3delight tests

[maze]

Hi Mathaeus,

The scene is looking good! I specially like the fine detail of the fabrics bump (or disp?) on the seat, it does read well although its pretty small..
metal is also looking nice, although you may want to add some glossiness variation to some spots to make a bit less *clean*

only thing bugging me a bit is the boots modeling, shape is not bold enough I think, might be the top ending looking without some sort of cap all around,
also a light shell to the interior might help to gain some weight.

cheers.

[Mathaeus]

Hi Mathaeus,

The scene is looking good! I specially like the fine detail of the fabrics bump (or disp?) on the seat, it does read well although its pretty small..
metal is also looking nice, although you may want to add some glossiness variation to some spots to make a bit less *clean*

only thing bugging me a bit is the boots modeling, shape is not bold enough I think, might be the top ending looking without some sort of cap all around,
also a light shell to the interior might help to gain some weight.

cheers.

Yes this is displacement on fabric, variable reflection's glossy spread as well. Once I'll put everything I want into this scene, if I ever, probably I'll see what to tweak.
BTW if you're coming from Max, maybe a good start with Renderman compliant renderer, is to consider it as an highly boosted Max default scanline renderer - means, shadow map rules... of course plus a bunch of additional features.
Regarding light falloff question from your another post, in 3delight it's the standard SI solution, by enabling falloff in light's PPG, you getting a default exponent of 2, usually considered as 'realistic' one.

[Mathaeus]

Hi,

a few tests of lightweight particles. When particle shape is set to "point", particles are rendered as circles using a specialized algorithm which is suitable for such small primitives. This allows to use much higher count of particles, but drawback is default billboard orientation. Circles are always aligned to rendered camera.

Here's small trick for more interesting shading - desired shading normal is converted to color. In render tree, color is converted to vectors for bump map. Particles are still aligned to rendering camera, but shading normal is modified. ICE tree and Render Tree are something like this. For some reason it seems 3Delight wants a negative of shading normal, here.



And how it looks like. I've used ICE setup which tries to do even distribution on mesh, following polygons. Still it needs work.

[rray]

Looking good, how much faster is it compared to your Knit Strands Pro plugin with these woven patterns?

[TwinSnakes007]

That SSS shader looks sooo nice. What's the rendertimes and resolution?

[Mathaeus]

yeah I forgot rendering times. First woven is longest - without subsurface on skin, it's about 1 minute, with subsurface, it's about two. Using 4 core 3Delight on QuadCore machine, 1280*720 resolution, 8 light with deep shadow maps, shading rate 0.5. In image, there's really sharp shading rate of 0.1, so this is about twice longer.

Anyway, I wanted effect of first one, ability to add dust or small specular dots, then to add this in post over existing image, somehow. Especially these specular dots are hard to do with displacement, as displacement needs to be "continuous". Another advantage is resistance to shading rate, each particle have own "contour". Woven is some kind of occasional product, maybe it could be faster than mesh, with detailed pattern. But once the particle is moved out of emitter's surface, or it's rendered alone, there's a good number of issues - it does work with ray-tracing, but circles seems to be still aligned to camera, supplying an unwanted target for the ray. It works with point-based GI too, but it's not so fast, nicely to say.
Would be interesting to try this for clouds, or short high-dense fluffy fur, like on teddy bears.

Subsurface is more along line of misss_fast stuff, preset is default, almost monochrome "marble". Subsurface gradient belongs to two Car Paint shaders, adapted to work with 3delight subsurface in similar way to 3dl misss_fast shader (two times stronger subsurface from back side, scattering from back side too, or "Nn" instead of "Nf"). Car Paint is there because of diffuse falloff, to get difference between layers. Base layer is original skin color, using diffuse falloff of 1. Top layer is inverse hue of skin, some kind of blue-purple, using diffuse falloff of 2-6. Idea is to get a "whitening" on high light-surface angle, in additive mix.
Finally, mix is what I call screen with pedestal, which allows output higher than 1, gradually looking like plain additive.
In short, subsurface shader is more for blurring, it could be replaced with some simpler shading model. Skin color is almost uniform.

Here is with - without subsurface comparison.

[Mathaeus]

Hi,

time to redo some old tests, now using a path-tracing engine from 3dl 3.1.35.. From my understanding, this path-tracing engine has to be a part of upcoming 3delight 4 for SI. Everything is ray-traced in these pics. I've used something like ray-tracing as primary ray, ray-tracing as global illumination, around 512-1024 samples for GI, 256-512 for glossy reflections. Image with girl, has one area light. Rest is lighted solely by environment, using equivalent of MIA physical sky (only sky, not classic light together).

On QuadCore machine and 4-core 3delight, render times are: for image with girl, about 20 minutes, metallic structure took about 40 minutes, building took about 2.5 hours - don't know does render-time CSG adds some time, probably it does. It seems that all features of 3dfSI, are working nicely with path-tracer. Hair, subsurface scattering, render time CSG, blobs, all kind of motion blur, displacement... Fine displacement seems to be a nice way to cover the noise, in case of stills.

