Waves on the Beach with Iray (converting 3dl to Iray)

[RVNSN]

Can anyone give me guidance on using Nerd 3D's Waves on the Beach with Iray?

I finally switched to iray toward the beginning of the year, and now I'm at the point where I'm back to working on some ocean scenes. While pretty much everything else is better in iray than 3delight, water does not seem to be one of the things that is. Especially Waves on the Beach. It's absolutely gorgeous in raytraced 3DL, absolutely garbage in iray.

I've been experimenting, and to be fair water is not always terrible in iray, and it's probably just a matter of what I still need to learn about using iray. But WotB, and other water props/shaders, looked fantastic in 3DL but are just plain lacking iray. In experiments, I've tried things like simply converting what I was using with 3DL with the iray uber shader. Tried iray water, other iray water shaders, tried adding the image maps from WotB to iray water shaders (could still experiment with this a bit), but none of it looks very good yet. One of the best results so far was using a 3rd party water shader and setting the refraction weight to 98%. Will experiment more, but it shouldn't be this difficult, should it?

Any help is appreciated.

 

[RVNSN]

Am getting some decent results using easy liquid shader and the WotB base color and opacity image maps (just in those two places, and have only used white and the easy liquids blue as the color setting). Trying different values for the liquid refraction weight - 90, 80, 70... now rendering with 50. After adding the 2 image maps, changing the liquid refraction weights does not produce as drastic a difference in the results as it did without them. Playing with the colors would possibly get the end result nearly the same as the original 3DL raytraced look.

 

[Rae134]

I don't have that product so I can't really help you, but maybe if you did a comparison render so people know what the 3DL one looks like compared to the Iray one, then people might be able to offer suggestions?

 

[MEC4D]

@RVNSN the shaders are different in iray than 3DLn, that's why you getting different result , you need first to translate first all 3DL shaders into Uber Iray shaders and working up from there adjusting proper the shaders .
The engine has nothing to much with the result but how it read the shaders you throwing on it .
To convert the shaders you need to go to iray shaders presets and in first row you will find Uber iray with a white material , select all surfaces and hold CTRL then click on the shader, you will see a pop-up windows with options , select all surfaces selected, ignore maps then OK , after that too need to adjust the shaders manually .
Remember iray use PBR , so put the proper values for Iray for fast rendering and proper results especially when working with glossy and reflections as that is the major key in beautiful result as the engine is based on reflections .

I don't have this product to give you exact values , but if you get in troubles, show me the screenshot of the shader and I may guide you for the best result as I know how the shaders works in iray .

Cath

 

[RVNSN]

@Rae134 @MEC4D
Thank you, I will work on changing the shaders with your suggestions later, as I cannot do it right now, but I certainly appreciate the input.

Here are some of the renders to show how it looked with 3DL, a few failed iray trials, and where it's at right now (images reduced to 540 to fit upload restrictions):

render done in 3delight

simple conversion to iray uber shader with image maps added

original raytraced water rendered with iray

easy liquid shader refraction weight 98%

easy liquid shader with original WotB base color and opacity image maps added - this is the most recent version of the water, from 31 may

 

[MEC4D]

the final result are plausible , but the waves need to get some work , the white part is too gray , again when I see the shader setting for the water I can give you some tips

 

[RVNSN]

the final result are plausible , but the waves need to get some work , the white part is too gray , again when I see the shader setting for the water I can give you some tips

yes, did not copy over a specular map (my first guess on why the white foam is not white), will take a screenshot of the shader settings when my current render finishes

will also be doing some ps postwork to add some spray and wave curl foam with brushes - was going to try something SY made that has some foam and spray props, but decided to just go with ps brushes for now (which has nothing to do with the white foam of the prop that is currently gray)

 

[RVNSN]

here are the screenshots of the shaders, first 3 are from WotB materials, last 2 are what i'm using at the moment:

 

[MEC4D]

I am seeing your liquid water shader is just the simple custom shader that can't truly replace everything what you need , the default shader is 3DL
I will set for you the standard Uber iray shader matching the one from 3DL so you can try it out , but it gonna be in the morning as I am not on my workstation no more for today. I will send you the presets so you can just plug in your maps it gonna be perfect, it is a nice set worth upgrading to iray materials.

 

[RVNSN]

I am seeing your liquid water shader is just the simple custom shader that can't truly replace everything what you need , the default shader is 3DL
I will set for you the standard Uber iray shader matching the one from 3DL so you can try it out , but it gonna be in the morning as I am not on my workstation no more for today. I will send you the presets so you can just plug in your maps it gonna be perfect, it is a nice set worth upgrading to iray materials.

Thank you, Cath, you rock!

 

[Alisa]

At Cath's request, I moved this over to the DAZ Studio forum. You asked in just the right forum, RVNSN, but with the info that's been added, moving it here might help others with this or similar products with water

 

[MEC4D]

Thank you, Cath, you rock!

You welcome, I may have the whole set upgraded to iray shaders , so stay tuned !

