Angel and demon ... unlikely allies: neat CG fantasy!

Had a neat idea for a fantasy ... suppose an angel and a demon joined forces to fight a common enemy ... and I just happen to have an angel and a demon in my own cast of characters!

I also used this as a testbed for some experiments. First, I raytraced is in Studio 3, and it took about 45 minutes. Then I raytraced it in Studio 4.10, and it took about three minutes! So there's a reason to put 4.10 to work -- speed. The new engine is soooo fast. Nice.

Then, I sent it to IRay, to see what would happen. Now, I know, I know, I know ... every single surface in an image that's going to be rendered by IRay is supposed to have a shader applied! But you have to BUY them thar shaders, and also the pro set-up lights ... and if I'm not careful I could throw a thousand dollars at this. Which I can't afford to do. Eventually I'll have to turn to Reality, because, as I remarked yesterday, IRay is a very deep money pit.

But here we are -- IRay without shaders and pro lights ... this is just the render straight from Studio 3, to 4.10, to IRay... which is what I have to work with:

Well worth the experiment, but as you can see, it's "six of one, half a dozen of the other." Without the pro lighting sets and the endless libraries of shaders which must be applied to every single surface, an IRay render is a bit different from a raytrace, but not really superior in any significant way. (In fact, Reality is better at rendering with garden variety lights and plain old mapping.) Alas, the cost of all those lighting sets and shaders for IRay is, frankly, prohibitive, for me.

So I will indeed to opting for Reality: their lights and shaders are free and/or built into the plugin. You drop fifty bucks one time, and you're good to go. That, I can afford. Hey ho.

DAZ Tech Support opened a dialog today, but only to ask for a screen shot of a window. No joy as per getting Studio 4.10 to access any content. So all I'm doing is opening Studio 3 renders in it, and playing, to learn the interface. OMG. Urg. To say I do not like it is an understatement, but it's the only way to work with the Genesis figures and the new Reality. Grit your teeth, Jade, and get it done, right? But Tech Support has to get this problem fixed for me first, or nothing new will happen! Aaarrrgghh.

Hunks, heroes, render wars and window shopping

Old Reality render: Leon

New Reality render: Rock Star

The top render is an IRay render done today ... and what you see here is not a clean render, but a composited "painting" derived from three renders, one of which was a raytrace, painted together in Photoshop! IRay is waaaay harder to use than it's said to be, and the interface is From Hell. It's not playing nice, and when you get into the surface, texture and shader settings --

Now I know what the guy behind the Reality engine means when he says, "No spaghetti shaders," on the Reality 4.3 page at DAZ. Spaghetti shaders? Huh? Yep, he's talking about IRay without (diplomatically!) mentioning IRay, since that one is the official built-in unbiased render engine in Studio 4.whatever  --

Now, I'm not saying IRay is crap!! Don't get me wrong: IRay renders are the equal of Reality renders. But here's the difference: it'll take hours to configure an IRay render; it's so complex, it'll take weeks or months to learn it; they sell the tutorials for US$50 per package (!), and so many people are so baffled, there's a huge trade in lighting suites for IRay, to make it possible for desktop users (hobbyists) to squeeze good work out of it ... and these ready-to-go lighting suites are not cheap.

Bottom line: IRay is a deep money pit, although they give away the engine ... meanwhile Reality is so simple, I was doing the rest of the renders, above, within a matter of days, on my own nutting-out, didn't even look at a manual, just poodled through the interface and thought about it. Reality is EASY, and I guess the ultimate bottom line is that its render quality is at least is good as IRay, while costing nothing but the plugin, and being sooo easy to learn/use. Hey ho.

Soooo, I've about had enough of IRay already, while still waiting for DAZ Tech Support to get back to me regarding the ticket I put in four days ago. Not very happy about this. And I'll add one other thing: I am not spending one more dollar until the tech aspect gets worked out, and I can load my content. Because this is getting silly.

None of which stopped me window shopping, and these, below, are on my wishlist:

...the really dumb thing is, I'm sitting here salivating, dying to send them money for Genesis characters, costumes, hair, props; but Tech Support is not answering. I ain't spending another dime till the technical bugs are sorted.

