Quick and dirty getting started with
3Delight
By varomix
Okey
first things first, Installing and running.
If you need a tutorial I guess you already have
3Delight, anyway, if u don't have it yet, get it from HERE
Follow the simple instruction on the site to download
it for your platform, virtualy ANY platform, windows, mac and linux,
did I mention 3delight is free, yeah, your FIRST license is FREE,
yeah, you can use it in commercial projects.
Okey you installed the software, got the license and
put it in the right place right?, okey okey, copy the license.dat
file in the main 3delight folder, in my case c:\3delight.
(You might need to restart)
Start
your engines, well, your license server
There are 2 options, the one I like is the one that says,
(background), cause it runs the server in the background, Duh!!.
Once you got it running, let's just load it in maya, really easy
stuff.
Once loaded, you have a brand new menu called 3Delight, I will not
go into the details in this tutorial, everything is very well
detailed in the 3Delight docs.
Now that everything is ready.
Let's
render.. man, :)
Okey, let's start with the examples that are included with
3Delight, will do the occlusion example
Launch Maya
Load the plugin if not loaded already
Open the scene named occlusion.ma
located
here >> x:\3Delight\examples\maya
my
case
Hit render
see ya l8r
Okey I'm kidding,
this is were most people run, 3Delight works a bit different that
other maya renderers,(I'm not sure that word exists hehe), I did, I
didn't knew what to do, how to render, or how to fix the errors in
the example files, but now I know, so here it is, is quite simple
actually.
First,
forget about the maya render globals window, we won't actually need
it to render here, 3Delight has it's own way, is called render
passes, just
like maya render layers, so first you create a render pass then
render it, very simple and give you very nice control, you can create
as many passes as you need.
Okey let's try and
render this example scene now:
Go to the
3Delight menu
Go to Render
> delightRenderPass1
a window pops
then goes away and an error is issued
no render
Duh!!
Okey, let's quickly fix this, the maya example scene was made on
an older version of 3Delight, so, somethings changed but is easy to
fix, I found this on the 3Delight forums and fixes everything at once
global
proc repair3dShaders()
{
string
$shads[] = `ls "*.shaderType"`;
string
$shad[];
int
$num = `size $shads`;
for
($i=0; $i< $num;$i++)
{
//
get just the shader name without .attribute //
$numTokens
= `tokenize $shads[$i] "." $shad`;
print
("\n Checking Shader : "+$shad[0]);
if
(!`attributeExists "outputShaderDir" $shad[0]`)
{
print
("\nRepairing shader "+$shad[0]);
addAttr
-ln outputShaderDir -at "bool" $shad[0];
}
else
{
print
"\t\t|| No action required ";
}
}
}
repair3dShaders;
Just copy this, paste it in the script editor, and run it, I have
it in a shelf button for later use, that will fix the shaders and
give u a nice feedback of what it fixed, so once again:
Go to
the 3Delight menu
Go to Render
> delightRenderPass1
And now the shader
errors are gone, but still no render, this tutorial is useless, hehe,
unless u configured i-display, I didn't at first so let's use the
maya display.
Go to
the 3Delight menu
Go to Select
Render Pass > delightRenderPass1
hit Ctrl + a
to open the attribute editor
Here's
the “render globals” for this pass, each pass will have
it's own settings, open the section called primary
display
change the Display
Driver
from idisplay to
maya_render_view,
you
can look around if you like, not much new, resolution, camera,
quality, etc, read the help if you get lost, for now, we only need to
change that.
Now, another way
to render this pass, if you look almost at the top of the attribute
editor, there's a big button that reads, Render, hit it to render
this pass again.
FINALLY A RENDER
IMAGE, and with occlusion, don't add this to your personal portafolio
please, I already did, hehe.
Well. Congrats to
you if you are still reading, you can check out the rest of the
examples on your own now, go.
Don't
make a scene here
Okey, we won't
make a scene here, just some thing very simple sphere and ground
plane to understand, how to do our own stuff.
Start with a
new scene
Create a poly
sphere
Create a poly
plane
Create
also a spot light
From the
3Delight menu choose add render pass
Select the
pass 3Delight>Select Render Pass>delightRenderPass1
Change the
Display Driver in the Primary Display to maya_render_view as before
Now hit the
Render button
Say “that
was really easy”.
Now you have
something that looks kindda like this
What if I want a
shadow?, open the pass settings again, under Shadow Maps, check
Render Shadow Maps, this is off by default, activate shadows on your
light and do a new render, now you have shadow.
Let's
get material
Will add some
materials and displacement to our objects now, is really easy, you
could use maya materials, but let's use some of the materials
included.
Open the
Shader Assignment Panel, menu 3Delight> Shader Assignment Panel
(keep it open all the time)
That floating
window is 3Delight Assignments panel,
select the
sphere in the viewport
click the
checker icon next to surface to apply a shader
The
Shader manager will pop, expand the window if it is to small
Choose
a shader from the right by double clicking it, I'll pick
LGVeinedMarble ,
when you double click it show now in the left side, with it
selected, hit the Assign button to assign it to the sphere.
Now
do the same for displacement, I'll choose castucco this time and
assign it
Do a render
now
Now you have
something that might looks like this
We have
displacement and shader and some problems with the displaced
geometry, so let's fix it
Add
attributes to the geometry by clicking the checker icon for Attribs,
hope you still have the sphere selected, if not, selected first.
Nothing happens,
well it did filled the name there, click the AE button next to the
checker button to open the attribute editor, now we are adding and
will modify some special attributes for this object.
Expand Geometry
section, polygons subsection and check the Poly As Subd option, this
will render our poly object as a subdivision surface for us at render
time, cool right?.
Open the
displacement section and type 0.1 in the Displacement Bound field,
that will give it a bit more room to displace and will fix our weird
displacement problem, Do a render now.
Try changing some
other attributes from the shader and the displacement, play with the
settings do crazy stuff, nothing will brake.
That's
it
Okey you guys,
hope this brief tutorial will give you a good starting point with the
wonderfull world of renering in 3Delight, I now I love it and use it
all the time, but I'm still learning, so if you know better ways to
do things please share them, we can all learn together.
Have fun !!
varomix
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