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By DroneMaster - 6 Years Ago
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I've been getting more involved in CC3 and iRay. I may have missed a few features that were there but didn't know about. Anyway, here are a few thoughts about what I've experienced so far: 1. In version 3.02, there was an eyedropper tool (pick) but no bucket (fill). This meant I had to record/remember all the Diffuse, Hue and Saturation numbers for each area I wanted to texture. There was a Load/Save setting but I never used it. But in version 3.03, the bucket tool magically appeared and all is good. Seems like they're rolling out the basics little by little. 2. Another nice thing is that there is a working "Appearance" section in the iRay controls and it works well. The "Sun and Sky" section is well developed and I noticed the "red shift" control and it is fantastic. It would be great if we could get some clouds to break up the background a bit. Maybe even a sun or a moon and stars for some evening compositions. If that's not possible, it would be great if we got the iClone "background image" in CC3. Using the included IBL images is too limiting. 3. I noticed that you can't presently see any MDL (iRay) textures outside of the iRay preview screen. And you can't "bake" any these textures. There are no features for this. Exporting characters with iRay materials only delivers whatever there was in the regular preview screen. This means iRay is not ready for developers because buyers will need iRay to view it. This will be a difficult sell. I'm not sure where RL wants to take iRay in CC3 in the future and I'm not sure they know either. It would be great to see a roadmap if there is one. Anyway, I'm still up to my eyeballs in iRay and it's simply amazing. I mentioned in another thread that I used DAZ for years and could never figure out their implementation of iRay. Now I don't have to. RL made it easier to understand and use. Bravo, RL.
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By DroneMaster - 6 Years Ago
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I found the "Project" and "Preference" windows when I switched from the "Standard" workspace to "All Panels". Very sneaky, RL. BUT, even putting a background image into the scene in CC3, the iRay render completely ignores it. And that bucket (fill) tool disappears when you come across a Substance material. . Looks like they don't want you to copy it to other items in the scene. I'm still looking for a way to bring in Substance material into CC3 directly. So far, no go. I also found that the "Red Shift" can be used as a HUE slider that can give you a night scene with the Tone Mapper exposure set to "low" Here are 3 images of the same scene to show some effects. The first 2 show the Sun&Sky using an Ektochrome film effect in the second. The 3rd image shows what you see in the regular CC3 preview window.
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By DroneMaster - 6 Years Ago
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This image is total iRay materials with Sun&Sky settings. It took about 40 minutes to get to 1000 iterations. There's still a lot to figure out. One thing for sure. iRay looks its best with Sun&Sky. Yes, you can do great interior lighting images with studio lights etc. but iRay's realism excels with Sun&Sky lighting in my opinion. Almost all of the iRay materials are "shiny" to bring out the realism but you'll need the Substance materials to get rough realistic rocks. I hope RL bundles more MDL material or makes it easier to use Substance inside CC3.
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By DroneMaster - 6 Years Ago
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I just figured out how to work with Substance in CC3. Have to use the Appearance Editor. I thought the Editor was dead according to the forum but it's not for .sbsar files. They even have a note that says "Click to activate the appearance editor". How nice. It works well when you can find out where your Substance files are hiding. Like I mentioned before, shiny stuff is nice but when you need the grainy, not so shiny ground materials, Substance is a treat to use. I'll post something soon with both Substance and iRay materials together soon.
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By animagic - 6 Years Ago
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DroneMaster (12/13/2018)
I just figured out how to work with Substance in CC3. Have to use the Appearance Editor. I thought the Editor was dead according to the forum but it's not for .sbsar files. They even have a note that says "Click to activate the appearance editor". How nice. It works well when you can find out where your Substance files are hiding. Like I mentioned before, shiny stuff is nice but when you need the grainy, not so shiny ground materials, Substance is a treat to use. I'll post something soon with both Substance and iRay materials together soon.
There has been a lot of misinformation about the Appearance Editor in CC3, unfortunately. It works for everything except CC3 skin for which it needs to be updated due to the higher texture resolution.
I'm a novice at Substance, so it would be interesting to learn about your experiences.
BTW, I just tried Iray with a background image and it does render in Iray for me. However, if using Sun and Sky background images will be ignored, I believe.
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By DroneMaster - 6 Years Ago
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I'm a novice at Substance, so it would be interesting to learn about your experiences.
Thanks for jumping in, animagic. I just found out that RL has severly restricted the use of Substance in CC3 unless it's "cloth". Any prop you bring into the scene won't even show up in the material list so forget about Substance unless you apply it in iClone and even then, you won't be able to switch to a new Substance material in CC3. And some important parameters are missing like being able to tile the texture or flip the UV's like "Planer" or "Box" etc. Very limiting. It seems like you're going to have to do all the work in iClone and then bring it into CC3. Anyway, it's what I've discovered so far. I like what you posted. Very cool. Anyway, I'm doing more research on this. I hope RL didn't just "throw iRay into the mix" like they did with the other renderer that went basically nowhere.
