Inspiring CG Works

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The DAZ 3D Galleries

It has been quite some time since I checked in on the DAZ 3D Galleries. Actually I haven’t really dropped by since they were first setup, but a recent visit turned into several hours of awe and wonder. Like any gallery open to self submission, anyone can post and as such the works range from beginner to master levels. With the surface of the gallery barely scratched, I was compelled to compile the most inspiring works and finally make use of my Pinterest account.

The selected works are software agnostic, so there is work with Bryce, DAZ etc using a variety of different render engines.

Hit me back with links to your own eye-popping boards, and don’t forget to drop a thumbs up, comment or share on the DAZ 3D gallery/artist page of any works that inspire you.

Follow Jim’s board Inspireing images from the DAZ 3D Gallery on Pinterest.

Iray and Octane Render for DAZ Studio: Which Graphics Card is Best?

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With Iray coming to DAZ Studio it is becoming harder to ignore CUDA/Nvidia powered rendering. Of course, Octane has offered support for DAZ Studio a number of years, but for some with AMD cards (no CUDAs) then the price of a higher end Nvidia gamer card and an Octane licence may be a little on the hefty side. And now we have Iray – It’s there, it’s free to use, and it is already well integrated into DS. This is a very nice marketing move by Nvidia. It also works out great for DAZ as they have wanted to incorporate simpler GPU rendering solutions for a long time.

Unbiased physically accurate/plausible GPU rendering is great. Lights always behave realistically, you get that nice bounce of light and blending of colour. In short, unbiased takes so much of the pain out of lighting a scene, especially when quicker, more realistic renders are the order of the day. CPU driven physically plausible/accurate rendering has been around a long time, but it has only been recently that the hardware made it financially viable to go this direction for large-scale production. There was an interesting article in a recent 3D Artist magazine that discussed how incredibly complex and painstaking lighting arrangements had become for Pixar movies prior to adopting global illumination (GI).

Anyone else go along to see Monsters University and realise Pixar had just changed the way they worked? Well, that’s GI, and it’s glorious! But just as this was happening with titanic farms of CPUs it seems that the GPU is poised to take over, doing it faster and cheaper.

BMW Iray render - Maya courtesy of Nvidia

BMW Iray render – Maya courtesy of Nvidia

Sure, most people who come to this little blog aren’t working at Pixar on hundreds of millions of dollars movies, but that’s not to say we don’t see the benefit and joy of working with lights that behave as physics intended (or close there enough to). Being able to work with these tools with the huge speed increases on mid – high end gaming cards means we can experiment and get much faster feedback, and for me that’s the greatest thing of it all.

So, in the interest of getting the best bang from a limited budget I set about finding the best card for me. Before we get to that there are a couple of points that need to be demystified.

1. There is no SLI.
I’ve seen many people make this mistake and run off to buy as many shiny cards as they can stuff on their motherboards. There may be some engines out there that do take advantage of SLI (Nvidia’s Scalable Link Interface), but neither Octane nor Iray support it.

2. Multiple video cards
If you are one of those that stuffed your motherboard with graphics cards that money is not necessarily wasted. You may go faster, just not bigger. Octane and Iray, (and as far as I know) all CUDA engines require a scene to be loaded fully onto all cards. The card with the least amount of RAM is the limiting factor here. If your scene won’t fit on a card then the render engine will ignore that card.

3. AMD = no CUDA. Sad, but true. There are some render engines out there that support OpenCL (which both AMD and Nvidia support) and CUDA (Nvidia), like Indigo Render, but CUDA is still the most common framework for GPU render engines and will only work with newer CUDA enabled Nvidia cards.

CUDA Enabled Card Selection Criteria

GeForce_GTX_TITANX_KeyVisualTo business! When deciding which cards to consider benchmarks were my go-to. These give a solid indication of which cards perform the fastest. Benchmarks for both Octane and Iray tell a pretty consistent story; for your buck, gaming cards are where it’s at. They also point out that newer is not necessarily better. I’ll point out right now that I’m not looking at particular brands of cards, just the Nvidia reference specs. I don’t endorse one brand over others, but I do endorse CUDA to CUDA.

