Gypsy eyes, IRay adventures, and the Reality fizzler

Well, phooey ... best laid plans and all that. Boy, have I learned some stuff since the last time I posted! Some of it good, some of it not so good! The good stuff first: above -- we'll call him a gypsy boy, I think. That's the Genesis 8 base figure, no special skinmap or shaders added yet, because I don't have any -- that's the next thing we're about to fix. But I did buy him some decent hair to get rid of that dorky hairstyles which was the only thing that came prepackaged with Studio! This looks lovely-- the Elan hair, which was on sale via the DAZ marketplace, so I grabbed it while the going was good! Next, we'll get a proper skinmap or shaders; but you gotta start somewhere, and --

The fact is, Studio 4.11 is still doing this to me:

You set up your scene, with the Millennium Falcon in a hangar, and two guys, one of whom is the Genesis 8 base figure, complete with the dorky hair, the other is Michael 4...

...you think to yourself, "this is great, we're halfway there, even if the Genesis 8 boy looks like the undead -- flat white eyes. Okay, he's a zombie. Zombies need love too." But then you save the file so you can come back to it the next day and ...

When you open the file, instead of getting your Michael 4 + costume + hair, you get ... a stack of boxes and a warning about missing files; and when you describe this to tech support, you get the email equivalent of a blank stare. They are on the problem, but it seems that the issues I'm experiencing are vastly unusual Anyway, we're working on it, but Studio 4.11 is jacking around massively. It's already been uninstalled and reinstalled; one wonders what happens next! So...

Last I posted, I had a render that was going on and on and on, six hours and counting. I left it rendering all night, and it didn't look any better in the morning, so it was abandoned on account of "I don't have time to let IRay own the computer any longer!" What I ended up with was --

Raytraced figure added to IRay rendered set: Mog Ruith

Don't get excited: that's the raytraced figure set into the IRay rendered set (images manipulated in Photoshop), because after seven hours the IRay render of the figure was just a blizzard of grain. But on the other hand, the set itself rendered rather nicely, even if if did take seven hours. So I deleted the figure and left it to render just the set alone, and we got this:

It's okay, but it's nowhere near near as high-rez as it should have been, after six or seven hours; and IRay didn't give me a "resume" option, so ... what you see is what you get. Hmm...

I was thinking to myself, "if you were using Reality, you might do better, because you don't need all those pesky shaders," right? And I stumbled into the website for preta3D, the company behind Reality, which was having a special offer on Reality 4.3 -- US$17.48 instead of US$49.99 via the DAZ store. Got it. Installed it. Tested it. WFT? The whole reason I went with Reality was that Version 4.0 was reputed to anything up to 20x faster than Version 2.0, right? So why is it just the same speed as the old version I was using in 2012?! And it turns out, when I dug deep down into the research --

Reality used to fly, up till a very short time ago, when PCs got their new video driver updates, and suddenly the acceleration didn't work anymore. So ... yep, you guessed: Reality 4.3 is as now as slow as 2.0; and that is sloooow. Like this:

Left: Reality render, abandoned after SIX HOURS, at which point it wasn't even 'cooked' as much as a fifteen minute IRay render. I just plain don't have the time to do accommodate thirty-hour renders! And since the Genesis figure was also rendering with zombie eyes (plain white -- check it out at 600x900 and see what I mean there!) even in Reality, I just stopped the render.

So what's the deal with the eyes? I went into the textures and maps and all, and it turns out Studio 4.11 isn't loading a diffuse map on the Genesis 8 base figure's eyeballs. It's that simple. No diffuse map, no detail in the eyes. So my next trick was to scrounge around in the Studio folders, which are somewhat chaotic (Install Manager stuck anything anywhere: Michael 3.0 ended up in the Genesis folder, M4 and V4 disappeared altogether; Genesis 3 base ended up filed with shoes!!!), and I found some diffuse maps for Genesis 3 eyeballs. Soon as I applied a diffuse map to the Genesis 8 cornea, bingo, Genesis 8 suddenly has eyes ... not very good ones (because they're not made to fit), but at least it doesn't look like a Zombie. This suggests to me that proper shaders for the eyes will cure the problem permanently, with betters results --

GP Eyes for Genesis 8, catalog image

Yep, there's another US$20/A$30 ... starting to chuck quite a bit of cash at this already, and the oars aren't even in the water yet! But we'll persevere: one problem at a time. Get the eyes sorted, and get a proper skinmap for the poor boy, and see how we go from there.

