It's been quite an interesting day, render-wise ... many questions answered, and many more added to the list of questions still to be answered. But first: the Hyborian Age pinup boy is back, via a .dsb file -- albeit looking a little bit different than he did in the raytraces. The SAV Atlas skinmap doesn't render the same, though it does look very good; and I had to switch out the hair. The old renders use the Hermes hair, but although I was able to get it configured for Iray in terms of colour and lustre, I couldn't get the fit right. It looked like ... a coconut. Seriously. So I went back to a style that's almost "no style," so it looks good on anything, anywhere: Neftis's old My Rockstar Hair. It still works; but it looks better in darker tones. This guy used to be blond, but he's going to be raven dark from here on. Still --
I've got about two thirds of an idea about how to get atmospherics to work in Iray. I'm not there yet (this one, above, isn't perfect), but I think I know where 'm going with this. More experiments are in order, while I see if I can get this working properly. This is DM's old Circular shrine, which is a nice standing set, but I can't seem to get it properly configured for Iray. I've adjusted everything, but the surfaces still have a tendency to be glossy, even with gloss, reflection and even refraction turned off. So ...
I wanted to render again, with a character (this is Dae for Genesis 8, wearing the Landis hair, and The Huntsman costume for Genesis 3, which fits G8 well), so I took the opportunity to re-do all surfaces with shaders. These are a few of the Construction shaders from the Mech4D pack (from DAZ). It's not absolutely perfect, but it's pretty darned good. I could paint it, to take care of the slight deficiencies, but ... nah. It's very lovely as it is. And --
I rendered this at 3000 pixels high, so you can cut into it and still get a really good image ... you can get close enough to get a good look at the figure, costume and hair. In fact, let's get even closer:
More atmospheric experiments tomorrow. I have a couple of ideas that just might work. It's not a million miles away from the tricks I used to get up to in Studio 3 and 3Delight to make fog and mist! In fact, I'm dying to see if I can get this to work. Also, I'll be trying some "shader mixer" stuff, and I'd love to see if I can get the Hyborian Warrior dude (he needs a name) and Leon coherently into the same shot, in Iray. If not, then we'll play with some raytraces. Haven't done that in a couple of weeks. This is fun!
