Ruins in the dying light -- and browsing for a new leading man.

Here's an unexpected pleasure! The sale at Renderosity never stops, and since there's been a few things I've wanted (can't actually say "needed") for a while, I decided to take a look. This is AppleJack's Ruined Church, and it renders brilliantly. I added some skies photographed in the Flinders Ranges last week (where the sky is overwhelming, and gets very dramatic several times a day), and then got clever with IBL lighting, actually using the same images for backdrops and lighting. In this one, above, I added a hugely bright, warm spotlight, angled off to represent the lowering sun, and two copies of Merlin's crow, from the Wild Borders set.

The Ruined Church set may be old, and low-poly enough to render like lightning, but the finished result is more than good enough to feature on a book cover, for example -- and with careful lighting and camera work, it can be indistinguishable from reality. Neat! Very glad I shopped this sale! I also got a boat and a bridge, and you'll see more of all this in days to come. 

Next thing on my list of gotta-have items is this:

https://www.daz3d.com/michael-4-for-genesis-2-male

Rather speaks for itself, doesn't it? Basically, you can dial the exact-same body morphology for M4 into the Genesis 2 Male, which means that all your costumes and skinmaps will work. What won't work, of course, is the Morphs++ for M4; and you lose the head morphs. So the old characters (Jarrat and Stone, Leon, Sebastian, Amadeus, the list goes on) will be much, much harder to resurrect in the high-poly figure; though I wonder if it might be possible to go a step further. For US$50 there's a face transfer system, whereby you put in a clear full-face image, and it drops it onto the Genesis 8 ... mind you, not the Genesis 2! So there's a major compatibility clash, and to date no one has offered to resolve this. Hmm. US$50 is a a lot, but supposing Jarrat and Stone and the rest leapt into being as Genesis 8 characters. Lemme think about this. You have to wonder if there aren't better ways to go ... do what Hollywood does, and "recast" the parts. Try this for size:

See that full-sized, please ... I uploaded it large. This is Ragnar for Gianni 7, for Genesis 3 Male, by GypsyAngel, who also designed the Rex and Dae characters I use so much. Hmm. I really go need to think this through before I run hither and thither, chucking $$$ in every direction! Gianni 7 bundle for $90, and the GM3 Body morphs for $20, and Ragnar for $20. You're out US$130, but see where you are at the end of that spend! Huh.

See where your imagination goes, on a lazy Sunday afternoon?!

Installing third party content into DAZ Studio 4 ... new shaders, sets and toys!

I'd bought a gorgeous new set of shaders and set out to play with them, only to discover myself playing with lights, too ... and this happened. That's a heck of a nice picture. And...

This one makes me think of Purdey from The New Avengers -- is anyone old enough to remember that show? This is where shaders come into their own. This costume is put together from bits of four others, but a great shader on them makes the whole thing dovetail into something new. Kit bashing for fun. Continuing on --

This worked well. The background was rendered in Vue, many years ago (by Dave!),and it's the perfect sunset for DM's Sunedge set. I call this Forgotten. It was just a few minutes in Iray, because the older models and refreshingly low-poly; and then some quick post work in Photosop (birds, lens flare on the virtual camera), and it was done. Nice! Then --

This one, you're going to have to see full size, to appreciate the details. Throne of The Barbarian King, by Sveva, was on sale at Renderosity, and I couldn't resist. This was also the exact thing I needed to test out the installation paths for third party content going into Studio ... by George, I think I've got it. In fact, I know I have. When you're installing 3D goodies to Studio, the Zip file unpacks to produce a data folder and a Runtime folder. The data folder includes a sub-folder named for the designer of the goodies, and it gets unpacked/copied to this file path:

C:\Daz 3D\Applications\Data\DAZ 3D\My 3D Library\data\[designer]

There could also be an Environments folder (with the subfolder named for the designer within), and if there is, it gets unpacked/copied to --

C:\Daz 3D\Applications\Data\DAZ 3D\My 3D Library\Environoments\[designer]

...and after that, everything else is placed into the Runtime folder, same as always.

