Take Two, in LuxRender -- really blurring the line between art and photo

As promised ... here's the LuxRender version of yesterday's Michael 4. And boy, did I have to jog my memory! I started up the Reality bridge and went utterly blank. Blanker than blank. Floundered around for about ten minutes, made some false starts, and then sort of halfway remembered where some of the controls are and what they do!

The two things I did forget: when you set up your lights for LuxRender, you use ONE distant light only, and name it "sun," so Lux knows what to do with it ... and if you want to turn on depth of field, so the background is realistically out of focus, you must select what you want in focus, in DAZ Studio, before invoking Reality. Then Lux automatically pulls focus on that object. In this case, it's focused on Michael 4's face so tightly that you notice the hand closest to the camera is fuzzy. Neat!

For objective comparison purposes, here's a resized crop chopped out of yesterday's raytrace:

Compare yesterday's raytrace...

But which is better? Raytrace or LuxRender? In fact, a case could be made for either one. I'll leave it to you to decide, because each has its merits. For example, the hands definitely look better in Lux, but which face you prefer is down to the individual.

And there's one more thing I often do these days: have a look at the render in good old b&w. You can often get a clear idea of the photographic values of a piece of digital art when you drop out the color:

I feel a visual fantasy coming on. Something good is percolating in the back of my mind, and if it wasn't 10:21 at night I'd be starting up a new project. But I'm propping the eyelids open here, so -- tomorrow. Yawn. I'm off to bed now...

How much photo-realism can you squeeze out of raytracing?!

Assignment: how much photorealism can you squeeze out of old fashioned raytracing before you get into the more upmarket render engines, like LuxRender and SuperFly?  

And the reason I ask this is that I just spent half an hour on the gallery pages at Smith Micro, which is the company behind Poser. Hmm. Well, the fact is, if it's near-photorealism you're looking for...

...you'd actually be fairly surprised what you can do with raytracing, and it's not a million miles away from what you'd expect from one of the top-end engines. I'm asking this question because I have a LOT of images to render, and the version of LuxRender I'm running is slow. The new one is said to be seven times faster, but to get into that would take more than I have to give right now. So we'll just run for the moment on the old system and see how far we can push it. 

Which means I need to drive raytracing to the very limits it's capable of! And here we are, experimenting ... actually, jogging my memory too. I confess, it's been a while since I drove the software (have been far from physically well, as you know if you've been following these ramblings), and it turns out you can forget  how to fiddle all the details, just as your piano playing can get "rusty" through lack of use.

So, the model I chose to work with was a Michael 4 I developed five or so years ago for a book cover. At the time, the effect we wanted to achieve was ART, not photo, so the render was set up to give this effect:

The object was to achieve something much closer to a painting than a photo. That's two versions of M4. The bratty little imp on the right, and the more mature one -- which is the Michael 4 I chose to work with today. What did I do to make so much difference in him?

First: change the hairstyle. He's wearing SAV Eros short hair today. And then switch out the skinmap. The original dude is wearing the hi-rez Michael 4 "Millennium Man" skinmap, which is always a "go-to" skin when everything else fails. Today, he's wearing SAV Eros:

The skinmap is very pale and filled with texture; far from the "perfect skin" one looks for in a photographic model, and with good reason. This character is (!) a vampire. Check him out at Renderosity. I like this skinmap a lot because of its realistic texture. It also pairs up well with "less than perfect" faces. And when you drop this skinmap onto the face I designed for he old book cover, the effect is rather reminiscent of Vince Vaughan some years ago! And it does give the project a jump-start, if photorealism is the object today. The next item on the agenda was lighting

Out in the field, one can very rarely achieve "studio lighting" effects. There's a reason they scorn it as "available light." Natural daylight tends to be too bright, or too dim, or too harsh, or too blue ... always too something.   So let's use this deliberately.

I used just two distant lights, and deliberately overdrove one of them to get the "available light" effect. These lights are bright pale blue and dim soft orange. Shadows are turned on and left hard ... as per camera effects: depth of field is ON. The background outside the viewports is a photo which was blurred and blurred some more, and then blurred again, to match the amount of blur on the walls. I played around with adding film grain and lens flare in Photoshop, then decided not to. I think the render right out of DAZ Studio is good enough.

It'll be interesting to see what happens with this image in LuxRender. They don't always work, as this post shows! Very occasionally, the raytrace looks better. Also, there's a tendency for the Michael 4 "mesh" to collapse or distort. This doesn't become visible in a raytrace, but in a Lux project it can be catastrophic. So ... let's see what happens. Tomorrow.

