Water! I've been going fifteen rounds with Iray in the last couple of weeks, trying to get it to do realistic water by means of all those nifty tricks we knew and used in the old render engine ... no real joy. So in the interests of sanity I gave up and bought a great set of shaders, Easy Water and Fluids. Now, when they say "easy," all things are relative. First, although you can just slap the shader on a plane and hit "render," you really, really want to configure the water to be just what you want ... and that takes a bit of learning. No problem: in half an hour I had it figured. But high rez rendering is another question! This is the first render I've done on the new system that took over an hour! Well worth it; but if I'm rendering on 10 cores threaded as 20, and it still took 70 minutes to get this, I can just imagine how a slower system would struggle.
Anyway -- the rock and water prop is the Daz freebie, Garden Pond, which I massively rescaled into a small lake, and then I redid the rocks with a shader. The tree is Flink's Tree 6d (from Renderosity), and the grasses are from Merlin's Wild Borders set (Daz). That's ... not bad. Not bad at all, especially for a very simple old prop. This is filled with possibility, and I've only just started to experiment! Also --
Finally, I actually bought a costume for the G8 female! So far I've been working with the freebies supplied with the Essentials kits for the Genesis figures -- and that's fair enough; they'll take you quite a long way, if you spritz them up with new shaders. This is called a "sun dress," but it would also do as a top or lingerie, depending on how it was textured. I paired it with the pants from a G2 costume, and had fun with the lights. That's the Georgia skinmap, but I tweaked the body morph a lot.
One thing this costume isn't is dynamic ... and I really, really have to get into the dForce system. Shopping for a dress for the G8 to wear, I had to search long and hard to find something I liked that wasn't dForce. Seems like all the cool costumes and hairstyles are dForce now, so this is one of the very few things I need to catch up with. I guess I'll put this next on my list of Must Do jobs!
I have numerous images swimming in my imagination, and I should have the time to do some renders next week. The last couple of weeks have been waaaay too busy with a writing project -- a novel, done now and beginning the hunt for agency representation -- wish me luck; and the week after next I'll be away from the computer the whole time: Dave and I are "doing" the Limestone Coast over six days, so it's going to be about photography, travel, spending some quality time with by hubby on and around our wedding anniversary. It's been 22 years. I don't believe it, but it has!
More soon ... I have a couple of images clamouring to be rendered.