Render times are the major issue for me right now. It's dead easy if you just want to stand a model in front of the camera, set up a light and come back in an hour. I can do that. But if you want to render a scene, or a complex set ... better come back tomorrow, or the next day. I peeked into the log file to see what DAZ is doing, and had a major "hmmm" moment. In order to get SPEED out of IRay, you need to be rendering on the NVIDIA card -- and since I have a pretty good middle of the road NVIDIA card, I assumed it would be working. Nope. As good as my card is, it doesn't have the top-end performance and CUDA capacity (look it up) to handle IRay. So it turns out, I'm just rendering on the CPU, and that explains why IRay "owns the computer" while the render is, uh, rendering. Ah, so.

Solution: get a faster NVIDIA card? Sure; but they retail for A$800 - A$2,000 ... it won't be happening for me anytime soon! So I'm going to be a bit restricted in what I can render in IRay (and Reality is way too slow to be feasible). It looks like I can't do large images; and I can't do big, complex sets.

As I began -- I have learned soooo much in the last couple of days! Why things aren't working, and short-term solutions; Reality is installed but shelved; back to IRay, needing shaders and more shaders. But here's some better news: it dawned on me (duh) to go to Ma Google and run a search on 'free IRay shaders,' to see if there's anything out there. And it turns out that wonderful people on DeviantArt are making shaders available to save the lives of people in the same boat as myself! So ... the experiment continues.

Next: a skinmap for Genesis 8. And with any luck, said skinmap will have good eyeball shaders as part of the package! Stay tuned... 😝

Big decisions -- and tech support

Time for the big decisions: do I start chucking wads of cash at IRay shaders? Or do I buy Reality and run with Reality's built-in materials? So -- an experiment. I've been re-rendering old Reality/Lux renders in IRay to see which I prefer. And I actually like both. Reality/Lux is better for some things, IRay is better for others. I'm seriously yoyoing from one choice to the other, genuinely unable to figure out which to run with...

The only thing I can say for sure is ... I do love the way IRay renders eyes, and I hate the way it ignores any attempt on my behalf to add bump and displacement maps (textures) to, say, fabrics. This render, above -- a double portrait, Leon and Roald against a Terragen background -- was abandoned at the 50% mark ... it could be a lot smoother, if I wanted to wait another hour or so for it to cook, but it already told me everything I needed to know --

Yes, my textures have dropped out on the fabrics (again!) which leaves them looking very flat. No, the old Neftis Hair Salon wigs don't look so good when you see them in extreme closeup in the IRay renders. Yes, Michael 4 renders up very nicely -- but those fabrics are too flat to be worth the extra hour of render time!

Sooo -- this was rendering in Terragen while we watched Thor on dvd:

Yep, the Millennium Falcon, by J. Hoagland, a freebie from Vanishing Point -- very nice! I enjoyed working with this a lot, though it was a toughie to find the model in Studio 4.10, which is so thoroughly stuffed up, it can't even find its own so-called "smart content." In fact --

DAZ tech support just recommended that I uninstall it and reinstall it, and then go in and do some other very specific things with hidden files ... all rather hair-raising. Dave will give me a hand with this tomorrow; we'll see if it makes Studio 4.10 work any better ... or if it simply is as it is! Right now, 4.10 is not really functional: there's no content in it to work with, and I can't see, to get any content into it! Everything I do, I do in Studio 3 and then open the file in 4.10 and fiddle with the renders. But you can't do that forever. Can you? Very strange. And if the reinstall doesn't bring it up to spec, well, this is the only thing tech support was able to come up with!