Along with benchmark result, the other factors I take into consideration are:
1 Number of CUDA cores (which has a tight correlation with said results)
2 Amount of RAM (which has little to do with benchmark results)

The cards

GTX Titan X

3072 CUDA cores
12GB Ram
In the ideal world where price was not an issue every 3D artist would have one of these in their rig. Unlike its predecessor the Titan X really is the king of the hill. It’s fast and packs more RAM than many cheaper off the shelf gaming PC’s come with. The 12GB of DDR5 RAM is the primary factor of the card’s price.

Titan X @ Newegg.com

GTX 980 Ti

2816 CUDA cores
6GB RAM
In terms of performance this is my runner-up. With only marginally fewer CUDA cores than the Titan, it’s damn fast and still packs plenty of RAM.

GTX 980 Ti @ Newegg.com

GTX 980

2048 CUDA cores
4GB Ram

GTX 970

1664 CUDA cores
4 GB RAM

Both these cards can’t be dismissed, but they are rather underwhelming. Though the 980 does have more CUDA cores (and benchmarks justifiably higher) than the 970, the 970’s cheaper price makes it attractive when considering they both have the 4GB of RAM.
GTX 980 @ Newegg.com
GTX 970 @ Newegg.com

GTX 960

1024 CUDA cores
2 – 4 GB RAM

A decent entry level card of the current generation.
GTX 960 @ Newegg.com

GTX 780 TI

2880 CUDA cores
3 – 6GB RAM

This card is a true gem (though not literally). You can still buy these cards new from Amazon and Newegg, but here in Australia they are hard to find outside second-hand eBay auctions or classifieds. Though the newer Maxwell CUDA cores are purportedly around 25% more efficient than those in the 700 series of GTX cards, the 780 Ti benches better than most of the newer generation of cards.

The common variants out there may only have 3 GBs of RAM but this card wins my benchmark to cost ratio. It is an utter travesty that we haven’t seen more 6GB variants of this card.
GTX 780 Ti @ Newegg.com

Which Card Did I Pick For Iray?

If you have the dosh the Titan X and 980 Ti look great. If you want something cheaper the 780 Ti is still a very competitive card, though most have just 3GB of RAM. Finding one with 6 will likely come in at a price comparable to a 980 Ti. On a pure cost to performance basis it is hard to recommend a 980. For its price the 970 is a solid card. The 960 still has as much RAM as the current crop of 980 and 970s, which is still more than most of the older cards, making it a worthy Iray/Octane entry level card.

So, I went and did it. I picked up a GTX 780 Ti off eBay for a modest price. This “little” card takes the DigiSprawl Budget CUDA Choice Award.

The GTX Titan X takes the Starving Artist Wishlist Award.


Genesis 3: Victoria 7 Review

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DAZ 3D Victoria 7 promo image: Victoria 7 in leather and corsetSo here we are with Victoria 7 in our runtimes! Wow, feels as if I’ve barely unpacked Genesis 2, but yes indeed it has already been 2 years since the review of Victoria 6. Looking back on all the DAZ Studio scenes floating about my hard drives and bits and pieces created for the figures it is clear I had lots of plans that involved Victoria 6 and her Genesis 2 cohort. Creative procrastination seems to have taken a toll. Anyway, all that in the past, the recent release provided a perfect excuse to ignore as much else as possible to have some solid DAZ Studio time.

The first thing I noticed about the Victoria 7 unveiling was that the content pickings were a lot slimmer than with 6. Less characters and texture sets, less hair and wardrobe options. So, not a bonanza this time around but there was some useful products at release. As with V6 I wasn’t particularly interested in either the “Starter” or “Pro” bundles, but unlike last time I actually stuck to my guns and bought just the base character with a few choice products. For me, the body and head morph packages are a must (I still feel strongly that these items should be the core of any “pro” bundle).

Genesis Out of the Box

With this generation of characters it is clear that Iray is a core component of DAZ Studio’s future. All the products I purchased loaded by default with Iray materials. Not having an nVidia card my use of Iray has been limited, though I have some nice renders (small and time expensive) from it running on pure CPU.

Victoria 7 rendered, sitting in the "star room" modeled in lightwave.

