A grab-bag of goodies

 

Old OBJ models and new shaders ... it's an adventure in Iray, with results that can be astonishing ... or not so good. Depends on a lot of random factors. The question is always on my mind, "What can we do with the old generation four models, since almost everything I have was designed for Michael 4, and while the new Genesis stuff is terrific, I just don't have another three or four thousand dollars to spend on renewing everything in the 3D cupboard! So what do we have here? Well --

This, above, is Iray's rendering of the Jagger skinmap for M4; he's wearing Neftis's Ricardi hair and Sickle Yield's track pants; but I resurfaced the trackies with Iray shaders, so they look pretty good. The results here are not so very different from the Genesis figures -- with one exception. M4 ain't as posable: wait till you start to bend the limbs, and you'll soon see that they don't bend realistically; they just sort of fold, and tend to crease, which Genesis limbs usually don't.This effect is very, very noticeable with Victoria 4, also --

Now, this is Victori 4, wearing the HR Donna skinmap, and one of the Neftis wigs ... it's actually more of a test of the costume, which is one of Powerage's old fantasy sets, the Fantasy Cult costume. It depends on metals and transparency maps, and it was never designed for Iray! But it turns out the transparency maps worked wonderfully in Iray ... the metals? Nope. So I resurfaced all the metals with a gold shader from Mech4D's immense pack of shaders, and the result is actually very nice...

The crystals are a prop from an old fantasy collection, Magic Containers, which I think came from Renderosity about the time Noah was launching his ark. Obviously, it was never going to work well in Iray, but I used a volumetric diamond shader from Mech4D's collection (from DAZ), and the result is very nice. I can use this prop, and many others ... we're happy!

The Elven Merchant Ship was from Renderosity too; and I'm not enormously fond of this prop, which is why I've never used it much. It was made using textures rather than materials, so the surfacing on it is disappointing; and no templates were provided, so one can't go in and paint a material. Soooo ... I put it into silhouette by placing the key light almost behind it, and did some overpainting in Photoshop, which increased the realism. Cool.

On that render, the water was the big, big challenge. I don't own a "water prop" (yet) for Iray, and of course it's totally different trying to work with surfaces in Iray than in 3Delight. This is an Iray render, so ... what the heck was I going to do? Well, displacement maps DO -- NOT -- WORK in Iray. Or, if they do, I haven't found the trick, and I don't think anyone else has. Normally mapping works, but it won't get you where you need to go, if you start out with a created primitive (plane) and try deforming it into a choppy surface with a displacement map. No joy there. Harrumph. So (he he he) I used an old OBJ I made in, and exported from, Bryce 7 Pro, about eight years ago. Mmm. The "water" is actually a terrain, onto which I slapped one of Mech4D's volumetric water shaders. Even then, it took one heck of a lot of work with all kinds of maps to break up the surface and make it less than a mirror. There's a trick to this, which I have yet to learn ... but this is quite nice, so I'll post it and make notes to myself about figuring this out!

And lastly for today, after all that pushing and pulling with old models, I wanted something that would make life a bit easier (especially since it's over 100 degrees in this neck of the woods, and almost too hot to even think, much less wrestle with problems). So this is a set called Shady Haven, from DAZ, already configured for Iray. I have an environment light and one spotlight set, and this render, at very high resolution, took about fifteen minutes. Next, I'm going to see what happens to the render times we we stand a couple of Genesis figures in the set. So --

Let's have a closer look at how Iray handles the Jagger skinmap on the Michael 4 geometry ... and then I'm going to get a cool drink and relax in front of a fan. Yes, the a/c has been blasting away since before dawn, but it's just too hot. One thing that's definitely on my agenda: a new monitor. I'm still using an LG monitor from 2010, and it runs so hot, it feels like you're sitting in front of a heater! Not what you want, in this weather.

Stormy Weather

Stormy weather: an old break-bulk freighter, a big storm running, and DAZ's Michael, lost in the middle of it. Yes, another book cover (two to go, still ... dying to be finished this weekend), but this was the assignment. I'd originally thought the background image would be the difficult part, but it turned out to be dead easy, about twenty minutes fiddling with twelve layers in Photoshop.

An ancient image of an utterly obsolete ship (probably went to the scrapyard thirty year ago. Or forty), plus one of my own stormy skies -- I grab the camera every time the sky does something extraordinary -- and then, with the backdrop done, a lot of work doing everything possible to make the old Michael 4 model render up quite realistically in a raytrace...

This is a new Michael face; he's wearing the Tosca skinmap, which I like a lot ... it has a realism which is very useful; that's the Garry hair, mussed up to make it look like there's a wind teasing it. This isn't a hairstyle I've used very often, because it's short, and my own preference is for longer hair. This time the project demanded short hair, though. Just two lights are set, one gray-green, the other pale gold, both with shadows; and the DOF is turned ON, as usual. (One of the neatest tricks for making a 3D render look a bit more realistic is to knock the "focus" off the virtual camera, just by a few percent. 3D renders, especially raytraces, can look rather obnoxious ... plasticky. There's no such word, I know. But if you whop the focus off a bit, you can get around that to a surprising extent.)

Okay: two more to go, then I can get into my own stuff. I've got this fantasy buzzing around in my head. I've actually written the first chapter of it, and would love to get into rendering characters and scenarios. The thing is, to do a full-on job I'll need to track down a 3D model of a galleon. Yes, you heard, a galleon. Or similar.

