtist=Y&Artist=paulwillocks ) this guy is a genius! Any ideas on how to get similar results? Type of lighting, render engine, or others?..."*** That's a great gallery, although I don't see very much "true" photorealism there. The renders are very realistic, but fall short of photorealism in my opinion. Extremely high levels of realism aren't very hard to achieve with the right tools. Lighting and materials are critical. Take for example the link I provided in my post. Check out the video on that page called "test 3" (at the bottom of the page). You'll need the Divx codec to view it, but it's WELL worth it. Now there's some of the most convincing display of photorealism I've ever seen done on a human figure in 3D in any program (the artist used 3dsMax for that, but similar results are possible in other apps too). Anyway, the secret to photorealism is mostly in the materials and lighting. The models, apps, etc. are almost incidental when it comes to photorealism.

maxxxmodelz: Ouch! That is realism! You're right, I thought paulwillocks achieved the highest realism i had ever seen, but Liam Kemp totally blew it. I suppose all of us would like to get to that level... As you said, lighting is critical. I'm a photographer myself, with this I mean that, i know how to light scenes, but poser doesn't help too much, i find the lighting system quite unreliable. Even if my knowledge in the 3d area was quite reduced, I've learned a lot during the last couple of months, but the results are quite far from what i want. I may try the HDRI features in PovRay. Think it'll help? Flyerx: I'm quite new to Poseray, not to say a total newbie! I'm going to try playing with the Materials and I'll let you know what i get. I don't think I'm able to rip off the material nodes from poser to send them to you, i believe they're embedded in the program... You know, the Math Variables, sphere maps, and reflections... I'll keep trying in Poseray (thanks for the program btw!) I've posted one of my latest renders, one I don't feel too embarrased of! Quite far from photorealism, but i gotta keep trying! Any comments are welcome. Oh, and thanks for the tips 4140HT! See ya!

FlyerX, If the materials in question are procedural in nature, then unfortunately you won't be able to include them, as only references are stored, not the procedures themselves. however, if you would like, I'll set up a basic pose file for P5 that contains all the channels so you can at least see how they are implemented. That way, if a textural use in implemented, you can at least transfer over some of the properties of the image maps when connected through complex nodes.

Photorealism comes from dirt, not from raytracing. In the example of that movie clip, what makes it real are in-focus/out-of-focus effects, motion blur, camera shaking and the not-supermodel shape of her face. It's a little ruined by the shiny white teeth imho. Don't attribute too much to the render engine - render engines are just number crunchers that calculate a precise result of whatever input you give it. Focus on you input instead - proper lights, material setups and textures make the difference.

Message edited on: 10/26/2004 02:25

Ynsaen: that's what I meant, procedural materials. Sorry about my reduced 3d vocabulary! I believe these are impossible to reproduce exactly in Poseray, but I played around those PovRay materials and got it to work... it's not the same, but does the effect. Anyway, I dumped that figure and I'm working on another one with no procedural materials. I'd be glad if you could post that pose file, i'm sure it'll be helpful... Stewer: You're right stewer, BUT... that "dirt" you mention has to be applied to a model and scene that works flawlessly without it. I mean, that dirt adds realism and truth to the whole, but the scene's got to work fine before adding it. I'm actually thinking of capturing the grain on the film emulsion of my negs and slides to overlay it onto the rendered images, and see how it works... some selective defocusing would do too... Anyway, I'm experimenting with HDRI lighting at this moment. First renders show a great advance, i got to keep working on it.

The lips on the test3 animation look a bit wrong too, they seem too smooth (to me at least).

BTW, if you read the interview to the "wonderful life" short, it was lit with 26 spotlights - no GI, no IBL/HDRI.

"BTW, if you read the interview to the "wonderful life" short, it was lit with 26 spotlights - no GI, no IBL/HDRI." That's true, Stewer, but let's not forget... you can do things with 3dsMax lights that you can't do with Poser lights. For instance, the ability to set certain lights as "ambient only", so as to better simulate light bounce, or indirect lighting without having that same light affect specular or diffuse portions of scene objects. Not saying you can't get realistic lighting without that feature, but it certainly helps. ;-) Also, I'm sure he rendered the movie in passes, something which you can't do in Poser, but makes it much easier to adjust and tweak the movie in post. For instance, rendering just the specular ,diffuse, shadows, etc. to seperate layers for post compositing. Also other G-buffer information like Z-depth can be saved for deep postwork in AfterEffects or Combustion or other video FX editors. I'm not saying Poser can't achieve realism on its own, but just pointing out some of it's deficiencies. When we see people creating highly realistic lighting for video in other high end apps, and they don't use GI or advanced lighting techniques, we need not forget they usually have tools at their disposal which make that process much easier than it would be in Poser directly. ;-)

Of course, if it were after me, Poser would have a light linking editor. But that would certainly get beyond the average Poser user's horizon, seeing how people feel challenged already with the material room. No, my main point was just to say that you don't need GI to render cool or realistic images - a lot can be done with traditional lighting. It seems to me like many seem to think that GI would be a magic thing to give you instant pretty images. But if you don't know how to create a good mood with traditional light, why should you be able with (often more complex to handle) GI?

Blender's lighting has gotten so simple and good over the last couple versions, everyone should give it at least a try.

I've been experimenting for the whole day, and after so much work I'm starting to feel happier about the realism in my renders.

I tried real HDRI in Poseray, but couldn't get enough control over the lights. Finally Flyerx gave me some clues (and that's going to be my next step). So I dumped the HDRI, and gave RDNA's Poor Man's HDRI lights a try, it worked great and the effect despite of being too soft and shadowless, rendered the image above. It's my best image so far! However I still feel the face is not properly lit, and that's the biggest telltale. Any suggestions?

Rendering took a long while... (30 mins?). So next time i'll make sure to add a very soft spotlight to the face, or something...! Well, that's it for now! Feel free to post any comments. *Oh, as you can see, i never used backgrounds before, so i had some problems centering the sky image...

Message edited on: 10/26/2004 17:10

Hopefully I will post some tutorials here soon on using PoseRay's features. (HDRI, subdivision, radiosity, etc)

FlyerX

Yes please Flyerx! Tutorials for Poseray will be very welcome! Hey, after posting that last pic in the post(rendered in Poser), i went to Poseray to see if it could get any better. I played with the lights for a while following your tips from yesterday (reduce number of lights, convert to area lights, check intensities...) and even tried radiosity... First time (radiosity ON), rendering got stuck in the hair, and just rendered 2% in an hour and half. So I canceled it, and gave it a try with radiosity OFF, but same thing happened... stuck for hours in the hair. I've read some posts with other people having trouble rendering hair in P5, in their cases they were told to use one of Kozaburo's hair to speed up rendering... and that's the type of hair I use! Anything I can do? What do you think of the image in my previous post? Is it fairly realistic to your standards? Thanks!!!

" Blender's lighting has gotten so simple and good over the last couple versions, everyone should give it at least a try." What or who is Blender and what's his/her/its lighting? ;-)

Attached Link: http://www.blender3d.com/

Blender is a free 3d program available at the link.