3delight tests

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Blob StrokesAuthor: Anto Matkovic
Here's a small ICE compound used to generate these 'blob-strokes'. I had something like this before, but I really wasn't so excited by the speed of generation. Now with 3delight, it's definitely feasible, updates are performed immediately. The compound creates particles on curve list, evenly distributed, count is relative to particular sub-curve length (still, you'll need to take care of curve re-parametrization). It's also able to perform 'write on' on one-after-another subcurve (by sub-curve, or normalized by sub-curve length). In short, you can 'draw' 3d strokes with it, by animating the slider value. There are a few additional parameters. [..] contd. under si-community link

local backup: Emit Blobs From CurveList.xsicompound
3DelightAuthor: dna research
v4.0.41 updated Feb 21st 2015. 3Delight is a fast, high quality, RenderMan®-compliant renderer designed to produce photo-realistic images in demanding production environments. The renderer was introduced to the public in the year 2000 after being used for more than a year as the sole renderer in a sister production company. It is now widely used and earning a reputation as a benchmark in rendering technology. [..] (cont'd on product page)

DNA research recently released the 4.0.41 upgrade along with making the free license now support up to 8-core CPUs. Highlights from the changelog: Volumetric Smoke and Shards Any shader as light source projection Exposure, Gamma Controls Mesh Light support ESC to stop render. Last year's big 4.0 update introduced features such as: support for deep EXR files Native MARI textures support Improved sampling of environment maps Added the physically plausible 3Delight Material "Continuous rendering" is now enabled by default Up to x2 acceleration in hair/fur rendering Memory usage is down 30% when using the path tracer Skin shader for 3Delight for Softimage Motion Map property is now supported

A list of movie project rendered with the 3Delight renderer. As mentioned the product is free of charge for the first 8-core license. Additional quad-core licenses are available for 400$ each and unlimited multi-core licenses for 900$ each. Yearly support and updates 190$/290$ resp.


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Mathaeus
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Re: 3delight tests

Post by Mathaeus » 19 Mar 2012, 02:57

JPWestmas wrote:oh wow, baked vertex colors. So it's kinda like Zbrush where you bake the vertex colors to bitmap?
no :)
here, vertex color supplies the 'second radiosity bounce'. I've talked about *possible* baking of procedural texture to bitmap. But this really belongs to specific work, imho no sense to go with 'universal' recipes....

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Re: 3delight tests

Post by JPWestmas » 19 Mar 2012, 03:16

haha, alright. I didn't realize you were mixing in AO and Radiosity bounces in with this. Secondary bounces being vertex, first bounce passes are at pixel level I guess. Your terminology is different from mine, much more specific and technical.

Anyway sounds interesting of course, it's hard to not wonder about this.

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Re: 3delight tests

Post by Mathaeus » 19 Apr 2012, 02:41

Hi,

Yet another of 'girls in uniforms'. Pic is just a start, I'm planning to add more details. Still using the SurfaceColor3Delight together with ray-traced GI, reflection, subsurface scattering. About 15 lights with DSMs for initial lighting. Armor is also subsurface scattering, I just wanted this plastic look.
Render time for 1536*2048 was about 40 minutes on QuadCore, 4 core 3delight 3.13. Didn't bothered myself with optimizations that much, anyway.

Image

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Re: 3delight tests

Post by Kzin » 19 Apr 2012, 09:25

that looks great!
could you discribe point for point your wokrflow here.
i tryed this some weeks ago and i could not replicate this lighting with vertex color only on all object, so a short list of the steps would be great. ;)

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Re: 3delight tests

Post by Mathaeus » 19 Apr 2012, 22:20

Kzin wrote:that looks great!
could you discribe point for point your wokrflow here.
i tryed this some weeks ago and i could not replicate this lighting with vertex color only on all object, so a short list of the steps would be great. ;)
Hi Kzin,

well it's not only workflow, there are few modifications of sl files.