If you've been trying to work this out, this should get you going. I have much more to upload, and a very complex render cooking in the background as I type this, but I'll sign out here, and go looking for some dinner! 

 

Shamanic Visions, and an Elf about town

 

It might look like a simple image, but it's actually very complex! Took an hour to set it up, an hour to cook till the fireflies resolved, and then an hour to paint the next morning --

There's every technique in this one, from an under-painting generated specifically for this project, to the render itself, to 2D graphical layers (Renderosity to the rescue again -- so long as you really know what you're doing with the resources!) and photoshop brushes. I love the graphical layers:

This project was huge fun -- to begin with, playing with new 3D toys. The headdress is the Axarra Headdress for Genesis 8, and it's the most amazing prop to work with. The only downside is that, in closeup, it takes 12,500 samples to resolve all its fireflies, it's sooo poly-heavy. But it's worth the work, and the wait. I'll be using this again, often, I think ... there's so much you can do with it. I'd had my eye on it for some time, and when it popped up on sale for half price, well --!

I call that one Shamanic Visions, and it was big fun ... but there's more! You want fun? Try this:

That's our elven archer, from yesterday's Archer in the Dawn project, but this time it's a street scene, with leather jacket and shades. Elf about town. How realistic is that? It's almost, almost at the level where you'd just accept it as a snapshot or selfie in the street. Moreover, that's G8 wearing Michael 4's sunglasses; I redid the surfaces for Iray with shaders, and they worked just fine. Well, there's more, but I'm tired so I'm calling it a day. ack tomorrow, with pretty things! 

Shaders, Iray, Photoshop, and the Genesis 8 female

So -- the Genesis 8 female, with a character (face morph and skinmap) added. This is not Victoria 8; this is Georgia HD, on special the other day at about $11.50 or so, well worth the investment. This is the Bardot dress, which was free with Studio 4.15, but I changed the fabric for a shader acquired from Renderosity last lear -- Sveva's Shimmer and Shine Satin, I believe it is. This is the Shavonne Hair for Genesis 3 and 8. And this, I like.

I'd been trying to order the Body Morphs for Genesis 8 Female too, but DAZ's shopping cart was veru squirrelly. After five attempts and two rounds of emails from their5 Help Desk, I still couldn't order. Weird. I'll play around with what I have for a while, but from what I'm already seeing, I like it!

More experiments ... this is the old Reparation set, a cenotaph, wearing the Requiescat materials ... and I'd been wondering how (or even if)  it would render in Iray. Very nice indeed. I'm stumbling around in Studio and Iray, relearning a lot of what I seem to have forgotten in a year, and learning a great deal I never knew. Lots of questions remain to be answered, but I'm getting there. Slowly, LOL.

After spending weeks trying to find the tools in Affinity Photo to do things I used to do so easily in Photoshop Elements 9, back in 2010 -- and in Micrographx Picture Publisher, in 1997! -- I discovered that the tools are not actually there. (Boo, hiss, to Serif for taking the tools away that were in their early programs! Why would they do this?) The only solution to the problem was to shell out more cash and buy Photoshop Elements 2021, and then learn a new interface. Safe to say the oars are back in the water; if I had a single grumble with Elements 2021, it's that the interface seems to have been designed for children. It looks juvenile, tinker-toy, while the elements 2009 interface was adult, businesslike and professional. Go figure. I'll get used to it.  So --

-- again, piling in the experiments. Here's about forty things I used to use every day, all rolled into one, a digital abstract based on a picnic we took at Sellicks, on the clifftop, a week or two ago. The big questions were, Can I use my .abr brushes with this version? Yes? How do you install them? There's two or three ways; I might have done it the hard way, but it got done quickly. How to you access them, select them and paint with them? That was more of a challenge, and I only stumbled over the answer, with Dave's help. (If you're going through this, just ask, I'll go into this in detail). So --

This outtake from "First Snows of Winter" shows .abr brushwork (Ron's Magical Snow), and there's also a bunch of painting done on the mane ... and the mane is a CWRW addon, which needs to be manipulated ten different ways to work and look good -- meaning, you better know where the tools are, and how to use them! I think I'm just about caught up! Couple more questions to answer in Studio 4.15 ... how do you get soft(er) shadows on photometric lights??? ... and how do you use dForce for dynamic clothing, hair and props? With those questions asked, I do believe I'll be back where I was years ago, but using the Genesis 8 models and rendering at light speed. Am starting to smile now!