Help! The project files are missing!!

Well, fudgesickles, as Dave says. I've just spent about an hour and a half tearing several harddrives apart, looking for a whole swag of the project files for Jarrat and Stone, the Hellgate characters, and a lot of other stuff which I've been wanting to rerender in Lux and so forth. A case of mild panic ensued. A lot of the files are there to be found. A lot aren't. Well ... dang. The good news is, Jarrat and Stone have survived; and Rick Vaurien, Mark Sherrat and so forth. The bad news is, some of the minor characters -- such as Tully Ingersol, the Weimann specialist on the Wastrel, for instance, is just gone. So...

Some of the characters will have to be reimagined. Like this:

There's the new Tully Ingersol -- somewhat serendipitously, because I'd just finished doing fresh art to rejacket at old book...

...and couldn't resist playing around with the hairstyles. Would you believe that the two characters you see above are actually the same Michael 4 morph, just with a switch of hairdo! Amazing, but true. I'm barely believing it myself, but the facts are right there in the software. Cool.

So the next weeks will see me recovering a lot of the old ground ... but this is actually a good thing, because so much of the art from 2010 needs to be re-rendered in any case. It's always astonishing, the way it comes up afresh in LuxRender -- or even with the techniques I learned in later years.

In fact, we're running up to a milestone. The first post went up on this blog on September 25, 2009. We're racing toward the seventh anniversary of the day when I decided to share the process of "nutting out" 3D art. Dang, what a long way I've traveled -- and we're not done yet.

Stay tuned. Good things are to follow.

After a very, very long absence ... am I back? I sure hope so!

Richard Vaurien and Sergei van Donne

After a very, very long absence ... I'm back. At least, I hope I'm back. I'm certainly going to try! I've been wrestling with health issues that came close to utterly defeating me, and though I'm still not well, the fact is, I'm bored out of my gourd. So I'm going back to artwork and writing, and nuts to the fact I don't feel so good. My head's going to ache permanently? Fine: be like that. It'll just have to get on and ache, because I'm bored enough to stick out a thumb, just ahead of the next UFO, and bum a ride right out of here. So...

What better place to start than Hellgate. Always my favorite place to "run home" when I need a vacation. I could live there in a heartbeat because I love the places, the people ... everything. All credit to Mel Keegan as the creator of this fantastic universe. [2023 EDIT: the dot-com web address is defunct as of early this year. For some reason, the system utterly denied access to it, and it could not be renewed. Then some joker bought it as a zombie domain name, and MK would have to buy it back at significant cost. Not going to happen, but the web pages are all still there and still viable. Find MK online in the same place.]

I did a lot of Hellgate art years and years ago, and some of it has traveled surprisingly well across time, and some ... hasn't. Generally, it was "okay in its day," but CG art has progressed by leaps and bounds since the last time I dabbled. Michael 4 has become Michael 6, while I was looking in another direction, hunting for my health! Well, I don't have access to Michael 6, or the Genesis figures, or anything remotely similar. But I do know where I am, driving the classic software.

So here's one of my old favorites: Richard Vaurien, talking to Sergei van Donne in the big industrial airlocks on the Wastrel. This is "just" a DAZ Studio raytrace with a modicum of Photoshopping in post-production. No Lux or Bryce involved here. Most textures on the costumes were switche dout for my own textures, and displacement maps added. Depth of field (DOF) is turned ON, and much work was done with lights and virtual camera settings before the whole shebang was raytraced at 3200 pixels wide. Good old Studio 3. Still works -- dead simple, friendly interface. Next, I'll go play with LuxRender!

And just in case you're into Hellgate, here's a wallpaper version  ...

Hellgate wallpapeer: 1600x900

... at 1600 x 900, which suits most monitors. Certainly, if you have Irfanview, you can tell it to "stretch proportionally," and it'll fill the whole screen on a big 26" monitor --

-- like that. Neat. Loads of space on the blank left side of screen for parking icons out of the way, allowing you to keep the art clear. Golly, you'd think it was designed that way, LOL.

So in the days and weeks ahead, look out for new art, with all the bells, whistles and skill I learned and acquired in the seven years since the original art on this blog was done! If I do manage to trade up to new software and Genesis models -- dandy. If I don't, the art will still be suitable eye-candy ... and there's a lot of it, backlogged, from the ten months or so (I know, I know ...) since I had the chance to upload here.

Cross fingers, things are "coming good."