Quote - > Quote - Long story short, my point is simple, albeit likely to cause a ruckus, but so be it: it ain't DAZ' responsibility to do Smith Micro's job for them. 

Since when is it SM's job to follow DAZ?  When DAZ came up with the gray golum, they knew Poser couldn't use it, and they probably knew they would never, ever, come up with a bridge between the two programs.  Something that would partially work, yes, but full functionality with no problems, never. 

It's not SM's fault that DAZ came up with something incompatible, it's DAZ fault.  It's not SM's place to fix the kludge, it's DAZ place, and they're not doing it.  Sorry, take that argument to somewhere else, preferably someplace where the average iQ is 2. 

Daz has their format, SM has their own. For the longest time Daz has fully supported Poser formats and their inclusion of the DSON importer is only evidence that they are making an attempt at maintaining compatibility with Poser. As previously mentioned, SM were approached by Daz who offered their DSON freely, but SM turned down the offer. Now, SM figures have been ugly at best, hideous at worst. I think most of us can agree on that. With that said, the majority of people I've seen are still using Daz figures, whether it's Genesis through the DSON or poser-compatible Victoria 4. I highly doubt that SM are unaware of this, so the onus is on them to either provide a figure which people actually want to use or man up and provide better compatibility.

When most of your customers are using your competitors resources, the smart company provides for them rather than telling them to put up and shut up.

Why there are different files in the first place I'm unsure of. A little bird told me that Daz's more optimised format tends to load faster, though I only have a slightly older Poser Pro 2010 to judge that on so I can't say for it's the same for the newer releases. However, if they were to release two different formats for the same figure you would also need two formats for every clothing item and accessory. Some PA's simply don't own Poser to provide this, just as some PA's don't own Daz to make Daz specific materials.

The upside for Daz users is no matter what Poser throws out, DS can use it because it has maintained compatibility. SM's refusal to do likewise just reeks of foolish corporate elitism. The ball is in their court, but they just don't seem to care.

On topic: I'm not enthused about Victoria 6 either. I dislike the move back to individual figures and twice the number of purchases for no apparent reason. I'm very interested in the new Dawn figure though. Is there a link somewhere to find out more information, or is there very little of that to go around at the moment?

Quote - You can set the gain of the IBL in Reality, include a sun and then save the whole setup as a Studio scene. Add it to the Content Manager as a preset and, when added to your Studio scene, the settings will be merged by Reality resulting in light presets. That should be a section in the RUG that talks about it.

Cheers.

I set up a preset which reduces the sky gain to minimum, since there doesn't appear to be a way to either remove it or disable it entirely. Since it's pretty much on par with my other presets I'm reasonably content with the results. I'll be making them available as soon as they're all ready. Thanks for the assists.

Quote - > Quote - he problem with pure IBL is that the shadows are awful and unrealistic. Lux does a terrible job of figuring out where the primary light source is even with a really bright sunspot on the HDR. 

I think that Lux actually does a really good job at lighting the scene with the IBl map, but it is true the shadows can be too soft. It's very easy to add a mesh light that is small and therefore creates a sharp shadow. 

This technique was used by a couple of "Skies of Reality" products that were out two years ago.

There is no problem in replicating the technique with Reality's lights today.

Hope this helps

Again though there are issues using mesh lights, the most glaring of which is that it's not an infinite distance away like a source like the sun, so positioning it in relation to the IBL is much more difficult for various reasons. For starters you no longer have the ability to use Daz's 'light cam' to ensure it's facing the right direction, and second of all larger scenes might move out of the light boundaries. The reason I made the presets was to be a lighting solution which works out of the box. The whole concept fails if you're forced to manipulate the light manually, since it would have to be set up again from scratch.

I appreciate the responses and the ideas, but I didn't choose this approach without a reason and was really looking for a way to get Reality to export similar data. I should point out that this is actually an approach which is detailed in the Luxrender Wiki, not just simply random experimentation on my part.

http://www.luxrender.net/wiki/Sun,_Sky_and_HDRI

Again, I must point out that the 'sky' which comes with the sun is essentially just an IBL all of its own. By having a dedicated IBL along with the sun you get your daylight preset, only with much nicer reflections and overall light colour.

