Challenge - LVI Manta Submarine Ferry

[Finis]

About a quarter million polygons of chairs and benches. Render time 16 minutes. This is straight from Daz except for resizing and adding logos. Now to put the seats in the sub and add an outside scene.

There will be more color for the seats. I should rearrange them. This arrangement doesn't show them off well.

Ideas? There should be more types of objects or features to add interest. I'll model some bags, surf boards, etc. but what items or features could the ferry have?

Photographers help please. This picture looks distorted. The standing characters are 6 feet (1.83 meters) tall. The sitting character is slightly shorter. She looks tiny and Purple Dress (from my Golden Age picture) looks much taller than Surf Guy. What camera settings would you use to photograph this scene? Daz has camera settings focal length (mm), focal distance (unknown units but easy to place using UI), F stop.

[jamesmc]

About a quarter million polygons of chairs and benches. Render time 16 minutes. This is straight from Daz except for resizing and adding logos. Now to put the seats in the sub and add an outside scene.

Nice!

There isn't an instance generator in the software you are using? That would save a ton of poly-overhead imo.

[Finis]

Thanks James! Daz Studio has instancing but it didn't work well in vs. 4.5. I have 4.6 now (check your Daz account for new free stuff) so maybe it has been improved. Daz is not good at precise placement of items either so I placed the seats in Hexagon. I did drag them with a grid reference though so I guess that would work as well in Daz.

Here is the seating layout. Changing it. The floor is the bottom of the passenger part which is the inner bubble seen in earlier clear shell pictures.

Also a test with the submarine's transparent shell in place. Reflection and refraction look ok. There will be an opaque floor in the passenger zone. I'll add a displacement map to the ceiling to help define that shape and space.

[Dragneye]

Nice work Finis. Just realized its much bigger than I thought from looking at the exterior shots.

My guess is to drop the camera a bit. If it helps, the distortion is from 'fish-eyeing' perspective - the smaller number (average lens is abt 40-50 mm) makes it more fisheye warped, but you get a wider view. Also distance of item to camera affects distortion. The further away from foreground object the camera is, the more 'leveling' between near and far objects.

[Finis]

@Dragneye: 40mm looked better but the camera is close to them. I'll arrange the scene so it can be father.

@James: I tried instances and had mixed results. The MantaU3DATempSeatsFigs.jpg (see earlier post) took 16 minutes but using instances of the seats took 20 minutes. Without the GI lighting each took 28 seconds. However I was able to use huge amounts of instances in another test. I did a test with 300 instances of the full set of seats. (1000 crashed my GeForce GT 610) That rendered in 10 minutes (no GI no people just seats) even though it used all 8GB of memory and started virtual memory with 100% disk usage. So, I think there is no time savings but there may be an ability to use large numbers of copies. I vaguely remember reading that Daz's instances aren't really instances.

Given 28 seconds vs. 20 minutes (one hour with GI and transparent shell) I might try traditional lighting instead of GI.

Edit: Here is what I have learned about reducing render time in DAz Studio.

- No GI lighting. Traditional lighting is very fast vs. GI. Seconds vs. minutes.

- Instances. Unpredictable. I'll count them as not useful vs. render time. They may allow larger numbers of copies in a scene.

- Geometry shells of characters*. I found no difference in render time.

- Shaders. Daz characters use the complex Uber Surface shader for realistic effects like SSS. The default shader renders in half the time. The realism is not needed for characters or objects in the background or in some scenes. The eye surfaces won't look right with the default shader.

- Hair. Turning off transparency is the main time saver for hair. This is not good for final images. It looks like my test renders above. Of course turning off the hair visibility is best for tests.

