Okay ... I'm up to my eyeballs with wrestling with Generation Four skinmaps, and trying to get them to look ab fab in Iray! So fed up, I'm running back to Iray, and let's do something EASY. You reckon those glam shots of pretty young girls in fancy clothes (or none at all...) are difficult? Nope --
Too easy. The fact is, you sweat blood on the kind of render you saw this morning -- a scene, filled with props, massive amounts of light, a difficult pose, whatever. Glamour shots are easy by comparison. So, right here, what do you have?
Genesis 8 Female wearing the Zahra face morph and the Georgia skinmap, and a body morph designed by me (because she's a bunch of spaghetti, right out of the box). Eyes from the Ultimate Eyes for Genesis collection; the hair is Aldora for Genesis 3, and the costume is the Persian Top (there's also a pair of pants goes with this) for Genesis 2 -- the Wardrobe Wizard really works, thank heavens! Then I switched out the boring, boring MATS on the fabric, using shaders by Sveva, (from Renderosity) and conjured a backdrop to match by putting a zoom/motion blur on a winter scene, to get the right colours. About 90mins later, it was done -- I'd set the Iray parameters massively high, off-scale, as an experiment, to see if that produces any visible result --
Here's the bottom line of that experiment: past a certain point, or sweet spot, you could leave it rendering forever, but you wouldn't tell one Iota of difference. I could have shut this down at 45mins, it would have been just as good. So the Iray sweet spot is something around a minimum of 40 or 50 samples, a max of about 12,000 - 15,000, and ... in fact, why don't I just take a screen shot and paste it in here?
That should get you where you need to be. The lighting for this render was also dead easy. I set an environment map that started life as an HDR photo of an apartment, but I cranked all the tones into the blue range; then I put one (just one) spotlight on the model to make the shot pop. Mind you, the photometrics might seem a bit extreme if you're not accustomed to this:
Yes, I have 100,000 lumens on this face; I've also pulled the colour temperature into the blue zone (red to the left, blue to the right, right?). There was just a bit of painting to do in post: the hairstyle is old, and in super closeup you can see that strands "go around corners," LOL. Also some of the mesh on the shirt collapsed, or crumpled, so there was some fix-it work which took about three minutes flat; and -- done!
In fact, I'm so tickled with this, I'm going to do a G8 glam shot tomorrow. In fact, this was rather fun. A nice break from tough shots.
