New Life for my older assets

[Ma3rk]

Been a long time coming so a bit of a ramble, but I'm finally able to slowly convert Daz scenes into Lightwave. Definitely not a couple clicks & your done but now I've a workflow.

Initially, this was motivated both by just having more control in LW. But until I got the new system, I could barely even enable Iray in Daz and only for a couple minutes as it would over tax & shutdown the aged Win7 system. Now, not only can I go full HD & crank up the settings with Iray, easily maneuver, plus I'm able to have both Daz AND Layout with VPR open at the same time! That's what allowed me to finally spelunk the labyrinthian Daz Studios UI to dissect surfaces, etc. Still many mysteries though.

There is one issue and I think is happening with the FBX export & how Instances get handled. Maybe there's some sort of baking step I could do first but I'm not exporting animation. Anyway, some parenting hiccups occur and most are easily correctable. Some just aren't and have yet figure out how they're different. I use a script in Daz first to convert Instances to Objects before exporting, but there are no options so you get what you get. Tried to get more info on Daz forum & pretty much just got crickets.

The process of making the FBX results with EVERYTHING getting parented to a new Null named the same as the item. Department of Redundancy Dept. Cameras come in positioned & aimed & match Daz's, but I do an unparent in place & get rid of the null. The Daz Cam themselves all get set to 640 x 480 and everything else to mins. Setting the dims is no problem but the focal lengths don't quite match. I eventually replace them but nice to have the same view as in Daz to begin with. Lights come in positioned but not aimed correctly. Usually it's just a +/- 90 or 180 on P or B takes care of that, but they'll get replaced too. Daz has a SunSky and various Iray & effects settings, but haven't found the equivalent in LW yet. I prefer an appropriate HDR as a base, no camera or lens effects, & add specific lights were needed. Props with lighting elements I rework & convert to Primitive lights.

The exported textures only bring in the base color & maybe a bump or normal for a Standard surface, so for PBR you'll have to build on your own. The rest are in the original Daz folder (if the product has Iray textures) so just a matter of copying over to the newly made .images folder the FBX extraction created. I rename & move that to a sub of the newly created scene folder, launch the scene & relink the first image when the requester comes up & the rest it finds, and remember to do a Save All.

With lighting establish, then comes the task of retexturing. More on that later.

I've several of his products that I'll revisit but since it was on sale, decided to give Stonemason's "Streets of Morocco" a go. So after about 3 days whanging away, I finally got to make some renders yesterday:

[macb]

Great renders!
I can picture an Indiana Jones type character running
Through the scenery. The lighting and textures tell a story.

Congrats on the new setup as well.
what are the specs of your new machine?

[Sensei]

Attached renders remind me Counter-Strike...

[Ma3rk]

Great renders!
I can picture an Indiana Jones type character running
Through the scenery. The lighting and textures tell a story.

Congrats on the new setup as well.
what are the specs of your new machine?

Thanx.

It's a Boxx Systems Apexx T3
AMD RYZEN THREADRIPPER 2990WX Processor (3.00GHz) 32 Core
64GB DDR4-2666
2x NVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000 8GB

The Daz scene has some Iray camera presets that are for my taste a bit over the top with Bloom, Vignetting, etc. on some of the camera angles, but worth playing with. It also uses block object around the entire set used for atmosphere. Not sure how it's attributes work with Daz's Iray + mixture of SunSky, Uberlight though. It's a pretty good sized set: https://www.daz3d.com/the-streets-of-morocco

I'll revisit & work on the atmospherics at some point.

[Ma3rk]

Attached renders remind me Counter-Strike...

I'm more the Sniper Elite type, but ya some of the games these days are pretty impressive. Unfortunately one of the games that doesn't like the new system is Assassins Creed: Syndicate. I was really looking forward to playing that one with all the graphics enabled.

[Gungho3D]

… after about 3 days whanging away, I finally got to make some renders yesterday:

NIce work Ma3rk, really nice! …

I love the look and feel of the place, there's a sense of "something about to happen"

[Sensei]

What I meant that you should make entire map for game with this style..

[Ma3rk]

Well, even when you think your done, your not. Started to look around beyond the original camera views & comparing things; finding objects (probably instanced) with same named surfs but using different maps in the original, smoothing toggles &/or angles, etc. Backed the camera into a shaded archway and found it completely goobered; wrong map & no UV set (these are all using Object UV). Happily, that took only a few minutes to fix; using one of Oliver's tools, the PBR Importer.