- Render settings. These settings work for me for nearly finished quality for computer screen display. I think print or cinema or very HD would require more.
--- Progressive rendering - Turn off. Good for a quick look at general lighting though.
--- Bucket size - 128 or maximum. Requires more memory for larger buckets.
--- Max ray trace depth - 3 for most scenes. Higher, even 6 or 7, may be needed for complex transparent or translucent items. This setting has significant effect on render time. Low = fast, high = slow.
--- Pixel samples. 3 for most scenes. Some pixelation or grain artifacts may need higher.
--- Shadow samples. 3 nearly always works for me.
--- Shading rate. Important! This is the main setting for speed vs. quality. Low = quality, High = speed. 1.00 is often good enough, 0.50 or less for best quality but slow, 4+ quick test renders.
--- Pixel filter. Sync.
--- Pixel filter width. 3. Similar to pixel samples for artifacts.

- Uber Environment Light. This light is used to activate photon mapped GI lighting (bounce light mode) or IBL. The main render speed related settings are:
--- Occlusion Samples. Low = fast low quality, high = slow high quality. 8 is often good but much higher is sometimes need. Blotches happen in areas with reflected/bounced light if this is too low.
--- Shading rate. Same as in render settings. This can usually be 1 or even 2 for final renders. 30 is not bad for tests.


* I read that geometry shells, copies of objects, could save time on characters since the shell has no morphs or rigging and associated overhead. The idea is to make a geometry shell copy of a character after posing, texturing, etc. and render that instead of the full character item.

[Finis]

I'm frustrated now. I can't get anything like this image http://united3dartists.com/forum/do ... p?id=10820 earlier in the thread. That is what I want for reflections but now I only get reflections of the seats by looking almost straight up. Also the edges of the poylgons in the model appear and countermeasures cause other artifacts.

Why did all my earlier renders look like glass without these artifacts?

Daz objects have the normals pointing inward. Flipping the normals on the shell removes the visible edge effect but causes trouble with the reflections. Daz doesn't have a "double sided" rendering option that I have found.

Since this is no fun this way, is taking too much time, and I'm learning too much about programs that aren't Blender I'll use the method that produces the least render strangeness and go on with modeling more items for the scene.

[jamesmc]

I'm frustrated now. I can't get anything like this image http://united3dartists.com/forum/do ... p?id=10820 earlier in the thread. That is what I want for reflections but now I only get reflections of the seats by looking almost straight up. Also the edges of the poylgons in the model appear and countermeasures cause other artifacts.

Why did all my earlier renders look like glass without these artifacts?

Daz objects have the normals pointing inward. Flipping the normals on the shell removes the visible edge effect but causes trouble with the reflections. Daz doesn't have a "double sided" rendering option that I have found.

Since this is no fun this way, is taking too much time, and I'm learning too much about programs that aren't Blender I'll use the method that produces the least render strangeness and go on with modeling more items for the scene.

Maybe the objects in the scene need to be children of the main object rather than groups or links?

[Steve]

quarter million polys...

My laptop cries for you. Good luck!

[Finis]

@James: Thanks. Na wasn't that. I made a mistake and cranked refraction strength up to awesome instead of reflection strength. SDS was needed to. Looks right now.

@Steve: Try 75 million polys in the 300 instances test.

I got render time down to 6 minutes on this interior image with GI on! I think I'll do this with no GI and traditional lighting though. GI can wait for Blender and Cycles. The reason is that I rendered in Daz for realism but I have to simplify the characters, especially their hair, until they look like mannequins. Without GI renders are fast enough to use the full materials.

I discovered two not so good things about Daz characters. I know of no way to move their eyes to focus them on things. They can't be made older. The "child" slider only make them younger. I'm sure there are products to buy that can do that but nothing standard. Make Human can do it but importing to Daz and rigging would be hard.

Now to model more items and put in more seats. I'll make surf boards, bags, maybe a snorkle and flippers. The back wall should have big screens for entertainment and info.

Putting a hexagonal bump on the ceiling helps to define the passenger space, let the viewer know there is a ceiling there without prior background knowledge, and gives a sense of scale. I'd prefer the featureless ceiling but it needs the structure.

[Steve]

I have a better idea.

I'll let you try 75 million polys and I'll sit here and watch the results!

Good seat details by the way, sorry I'm not able to read all the text you wrote!