Ack. So -- wish me luck for tomorrow's "brain surgery" on the system! Just a short post today, but -- more soon, if/when I can get the difficulties sorted! I'm still drooling over the image quality other people can get, and I think I'm in striking range of those results, just not there yet. I did manage to get the Genesis 8 base figure to load, and it renders up fine, with one exception: its eyes are either flat black or flat white. I'm going to guess that this is because I haven't (yet) dropped fifty bucks on skinmaps (characters) which all boil down to (yes) shaders. No proper shaders = no proper results, right? Right. *sigh*

And so to bed. It's midnight, and I'm propping my eyes with my fingers.

Ronin, Xeno, and a lot more!

Been busy ... fiddling with IRay, trying to get it to play nice. Sorta halfway there, although we're not seeing the glorious skin tones that are definitely possible:

Right now, what I can squeeze out of IRay using Michael 4 is like ... "raytacing on steroids." These are seriously nice renders. They're not photographic by any means, but very nice renders. Have been reading on forums and tutorials, and (most old hands at this say) it comes down to needing to buy all the maps and shaders in the world to get those glorious skin tones. And here's the stumbling block: there are no shaders available for Michael 4. They only entered the repertoire with Genesis. The old figure is pretty much abandoned as per specialist shaders, which means that coaxing photographic results out of IRay with Michael 4 is probably not possible. I can maybe improve on this a bit, but to get astonishing results, we'll need to look elsewhere.

Try this for size, for a start:

I did this in 2015, in Reality/LuxRender. In Reality, it's just a few clicks to configure it, and you can re-re-readjust the lighting on the fly during the render. This was done with Reality 2.0. The current version is 4.3; and I got this result in about two hours flat, including posting the model:

To my eyes, this looks better than the IRay render of the same character (same skin map, same lights, same everything). The Lux Render is actually tickling the line of being photographic ... and the software is 100x easier to use than IRay. Soooo...

Just waiting to get the bugs ironed out. Waiting for tech support, but they only write/reply once per week, and this is taking forever. *Sigh* Anyway, at least I've learned the Studio 4 interface backwards and sideways while trying to coax a decent render into being!

And in the course of mucking about, I found some extremely rudimentary morphs that allow you to at least make Genesis look like an adult rather than Peter Pan:

It still looks like a cartoon of a human, but at least it's not an adolescent body form now. What really is creepy is, if you "hide" the costume so as to see the torso, there isn't a detail on the skinmap. No freckles or hair chest, sure, I can see the sense of that. But the Genesis doll has no nipples, which looks ... creepy. You can put body builder muscles on this guy, and he has no nipples. You don't realize how odd it looks till you see it. I guess mammals are as mammals do! 😮 Alas, to do much more with Genesis, you have to chuck a lot of money at characters, toupees and costumes. Right now, I don't have the cash, it's as simple as that! You'll have to bear with me while things chug along as fast as they can. Blame the dentist, LOL.

Also -- something very exciting is happening:

Yes!!!! There is a new Mel Keegan book on the way! This is fabulous news, and it's been a thrill designing the cover. I did most of it in Bryce 7 Pro, working with an old image from years ago, which was re-edited to take out the ocean, move the mountains and so on, so that the background started life like this, kinda like a Chris Foss book cover from the days of yore:

...before it went into Serif to have the byline added, then into DAZ Studio 3 to have the character rendered, then into Photoshop to be painted, then back into Serif to have the title overlaid. There might be some nips and tucks or tweaks to be done to it later -- I have all the files, it can be adjusted at whim -- but the author is delighted with this design. And so am I!

That's all from me for today. More soon ... still experimenting at full throttle!

Hunks, heroes, render wars and window shopping

Old Reality render: Leon

New Reality render: Rock Star

The top render is an IRay render done today ... and what you see here is not a clean render, but a composited "painting" derived from three renders, one of which was a raytrace, painted together in Photoshop! IRay is waaaay harder to use than it's said to be, and the interface is From Hell. It's not playing nice, and when you get into the surface, texture and shader settings --

Now I know what the guy behind the Reality engine means when he says, "No spaghetti shaders," on the Reality 4.3 page at DAZ. Spaghetti shaders? Huh? Yep, he's talking about IRay without (diplomatically!) mentioning IRay, since that one is the official built-in unbiased render engine in Studio 4.whatever  --

Now, I'm not saying IRay is crap!! Don't get me wrong: IRay renders are the equal of Reality renders. But here's the difference: it'll take hours to configure an IRay render; it's so complex, it'll take weeks or months to learn it; they sell the tutorials for US$50 per package (!), and so many people are so baffled, there's a huge trade in lighting suites for IRay, to make it possible for desktop users (hobbyists) to squeeze good work out of it ... and these ready-to-go lighting suites are not cheap.