There is also an especial, general purpose 3Delight material in this version. Didn't used it for now, had no time to redo the materials, so here it's still 3delight's equivalent of MIA.From first look at SL files, there is a lot of new code, at least some kind of new shading op, having a BSDF option. For now, I think fastest option for path-tracing is: ray-tracing as primary ray, without progressive rendering for final. Adding some area lights, removing some GI bounce, I believe this improves the render time. too.

[Kzin]

nice tests.
rendertimes are a bit high, but i think it should render faster with bsdf once its integrated. it should also eleminate the noise, which is a bit strong for the girl and the building. looking forward for updates.

[Falam]

Hi,

time to redo some old tests, now using a path-tracing engine from 3dl 3.1.35.. From my understanding, this path-tracing engine has to be a part of upcoming 3delight 4 for SI. Everything is ray-traced in these pics. I've used something like ray-tracing as primary ray, ray-tracing as global illumination, around 512-1024 samples for GI, 256-512 for glossy reflections. Image with girl, has one area light. Rest is lighted solely by environment, using equivalent of MIA physical sky (only sky, not classic light together).

On QuadCore machine and 4-core 3delight, render times are: for image with girl, about 20 minutes, metallic structure took about 40 minutes, building took about 2.5 hours - don't know does render-time CSG adds some time, probably it does. It seems that all features of 3dfSI, are working nicely with path-tracer. Hair, subsurface scattering, render time CSG, blobs, all kind of motion blur, displacement... Fine displacement seems to be a nice way to cover the noise, in case of stills.

There is also an especial, general purpose 3Delight material in this version. Didn't used it for now, had no time to redo the materials, so here it's still 3delight's equivalent of MIA.From first look at SL files, there is a lot of new code, at least some kind of new shading op, having a BSDF option. For now, I think fastest option for path-tracing is: ray-tracing as primary ray, without progressive rendering for final. Adding some area lights, removing some GI bounce, I believe this improves the render time. too.

How are you fairing with 3Delight, are you testing ? I was considering buying a License, Mental Ray nodes are limited in 3Delight and to create your own RenderMan shader you'd need Pixar Node based RenderMan software, another $2K

[Mathaeus]

How are you fairing with 3Delight, are you testing ? I was considering buying a License, Mental Ray nodes are limited in 3Delight and to create your own RenderMan shader you'd need Pixar Node based RenderMan software, another $2K

Hello Falam,

these three were done with out-of-the-box shaders. There are only few parameters to tweak when it comes to path-tracing, everywhere . Regarding shaders, wouldn't hurt to have some hair shader with shifted highlights, and that's all, imho (which is not hard to put into existing hair shader, btw). New 3delight material should be able to cover all opaque stuff - including subsurface scattering, reflection coating, so on.

I'm not a tester, I believe I'm able to recognize the software, able to return the energy I put into it. Beside 3Delight, this could be Modo renderer and V-Ray, Softimage standard kinematics, Softimage ICE, so on. Of course I'd always prefer a full featured renderer, let's say, deformation blur is a thicket.

[Falam]

How are you fairing with 3Delight, are you testing ? I was considering buying a License, Mental Ray nodes are limited in 3Delight and to create your own RenderMan shader you'd need Pixar Node based RenderMan software, another $2K

Hello Falam,

these three were done with out-of-the-box shaders. There are only few parameters to tweak when it comes to path-tracing, everywhere . Regarding shaders, wouldn't hurt to have some hair shader with shifted highlights, and that's all, imho (which is not hard to put into existing hair shader, btw). New 3delight material should be able to cover all opaque stuff - including subsurface scattering, reflection coating, so on.

I'm not a tester, I believe I'm able to recognize the software, able to return the energy I put into it. Beside 3Delight, this could be Modo renderer and V-Ray, Softimage standard kinematics, Softimage ICE, so on. Of course I'd always prefer a full featured renderer, let's say, deformation blur is a thicket.

Would you buy a 3Delight License ?

[Mathaeus]

Would you buy a 3Delight License ?

I already bought what's fit to my machine. Will see if I'll extend it this summer, for purpose of 3Delight exporter for Blender - maybe it's too early to talk about...

[Falam]

Would you buy a 3Delight License ?

I already bought what's fit to my machine. Will see if I'll extend it this summer, for purpose of 3Delight exporter for Blender - maybe it's too early to talk about...

What do you mean what 'fit to my machine' ? You're limited to phong shaders for Illumination, maybe I'm not seeing that it's good for NPR renders, therefore phong is all you need ? Do you use any renderman shaders ?

[Mathaeus]

Oh come on, I think I didn't used any phong shader since 2004 or so - at least, not plain one.
It's very late evening where I'm, time to sleep....

[Falam]

Oh come on, I think I didn't used any phong shader since 2004 or so - at least, not plain one.
It's very late evening where I'm, time to sleep....

The Arch Shader I was told doesn't work in 3Delight. Only (1) SSS shaders works in 3D delight, that is not much concern with the SSS within 3Delight. What shader(s) are you using if you don't use phong ?

[Kzin]

you have two versions of the arch shader in xsi. the mia one and the native integrated, one of these two is working, not sure which at the moment, but i think you can find the informations in the 3delight docs.