An existing set, built in Sudio 3 for another scene a few months ago ... a new Genesis 8 character. This is "Foster," or "CC Foster," from the DAZ marketplace ... off the peg; I still don't have the face morphs, so we're using them pretty much as they come. I wanted something clearly different from Rex and Dae, and this one is very nice indeed. I'm delighted with the way he renders in closeup, too:
I've uploaded the portrait at 1200x1800 to give a good look at the eyes -- I switched out the model's own eyes for the GP Character Eyes, which are both ultra-realistic, and also go a long way toward curing the "brilliant white sclera" trouble you can get. (Then again, this is also lit with IBL lighting, which also part-way cures that problem...)
And we had a bunch of fun with shaders -- believe it or not, this is just a pair of jeans, but I applied one of the "Pd Soft Leader" shaders by "parrotdolphin" from DeviantArt, and the effect is great, turns them into leathers, not a mile away from something you'd see on The Musketeers:
That looks like a whole new costume, but it's not. Soooo nice to be able to do this! In fact, I was inspired to buy a set of rock and stone shaders from Renderosity, when I realized I was in big trouble with the set. Studio 4.11 won't load it properly (what a shock there), so I went back to Studio 3 and exported it as an OBJ, imported this into Studio 4.11 ...
Now, up to about three weeks ago, an OBJ used to load complete with its textures, ready to render, right? Then something happened, and wham! Now, though Studio 4.11 will load an OBJ, an will collect the textures (or materials), it refuses to apply them. You'd have to spend hours fiddling the original textures/materials into place. You could do that. If you did, the raytrace would look like this:
...and yes, that rock looks a heck of a lot better than what I ended up with in the Iray render of the exact same set. Because Iray does't even "see" the old textures -- those same columns rendered bright blue and shiny (WTF??), so I basically whacked a shader onto them:
...the only halfway applicable shaderI had was concrete, but at least it worked. Not what I wanted, but at least we got a render. I'd wanted to see what Iray could make of Michael 4 in the same set, and had to slog though the shader battle before I could get even halfway there. So --
Left: Iray. Right: Raytrace. Worth looking at full-size. There's things you prefer about the raytrace, things you prefer about the Iray. I know, I know. M4 is never going to render up brilliantly in Iray -- duh. Shader issues again. The first thing you notice is, the venous map has dropped out. And nothing I could do with persuade it to work, so -- what can you do? Unless someone makes an Iray venous map for M4 ... like that's going to happen!
Soooo I wound up going to Renderosity and buying rock and stone shaders, which we'll play with tomorrow. (In fact, I'm trying to save a fortune's worth of "assets," which are stuck in Studio 3, because Iray only works properly with these shaders, and Reality is so slow, I'd be rendering the same picture for a week!)
Tomorrow we'll see how the rock and stone renders up. This will be interesting. We'll see what we can do with Foster, too. I like the character a lot.