But yes, I did play around with IRay a lot ... enough to discover that it's 100x harder to work with than Reality, and it will turn into a money pit, which very few people can afford. I know I certainly can't. So -- bear with me a tad bit longer.

The leader picture today -- "Snake Charmer" -- as an IRay version of a raytrace I did about five months ago. Here it is ... and I leave it to you to decide if you like the IRay render or the raytrace. I have a feeling I actually prefer the raytrace, even though it's definitely art, not trying hard to be a photo.

Last for today: badlands, in Terragen:

Now, Terragen I am seriously loving. The computer romps it now, and each of these renders took about 20 minutes. So realistic, you're looking for the dinosaurs! Reminds you of something like Dakota, or similar, which was dinosaur country about 60 million years ago. If I can ever get my head around it, I hope to be rendering dinosaurs in Terragen. One day...

Adventures in IRay, Terragen, Bryce and ...!

Yes, you're right: that's trusty old Michael 4 -- "The Man in the Hat," as you might know him from a fair number of renders on this blog! The difference? It's an IRay render. Turns out, IRay is actually built into DAZ Studio these days, which is neat. Also neat is that is does 80% of the textural work automatically ... however, the last 20% is stuffs up royally, and unless I'm missing something major, there aren't any controls in DAZ Studio 4 to fine-tune IRay: you need to drop US$50 and get IRay Studio, a plug-in. Well ... if I'm going to drop A$75, I'll probably opt for Reality, which is an interface I known and trust from past experience. IRay is fast, sure: the render, above, took about 50 minutes with a lot of stuff running in the background. It'd have been faster if I committed the whole computer to the render. But the new Reality is supposed to be up to 20x faster than the version I was using years ago, so it's a safe bet, these two, IRay and Reality, are comparable. So --

First, today's new art:

Terragen: that took about half an hour. It's pretty simple, but quite effective. I need to jog my own memory on Terragen ... haven't done it in a month or two, and am starting to forget! I know I need to wrap my head around procedural terrains, then get into working with objects. Like trees and plants. Just a few experiments to see how long renders take, involving trees. If it pans out to a render taking three days and tying up the whole computer to get an image with a tree -- forget it. Won't know till I try, right? And ...

Bryce 7 Pro, and a rather nice abstract. No way will Bryce give me realistic landscapes, but by golly, you can make it render some very nice arty-tarty images. I like this kind of thing a lot. Must do more.

And then, I decided to put a couple of recent images through the IRay process to see what it can make of them. Here we go:

Now it's starting to get interesting ... though I have no control whatsoever over what IRay is doing at this point. This is "click and go" stuff. And IRay is making a mess of a lot of the textures: it was Photoshop to the rescue" to fix this picture, after it refused to "see" or "apply" the diffuse maps on the plants on the foreground. They were white plastic, when rendered -- so weird. Anyway, Photoshop fixed that and saved the picture. For comparison --

Left: IRay. Right: Raytrace

That's worth a look at large size. The other challenge about the IRay render of this was that Studio 4 couldn't find the sword of the tree ... I had to import those as OBJs. Which is easy, I guess, so -- no real problem. Just a few minutes' extra work. Quite impressed with the quality of the basic IRay render, though I also see the art value in the old fashioned raytrace. (Incidentally, that on the right is the raytrace from Studio 3. Interestingly, the deep shadow map image choice seems to have been deleted from the 3DLight engine built into Studio 4.10 -- with good reason. Its raytrace feature is FAST. I mean, lightning fast. Cool.)

Here's the recent "Jack," sent to IRay:

Not bad. Far from brilliant, because, as I said, I have zero control over the render engine: this is just "click and go," and Iray is utterly ignoring a lot of the mapping. The venous map on the Michael 4 has dropped out; it made a mess of the texture on the shirt (Photoshop to the rescue again), and I think the skin tones are washed out. It was an adventure getting this picture into Studio 4, in order to send it to IRay...

