Show us your Blender Renders

TheKD · July 2020

Just wait till the optix AI denoiser makes it into the general release, it's so much better than the one that's in it right now. Unless I am a dope and it is there now lol. Been using a paid fork of blender for a while with it, haven't installed vanilla blender in a while. The optix AI uses albedo and normal maps which is why it is so good. Also the renders here are making me mad lol. Haven't made a render that didn't make me rage delete it in sooooo long :P

Kitsumo · July 2020

Daventaki said:

So just so everyone knows I know absolutely nothing about Blender. I have downloaded it a while back and did somewhat build a hammer off of a tutorial that I found (and didn't finish). Be that as it may I was able to import with both plugins with only a little bit of scowling and curse words. Honestly Im surpised I was able to get around to actually figuring out how to render. Definitely going to have to watch some videos lol. Anyhow without further ado:

First thoughts are both plugins are not to bad to work with once I figured out how to get them installed. Diffeomorphic's installation guide was more useful to me than the Daz to Blender. Second thing is Diffeo imports the model with pose and all. THIS I love because I was having a heck of a time posing in Blender (another learning thing probably) I know that Diffeo does not transfer everything (IK's?) but at this point I don't even know how much this affects me (noob much?). The light seems to be washing out the texture in the Diffeo import. Im not sure if this is because of materials setup or if it has to do with me moving the light. I have yet to figure out how to do like HDRI light in DS.

I have a lot to learn.........

First image Daz to Blender, second image Diffeomorphic both rendered is Cycles, third straight out of Iray

Don't sweat it. I barely know anything about Blender, just enough to import my scenes and render. Your images look good, the lighting is always the most important, IMO. Personally, I'm on team-Diffeo, but I have to admit your D2B image probably looks better. The freckles are more visible and the lighting seems a little better. It's a great start.

Daventaki · July 2020

benniewoodell said:

I can't really get the IK to work with the MHX rig that well, but if you convert it to rigify in the final box, you can get awesome IK. But to get an HDRI, go to the little world icon on the right, it should be the sixth icon, click on the circle in the color box and then do environment texture, and then click open and that's where you import your HDRI.

Personally, I love so much about diffeomorphic's tool, but the materials are what always were the biggest problem for me (except in the stable version, it looked great there but when I switched to the development version it all switched on me). I know there's folks that say it rivals iray, and I'm sure it does, but without knowing the node structure exactly, it's hard. I had a list of PA's and characters I couldn't use to transfer over because their skins just would not look right. Once I had a character come over with a green tint to her skin. And then, sure, I'd go in the nodes and take the green out, but then her skin looked even weirder. I'm sure someone who knows what they're doing with that could fix it in a heartbeat and make it look amazing, but the Daz to Blender transfer of materials looks wonderful without making a single change.

Thanks for the tips and I completely understand! It took me forever just to figure out how to even look at the textures! I still don't even know much about the shader system in DS so I can't even imagine learning an new one although I would love to. I can never get things to look like I want them to.

@Kitsumo, Thank you!

Kitsumo · July 2020

Ok, this isn't exactly a render, but I got fed up with people calling Blender bloated, so I decided to try to render the Daz Material Ball scene in Blender on my Raspberry Pi. This is on version 2.79 which is the most recent that will run on a Pi. As far as I know, 2.80 and above require OpenGL 3.3 which the Pi doesn't support.

The hardest part by far was figuring out the Blender 2.79 interface. Then copying the textures to a separate folder to transfer to the Pi.

The low quality of the render is because it was set to 1920x1080 at 50% so actually only 960x580 pixels, which I didn't catch before I started rendering. Also, the high-temperature icon displayed in the upper corner of the screen so I decided not to do a full size render. The Pi's not a rendering powerhouse to be sure, but I did this mostly to see if it was possible. Hardware specs: Raspberry Pi 3B+ 1.4Ghz 4-core, 1Gb RAM. Total rendering time: 12m42s

nicstt · July 2020

Kitsumo said:

Wow, I've never looked at that passes menu before. Here's what I've been using. It works ok for me as long as I don't turn the render samples too low.

It's not great although it does the job.

I have my start up file set to load with that; I also changed the camera resolution and some other settings.

File > Defaults lets you save the startup settings. You can also navigate to where it is and copy it or work on it from there; I'd reccommend copying it somewhere as a backup. You can find it in App Data > Roaming iirc.

nicstt · July 2020

TheKD said:

Just wait till the optix AI denoiser makes it into the general release, it's so much better than the one that's in it right now. Unless I am a dope and it is there now lol. Been using a paid fork of blender for a while with it, haven't installed vanilla blender in a while. The optix AI uses albedo and normal maps which is why it is so good. Also the renders here are making me mad lol. Haven't made a render that didn't make me rage delete it in sooooo long :P

I don't believe it's that much better, and it's RTX; I'm not interested in giving nvidia more cash unless it's worth my while.