Textures and Materials

When attempting quick renders with default settings for the Victoria 6 review I was frustrated with the texture set and material settings. Lots of work was required to get results I was happy with (V6 HD ended up coming out with the goods on this count). Thankfully, V7 comes with good textures and material configurations. That’s not to say I didn’t play around to get things closer to what I want, but the process was much less frustrating (don’t forget to gamma correct!).

Another thing I’m really happy about is the simplified material zones and selections. The arms and hands; legs and feet; hips, torso, neck, nipples and head have been merged into simplified respective material zones. No longer do we have to worry about selecting all parts of limbs, etc to edit materials quickly. This is particularly beneficial when working with other 3D packages. Going through and reapplying the same textures over and again was painful business.

Sci-fi rendering of Victoria 7 using 3Delight, UberEnvironment and UberShader.

Victoria 7 with V6 Sci-fi Suit auto-fit. 3Delight render.

Auto-fit

With the somewhat limited selection of content right now, it is great to see DAZ continuing backwards auto-fit compatibility, if only with G2F. Due to the similarity in shape, Victoria 4 shirts, pants, and hair work reasonably well (go for tighter conforming apparel), but forget about boots and shoes. Genesis stuff is simply a no-go.

Victoria 7 with V4 hair and clothes auto-fitted

Victoria 7 with V4 hair and clothes auto-fitted

Victoria 7 Figure, Topology and Rigging

The Mesh

As we’ve come to expect of our Victoria figures, we find Miss 7 likes to visit the gym and has less than convincing breast implants. Victoria 7 conforms closely to idealised artistic proportions, particularly when compared to Victoria 5, which was very different to the other popular incarnations. In this regard V7 is much like V4 and 6, though more delicate and perhaps slightly more detailed than both. The V7 base mesh has fewer polygons than the previous versions, but like V4 an d V5, is constructed entirely of 4 point polygons. Of course lower poly isn’t an issue. With the now ubiquitous subdivision surfaces we can get a lot more from a lot less.

Left to right: V5, V7, V6 - Victoria 4 to 7. Image rendered with 3Delight.

Left to right: V5, V7, V6

Expanded Rigging

One of the major upgrades with Victoria 7 is the expanded rigging, particularly the face, which allows for greater articulation of expression. Up till now we’ve had to rely on predefined morphs and dials for expressions (or creating them with 3rd party modelling tools). Additionally there are additional bones in the hands and feet, again allowing for greater pose control. Oh, and I almost forgot! We can wiggle ears now too. I expect this will be very handy for artists that work with a lot of animalistic and alien characters.

Victoria's new bones.

Victoria’s new bones.

Weight-mapping

DAZ 3D have opted to move from TriAx to General (Dual Quaternion) weight-maps. This one is a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, this means that we can move Genesis 3 figures into 3rd party animation packages and game engines without having to create new weight maps; on the other hand, TriAx is much more flexible, allowing for multiple maps to control mesh deformation over multiple axis of rotation, scale and bulge. General allows for just a single weight map.

The upshot of this is obvious. More people will get more use out of DAZ Studio and Genesis 3 figures. The downside, also obvious, we lose some detail in our poses – particularly a downer for those of us that keep our DAZ in DAZ.

No texture converting from previous generations

This will be a big issue for some artists when considering buying into the new generation. Due to the switch to the UDIM UV coordinate system there is no easy to implement “1 click” texture transfer solution (as there is with V4/M4 – V5/M5 etc). There are existing solutions, but none of them are perfect and rely on 3rd party programs (C4D and Maya users have demonstrated such on the DAZ 3D forum).

Verdict

Victoria 7 and Genesis 3 is another step in the right direction. DAZ have made Genesis 3 more accessible and easier to use for more people, particularly with the switch in weight-mapping standards. The expanded rigging opens up creating new and varied facial expression to those not comfortable or interested using sculpting programs. In general, Genesis 3 is more articulate and flexible than any of the other popular Poserverse figures. Lack of texture/uv backwards compatibility, with the move to UDIM UVs, will frustrate some, as will the shift from TriAx weights, but these changes bring V7 and G3 into line with some important industry standards.