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Stranded Reop 0044 — Description
Yes, I am still here. Story-wise, I am a little off grid - for a reason.

PBR rendering. Filament. A new DAZ Studio release. It is cool and I am poking fun here, but I get this feeling we are in Poser's Firefly versus Superfly territory and very few people will have the technical know-how to be able to convert all their materials over and get good results from the PBR engine. The speed is real-time fantastic, but:

* Objects do not cast shadows onto other objects.
* Shadows look like they are only generated from PBR sources, such as the environment lighting.
* Transparent materials (like the water) and refraction? Very messed up.

As a preview mode for iRay? It is different enough to throw me off my game, and the results in it are not what you get in iRay. Some of the products and preview images for it are cool and I am sure you could do good work with getting results, but again, with an entire library optimized for iRay this I feel is going to be a challenge for many. It will take quite a few hacking skills at materials and lighting to get looking right (for a release, considering iRay has so many fans), and I can only imagine how long this took.

I would have liked more converters built-in for this mode, or even dual-mode shaders in the UI (like Poser's Firefly/Superfly shader trees) that get auto-converted over and you could tweak from there. Granted, my figure looks "pretty" good - not "really" good, and I could see doing a release with this style. Maybe. Or animation may work.

Still, congrats to the DAZ team for getting this done, and it must have taken a heck of a lot of QA and testing time to make it work and look this good (not perfect, but working well) out of the box.

-Ren

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