My threadripper renders faster than my 980ti, which it didn't in iray, was about 35-40% slower.

wolf359 · July 2020

Stonemason environment converted with Diffeo....

AllenArt · July 2020

Nothing special - Christian in Cycles, exported with Diffeomorphic (which I like a ton better than the new one). I used the development version here actually. Indoor HDRI and three spots.

Laurie

nicstt · July 2020

That's really nice, and yeh the diffemorphic plugin is great

andya_b341b7c5f5 · July 2020

No artistic merit here, just sharing a comparison I did for my own interest. It is Leisa 8 with Rose hair (because I just bought them) and the default Ruins HDRI. (I deleted the Sun light that DazToBlender added for some reasons of its own. Other than that everything is default settings, so 'Auto Material' setting for the Thomas Larsson Daz Importer.) I am using a recent (June) download of the development version of the Daz Importer.

Honestly, I don't think the results are great with either transfer method as materials go. I would have to spend some time working on all the materials in either case. Using Cycles in both cases, Blender rendered both faster (much less than 1 minute) to 100 samples than Iray to 100 iterations (1 mn 20 secs). Iray render included for comparison.

Padone · July 2020

@andya If you added the hdri yourself be sure to set the intensity to 2 the same as daz studio. Then Leisa should work fine with the volumetric skin if you render with cycles and the required minimum settings. If you have any doubt as for cycles settings then let the plugin update them for you or set them to full global illumination so you're sure you're good.

Does Victoria 8 work fine for you ? I can do a comparison with her if it may help.

Kitsumo · July 2020

AllenArt, Nice image. Good use of SSS without going overboard. That outfit is funny to me because I live in a part of the country where people use belt buckles as a second form of ID.

andya_b341b7c5f5, that looks like a good starting point. Skin textures are always going to be a challenge, I still struggle with them.

Kitsumo · July 2020

Here's a gallery post I made a while ago. I just thought I'd provide links to the sources - hopefully the mods don't mind.

The LEGO content comes from https://www.ldraw.org/ . They have editors that let you build your own creations, plus a library of user submitted models.

The Ldraw Blender plugin is at https://github.com/TobyLobster/ImportLDraw

The Daz figures were imported using diffeomorphic and the details are in the gallery post. The only textures I adjusted were on the cyborg figure, I also had to edit some geometry around the geografted joints. All the LEGO shaders were already configured by the plugin, I didn't have to touch anything.

andya_b341b7c5f5 · July 2020

Padone said:

@andya If you added the hdri yourself be sure to set the intensity to 2 the same as daz studio. Then Leisa should work fine with the volumetric skin if you render with cycles and the required minimum settings. If you have any doubt as for cycles settings then let the plugin update them for you or set them to full global illumination so you're sure you're good.

Does Victoria 8 work fine for you ? I can do a comparison with her if it may help.

The idea here was to compare the results of the two transfer methods against Daz Studio Iray with as little user intervention as possible. People using these tools may know very little about Blender, so may judge only by what they get 'out of the box'. The defaults are also I think the closest to an 'apples to apples' comparison.

So, I did a fresh install of both plugins and used the defaults provided. Daz Importer was downloaded today. As noted, DazToBlender sticks a Sun light in the scene (maybe because the only light is an HDRI?), so I deleted that. The strength was set to 2 by the Daz Importer, which I used first, and I did not change it thereafter The Daz Importer is set to Warn for the Lighting, and does not warn me, so I assume it is satisfied. It is set to Update for Rennder Settings.

Victoria 8 gives similar results to Leisa 8 - not surprising really as they are both Daz models. Again, neither gets very close to the Iray result, and both would need some work on materials.

mal3Imagery · July 2020

Yay a Blender thread :P Here's one for the Blender thread :)

Edit: For anyone curious what viewport looks like :)

My salt and pepper gent.

nicstt · July 2020

mal3Imagery said:

Yay a Blender thread :P Here's one for the Blender thread :)

Edit: For anyone curious what viewport looks like :)

My salt and pepper gent.

