Safe to say, the "shader wars" have been won! The problem was, where to put the shaders so that DAZ Studio 4.11 can find the damn things. I tried everything. I mean, everything ... and at last, it worked with one pack. So I tried it with another. Got it! I can now use Iray shaders. Phew. This is "just" Michael 4. It's actually "the man in the hat," whom you've seen several times in different guises, but when I started to play with the shaders on the costume, the skinmap on M4 went ballistic! I have no idea how or why that would happen, but it did. So I switched it out for a different skinmap, which creates a slightly different character. Actually, nice! Michael 4 is never going to look incredibly good in Iray due to the old, old skinmaps, but this is not bad at all. It's the JM Alexandre skinmap, but not the body or face morphs. Those, I designed myself.
One of the best things about Genesis, I'll admit, is that you can get very, very close to the character and the renders still look dandy. In a sale last week, I got the GP Character Eyes for Genesis 8, at about half price, and this is the first chance I've had to play with them. Check this out:
That's not even a particularly high-rez render. I let it cook for an hour or so, at which point I'm out of time, so I cancelled it because ... frankly, in the last 20 minutes you can't see any real difference. The whole point of this was to play with the eyes ... dilate the pupils and so forth. Nice! Gotta like this.
In fact, if it wasn't for the sheer impossibility of saving a file in DAZ Studio 4.11, I'd say I was very happy with the program. However ... you take the top picture, which has buildings, a plant pot and plant, the character, hair and costume ... you SAVE it, then you reopen the file to do a bit more work on it later, and --
EVERYTHING is gone. The only thing that makes it through the process is the pose on the figure! The rest is utterly lost. So whatever you're going to render, it's one-shot, you can't come back to it. That's a major aggravation, and I'm seriously giving up on DAZ tech support. After six weeks of me trying to explain the problem to them (which pictures, diagrams, project files) they seem oblivious to it. Urk.
So ... shaders, check. Eyes, check. Lighting: check. Camera settings: check. Doing well here. And now ... to bed. It's late, I'm tired, so ... 'night, all!
