Hi,

These few pictures were done mainly to help my own knowledge. I'd believe it's just a start, and I won't be only poster here

The thread is *not* for comparison with another renderers, it's just for sharing our experiences with 3delight.

For now, it's mainly about 'native' subsurface scattering in 3dl. 3delight has a built in 'physically plausible' Subsurface light transport.'Physically plausible' here exactly means that you can use built-in presets (apple, chicken, cream, marble, skin, milk..) and get desired look. Final look reminds to some well known MR shaders, such as Daniel Rind's Diffusion or Mark Davies Subscatter.
There a few advantages too. 3delight's subsurface is able to utilize the IBL lighting too, it's able to avoid unwanted effect of 'cavities' (for example, eye holes on typical 3d character), and it's faster.





'Skim Milk' preset... render time is from 2 to 6 minutes.
bigger picture...




Custom 'deep blue ice setting, not exactly sure is it a correct ice..render time is from 5 to 15 minutes.
bigger picture...




'Marble' preset on curtains
bigger picture...

Subsurface adds a bit more of indirect lighting. Anyway, most of indirect lighting is bounced from floor. There is only one direct light for sun.
As it is noticeable, there is just one 'bounce'. It would be interesting to make some 'multiple bouncing' procedure. Render time: from 4 to 15 minutes.
Fast setup is as much 'simple' lighting (shadow maps instead of ray trace area, about 8 for point based color bleeding shading rate). Quality setup would be default 2 for shading rate, area shadows. Here's fast setup.

To allow presets from 3dl subsurface attribute, I've used a bit of custom shader, slightly modified sl sample from 3delight's doc's, plus screen composite for diffuse, specular and environment reflection.
As it is for now, 3dl subsurface presets are accessible only on standard XSI shaders, but it seems they are a bit limited (I think it's only 'forward' shading normal, instead of 'all directions'). Interfaces for mi_sss_skin stuff seems to be just a painting over fixed preset, as those PPGs doesn't provide interface for scattering values, IOR, so on.

How about ICE Strands or staff hair with IBL and color bleeding?

those are really nice tests!
can you share a bit how you did the ice rendering? it looks great to me, nice looking and shading, i would be interested in knowing a bit more
i'm tryin to give a look at 3Delight too but i find it really awkward and lack of "how to", especially on shading, lights/shadows and illumination in general..

Kosyan,

that's how IBL and point-based AO looks like, at least my first attempt. IBL and point-based AO, that works with default Hair Shader - even I had to exaggerate hair color a bit.
Render time for 768*1024 is about 4-10 minutes, at point cloud shading rates 16-2. Anyway, I think that good old light rig with DSM (deep shadow map) is still a working horse...
At some long-range DSM bias, about 0.1 or more, I was been able to got a quite nice 'translucency' effect.

About Color bleeding, I got it using standard XSI shaders. For example, plug the Hair Renderer into the color input of Constant Shader. It seems there isn't connection from Hair Shader to indirect diffuse shading in 3dl, as it is for now. Tips for color bleding:
- set ambient to black in shader PPG too, regardless of global ambience
- for hiding the 'bounce cards' for camera ray, render with 'reuse point cloud', just hide them then..
- generally for hair, do not use variable thickens/strand size. 3delight seems to became allergic about that...




Maximus, if you want to play with 'native' 3dl subsurface, for now, all what I can offer is a custom, very basic Renderman shader (no textured scattering, no color bleeding, so on..). You'll have to compile it. There are nicer ways, but that's still WIP for me. So how to do that:
1: copy this sl file to to your XSI project folder, let's say in 3delight folder.
2: navigate to folder where shaderdl.exe is (something like users\...... \\Addons\3DelightForSoftimage\Application\bin\nt-x86-64 - or nt-x86 for 32bit systems)
3: drag and drop sl file to shaderdl.exe - new file with same name, but with 'sdl' extension should appear
4: in Softimage, apply 3dl properties, like in image
5: load sdl file as Renderman surface shader (still, you'll be able to use displacement from Render tree)
6: draw render region and play with parameters. If you notice artifacts, lower the shading rate. For 'native' subsurface, keep colors at white or gray.

Thanks a lot for the shader!!
I'm tryin to get started with 3delight but at the moment it doesnt anything else than crashing or resetting the shaders, no idea whats wrong with it..maybe its a heavy beta..
Its really frustrating.

anyway thanks again for help, i'll try tomorrow again..got like 3 crashes in a row!

great stuff here,i really like the materials!!!
well done

A common issue is a 'minus' character somewhere in shader name, texture name, render pass name (because it's used by env shader). For example, 'my-blinn-two' is a no-no. 'my_blinn_two' is OK. I don't even need to say that 'minus' was a my bad habit for a years ...

And, this one is with a 'calm' environment map, and for AO, "hitsides" set to "both" (custom shader, again....) - but that's is how point-based AO should look like... still, very nice render time

So, that's a bit lighter point-based AO, together with IBL. IBL has no shadows. Beside usual methods, I got the lighter AO by supplying thinner strands into point cloud generation, then rendering at desired thickness/size with 'reuse' option. Render time is about 10 min for 768x1024 - a bit unbelievable for AO on hair.

I'm planning the next update for next weekend. Thank you all for comments!

My hair tests with polish bison

Impressive.
Did you use any "external" Renderman shaders or plain "out of the box" 3Delight translated shaders?