Pret-A-3D

Today Pret-A-3D announces the features for the upcoming plug-in “Reality.” The following video highlights what Reality does.



Reality features at a glance:

• Interface between Daz Studio and LuxRender. LuxRender is the physically-based, Open Source renderer developed at http://www.luxrender.net
• Mac OS and Windows versions available. For Windows, both 32 and 64 bit versions will be released.
• Automatic conversion of Studio shaders to LuxRender materials
• Support for fine-tuning of materials
• Materials available:
  • Glossy
  • Matte
  • Matte Translucent
  • Water
  • Glass with volumetric dispersion
  • Fog
  • Realistic Metal
  • Mirror
  • Presets for gemstones, different types of glass, human cornea and more.
• Built-in material preview
• Turn any .OBJ into a water object.
• Indirect light, caustics, reflective surfaces. All materials work like in real life.
• Intuitive light and materials setting. It works like a photo studio
• Bump-map and displacement maps supported
• Built-in subdivision
• Sun light, spotlights and mesh-based lights
• Shallow Depth Of Field with one-click setup and camera-like controls
• Render scenes outside Studio, allowing you to continue work in Studio while rendering.
• Stop and resume any render.
• Multi-processor/hyper-threading ready.
• Network rendering support thanks to LuxRender
• Built-in UV Map+texture viewer

Reality brings the world of physically-based materials to Studio. Now you can shine a light in front of a Daz character and see that light reflected accurately on the cornea of the character. No need to use reflection maps that rarely match the lighting in your scene. Water can be fine tuned to any degree, changing color, clarity, and ripple amount. Metal presets are available for Gold, Silver, Aluminum and Copper. Metal is reflective to any degree of polish and supports anisotropic reflections.

Availability and price to be announced.

This is an image rendered by Daz Studio artist “Mattymanx” after just a few days of use of a pre-release version of Reality. Click on it for full size version:

The same exact scene rendered with the built-in renderer of Daz Studio, without using Reality:

Reality includes the ACSEL (Automatic Custom ShadEr Loading) technology that reads specially fine-tuned shaders for a given model. With ACSEL, content creators will be able to provide specially fine-tuned shader settings that will deliver the best realistic result for their Studio models right out of the box. If you would like to learn about ACSEL and how it can make your products stand out please contact Paolo Ciccone: phciccone@gmail.com.

I take the occasion to thank the development team of LuxRender, for creating Lux, the amazing program that the Reality plug-in is designed to work with. Without Lux there would be no “Reality” so please be sure to go to http://www.luxrender.net and leave a thank you note for all the people who made this possible.

Credit: bottle collection in video modeled by Jeremy Birn.

This is a technology preview of an upcoming plugin from Pret-A-3D.

In the past months I’ve been working on a new idea to extend the rendering capabilities of Daz Studio. The result is an upcoming plug-in  that opens new possibilities not available before for the Studio artist.
The following scene was created in Daz Studio, rendered from Studio with this new plugin. The image has absolutely no postwork, that is a straight-from-the-renderer file.
The scene uses only one light, a physically-accurate sun light. No Image-Base Lighting was used.
The water is physically based with real-life absorption mapped.

Please note the back-side of the columns, it has a bit of reflected light. Please note the underwater caustics and the ambient light. All this is automatically generated by a single light.
This is only one of the many features that I will introduce in the next few weeks.

More in the coming days. I hope you enjoy it and that it can inspire on what is going to be possible in Daz Studio. Click on the image to see it at full size.