First of all, the same could be done with point-based method. For point-based reflection, Ciaran already posted the mod of mia_material.sl, somewhere on 3Delight forums. Thread named "3DFS 3.0.15 is available for download" or like. But I have no patience to tweak the point-based stuff, just because avoiding the artifacts. So here is that "probe-ray in color" method.

Second, hair is still lighted solely by classic lighting, seems to be most elegant way.

Anyway, here is modification of mia_material.sl, I've used here. So it have:
1: Mentioned modification for point-based method (didn't used it, here). With enabled point-based GI, and "highlight only" mode in MIA ppg, it's possible to tweak the angle (glossiness) of point-based reflection.
2: If "SurfaceColor3Delight" hit mode is enabled, and objects have a vertex color property with exactly the same name, this vertex color is traced, instead of full shader. This is what I've used, here.
3: Drawback: it doesn't trace the "pure" glossy refraction anymore, for now I don't know how to enable both...
4: Drawback: probably doesn't works correctly in "single environment sample" mode
5: Drawback: in case of zero glossiness, it switches to 'safe mode of 4 samples" - this is 3delight default

I've used it with 3Delight 3.13, should work nicely with earlier versions too. For newer versions, I don't know.
Of course, someone could use it only on own risk. Make backup of original, first.


Basic workflow for this one (again, very personal preference, maybe I'll change this next time):

1: make a light rig that roughly covers the entire sphere
2: render-map it into environment map, through spherically mapped sphere, paint some details on env map.
3: bake classic lights into SurfaceColor3Delight CAV.
4: beauty render, still using the rig of classic lights, GI only for bounces from baked CAV, reflection both from environment map and baked CAV.

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Last edited by Mathaeus on 20 Apr 2012, 00:05, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: 3delight tests

Post by rray » 19 Apr 2012, 22:27

Hey this turned out great. Cloth texture and hair shading are particularly convincing.
softimage resources section updated Jan 5th 2024

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Re: 3delight tests

Post by Mathaeus » 19 Apr 2012, 23:37

And here's small recipe for 'specular dots' on hair, still tied to hairs (won't swim in movement). One 3d vector component is 'lengthwise hair', another is from random color ICE attribute, third actually could be zero, I think. It should work anywhere. Actually it's a bit harder to get it in 3delight, requires a pretty sharp shading rate.
Hair is mix of two hair shaders, basic with base color and very wide blueish specular ( decay about 4-8). On top of this is another, only with specular (decay about 50), modulated with fractal.
Both hair shaders have disabled transparency, additive mix is passed through Constant shader, only this one has transparency.

Cloth texture is exactly from latest ICE Knit Strand download, rendered from Knit Strand model, as vertical gradient for displacement, also as incidence to camera. 'Incidence channel' drives the color mix.

Image

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Re: 3delight tests

Post by Mathaeus » 01 May 2012, 02:34

Hi,

that's a test.... well I don't know of what :) Between 8-18 minutes for render on QuadCore machine, 4 core 3delight. Depends on transparency level, used subsurface scattering, so on.
Finally I had to add an another point cloud for 'fine hair' on hair-skin border.

Image

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Re: 3delight tests

Post by Mathaeus » 22 May 2012, 02:19

So that's a final pic. About testing, characters in front, that's how heavy render fits into my 4 gigs of RAM ( don't laugh... ), without going to scene archiving. With all knobs on,
ray-traced GI and reflection ( still using 'probe ray in color'), DOF, hair and subsurface scattering, displacement on subsurface scattering and everything else. About 40 mins for characters, 15 mins for background, on QuadCore and 4 core 3delight.

original pic

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Re: 3delight tests

Post by Kzin » 22 May 2012, 23:36

really nice rendering with all the shadingdetails, like the dispmaps und sss.
is the way you setup and render the shot suitable for animation? because you do alot of presteps before final rendering. i thought it could be a bit hard to manage in more complex scenes?

