Tuesday, November 2, 2010

Painting with light



EDIT: many images have vanished, with the cancellation of some accoun like Photobucket or Flickr, or whatever it was. Can't find them on any HDD, so ... sorry. 

I'm not a hundred percent satisfied with these renders [whatever they were!] ... but at this moment there's no more I can do to improve on them -- because as far as I can tell, the problem is in the rendering engine. If the light is very low and the shadows are turned on, the renders start to pick up "grain," or would you call it "spotty areas and streaks" in the mid-tone areas. That has to be something to do with the render engine. I think.


I'm still using the free render engine which ships with DAZ Studio 3 -- 3DLight. And I think there's actually a limit to how far you can push this.

Now, DAZ recently released a whoooole new render engine, called Reality. This impresses the heck out of me:


Image is gone ... it's possible the Reality site isn't even there now...

 

You can have look at it here... [nope. Link is dead] but here's the catch. First, it's $80. Second, it's whimpering for a 64-bit system with tons of ram and video ram, which I don't possess. Powerful as this system is, it's 32 bit. My laptop is 64 bit, but it doesn't have the video card or the ram to cope.


Now, at YouTube you can see LuxRender in action:


Video is gone ... it's possible the Reality site isn't even there now...

 


...and that also is impressive, but it doesn't solve my problem of being 32 bits short of a picnic!

So for the meantime I'm going to muddle along with what I have, and dream on about this kind of render potential:


Image is gone ... I wonder what it was???

 

Right now this is waaay out of my price bracket. It's not the price of the Reality 1.0 plugin, it's the price of the whole new system to run it efficiently. Ouch!

Jade, November 2


***Posted by MK: my connection is intermittent, too slow for this. Seriously, guys, I've got dialup speeds. How are you expected to do anything these days, at 1990 dialup speeds?!!!