Experiments in Genesis: what's the compatibility with earlier figures and props?

Genesis 8 in NVIDIA Iray

Am spending a week or two back in DAZ Studio, before I start to commit to another writing project, and this really is time to make all the experiments that'll let me catch up quickly. I bowed out back when the Genesis figures were just making their debut, for various reasons, all of them good. The first was, my hardware wouldn't handle Studio 4 The second was, I hated the new interface. But now I have the hardware and the time ... okay. So. First experiment: I'm working with Genesis 8, which is the new generation, but so much of the content was designed for earlier forms. Now, there's a converter running, when you load the hair and costume, so -- can Genesis 8 wear something designed for Genesis 1? The answer is, yes. This is a Genesis 8 figure (mostly designed my me), but the hair on his head, and what he's wearing, were deigned for the original figure. Okay. And yes, Genesis 8 is a vast improvement over Michael 4 ...

Michael 4 in NVIDIA Iray

This is Michael 4, as rendered by NVIDIA Iray. First, yes, you can render the old figures in Iray. They're quite nice; and they're low-poly enough to render fast. But they're also low-poly enough to not quite give you the photographic realism we want today. This is the Jagger skinmap, an almost random face morph -- and the other experiment I'm running here is, "Can I install my old Renderosity content into studio 4.15, AND find it, AND have it be fully functional?" Answer, yes. The hair on M4's head is Akaste Hair, from Renderosity. You just have to know where to look for the old stuff in the content menus! Studio likes to hide things away. Renderosity content is most often Poser content, so, by and large, you find it in Poser Formats > My DAZ 3D Library ... and here's the kicker: Michael 4 himself, the base figure, is hidden away there. Took me a week to find it, at the outset! You really have to get the hang of this. So, if this is Michael 4, what about the old Victoria 4?

Victoria 4.2 in NVIDIA Iray

Yes, I know, I haven't done nearly as much with Victoria 4 has with Michael 4 ... one of the reasons was that 90% of everything features the female models (still true today; have a look at 3D art, and it's rare to see a male, and far more rare that the male will not be old, ugly, or a cartoon. It's almost as if artists are worried about being categorized as gay if they should render beautiful men! Meh). This, above, was done in Iray about eighteen months ago, before computer problems caused me to put art away for almost a whole year, till I could get a new system. Compare Victoria 4.2 with...

Genesis 1 in NVIDIA Iray

That's the original Genesis figure, Genesis 1. There's not a wealth of visible difference between this and Victoria; in fact, many times, Victoria looked better. There, I've said it. There was a ton of room for improvement with the original Genesis, and it didn't take them long to come out with Genesis 2 --

Genesis 2 in NVIDIA Iray

That's Genesis 2, rendered in Iray; and we're starting to get into the ballpark now. I've been installing and cataloging content for the past week, and have stumbled over tons of Genesis 1,2,3 content that was packaged along with DAZ Studio. The quality isn't startling, but it's enough to give you a feel for the model and props. Before Genesis 3, I was more impressed with the render engine than with the figures! And of course I entered the field again when Genesis 8 was new ... 8.1 is out now, with improved mesh; but I doubt you could see any difference unless you were animating, which I'm not! But since we started with a Genesis 8 male, let's end this look at the figures with the Genesis 8 female:

Now we're' cooking! I can work with this ... in fact, I promptly went to DAZ and tried to buy the body morphs for Genesis 8 female, and a character (skinmap and morphs), but there's some kind of error going on, server-side. It won't let me pay. Hunh?? So that'll have to wait for another day. More soon.

