Leonides02 wrote:This small dorm room scene has 139 materials. I'm really supposed to go in and edit each one until it looks as good as the FREE rendering program does? What the heck, guys?
But DOES it have 139 discreet materials, or is it 5-10 materials with different textures applied to them to make 139 "different " materials? This is a very fundamental question to ask when looking at this, and can make an impossible seeming task a lot more manageable. A key task when converting the materials is to identify the materials that are REALLY differnent, find a good base material and template that. Then you can apply the same templated material to all the surfaces.
For instance, a scene may have 10 different types of wood in it, but have all of them use the same basic wood shader. The same goes for glass, plastic, fabric and people. Genesis characters have like 15 materials, but you basically just need skin, eye and mucus membrane materials. I normally use exactly the same templated material for face, legs, torso and so on.
Iray really put a dent in the valuse of Octane. Instead of being an alternative to 3Dlight (which isn't unbiased or even in the same league as Octane) it's now a
slightly better unbiased renderer for DAZ, which is a lot harder to use, especially for beginners. There's just no way around that.
What we need are some good basic materials, that are calibrated for DAZ. The LiveDB materials are often scaled wrong or weird in other ways (have fun getting the TonySculpor skin materials running well). For crazy good skin and hair you can just buy Redspec, but it would be nice with a small library of skin, wood and so on. I haven't had time to really play with Octane lately, but when I get started again, I'm going to start sharing my basic materials for this kind of stuff.