> Quote - Yes, adding a sun with IBL does not make sense with Lux. This is not about Reality. If you have an HDR IBL map you don't need the sun, the illumination will come from the map. > > If you don't have an HDR map then you can use a mesh light mapped small and positioned where it makes sense. > Hope this helps

The problem with pure IBL is that the shadows are awful and unrealistic. Lux does a terrible job of figuring out where the primary light source is even with a really bright sunspot on the HDR. This is because it treats the entire IBL as one huge light from everywhere. By adding a sun you get those shadows back. Here's an example render I did using this technique with Luxus. I'd love to be able to reproduce this with presets in Reality. This same render with pure IBL has no visible shadows at all, despite the glaring sunspot.

Edit: Attachment was too big apparently. (curse that tiny 200k limit)

Okay, so I can edit the scripts and create a new DSA file which will add in an IBL. That's not a problem. However, the issue comes when adding a sun light to the scene. The sun effectively overpowers the IBL, killing everything from reflections to the background. The Reality 'Sun' comes with its own sky model, and the only way to achieve the results I'm aiming for would be to set the gain of the sky to zero and beef up the IBL's in response.

Doing this programatically, however, seems to be a touch more difficult than that.

In my presets, the environment map effectively replaces the default sky you'd normally add with a sun. The result is very nice reflections with more accurate shadows. I'm sure there's a way to mimic this with Reality, so further advice would be helpful.

Quote - Crystan, Reality 2 includes three IBL setups with preview sphere that can be rotated. I pioneered that approach two years ago, when Reality 2.0 was shipped. You can simply analyze the system and extend it to include additional IBL maps of your choice.

Cheers.

It did not escape my notice that there was a set which did this already, I was merely curious as to how I could put together a similar set which would load just as easily and contain all the necessary information. I know that Reality adds hidden 'Reality MetaData' objects presumably to house the Luxrender specific information the scene needs, but I'm unsure how to access or alter that data in a manner which would allow me to distribute them.

I'll take a peek at the actual files and see if something clicks for now.

Got a question for the experts, one which has left me a little stumped. As some of you may be aware, I posted some preset IBL's for Luxus on ShareCG. What I'm after is some way of creating similar presets which function under Reality 2.5.

The idea is simple. A 'null' holds an environmental map as an 'infinite' light source. A visible sphere is placed in the scene, similar to UberEnvironment, and is rotated and textured to match the environment map. The sphere is given a 'null' material so it can be used for reference freely without being visible in the scene itself.

Additionally, a sun without a sky is added and positioned to match the position of the real world sun on the image based light.

The result is an IBL which serves two purposes. Firstly, it acts much like a regular IBL would, in that it will tint the light colours emitting from it, and secondly it can act as a 'skydome' since the light being emitted will be visible. The file can still be exported with alpha to remove this 'sky' but it can also be exported without it to retain it, as an option.

Now that the lengthy explanation is out of the way my question is simple. How can I reproduce a similar preset designed for Reality 2.5? Reality supports IBL's, but there doesn't appear to be any way to visibly rotate them nor make them visible in the render.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Quote - The render times may be quicker, but I feel that the tradeoff will be quality (as it was with the Render Throttle plugin which had difficulty interpreting detailed textures and transmapped hair). In a way I cannot help but feel it does not use LuxRender to it's fullest.  Yeah they may have the jump on a bridge between Lux for 4.5 for now but I beleive Reality 3 will blow it out of the water.

I'll admit I thought the same until I saw the materials editor and discovered some interesting facts about Luxus. The major one is that the materials are extremely customizable, meaning that anything Lux can do, so can Luxus. Of course, it will require prior knowledge of Lux's internal material settings, but it's very doable.

That's not to say Reality doesn't streamline the process, but with Luxus having the price advantage, it will no doubt pick up its own fans, especially with it featuring materials which Reality doesn't currently support.

One thing I've been curious about for a while. Is there support in Reality currently for homogeneous materials? I know a lot of the other materials are converted (such as Glass 2 being under hyper-realistic), but since homogeneous materials are the ones which currently support SSS, it might be very useful for skin materials. I did a search, but I couldn't find any info on this.

Anyway, here's a somewhat recent Reality render.

Quote - Crystan, you'll find diamond in the Gemstone material drop-down list, which will set the IOR for you. Personally I do not set it to Hyper Realistic.

There was a setting for Pearls but it was on the old Daz site, so cannot find it for you. There is a IOR setting for pearl in the same drop-down list though.

Sharkbyte, funny how we both rendered redheads with the simular poses.

