Tuesday, October 22, 2019

Iray shakes hands with Michael 4 ... nicely!


Back in Iray today with a couple of experiments that produced extremely nice results. You don't too often think of rendering Michael 4 in Iray, and in fact, sometimes it doesn't work at all. But when it does, the results are rather rewarding.

This, above, is the high resolution Michael 4 skinmap, rendered for about 90 minutes ... that's an actual set in the background (another of Jack Tormalin's, 'Curious Passage'), with one of Merlin's Trees as filler, DOF set on the camera, and a very mix-and-match costume put together from several different odds and ends. The only thing I had to change was the texturing on the shoulder harness. That, I switched out for an Iray shader. Now --


By now you recognize this guy: my woodland elf, wearing the Ferendir skinmap with the facial tattoos turned on. That's the shorts from The Wood God costume, and I must say, that looks amazing in Iray -- just as it comes, nothing done to it. This one, I used one of DM's columns from some set or other, can't remember which, sorry; and that's a clip cut from a commercial backdrop (look up Sveva on Renderosity). The backdrop made this one fast -- just an hour to get this, whereas the top render really needed closer to three ... if had a lot of fireflies, or unresolved pixels; but I've figured out a five minute Photoshop fix for those. Turns out, it's dead easy to get rid of them with a couple of clicks, which saves a tonne of wear and tear on my tired old processor. Phew. That's a weight off my mind, actrually.

Okay ... one thing left to figure out here. You notice that Iray has dropped out the vascular mapping. You're supposed to be seeing nice venous mapping as you saw on this one, which was a very successful raytrace; but Iray just doesn't see the displacement map. I need to get this figured out for M4. One or two ideas, which we'll try tomorrow. I'd also like to see how the JM Falcon skinmap renders in Iray. It looks fantastic in a good raytrace --


-- this "big beauty" is Joe Ramos, whom you may know from NARC, and ... that's the MJ Falcon skinmap. Raytrace. Soooo, if a raytrace looks like that, what can we hope for, from Iray? Uh huh. Stay tuned, lets' find out!