@Alisa thank you dear !

 

[Rae134]

MEC4D is the best!

 

[MEC4D]

I was able to separate the foam from the water IOR so it have different physicals proportions , the displacement would not works well in iray because this mesh is big 270K of poly and it need to be subdivided to a level it would kill even my machine that is very powerful, I will try to make a normal maps and see how it works better , but I am getting there , for the light and background I used my Beach HDRI set from my DAZ store
I am gonna see if I can use the back mesh to have some clouds on it to use with Sky and dome without HDRI , so give me some time

 

[MEC4D]

I don't know what is going on with the water model , it does not render any iray proper IOR shaders , unless the opacity is set to 98%
I made some water shader presets and it works on any other models.

the second image is how it appears on the beach water model and should looks like on the first image , the volumetric is vanishinging
I have to give up on it for now .. sorry ,
or try again later when I have more time on my hands as right my time is up .

@RVNSN the way you setup the last scene is the closest you can go to 3DL effect , but it will not produce proper IOR this way since you have plugged opacity maps that canceling the volumetrics , and if you unplug them you get really not so good effect as you show before
I was doing a lot of beautiful things with this kind of scenes .. but with the construction it just don't want to work for some reason because the water is not physically accurate object like the cube.

I can sent you the little improved shaders but you need to set the opacity to 0.98% without any maps as no maps should go there when you using Index of Refraction . It will produce so called Thin water without volumetric but it may help you to get the effect you meant

 

[RVNSN]

Thank you for all you're doing.

Perhaps there is a way around that issue. If I am not mistaken, which I could be - been awhile since I read the WotB manual, the tool should work on any water plane or slab. Unless it has to do with the mesh being made with a high poly count to produce higher quality results, as I have already run into issues with some results being too blocky.

That brings up another question I had, though I'm not sure I'll like the answer after reading what you said about the included mesh already being so high poly: any suggestions to improve shots like the one attached, when I scale up and make larger waves, some of the mesh qualities start to decline, suggestion? I was planning on trying a water slab, which would be a first for me, and what few meshes I've made have mostly been done in another program, but I'm wondering if detail could be improved that way.

 

[MEC4D]

Thank you for all you're doing.

Perhaps there is a way around that issue. If I am not mistaken, which I could be - been awhile since I read the WotB manual, the tool should work on any water plane or slab. Unless it has to do with the mesh being made with a high poly count to produce higher quality results, as I have already run into issues with some results being too blocky.

That brings up another question I had, though I'm not sure I'll like the answer after reading what you said about the included mesh already being so high poly: any suggestions to improve shots like the one attached, when I scale up and make larger waves, some of the mesh qualities start to decline, suggestion? I was planning on trying a water slab, which would be a first for me, and what few meshes I've made have mostly been done in another program, but I'm wondering if detail could be improved that way.

View attachment 69641

You can select the water and click to SUB-D .. it will improve , but I don't think this is made to make close up shots like that as it get too blocky for close up shots and you can crash as I did ..

To tell you the truth I would prefer to make a new one than fix it

 

[RVNSN]

I also have fluidos, which I haven't gotten into yet, as it isn't as user friendly, and I don't know if you can give each wave in a set of waves different characteristics, though it will interact with other objects like characters and props. For the water itself, I think this WotB shader is much nicer with the floating foam. My dream wave tool would be something like WotB but with the ability to interact/react (can't think of the proper term at the moment) with/to other objects. Not sure how it handles making waves, but I followed along with a tutorial using bifrost in maya for a ship sailing through an ocean, and that seemed to be a fairly flexible, powerful, and user friendly tool.

Still so much for me to learn, wish my knowledge in this area was at the point where I could create my own dream tools, but one step at a time.

So when you say "would prefer to make a new one than fix it", are you saying I could make a different water plane or slab that would work with your modified shader and produce the details I'd like to get, or do you think the deformers would need to be remade?

 

[MEC4D]

for add geometry, but it may crash or get very slow

 

[MEC4D]

I also have fluidos, which I haven't gotten into yet, as it isn't as user friendly, and I don't know if you can give each wave in a set of waves different characteristics, though it will interact with other objects like characters and props. For the water itself, I think this WotB shader is much nicer with the floating foam. My dream wave tool would be something like WotB but with the ability to interact/react (can't think of the proper term at the moment) with/to other objects. Not sure how it handles making waves, but I followed along with a tutorial using bifrost in maya for a ship sailing through an ocean, and that seemed to be a fairly flexible, powerful, and user friendly tool.

This is not yet possible in DS for water to interact with models the way you want, my dream too , I love how it works in Cinema4D

So when you say "would prefer to make a new one than fix it", are you saying I could make a different water plane or slab that would work with your modified shader and produce the details I'd like to get, or do you think the deformers would need to be remade?

I am thinking about new model , so it can take advantage of the subdivision , the deformers would need to be modeled as well as all other effects
and more detailed textures for the fine details on top of the water , like seaweeds or foam , or ice ..