The problem is that the IOR alone isn't really giving the effect I was after. It just looks like glass but the background beyond looks a bit more bulbous than usual. I was really looking for some thin film settings which aren't added by the drop-down so I can get that same irridescence normally associated with shiny gemstones. Well, the render didn't come out too badly in the end regardless. I just have a bit of extra postworking to do.

Here's a question I'd love to see someone answer. Is there a good way to simulate diamonds within Reality? I've been using glass with an IOR of 2.42 but it still ends up looking a lot like glass. I was thinkng that the use of thin film might help me get a bit of a rainbow sheen to them. On a similar note, I'd also be very interested if anyone had good settings for pearls as well.

Incidentally, is it better to use normal glass or 'hyper realistic' for the above? I recently picked up the Divine Hair from Rendo and I'm planning to render a pretty princess with a diamond tiara.

Quote - Did you have displacement set to any of the items that got poked-through? If so: disable all displacement settings on those items (and also on the model that is doing the 'poking')

No, it's all smoothing and no displacement at all. A bump map is the only depth given to the outfit. It's not an issue I have with all outfits, mercifully, but as a good number of my favorites are heavily meshsmoothed it's something I've learned to be wary about.

Quote - I did a simliar image awhile back. Used a small ball meshlight which gave me all the lighting I needed in the scene and then postworked the actual effect. Would be cool if it could all be done in Lux though. as for the pokethru, only had it happen a couple of times and increasing the collision iterations fixed it

I tried that, but no matter how crazy I went with the collision iterations it would still render the same way in Lux. It got to the point where it was taking literally 5 minutes to calculate before I gave up trying. The problem is that it shows just fine in Daz Studio, so I have no visual reference to go by to say that it will work in Lux. I have to keep exporting after playing with settings to try and fix it. Since the majority of stuff I do is with Genesis at the moment which uses smoothing liberally, it's quite the conundrum.

Still if there's nothing that can be done, however frustrating it might be, then there's no point in crying over it. I appreciate the update though. Guess I'll just have to be extra careful which outfits I use with Reality for the time being. At least until Daz fix the issue.

Good tip for removing the backgrounds. I have to admit, I hadn't considered using that method, and it's fairly straightforward and quick to do. I have Photoshop CS5, so the tecnhique is well known to me, I just never thought to apply it in such a way.

As for the why of ambient strength, I offer you the example above. This was rendered in Lux using point lights (yes, its an ugly method) at the locations of the fire and the ice. I had originally set them to be light emitters, but the results made the texture 'blown out' as I wanted them to be fairly bright. The glare was added in post using Photoshop, not via Lux. Those are Jepes' Elementz. Essentially flat planes with alpha maps and textures to mimic fantasy effects. Arguably, such things can be added in post, but occasionally I have them partially obscured by scenery and the like, so it's sometimes useful to keep them in the scene.

Moving on from my own bad habits though, there is one issue I hope that has an easy solution. I have a lot of Genesis outfits, and many of them use mesh smoothing. In Daz, the smoothing seems to behave as expected, but when it's converted to Lux I see visible poke-through. A quick web-search revealed a post on the Pret-A-3D site which indicated the problem has been mentioned before, but I couldn't find a solution for it.

Have you had the opportunity to speak with Daz and discover what's causing the oddity? If so, was a solution ever proposed? It'd be extremely useful to be able to use smoothing without worrying too much about how it translates.

To clarify, there's an 'Ambient Strength' setting under Daz Default material, and in fact most common materials. Essentially this setting 'brightens' the object. Setting Ambient Strength to 100% will, in most cases, make it fully bright however the scene is lit. In some cases it's used to artificially light surfaces which aren't covered well by 'normal' lighting, in other cases it's used to make some surfaces stand out more. In the case of Lux, it's probably not there because the emphasis is on realistic lighting rather than 'faking it' with the use of ambient. Edit: Added an image to illustrate what I mean.

Most of my general stuff is done in 800x800 to start with. That goes for both 3Delight and Lux. Of course, the problem comes that if I want a transparent background it's more difficult to get light to bounce around the character. Putting in a plane works for getting light to bounce, but the problem is keeping it out of the frame and still getting the same effects. In the real world, people can't stand against a void, so there's no real-world equivalent situation that can help with that.

In those situations I tend to add more lights, which probably isn't helping my render times any. I'm still very much used to a 3-point lighting system which I tend to adopt for most of my work in Daz. Sometimes it's hard to break old habits.