 

Michael 4 fantasy, in and out of Iray ... and feeling optimistic --

As promised yesterday, we'll step back a couple of paces, go back to simpler things and work back toward what's doable in Iray (for me, with my hardware). So -- for a start, we'll do a raytrace! And here's where it gets interesting. I've never really delved into the 3Delight engine in Studio 4 -- why would you? You to to Studio 4 to get access to Iray, right.? But I did "go backwards" for a while, and wound up noticing that 3Delight is a lot more fully featured than it used to be --

The version built into Studio is the freebie. The full-on pro version of 3Delight is about A$2000, which is dumb, when you realize NVIDIA Iray is free, like LuxRender, and you can even get Maya, from Autudesk, for about a grand, Aussie. The major thing Poser users always held against DAZ Studio 3 wasn't the interface, which is fine, but the very rudimentary render engine built into it. The truth is, by comparison with Poser's Firefly engine, 3Delight is extremely limited. Disappointing. Soooo ... I was intrigued to dig around in 3Delight, as built into Studio 4.11, and discover a lot more ways to configure it... Hmm.

You can now squeeze a lot more out of raytracing than you used to get out of it. There is a downside: as you crank up the sampling and so forth, render times blow out massively. Duh. You have to look for the sweet spot, because you could wind up with a raytrace that took longer to render than an Iray image! Anyway, this raytrace, above, was done at much higher settings, taking about an hour. I can tell the difference.

Curious to see what Iray could make of the same material (all of which is low-poly: two Michael 4 figures, a couple of props, a set), I gave the picture one hour in Iray, at half size:

Very different, isn't it? The same render time as the raytrace, albeit at half the size. Seeing the result here made me wonder how our avenging angel might render in closeup, so --

That's an hour in Iray, too -- and the beauty of this is, there renders are finished, whereas the Genesis 8 work I've been tackling in the last week or so chokes my system after about five or six hours and can never be finished on my current hardware! I do like Michael 4 a lot, actually. With this character here, the only thing that's missing is the vascular mapping: the venous, or vein, mapping. Soooo...

I'm 99.75% sure I have the manual installation thing worked out now. Seriously. I've got the old content working tolerably well in Studio 4 (even though I still can't actually save a file in Studio 4!), and I was feeling optimistic enough to shop a sale DAZ is having right now. One of the things I just got was this:

Catalog image. See this.

This is a very, very nice displacement map for the Michael 4 figure. It was on sale at about 70% off, so how could I not get it? (I also got some Genesis stuff, including a new wig). I just have to slog through the process and get this installed and working ... tomorrow. Then we'll mix and match skin maps, hairdos, costumes, and we'll see what we shall see! This is going to be fun ... stay tuned!

A wood elf in Iray. Uh, Legolas, anyone?!

A wood elf ... about five hours in Iray and a bit of painting to finish it out, where various zones would have been rendering for the rest of my life. This is nice, very natural and lifelike. The big trick was matching the lighting across foreground and background, since the backdrop is a photo (which I took in Belair National Park a year or two ago). Getting the lighting angle to match was a bit of a challenge, but otherwise ... patience, while it renders, and then renders some more.

Expect to see this character again! The ears work brilliantly ... he's wearing the Michael 8 skinmap, which always renders superbly, GP character eyes, and Shavonne hair; and the face is one of mine...

I'd love to go shopping for costumes for this character -- something befitting Legolas. I'm just not a hundred percent sure of getting new purchases to install properly, using manual installation, and they're not cheap. Hmm. I need to run an experiment and just try it. Since the computer I use to run DAZ Studio dropped permanently offline, life is more complex than it used to be! (If you're accustomed to Studio, you'll be used to running the Install Manager, which handles everything ... and tech support want to have you updating this, uninstalling and reinstalling that -- all of which is simple, so long as you have an internet connection. Alas, I don't now! Nothing, but nothing, will get the computer to go back online. Which all adds up to a new computer, right? Okay, I know, I'm due for one. I've been using this one for ... how many years? Whoa, how time files. Anyway --

I see this character and I think, "Hmm, Legolas!"

A wood elf, at any rate. Nice!