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Re: 3delight tests

Post by Mathaeus » 23 May 2012, 01:04

Kzin wrote:really nice rendering with all the shadingdetails, like the dispmaps und sss.
is the way you setup and render the shot suitable for animation? because you do alot of presteps before final rendering. i thought it could be a bit hard to manage in more complex scenes?
as you probably noticed, this is still image, not an animation :) Maybe I'll play with something else in another "scenario", "complex scene" or what not. BTW nobody with sane mind, would go with such complex character into animation, at least no one man band.

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Re: 3delight tests

Post by Kzin » 24 May 2012, 08:50

Mathaeus wrote:
Kzin wrote:really nice rendering with all the shadingdetails, like the dispmaps und sss.
is the way you setup and render the shot suitable for animation? because you do alot of presteps before final rendering. i thought it could be a bit hard to manage in more complex scenes?
as you probably noticed, this is still image, not an animation :) Maybe I'll play with something else in another "scenario", "complex scene" or what not. BTW nobody with sane mind, would go with such complex character into animation, at least no one man band.
animation is my first question for things like this, because i only render animations, except some archviz stuff.
your workflow is not that good for simplier scenes i think, but it could be good for more complex shots in which you need all the details but also want to use gi, so its a trade off.

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Re: 3delight tests

Post by Mathaeus » 24 May 2012, 21:09

Kzin wrote: animation is my first question for things like this, because i only render animations, except some archviz stuff.
your workflow is not that good for simplier scenes i think, but it could be good for more complex shots in which you need all the details but also want to use gi, so its a trade off.
Of course, it is possible to have a sequence of baked vertex colors, by ICE. Not vertex color directly, instead you create a custom 3d vector attribute, per point, bake and load this 3d vector, convert it to vertex color at the end of ICE tree. Something like: get node location > get 3d vector attribute > convert to scalars > convert to RGBA > set vertex color. Once you have this 3d vector attribute, loaded through load cache node ( not through mixer), it's possible to smooth with the neighbors, blend across frames, apply it partially, so on.
It's also possible to create entire ICE based lighting setup, affecting the vertex color.

To prevent ICE to kill the attribute during cache process, my own recipe is something like: get the attribute in first row, do something with attribute in second row, set the attribute in last row.
All the time, you want a float vertex color, not 2 bytes.

1 Mb of ICE cache, having only this attribute, contains about 100k vertices. For scene like this, that would be about 30 mb per frame, for all.

How hard it is to manage all that, well, just like any other ICE caching. I'd say it's 90% about skill of user. If I would be a measure, let's say I've been confident with this after two months of ICE-ing.

Still, I don't explaining and defending a workflow theory here, I just saying what I've used.

Afaik, method belongs to 'old fashion', I'd believe the "proffered" way is point-based GI.

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Re: 3delight tests

Post by ActionArt » 04 Jul 2012, 23:45

Looks like a new version just became available for the public.

http://www.3delight.com/en/modules/PunB ... hp?id=3514

Looks like a number of nice fixes and upadates.

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Re: 3delight tests

Post by Mathaeus » 06 Jul 2012, 02:30

One noticeable, which is in commercial version for a while, would be a stronger support for deep shadow maps. If volumic shadow map is enabled, slider for sub-samples has effect. Before was only from up to down mip - mapping, 3dl optimized shadow map of high resolution, Now it's in both direction, generally some smaller initial resolution + sub- sampling should be enough.
Easier to get detailed shadows for tiny objects, leaves, grass, hair or like.

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Re: 3delight tests

Post by Mathaeus » 12 Sep 2012, 01:59

Hi

just to warm up version 3.1.15 a bit. Boots are here instead of people I've planning to put into scene, one day :) It's closed scene, rendered with a help of shader modifications, mentioned above in the thread. So it's *not* OOTB 3delight for SI, not especially related to last version. It took about 30 minutes on QuadCore with 4core 3delight for SI, using ray-traced GI and reflection. Probably it will take a twice to get smooth sampling, or I'll switch it to point-based GI, if ray-trace become boring.

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