Damn

AllenArt · July 2020

Hair and cloth in Blender is DEFINITELY something I'm going to focus on...lol. Fantastic character mal3Imagery. :)

Laurie

benniewoodell · July 2020

I got this set up (took forever because the file size is so large) and by the time the render got to her face and the fingers it was already about two hours in and I wasn't about to stop and start over so I just let it finish, but the nose is kind of jaggedy here with some weird block shadow on the underside and some weird green specs under the cheek, but otherwise I'm happy with how this turned out. If those were fixed, I'd be ecstatic with this as the grass turned out really great (grass clumps from Quixel scattered with the particle system) and the cherry blossoms turned out wonderful as well (those are from the Grove).

I either have to upgrade my computer to more Ram to accomodate these huge file sizes as one character and the terrain were like 14GB and my memory usage was at like 92% so I'd click on something and have to wait ten, fifteen minutes for it to be movable lol, never had this issue with Diffeomorphic's transfer. Until I either upgrade my system or the bridge gets more efficient sizewise in a future update, I'll go back to rendering backgrounds in Blender and comping with the characters from Daz as this photo took me about 6 hours to get together after all the assets were already together in the scene.

SilentLadyGTA · July 2020

A render out of the box of an import of G8F by BazToBlender tool fromBlender.

Cycles - subdivision 3 -

I just use adaptative sampling

Result is very nice (from my point of view)

Padone · July 2020

@andya There's definitely something odd in your blender settings then. I see a strange "black" skin in your render. I mean Victoria 8 is what we used for testing the volumetric skin together with other characters and they all look good with the default settings. You just have to let the plugin update for minimal requirements. It may be that we overlooked something though.

What blender version are you using ? The plugin is tested with the 2.83 stable release. Also can you please make a render with cycles and full global illumination settings ? This will check if the issue is in the render settings.

Another useful test would be if someone else can check Victoria 8 with diffeo. She works fine for me and the others at diffeomorphic.

https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/issues/24/i-believe-i-nailed-v8-aka-true-iray-skins

nicstt · July 2020

Just doing a default V8 now; first time I've actually done a default character with no changes.

I'll post back results.

Edit

Default V8; no settings changed on import, using a recent beta of the Diffemorphic plugin.

Padone · July 2020

@andya The test by @nicstt seems good to me no black skin there. Waiting for your specs and full global illumination.

edit. Below my G8F and V8 with default settings, first iray then cycles. I also imported the daz camera to get the same frame. I used the filmic tone mapping in blender, that's why there's some difference in the sky since filmic flattens overexposure.

Please note that diffeo actually converts materials. On the contrary daztoblender applies a default shader that you have then to fit, it doesn't convert anything other than applying textures. This means for example that if you change the V8 skin with a green traslucency you will get a green translucency as well with diffeo, while daztoblender will not because it just applies its default shaders.

V8 test scene included

AllenArt · July 2020

V8 straight from DS to Blender thru Diffeomorphic. Indoor HDRI and one spot. No fiddling with materials. I think the darkness in andya's image is due to something else.

Laurie

nicstt · July 2020

Laci for V4 has travelled a long way, well her textures have.

Castle Dungeon, Anime Ninja Dress (cause skin makes for great armour and of course heels are best for fighting in particularly in a dungeon with holes everywhere ); April YSH Helena Hair; smoke, mist and sparks curtesy of Blender. I put a lot more Vignetter on than normal, it just seemed appropriate. Oh and I think the Tattoo is from Xoxo, or one of the PA's characters.

A lot of retexturing the outfit; nothing done on the Dungeon other than the 'Torch'.

Padone · July 2020

@nicstt On defense of that outfit it doesn't seem to get heels, and some ninjas may be more "fly like a butterfly sting like a bee" than "hulk smash" so heavy armors may get in the way LOL. And nice picture there blender is great for fxs .

davidtriune · July 2020

testing kayo, hair, and some post processing in blender

nicstt · July 2020

Padone said:

@nicstt On defense of that outfit it doesn't seem to get heels, and some ninjas may be more "fly like a butterfly sting like a bee" than "hulk smash" so heavy armors may get in the way LOL. And nice picture there blender is great for fxs .

Yeh, certainly is.

Thanks for compliment, just wish I knew what it needed. lol, but Im fairly happy with it.

... And they are only small heals, but too damn long for that place! :)

I forgot to mention that the hair is a conversion; it converts well.

nicstt · July 2020

davidtriune said:

testing kayo, hair, and some post processing in blender

Looking good.

davidtriune · July 2020

by the way here are the nodes for kayo's face. all default textures. super simple :)

benniewoodell · July 2020

davidtriune said:

by the way here are the nodes for kayo's face. all default textures. super simple :)

Thank you for showing the nodes! The render looks fantastic. I love Kayo.

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