United3dArtists Archive

Finis · Post by **Finis** » 13 May 2015, 04:34

I'll do a still life for the Things that Exist challenge.

So far I've become frustrated trying to get caustics to work in Daz Studio. These tutorials help.

https://youtu.be/FwCHxSTlOQo
https://youtu.be/G2lwC6HHTrU

Finis · Post by **Finis** » 15 May 2015, 03:00

The results from the Daz videos were not satisfactory and so far no one has given solutions at the Daz forum. I'll use Kerkythea for rendering this and Hexagon for modeling. I'll find some objects around the house and set up a still life for a photo and then model it.

Finis · Post by **Finis** » 17 May 2015, 04:31

I miss displacement mapping in Daz but Kerkythea is doing the caustics.

Here are things I might model. An oil lamp my ancestors used, an old pharmacy bottle I got at a flea market, and my feather basket where I collect feathers I find hiking.

Finis · Post by **Finis** » 17 May 2015, 04:39

Success with the bottle. Modeled in Hexagon. Rendered in Kerkythea with metropolis light transport + BPT. That ran for 22 cycles in 9.5 minutes. I'm concerned about my CPU temp. Renders still reach 140F/60C.

Here is a photo of the real bottle with real caustics and the test render.

The rendered bottle doesn't have specular highlights, the reflections are distorted, and the refraction effect may be too pronounced. The real bottle doesn't distort the background much. It has bubbles in the glass and no seams.

The surface has slight bumps but I think the real caustics come from differences inside of the glass. Density, flows, and such. To get the effect in the render I gave the bottle a procedural bump map using Perlin noise. When I used images for bumps the effect was less clear.

I read that one small grid square = 1 meter in KT but I got little caustic effect when I scaled the bottle that way. Using one large gird square = 1 meter worked better.

Dragneye · Post by **Dragneye** » 17 May 2015, 08:00

Looks great Finis
I like the top one better. Mixes better. But cool work.

PS: that's what I'd like to find. Something that I can regulate when rendering; for example, use the GPU or CPU, but instead of working at 100% when rendering, I can dial it down so the most it uses is maybe 80 - 90%, thus increasing its lifespan instead of burning out by having it run at a lower temp.

Finis · Post by **Finis** » 17 May 2015, 15:45

Thanks Dragneye. The top picture of the bottle is a photograph of the real item. Kerkythea lets me set the number of cpu threads used so I might use fewer and see if that reduces cpu temp. It will render slowly that way but I don't mind if it saves the hardware. I'm going to re-paste the cpu cooler and add a fan too.

Dragneye · Post by **Dragneye** » 17 May 2015, 18:28

ah...

jamesmc · Post by **jamesmc** » 17 May 2015, 18:32

Looks like that bottle is ready to be filled with a cure all elixir. What's the refractive index for that type of glass?

Finis · Post by **Finis** » 18 May 2015, 18:51

Dragneye, I found soft shadows that produce a more mixed caustic that looks better.

James: Don't know the refraction of the glass. I found that IOR 1.10 looks kind of like the real bottle. Real glass with that IOR? Most is 1.4x -1.5x. I'd like the objects to closely resemble the real ones since that is on theme for the challange. These items really do exist and the renders will look like them to my ability and limited time to devote to this. For realism level I just want it to look believable. It doesn't have to duplicate the items exactly.

I re-pasted the cpu cooler with no improvement. Adding another fan reduced the temp about 5C to the recommended max. so I'm happy with render temps now.
vi ... 502#p46502

I found that 100 render cycles takes about 45 minutes with just the bottle and looks great.

Finis · Post by **Finis** » 23 May 2015, 03:04

Two or three more parts and the lamp is modeled.

jamesmc · Post by **jamesmc** » 23 May 2015, 20:46

I've been meaning to get myself a "temp" lamp. So I can replace every other week when I get tired of the old one.

Dragneye · Post by **Dragneye** » 24 May 2015, 03:57

Oh Cool!
Nice job so far Finis

I see a future 3D printed lamp seller here. . .
Ya know?

Finis · Post by **Finis** » 24 May 2015, 16:08

Thanks!

Here is an art shape inspired by experiments for modeling a lamp part. Lights are in the balls. The balls are pink-red glass and the tendrils are red glass.

Finis · Post by **Finis** » 26 May 2015, 19:03

Preliminary textures and render for the lamp. Not much time left so I'll make a picture with the bottle and lamp.

Let's have some competition. You all make challenge entries.

Draise · Post by **Draise** » 26 May 2015, 20:22

That lamp is badass.

jamesmc · Post by **jamesmc** » 27 May 2015, 00:13

that lamp is way cool, I dig it!

Finis · Post by **Finis** » 27 May 2015, 15:30

Thanks!

Realism is not as interesting to me as imagination, creativity, and art but this project has interesting technical challenges and realism is what architectural, product, and other potential freelance CG jobs need. It is fun to see the real objects done in CG too.

Daz Studio 4.8 with Nvidia IRay is available. I tried it. It has a setting for caustics which is something I had trouble with in 4.7. I loaded my Throne of Spring project and tried it with various settings. So far I noticed no speed improvement although it did use the GPU and CPU and the GI seemed missing on the IRay render. GI was present in a simple test. Needs study to learn to use it. I'll just wait to learn Blender and Cycles but this does look promising for Daz.

jamesmc · Post by **jamesmc** » 27 May 2015, 16:34

Downloaded the DAZ 4.8 Iradium. Haven't done a thing with it yet, but for content oriented package, a physically based render looks promising.

Finis · Post by **Finis** » 28 May 2015, 20:48

The glass is too dark. More light coming from inside the room is needed. I'll make a texture for the lamp's main body, flowers on the the real one, if I have time.

The perspective seems backwards. Look at the horizontal bar in the window. The right side is farther, left closer, but it looks like the near part is smaller that the far part.

Finis · Post by **Finis** » 30 May 2015, 16:03

A few things to improve and I'll do a large HQ one. Need to work on the lamp body texture. It has a flower painting texture I made from photos of the real lamp. That doesn't look right now. I'll move the lamp and the bottle next to it to have more direct sunlight on the lamp.

I found that cameras in Kerkythea reverse the perspective. The Current View does it right. The darkness of the glass: the sky (IBL/HDRI) doesn't show through glass as expected with MLT-BPT render so I made a background plate with the mountain image.

Finis · Post by **Finis** » 31 May 2015, 14:35

Here it is.

Draise · Post by **Draise** » 31 May 2015, 14:57

That's gorgeous.
Really nice.

My only critique to up your image would be make your cloth shader anisotropic instead of phong (I assume that's what you have?) and up the wood texture of the wall and hide the low detail with a bump!

The color tones and red and the glass and models, beautiful work. Really love the composition too. Hard to compete with!

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