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| Michael 4 in Iray; Elite Lee skinmap |
Today I'm revisiting the fourth generation figure -- good old Michael 4 himself. I'm loath to just abandon the figure, because 80% if all the resources I own are for M4, and all the characters I ever designed over ten years are for M4! So the question is, what can be done with Michael 4 today, in Iray? Turns out, you can do quite a lot with the old figure, though it's also a lot of work. The Genesis figures are pretty much "plug and play." With minor exception, they load up ready to render, while M4 takes a whale of a lot of configuring, to make the old materials and maps work well. This, above, is an HD map, Elite Lee, and it renders well in Iray. But when you use a skinmap that's not HD, you work hard...
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| Michael 4 in Iray; Ferendir skinmap |
This, above, is Sixth Sense's Ferendir, which looks fabulous in a raytrace, but looks very, very flat indeed in Iray; I pulled every trick I know to get a halfway decent result out of it, in Iray! You would not believe, would you, that this, below, is the same skinmap, raytraced --
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| Raytrace, in Studio 3 |
...and there's one other thing that Iray will absolutely, positively NOT do for you: displacement mapping. Iray utterly ignores displacement maps, which means the easy way to turn on the vascularity (venous mapping ... to throw into relief the veins in the skin) is off the table. So I did a lot of research, and discovered that Iray will recognize a normal map, which is something; and it allowed me to work with a simple prop and get better results:
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| Normal mapping... |
That's not bad: the normal map brought up the bark very nicely. I'm now asking the question, would a normal map bring up the vascularity in Michael 4? I'd have run the experiment today, but I ran out of time (ie., wasted over an hour) when Studio began to jack around, mis-cue and generally be weird. Right out of the blue, after having no problem with lights for weeks, Iray ceased to recognize the light pumped out by a photometric spotlight! I mean, I ended up with a searchlight about a foot away from the dude's face, the preview was glaring with light, but when you clicked "Render," the Iray engine couldn't see the light. The figure rendered flat black! Say, what?!! So I lit the whole this with IBL lights and then painted it in Photoshop, to make the most of a short foray into Genesis 3, and the result is like a storybook illustration:
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| Genesis 3 ... such a child! |
You can tell "something is wrong" with it ... if this was supposed to be photorealistic, it's more of a painting. And Genesis 3, right out of the box, is such a ... a child. That's a little boy, which is not to my taste at all. I imagine you can make something of him by adding character morphs?? Maybe so, but I've trawled the DAZ store, and I can't find any! Hair and costumes, yes, but as for character morphs and skinmaps specifically for G3? Nope. Go figure. So we'll be leaving G3 pretty much alone...
Tomorrow, I'll see if I can figure out what Studio is doing with the lights (not rendering them); and I'll see if normal mapping will make the venous detail appear in M4 ... and I'll have another go to see if I can get a coherent raytrace, and perhaps we can get back to this kind of work -- which is a raytrace, and you can tell that because M4 has the vascularity on and working ...
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| Raytrace, in Studio 3 |
