environment is no more imported with 4.14 release

[Alessandro Padovani]

Tested with daz studio 4.14.0.8, blender 2.90.1, commit 4417442.

In 4.14 the environment and tone mapping are changed. We need to create nodes for them to be included in the scene. In the daz forum they say it’s to allow animation. Anyway this way the environment is not imported anymore in blender. Test scene included.

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[engetudouiti]

I see, I thought if I can add multiple nodes for enviroment then exchange,, but it seems not work so. eye toggole etc not work for the node.

Basically old render setting>enviroment parameters = new enviroment nodes parameters.if I change one of them, after all both change. (remove HDRI one of them , remove HDRI another too. (actually simply annoying, ^^; though I know it may need to set key for those Nodes parameters )

[engetudouiti]

Then though it not related with how solve issue,, those nodes seems already generated when we open new scene, or old scene, I suppose. I afraid if it cause erroer to import old scene, which exported to blender, when re-import them ><;)

[Thomas Larsson]

Environments now work, both with old and new versions of DS. Only static worlds are generated in Blender, animated environments is probably to esoteric for this plugin, at least for now.

Tone-mapping does not work, because it never did. You gave me an example file long ago, but it was never clear how to implement that, and then I forgot about it. If there is a tone-mapping node, the plugin just prints the channels in the terminal window.

The empties are still generated. The plugin could delete them, but I think we can leave that to the user.

[Alessandro Padovani]

Commit 849c9a9 works fine.

It is not easy to translate tone mapping because iray and blender use different systems. Specifically iray gets the "burn highlights" and "crash blacks" parameters to map linear to srgb, that are some sort of limits for mapping. While blender gets the "view transform" and "look" parameters that are some sort of presets. We could play with the "use curves" option in blender to try to match iray but it is very clumsy.

The only equation that works fine is the exposure that we may import with the tone mapping option enabled. Also please note that tone mapping in daz studio is part of iray, while in blender it is ocio so independent from the render engine.

blender ocio exposure = 13 - iray exposure

Please Thomas let me know if you want to import the iray exposure, then I'll mark as resolved anyway. As a side note personally I’d like the plugin to delete the empties.

[Alessandro Padovani]

update. We have an explanation by the developer. The new nodes are just a different way to access the render settings. This has nothing to do with animation as someone erroneously reported.

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/6244686/#Comment_6244686

[Thomas Larsson]

The empties are not built in the latest commit, and everything that has to do with tone-mapping has been removed again. I feel that letting the plugin change too many Blender settings may create confusion, and very little would be gained. So I think we can just ignore tone-mapping altogether.