New video tutorial for Reality 1.0. How to add and configure water.

Here is a quick two-part tutorial on how to start using Reality/LuxRender and how to master the Glossiness material.
Enjoy!

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.

The BSG (Blender Survival Guide) is now completely available on iTunes as part of the COW Podcast. Making a program like Blender takes enormous amount of time and resources. It’s a very expensive operation that relies on the generosity of people. More people know about Blender, more people will be likely to buy books and tutorials from the Blender Foundation and in doing so they help the development of the program.

Please help me increase the awareness of Blender by subscribing, rating and voting for this podcast. With enough attention the podcast will be featured in the main page of iTunes and that can attract more people who don’t know yet about Blender. My goal is to get in the top 50 of the technology section. It doesn’t cost you anything, the Podcast is free, but it will greatly help in making Blender a global success.

Click on this link to go to the podcats. Send the link to friends or share this blog entry with as many people as you can.

Thank you!

When I started the BSG I didn’t know if it would be even noticed. Well, you made it very clear since the beginning that there was a crowd of people “hungry” for accessible training about Blender. And so I kept delivering an episode every week for 10 weeks. Then I took a little break and now I have delivered two episodes in one day completing a standard set of 13 episodes of a TV show:

BSG 12: http://library.creativecow.net/ciccone_paolo/blender-survival-guide-12/1

BSG 13: http://library.creativecow.net/articles/ciccone_paolo/blender-survival-guide-13.php

I hope you will enjoy them. The Blender Survival Guide, or BSG, is now available on your desktop, on your iPad and on iTunes as a Podcast.
I’m quite happy with it and I think it will keep people busy for a while. Similarly to what happenes after the final episode of a TV season I’m gonna take a break and come back in a while with more and more content.

This “break” doesn’t influence the other Blender activites at the COW and I will be always available via our wonderful forum so continue to post your comments, requests and suggestions for new BSG topics.

So, as we say in Italian, “arrivederci”, which means “we’ll see each other again”, and keep blendering!

–
Paolo

As promised, a new episode of the Blender Survival Guide, BSG for short, is available for your viewing pleasure.

We spent 10 good weeks getting comfortable with Blender and now we are in excellent position to start stepping it up a bit. With BSG 11 I begin to delve a little deeper into the modeling side of Blender, showing how to modify basic geometry and how to solve some of the problems that you will face in everyday projects. This involves joining different pieces of geometry, re-arranging them, creating organized duplicates of objects, etc.

All this while we search for the “Holy Grail” of lighting: volumetric lights.

BSG 11, clocking at around 30 minutes, is only the first part of this new tutorial. Next week we will see how to actually achieve the effect by using the amazing Lux Render. You don’t want to miss it!

No, I’m not the tutorial nazi, this week I’m taking a quick break.  You can find a bit more details at my COW Blog

I wrote a bit of explanation in my blog at the COW: http://blogs.creativecow.net/blog/1138/the-next-blender-25-or-26

This week episode of the Blender Survival Guide is a direct response to the feedback that you have sent after Episode 9 was published. Being able to edit the value and position of each keyframe to fine tune your animation is a necessary ability and the BSG 10 shows you how to do it.
Blender’s animation tools are very sophisticated and powerful but they use a unique layout for the UI and at first it might not be that clear where everything is. That’s why I wanted to cover this topic, once again, from the perspective of the MoGraph artists so that you can now see where everything is without having to read chapter after chapter of stuff that might never be used. Like rigging, for example.

So, if you were wondering how to create a “hold frame” or how to re-time your Blender animation, or you wanted to learn how to use markers (Blender has markers?), go to the Blender Survival Guide #10, it’s available at this link:

http://library.creativecow.net/articles/ciccone_paolo/blender-survival-guide-10.php