Bottom line: IRay is a deep money pit, although they give away the engine ... meanwhile Reality is so simple, I was doing the rest of the renders, above, within a matter of days, on my own nutting-out, didn't even look at a manual, just poodled through the interface and thought about it. Reality is EASY, and I guess the ultimate bottom line is that its render quality is at least is good as IRay, while costing nothing but the plugin, and being sooo easy to learn/use. Hey ho.

Soooo, I've about had enough of IRay already, while still waiting for DAZ Tech Support to get back to me regarding the ticket I put in four days ago. Not very happy about this. And I'll add one other thing: I am not spending one more dollar until the tech aspect gets worked out, and I can load my content. Because this is getting silly.

None of which stopped me window shopping, and these, below, are on my wishlist:

...the really dumb thing is, I'm sitting here salivating, dying to send them money for Genesis characters, costumes, hair, props; but Tech Support is not answering. I ain't spending another dime till the technical bugs are sorted.

But yes, I did play around with IRay a lot ... enough to discover that it's 100x harder to work with than Reality, and it will turn into a money pit, which very few people can afford. I know I certainly can't. So -- bear with me a tad bit longer.

The leader picture today -- "Snake Charmer" -- as an IRay version of a raytrace I did about five months ago. Here it is ... and I leave it to you to decide if you like the IRay render or the raytrace. I have a feeling I actually prefer the raytrace, even though it's definitely art, not trying hard to be a photo.

Last for today: badlands, in Terragen:

Now, Terragen I am seriously loving. The computer romps it now, and each of these renders took about 20 minutes. So realistic, you're looking for the dinosaurs! Reminds you of something like Dakota, or similar, which was dinosaur country about 60 million years ago. If I can ever get my head around it, I hope to be rendering dinosaurs in Terragen. One day...

Adventures in IRay, Terragen, Bryce and ...!

Yes, you're right: that's trusty old Michael 4 -- "The Man in the Hat," as you might know him from a fair number of renders on this blog! The difference? It's an IRay render. Turns out, IRay is actually built into DAZ Studio these days, which is neat. Also neat is that is does 80% of the textural work automatically ... however, the last 20% is stuffs up royally, and unless I'm missing something major, there aren't any controls in DAZ Studio 4 to fine-tune IRay: you need to drop US$50 and get IRay Studio, a plug-in. Well ... if I'm going to drop A$75, I'll probably opt for Reality, which is an interface I known and trust from past experience. IRay is fast, sure: the render, above, took about 50 minutes with a lot of stuff running in the background. It'd have been faster if I committed the whole computer to the render. But the new Reality is supposed to be up to 20x faster than the version I was using years ago, so it's a safe bet, these two, IRay and Reality, are comparable. So --

First, today's new art:

Terragen: that took about half an hour. It's pretty simple, but quite effective. I need to jog my own memory on Terragen ... haven't done it in a month or two, and am starting to forget! I know I need to wrap my head around procedural terrains, then get into working with objects. Like trees and plants. Just a few experiments to see how long renders take, involving trees. If it pans out to a render taking three days and tying up the whole computer to get an image with a tree -- forget it. Won't know till I try, right? And ...

Bryce 7 Pro, and a rather nice abstract. No way will Bryce give me realistic landscapes, but by golly, you can make it render some very nice arty-tarty images. I like this kind of thing a lot. Must do more.