One door opens, another closes ... G8 and M4 gladiators

Did you hear the sound of screaming from somewhere approximately due south of wherever you are, at about four o'clock this afternoon? That would have been me. Boy, did I learn a few things today ... and I'm not very happy with what I learned! For six months now, I've been chafing about not being able to load the old third party content into Studio 4, so that it can be rendered with Iray -- if you've been following this blog, you've heard me groaning! So --

I finally, finally figured it out. I got the old third party content to load into Studio 4.11!!! And then I discovered the other side to this situation. Sure, you can load the old content, but it's "mutually exclusive." The moment I loaded the old stuff, I lost all the new content! All the Genesis figures, sets, costumes, shaders, became inaccessible. Studio 4.11 behaved like it had a bunch of screws loose, telling me the "files do not exist." Well, from it's perspective at the time, they didn't ... because I'd changed the file path along which it accessed content: so now it was getting hold of the old and third party stuff, and here's the rub. It couldn't get a grip on two parallel file paths to use at one time. Just one. So --

You can either have the old and third party content or the new Genesis stuff. Well, while I had access to the old stuff I ran the experiment:

That's a Xurge costume, with Michael 4 wearing it, and SAV's Spartacus hair, loaded into Studio 4.11 and rendered in Iray. The problem is that (as Xurge warns!) their stuff is "not tested in DAZ Studio," so they don't guarantee how it'll render, especially in Iray. What you see here, above, is 30% painting. The metal parts all rendered as flat, ugly gray plastic -- pretty awful. Ack.

So I thought, "Why not apply a nice metallic shader, as you did when you rendered this costume in Iray before," like this --

-- yes, that was done with shaders, and Iray loved it. BUT that figure-n-costume was imported into Studio 4.11 as an OBJ, so Studio was delighted to work with shaders. After you've change the file path so it can actually load your old third party stuff, Studio is stuck on a different rail and can't find your shaders; you see the "file does not exist" dialog. As I said, mutually exclusive. You can either have the brilliant shaders in Iray and not the third party content, or you can load the third party content and Iray will render a lot of it looking like flat gray plastic! Ooooh, botheration. Or words to that effect,

Is there a work-around? I don't know. All I can tell you is, I sure as heck didn't find one today. After three hours of fiddling with it, I changed the file path back to the usual one, to get my Genesis gear and shaders back, so as to get some sense out of Iray; then I set the gladiator to render, and went for dinner. Harrumph. Four hours later, and it was still not fully rendered, but I have no more time, so we'll have to call it done at this level of integrity.

To speed it up, I did all the plants in the foreground separately, as a deep shadow map render in Studio 3 (less than a minute), with the gladiator Iray render stripped in as a backdrop, LOL. That probably took two hours off the render time, and I still ended up painting a lot, especially on the hair. The Landis hair looks rather plastic, don't you think? I need to experiment with this some more -- not yet getting the results I would have expected from it: it's an expensive prop.

We still can't get the desktop online, so am settling down to work with what I have for the time being. There's loads to work with, we're not short of models, costumes, wigs and whatnot. And if I'm really going to get busy with the old sets, shipped out to OBJ, to make it possible to whack shaders onto them and bring them up like new -- well, fair enough. Time to get busy!

Also, I'll continue to search for a work-around to the problem. You never know.

Exercises in frustration -- at Master Elrond's house

I would love to tell you I found a way to render a Genesis 8 figure standing in a big, complex, high-poly-count set ... but you know that would be a terrible fib! And no, I haven't bought a new computer since Monday. I wish ...!  No, no --

What I'm playing with here is the Nature's Room standing set, which really feels like a house at Rivendell ... that kind of indoor/outdoor design; you remember ...

As you drive the virtual camera around inside the Nature's Room closed set, you get from a courtyard to a bedchamber to a dining area, a yard, a pool, a fabulously gnarly tree. There's a trick to lighting this set that I have't (yet) discovered: actual lights (photometric included) don't work in here, so I lit this with various IBL images, environment maps, which worked. I can render angles on the set fairly well, but as for standing a Genesis 8 figure in it...? ROFLMAO. Sooo...

