Spending a cold, wet day installing old, old props and working with Iray shaders and surfaces to bring them up to spec for rendering as we understand it today. This, above, is DM's old Fantasy Musings, which goes back to about 2012, and is actually still available. The product notes say, "The entire content of this package has been optimized for Poser 6 and above. Not tested in Daz Studio. Some materials will need adjustment." And of course, when this was uploaded, Dannie and Maforno were talking about the 3Delight render engine, not Iray! The truth is, to get it working in Iray took some considerable time, but it was worth it. It renders up nicely. And of course --
--even if you were inclined to stick to poser (I bought Poser Pro 9 and never really got into it; I didn't have any space whatsoever on my C:\ drive to install the figures and props, and Poser wouldn't load content from any other drive, so I was sunk!) ... well, if you were inclined to stick to Poser, the aforementioned Poser 6 is long, long out of date. Ahem. Anyway...
This, above, is the old Dinokonda, which I used to love rendering ... in 3Delight. I just gave it a shot in Iray, and honestly, you had to cringe, LOL. So I spent an hour with the texture maps and redid everything; I still can't get quite the response from Iray that I keep hoping for, but it's not bad. What I'm still trying to work out is gloss and reflection. Right now, it seems to be a kind of "all or nothing" scenario: if the Glossy Layered Weight controls are there, bonza. You can do it. If they're not there -- you're up the creek. I'm sure I'll find a way to do this eventually, but for now I'm pretty happy with this; It's looking almost as good as it did in 3Delight -- not quite. There's room for improvement, and the next time I'm in the mood, I'll keep on experimenting, see if I can get closer to the old work:
More soon ... now I must get some actual "work" done! It's writing and editing stuff, of course ... but it won't do itself. I'll leave you with a closer look at the part of the picture I'm most pleased with -- the flames. I managed to turn the props into light-emitting fire -- gotta like this Ciao for now...