Once I got that all corrected, all sorts of detail popped out. Pretty decent test of how close I can get the cam & exposure range which looks as if it can take quite a bit more. I hit these with a minor curves tweek to snap them up just a bit.

Oh, and that's Camelia who wandered into the bg.



BTW, decided to run some tests using the new GPU Noise filter since I can now. It didn't eliminate one hit in particular, in fact made more prominent, but it was one ding that the non noise filtered / DeSpiked render had as well (shown here), but at nearly 1/3 the render time. Differences aren't apparent but there is some when checked in Photoshop using a Difference mode overlay. Not every angle has that sort of render time reduction, but think I'll make it part of my normal workflow.

[3dhotshot]

amazing work !!!

[Ma3rk]

Continuing on with my endeavor, here's another WIP: The Fugazi Coffee Shop. https://www.daz3d.com/fg-coffee-shop

Renders in Daz Studio using the product default settings didn't match the product page shots (which they normally do). Mostly just a color temp difference, so I took that as license to improvise.

After importing (FBX 2014 seems to be fine with LW 2019 for most exports), I began the one-surface-at-a-time conversion process to Principled BSDR. Doesn't help much when the original artist uses a surface name of default (and Default) on EVERY object, using texture 4 on object 3, several different types of glass all named glass... etc., so it wasn't a simple copy & paste this time. Made for a couple false starts, but so it goes.

Also, I entirely relit starting with a suitable HDR, then added native LW lights where needed including some Primitive Lights. For a few textures, I took the base image & converted to a full PBR set via Allegorithmic's B2M. Also swapped out the original ugly, standard shape frosted globes in the overheads to clear, antique shape tubulars but with LED filaments, & set the color temp to warm white fluorescent. As an experiment I went with a "cheap" fluorescent (greenish) & glass in the small pie display case (which actually has cakes in it ???), but I like the result.

You have to use Hierarchy clone to replicate Overheads as Primitive lights won't instance. Even so, you still have to manually set the light's element as it doesn't change to the new cloned one for some reason. Maybe in an update or two ...?

[Gungho3D]

Continuing on with my endeavor, here's another WIP: The Fugazi Coffee Shop. https://www.daz3d.com/fg-coffee-shop
...

Sweet work Ma3rk.

[marchermitte]

looks great but I'm very surprised, given the specs of the AMD RYZEN THREADRIPPER 2990WX, that the renders takes so long. Are all the threads used properly by Lightwave?

[Ma3rk]

looks great but I'm very surprised, given the specs of the AMD RYZEN THREADRIPPER 2990WX, that the renders takes so long. Are all the threads used properly by Lightwave?

I'm only allowing 60 of the 64 & rendering to 1920x1080. Compared to the Win7 system @ 1280x720 though, it's Warp 8.

As to having the best optimization, I don't know. Still feeling my way with that; just going with what looks good. I am using the GPU noise reduction, but still leaving a bit of Adaptive sampling on. Seems that VPR still likes to have that for it's display.

But, I am able to have both 2019 with VPR and Daz with Iray going at the same time. Not rendering, but just to work. That makes a huge difference right there.

[Ma3rk]

Here are a few more samples of another Stonemason set, "The Streets of Venice". This one gave me fits until I quit trying to get FBX to co-operate (it has it's own way of thinking when it comes to parenting) and exported using good ol' reliable OBJ and giving that a fine tuning in PolyTrans, it all went smoothly. Everything was in position although I might try different grouping options next time. Surfacing went pretty quick. You panic at first with the OBJ as it seems that there aren't textures in VPR but it's just that everything is set to Standard and cranked to 100% Gloss & Spec.

Took awhile to pick apart the water surface as constructed in Daz but think I got pretty close.

I do need a Gondola now of course.

[Gungho3D]

Here are a few more samples of another Stonemason set, "The Streets of Venice" ...

Took awhile to pick apart the water surface as constructed in Daz but think I got pretty close.

Beautiful conversion/materials/render work … but that water, what can I say forget about approximating DAZ for the water, the scale of waves is all out of proportion for the canal context …

… I'm still waiting to see Storm Troopers hiding in the alleyways in ambush