And then, I decided to put a couple of recent images through the IRay process to see what it can make of them. Here we go:

Now it's starting to get interesting ... though I have no control whatsoever over what IRay is doing at this point. This is "click and go" stuff. And IRay is making a mess of a lot of the textures: it was Photoshop to the rescue" to fix this picture, after it refused to "see" or "apply" the diffuse maps on the plants on the foreground. They were white plastic, when rendered -- so weird. Anyway, Photoshop fixed that and saved the picture. For comparison --

Left: IRay. Right: Raytrace

That's worth a look at large size. The other challenge about the IRay render of this was that Studio 4 couldn't find the sword of the tree ... I had to import those as OBJs. Which is easy, I guess, so -- no real problem. Just a few minutes' extra work. Quite impressed with the quality of the basic IRay render, though I also see the art value in the old fashioned raytrace. (Incidentally, that on the right is the raytrace from Studio 3. Interestingly, the deep shadow map image choice seems to have been deleted from the 3DLight engine built into Studio 4.10 -- with good reason. Its raytrace feature is FAST. I mean, lightning fast. Cool.)

Here's the recent "Jack," sent to IRay:

Not bad. Far from brilliant, because, as I said, I have zero control over the render engine: this is just "click and go," and Iray is utterly ignoring a lot of the mapping. The venous map on the Michael 4 has dropped out; it made a mess of the texture on the shirt (Photoshop to the rescue again), and I think the skin tones are washed out. It was an adventure getting this picture into Studio 4, in order to send it to IRay...

Problem 1: when Studio 4 opened the Studio 3 file, it left the hair behind! I did a test render to make sure it was worth going on, and when it was, I imported the hairdo as an OBJ. That's dead easy; but the next test render showed that Problem 2, adding an OBJ to the scene made the skin tones go utterly bananas in the raytrace. So I sent it to IRay and crossed fingers, and ... Problem 3, sure, IRay renders the skin fine with the OBJ-hair in place, but it makes a complete muck-up of the shirt. I gritted my teeth, finished out the render, put it in Photoshop and repaired it, to save it. Hmm.

Next thing I must learn is how to control the surfaces on IRay -- or make the decision: do I drop A$75 for IRay Studio, or for Reality? Because without one or the other, you'll get these problems all the time.

Before you get excited about the quality of the renders today -- hang on. First, these are auto-generated by the plugin, and they are NOT high-rez images. This one, below -- not my work: a catalog image from the DAZ store -- is a high-def image:

It's chalk and cheese. First, obviously, that's a Genesis 3 figure, whereas all I have to work with at the moment is Michael 4, because I am still waiting for help from Tech Support at DAZ. Right now, I cannot add content to Studio 4 ... any content at all. So all I'm doing is posing stuff in Studio 3, then opening it in Studio 4, giving it a tweak where possible (it seems not much is doable, when you're trying to interface with IRay without having the IRay Studio plugin), and then clicking "go." Sooo...

Suffice to say, there's a lot to learn, and/or a lot to buy. But I've made a start, and if Tech Support can get the SQL problem worked out, we'll be a step closer to having oars in water. At least I'll be able to work with a figure comparable to the one you see above. Till then, I can certainly get into the numbers and see if I can figure out how to configure a high-def render, rather than a "click and go" automatic one. And there are more problems beyond this --

Spent some fascinating (not!) hours on the forums, where people are screaming blue murder about not being able to install third party content into Studio 4. Hunh. About 70% of everything I have is third party, and if DAZ 4.10 won't load it ... well, we'll see. Maybe I can find a way.

The adventure continues...!

It's all happening! Whoooo!

If you would refer to your left ... ahem! Please note the large empty space where the brain box used to be. The CPU is currently some kilometers away in a workshop, being thoroughly upgraded -- just to a slightly different plan than I'd originally imagined. Clone the old harddrive onto a new one: no problem. For A$178, I'm getting a solid state 1TB internal harddrive, so she's going to be screamingly fast. But it turns out, the case is too old to fit a new USB Front Panel unit ... the only one that might have fit wouldn't plug into the old motherboard. Ack.