You're looking at the top image, thinking, "I recognize that figure from months ago, and he's in the set. Isn't he?" Actually, no he isn't. I rendered the camera angle without the character --

-- and then dropped it into a new project as a backdrop and floated the figure in midair over it. Set a light to represent the daylight from the window ... rendered that for about two hours, and hand-painted the shadows, and adjusted the figure's color, gamma and contrast to make it look like he's part of the background! It almost works. Not 100%, but close enough to still be a nice picture.

What I can do (and will do, tomorrow) is put a low poly figure into this set. We'll see what we can do with a Michael 4 character, see if we can get a decent render in a couple of hours.

We were watching one of the Hobbit movies the other night, and I've caught the elvish bug again. What wouldn't I give to be able to get into all this --

Catalog image. See this.

Catalog image. See this.

Catalog image. See this.

...but it looks like I do have serious computer problems with my desktop. No connectivity. Nada. I can't get it online, not even with advice from the shop that built it for me. Which means I'm halfway hamstrung with installing new content, which really, seriously has to be installed by the online Install Manager if it's going to work properly. I (so far) haven't managed to get a manual install to work at all ... I do have a ticket open with tech support that might, and I say might, resolve this ... don't hold your breath. I negotiated with tech support for over four months to see if I could solve the file-save problems. No joy, and in the end they just quit. So just opening a ticket with them doesn't automatically mean that 1) there is an answer to your problem, and 2) they will find it for you. But we can hope.

The other thing is -- Trystan here is a Michael 4 skinmap; and that's either an Iray or Reality render. Don't give up on good old Michael 4 just yet. You have to work damned hard to get good results with the older figures, but it can be done. My big problem is, I just can't save a file containing the older figures, so anything I do is strictly "on the fly," one-shot, from idea to finished render. (That being the issue that tech support couldn't resolve, and gave up on. Rats.)

So: let's do something brilliant with a Michael 4 character tomorrow, and see if we can get some more angles into/onto the Rivendell set to render in a decent time!

Stargate, anyone --?!

Stargate, anyone?! As I said in m last post (this morning!) I've just started to unpack a load of goodies I bought in 2013 or so, and couldn't install because I didn't have the hard drive space. Truth is, I'd forgotten what I have! There's oodles of stuff packed away there, forgotten! Costumes, hair, skinmaps, characters ... old stuff, which means low-polygon count ... which means I can render it in a flash! This is DM's "Pyrego," which has a real "alien pyramids" look about it --

Rendered in Studio 3 in no time flat, and painted up in Photoshop just as fast...

And the result is so striking, you're wondering what movie you missed! Tomorrow I'll see if I can coax these props into Iray, and see how they look in the unbiased renderer. Speaking of Iray --

On a whim, I went back to the black-winged character you saw this morning, and deleted the wings, which take about six hours to render. The rest of the character, leathers and all, rendered in two hours. Now ... if this was Stargate, the story wouldn't be complete without a Goa'ould, right? Someone to be the nemesis for Jack, Daniel, Sam and Teal'c. Okay, try this for size:

He has that supercilious arrogance and the physical perfection the Goa'ould always seemed to have. I could buy this character as a subtle villain. Not your over the top bad guy, but dangerous:

That's also a heck of a nice render. I've been using IBL lighting lately: it's a hell of a lot simpler than trying to get Iray to play nice with lights -- also, the more you try to light a scene, the longer it takes to render. IBL lighting works a treat. What you have here is Genesis 8 with a face designed by me, body morph designed by me, wearing Shavonne hair and one of the pale skinmaps supplied in the Michael 8 Pro bundle. What's it called? The one starting with a Z. Uh huh -- ooooh, my memory is loads of fun, isn't it?! He's wearing the Huntsman leathers ... and that is pretty good, if I do say so myself.

Can't wait to see if I can get Pyrego into Iray -- tomorrow's project. I also unpacked another set from 2013's shopping spree: Palladio, an ancient Greek garden and kind of temple. Now, I have some lovely stone and marble shaders for Iray which might just work with those old OBJ props. This is going to be interesting!