Spent the afternoon experimenting with raytracing ... yes, raytracing! This, above, is not a raytrace, obviously. This one is an Iray render, using one of Sveva's backdrops to save time, and a lot of Merlin's grass (from the Wild Borders set) to make the foreground and background kind of "smoosh" together till they look contiguous (I just invented a word). What's interesting about this render is that I created the figure from scratch. It uses a skinmap called called Zander for Genesis 8, and the Landis Hair for Genesis 3, but the face and body form were designed on the fly. This is good. I can do this. I rendered it at 2000 pixels high, rebalanced it quickly to brighten it up (a lot faster than trying to figure out the Gamma in Studio, though you could do it that way, if you wanted to), and called it good. Oh -- the backdrop had some work done to it; I Gaussed it quite a bit to soften it, give the impression of a focal drop-off into the distance... Now --
This one is your raytrace I'd been hoping to get raytracing working properly in Studio 4.15, and I think we can call it job done! Everything is performing properly --
-- the vascular mapping is on and working, that's Michael 4's High Resolution skinmap, there's a displacement map on the costume, custom eyes, DOF on the camera, the works. Plus, I cranked the settings up sky high on the raytrace to pump the most quality out of it that's possible. This would have been an impossible, 10-hour render on the old computer (the reason I shut it down a year or so ago). How long did this take? About twelve minutes. Yes, I'm happy. Good old Michael 4 is back. And --
-- the resolution on the Genesis 8 character is pretty amazing. I believe there's an add-on you can get, which will "age" the Genesis figure. I might get this next, because the one thing about these figures is, try as you might, you always end up with a twenty-something, or even a teen, and I tend to like a guy who looks like he's been around the block a couple of times. Let me see what I can find, something like "Aged for Gensis 8." I have two lights plus an environment light on this, and the result is pretty darned good. Good enough, I think, that if I were using a photographic backdrop, you'd have a hard time picking this for a render. You could assume it's a snapshot. More soon!