So I spent a few minutes on the DAZ marketplace, and was pleased to see you can get several ships that look pretty decent, for $15 - $40 ... good enough to get the job done, I guess. Though...

If you didn't mind laying down five...hundred...bucks you can get a Hollywood resolution model of the Golden Hind herself at TurboSquid:

Add to cart...? Uh, not today, thank you! Yes, I know: TurboSquid is where the pros go shopping for their odds and sods. But their pockets are somewhat deeper than mine! So we'll have to see what we can do, with what we an afford. That comes next, when I start to render the fantasy that's been buzzing around in my brain.

For now: back to work! I have two more book covers to do before I can call this assignment done, and they're not going to render themselves! (Wish they would...)

Buccaneer meets holiday hunk ... alas, two centuries apart!

A pirate hunk in 3D (thank you, DAZ Studio and Photoshop!), against the backdrop of an Elizabethan galley in the mist; and, staying with the Caribbean theme --

...another 3D hunk -- genuine poster boy for the Jamaican Tourist Association! Two more book covers today. Just a handful to go now, to get this assignment complete.

These are raytraces, not LuxRender projects, of course: it's a question of time. There just ain't enough hours in a day to scramble through so much work, if you want to put 4-8 hours into every final Lux render. Almost always, you need to do three or four (or more) test renders in Lux before you can set the piece to "go" and come back tomorrow. The results are gorgeous, but ... not this time.

However, I plan to come back to some of these pieces in a week or two, when I have the time, and see what LuxRender will make of them. I'll upload what I get, if it's rewarding enough to share around. (Not every project works in LuxRender. Very occasionally you do come up with a dud, where the raytrace is better. Shock, horror!) In the meantime, these are "superior" raytraces, in which all the technique available has been invested; so there's not a light year of difference between what you see here and the real unbiased renders...

In all seriousness, raytracing is becoming an abandoned art, with the wide availability of engines like Lux and SuperFly on the desktop. In a couple of years, it'll be forgotten -- and this is a pity, because if you know what you're doing you can get very good results. You also get very different results;  the best unbiased renders are eerily photographic, whereas even the best raytrace possible is still, well, art. And what's wrong with art, pray tell?!

Speaking of art, I'm also extremely pleased with the background images appearing with all of this 3D hunk work. In virtually every instance, these are full-on digital paintings (just a couple defy this rule).  I'm still in the learning curve with Photoshop. It's my pleasure, now, to tackle projects that would have scared me off a few years ago. So nice to be learning and developing, even now.

The nineteenth century poster boy, and the "fifty year storm"

The quintessential nineteenth century hunk ... in DAZ Studio, of course! What can you say? Technology by DAZ, face and bod by moi. He's wearing the JM Alexandre skinmap, and the hair is a Michael 3 toupee, "Ricardi Hair," which you can get to almost fit properly, if you jiggle the settings using the "Victoria 4 Male" fit. It still needs painting in the "post" phase, which is why I seldom use it; but it was just right for this piece, where our 1865 mariner needs to be deliciously windswept. Yes, it's another book cover. There's a bunch more to go, to get this whole assignment done. Phew.

(Incidentally,  if you enjoy classic cinema-- some people do, some don't, I know  -- there's two you need to track down. The World in his Arms, with Gregory Peck and Anthony Quinn captaining two schooners in a white-water race to Alaska: fantastic. Plus Reap the Wild Wind, with a stunningly young John Wayne, and Hollywood's iconic tomboy (precursor to Ripley and Sara Connor), Paulette Goddard: ship wrecking on the Florida Keys. Alas, they don't make movies like this anymore. Wish they did.) Anyway --

It's DAZ Studio and Photoshop again. Truth is, if I did this in LuxRender, I'd still be working on it; but I've pulled every trick I know on both foreground and background. You name it, the technique is invested in this one, from the"venous map" applied to Michael -- makes the veins rise in his torso and arms (I used the venous map from JM Falcon, applied as a displacement map) -- to the camera settings, lighting settings, then tons of over-painting. The background itself is a full-on digital painting which began as two photos. One was from Wikimedia (a schooner at sea, c. 1900), the other, a storm sky photographed from the beach a long time ago. Then the painting began!

Quite a drama unfolded as I tried to upload this one last night. I did the work while a "fifty year storm" barreled in off the Southern Ocean, and literally as my finger hovered over the "upload files" button, the lights flickered, flickered again, and the power went off. Uh huh. Here we go --

The storm crossing Brighton, South Australia...

...and at Woomera, faaaar away in the interior.

The big picture, from the Himawari weather satellite. Dang.

Boiled down to a story that fits in a thimble, what happened was: severe weather (over 100,000 lightning strikes) caused the main power generators to "trip." They scrammed, it took many hours to get them back online. Twenty-two power transmission pylons were totaled; the whole state of South Australia blacked out  -- yep, there's hell to pay, that this can happen to so large an area. The how and why, and what to do about it, will be beaten up for days. Hopefully, something will be done about it. Soon. 

Next day, there's still about fifty thousand homes without power, and the sting in the tail of the storm isn't yet spent . Our power came back on after about five hours in the dark -- we were lucky. Got the central heating on at once, because things got very cold, very fast. Today, rain continues to lash; thunder and hail are forecast for this afternoon. Dave and I are going to run errands in the lull, and be back inside when the "fun" starts ... with a good supply of candles, flashlights, batteries and fully-charged mobile devices. Like last night. 

So let's get this uploaded before anything more dramatic can happen!