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By DroneMaster - 6 Years Ago
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Very confusing. I posted that you couldn't tile or flip UV's in CC3 but with certain Substances, you get all the manipulation tools. I'm trying to find rhyme or reason here but I'm having trouble coming up with a logical reason for all this. Anyway, iRay turns out delicious visuals and when it comes to shiny stuff, this program rocks!
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By hattori kun - 6 Years Ago
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How does Iray deal with animations? Still exporting the frames one by one and create a huge cache on hdd?
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By DroneMaster - 6 Years Ago
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hattori kun (12/14/2018)
How does Iray deal with animations?
I don't know. I never tried it. One of the pictures below took close to 40 minutes for one frame. Not anxious to try even a 10 second animation. That's 300 frames at 40 minutes each. That would probably take longer than the time I got left to live. 
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By justaviking - 6 Years Ago
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DroneMaster (12/14/2018)
hattori kun (12/14/2018)
How does Iray deal with animations? I don't know. I never tried it. One of the pictures below took close to 40 minutes for one frame. Not anxious to try even a 10 second animation. That's 300 frames at 40 minutes each. That would probably take longer than the time I got left to live.
@Hattori Kun - We will have to wait until "1Q19" when the Iray plug-in for iClone is released. (1Q19 starts January 1st and ends March 31st, so anywhere in that range.)
@DroneMaster - Are you rendering at the default of 1,000 Iterations? Try changing your Max Iterations to 250, with Denoise turned on at 249 and see how that looks. It should finish in 1/4 the time. Ten minutes is still a long time for an animation frame, but 10 is a lot better than 40. If that looks okay, try 100 iterations, with Denoise on at 99 and you'll be down to 4-minutes. 
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By animagic - 6 Years Ago
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@Dronemaster: The image I posted was done with 300 iterations and with denoising at 298. It went fairly quickly; a few minutes at the most (I didn't time it).
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By DroneMaster - 6 Years Ago
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Are you rendering at the default of 1,000 Iterations? Try changing your Max Iterations to 250, with Denoise turned on at 249 and see how that looks.
Thanks, viking. No interest there for me. I can barely handle the iClone videos for my products in the Marketplace. I'll leave iRay animation for the pros.
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By DroneMaster - 6 Years Ago
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animagic (12/14/2018)
@Dronemaster: The image I posted was done with 300 iterations and with denoising at 298. It went fairly quickly; a few minutes at the most (I didn't time it).
Me, I time everything. A 60 second clip in iClone takes about 5 minutes. That's 5 minutes I'll never get back. Maybe in my next life I'll do iRay animations. 
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By justaviking - 6 Years Ago
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@DroneMaster - But even if you're just doing a still, 10 minutes is still at lot better than 40 if the result is good enough. I do most of mine at 250 iterations, with Denoise turned on near the end.
NOTE:
From my testing, turning Denoise on has a negligible impact on performance, so there is no great harm in turning it on early. But on the other hand, there is not quality benefit to turning it on early, so you might as well set it to come on one frame before you're done. The only caveat is if you are going to hit your TIME limit, then you want to be certain Denoise gets activated before you run out of time, in which case "sooner" is much better than "too late."
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By animagic - 6 Years Ago
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The way I would work is using the batch render on a secondary machine and also let it run overnight.
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By AutoDidact - 6 Years Ago
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When trying to establish what your minutes per frame time will be ,for an animation project ,it is very important to Test scenes that conform to your expected usage or complexity. particularly in the area of moving cameras, reflective materials or refractive glass subsurface scattering etc. These are the areas where Brute force path tracers like IRay tend to Slow down. Also animagic has the right Idea, in that having a second Machine to act as a full time " render slave", can make longer render times much more viable with any render engine even the native Iclone engine cranked up to maximum quality.
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By DroneMaster - 6 Years Ago
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Thanks for all the feedback on iRay animation. Will use the advice when I'm ready to do it. Meanwhile, here's another example of the amazing iRay materials available in the "600 Pack". This time I used a background image and had to find an IBL image and adjust its Hue/Saturation level to match the background color. It only took a few minutes to render. The first image is "straight out of the box" but I found it still too shiny. The second image is some grunge post work in Photoshop.
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By DroneMaster - 6 Years Ago
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It could be I'm missing something obvious but how can you possibly animate anything in CC3 at this point? It has no timeline and no way to playback any motion. If you send an avatar to iClone for animation, it won't come to iClone with any of the iRay materials and if you sent it back to CC3 it won't come with any motions.
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