This is a 2012 system, and in seven years, the manufacturers confidently expect that all the only machines will be dead and gone. Nope. This one has never been connected to the Internet (!) and is therefore as fresh and fast as it was on Day One. Uh huh. Tells you how and where your computers are going wrong, doesn't it? Anyway, the fix for that was to get a USB hub, and a long extension cable ... it'll be plugged into the USB 3 port on the back, the cable comes over the top and gets taped to the case, and thereafter I will have seven USB 3 ports, rather than 2 USB 2 ports, on the front. Neat. Done.

Pause for a little eye candy, or what's the point in this being an art and photo blog? 

Bryce 7 Pro: Highland Dawn

Raytrace: Leon and Roald, the courtyard scene

With any luck I'll get the system back on Saturday or Sunday, and then it's all about installing stuff and learning new interfaces. Now, I never liked the DAZ Studio 4 interface ... but I also haven't really looked at it since 4.1.5 or something in that bracket. I can't even remember the last time I turned it on, if I tell you the truth! I did use it now and then to send something to LuxRender, such as this, below --

Now, that's not so bad at all, but I was using the old version of LuxRender, Version 2.x, I think; so it would have taken something like 5 - 6 hours to get that render. I couldn't help comparing it with something like this one, below --

-- which is a painted raytrace. Now, yes, that's obviously ART, while the LuxRender image is trying very hard indeed to be a photo. But the raytace would have taken a matter of twenty minutes, plus half an hour to paint; and I obviously asked myself if it was worth the bother of tying up the computer all day to get one simple image!

Back in 2015, however, the new(er) versions of Lux were already coming out: touted as being seven times faster; so a seven-hour render was doable in an hour. Now it started getting interesting ... but by then I was out of harddrive space, and couldn't do a darned thing about it.

Obviously, at this point real life intervened: my mother entered her final days and passed away; my pancreas blew up in my face, literally, and I was in hospital twice; you name it, it went chaotically wrong, and four years went by so fast ... well, I'm still disabled, but getting better! So.

(Pause for a little more eye candy ... Elven Boat on the River, in Bryce 7 Pro, in 2011)

So, indeed! The PC has gone into the shop and will be back in 3 - 4 days, with 10x the HD space it used to have, all-new USB 3 ports, and a USB wifi adapter that'll let me jump online for a vry brief time, go get something I want ... like the installers for Studio 4.9.9.whatever, and the new Reality 4.3, which offers renders like this, for US$49.95:

That image is used as the showcase render for Reality 4.3 DAZ Studio Edition ... and you can only be impressed. This is what decided me to stick with Lux/Reality and not go out into IRay ...well, that and the necessity to buy a new NVIDIA video card before I could run IRay; which would necessitate putting in a new motherboardl which would mean buying a new PC case. In other words, I'd have spent upwards of A$1,000 to rebuilt the whole system, just to run IRay, when Reality will give you renders that look like this:

Thanks very much, NVIDIA, I do believe I'll keep my money and run with Reality, which will use the same video card and motherboard! Soooo, I spent a fabulous (not) morning backing up my weeny little boot drive and browsing around the Genesis figure "assets" on the DAZ Studio marketplace. It's many years since I shopped there, and things have changed, but this is going to be fun! (See the Lux Core Renderer Gallery here.)

I'll keep you posted in the next few days, and then ... new art. Uh huh. New interfaces to learn first! But this is good for your brain. The work-space might not be quite as aggravating as it used to be. By Studio 4.7, the use interface looked like this:

I can live with that. It's a million percent better than the early "Mickey Mouse" interface that drove me nuts -- drove me away, literally. But what is hugely irritating is this:

Yep. Those are the Genesis 0 and 2 and 3 and 8 "people" .... and it looks like every single "person" in the CG world is female. What is wrong with this picture?! And this is one of the reasons why I, as an artist, don't work with female characters very much: because you're bloody inundated with them. As if female is all that exists. [Rolls eyes] Browsing through the "Genesis 8 Items," you simply cannot find a man, a male, a he. You have to deliberately search the store for "Genesis 8 Male." Aggravating, but there is it *Sigh*  Anyway ... this will be fun. I'll need the Genesis 8 Body Morph and Face Morph plugins, to create my own faces and bodies; then, toupees, costumes, skinmaps ... and away we go! I hope.

More soon. Stay tuned.