Problem 1: when Studio 4 opened the Studio 3 file, it left the hair behind! I did a test render to make sure it was worth going on, and when it was, I imported the hairdo as an OBJ. That's dead easy; but the next test render showed that Problem 2, adding an OBJ to the scene made the skin tones go utterly bananas in the raytrace. So I sent it to IRay and crossed fingers, and ... Problem 3, sure, IRay renders the skin fine with the OBJ-hair in place, but it makes a complete muck-up of the shirt. I gritted my teeth, finished out the render, put it in Photoshop and repaired it, to save it. Hmm.

Next thing I must learn is how to control the surfaces on IRay -- or make the decision: do I drop A$75 for IRay Studio, or for Reality? Because without one or the other, you'll get these problems all the time.

Before you get excited about the quality of the renders today -- hang on. First, these are auto-generated by the plugin, and they are NOT high-rez images. This one, below -- not my work: a catalog image from the DAZ store -- is a high-def image:

It's chalk and cheese. First, obviously, that's a Genesis 3 figure, whereas all I have to work with at the moment is Michael 4, because I am still waiting for help from Tech Support at DAZ. Right now, I cannot add content to Studio 4 ... any content at all. So all I'm doing is posing stuff in Studio 3, then opening it in Studio 4, giving it a tweak where possible (it seems not much is doable, when you're trying to interface with IRay without having the IRay Studio plugin), and then clicking "go." Sooo...

Suffice to say, there's a lot to learn, and/or a lot to buy. But I've made a start, and if Tech Support can get the SQL problem worked out, we'll be a step closer to having oars in water. At least I'll be able to work with a figure comparable to the one you see above. Till then, I can certainly get into the numbers and see if I can figure out how to configure a high-def render, rather than a "click and go" automatic one. And there are more problems beyond this --

Spent some fascinating (not!) hours on the forums, where people are screaming blue murder about not being able to install third party content into Studio 4. Hunh. About 70% of everything I have is third party, and if DAZ 4.10 won't load it ... well, we'll see. Maybe I can find a way.

The adventure continues...!

Computer is back!! And, but ... harrumph. Anyway, new art.

Michael 4 in person. Call this character Jack

Yes -- the computer is home! Meaning, new art today, beginning with the leading man, hero type, above. Is it just me, or does he remind you of Captain Jack? As in, Harkness. Something about him just makes John Barrowman come to mind! Anyway, this character -- call him Jack, and expect to see him again very soon! And...

Terragen skyscape: Dawn Light

Yep, Terragen 4 is on and working: a 100% clean download, no problems whatsoever. The computer is working fine. Surprise: it didn't come home any faster, which is a trifle odd. I'd expected it to be screamingly fast with soooo much "swap disk space." Then again, it was always like greased lightning, so, no complaints there. Also, although this gorgeous Terragen evening sky did take twenty minutes to render, the desktop never got up above a normal working temperature, whereas the laptop, which (having eight core processors) would have rendered it in the same time, but would have been HOT. I mean, fry eggs type hot. So I'm happy. And...

Bryce 7 Pro abstract art: Mountain Lake at Dawn

Bryce 7 Pro, abstract art: mountain lake at dawn. A quickie render finished in Photoshop to bring out the fabulous reds in the sky. Which tells you that Bryce is on and working, and Photoshop is on and working. So --

What ain't working? Ahem. DAZ Studio 4.10 was not, repeat not, a clean download. It gave me one of those virtually meaningless error messages, installed its framework and then refused to install any content into that framework, on account of a "PostgreSQL CMH Connection error." Like that's going to mean anything to me. Double Dutch. Except ... if memory serves me, SQL is a programming language developed to handle online stores. Uh huh. So 4.10 failed to set up its umbilical cord to connect my computer to the shop??? And, having stumbled right there, it refused to install any content, even though my Product Library has ten pages of goodies I bought many years ago. As I said, harrumph.

Soooo, I chased the problem to their Forums, and Help Page. Found the instructions to 'fix' this --

Oh, yes? What a shock: no joy. The instructions don't work. Next?

Tech support, submit a ticket, and wait. Wait. Wait. 

And that's where we are, regarding DAZ Studio 4.10, Genesis and all: waiting. But I've got Studio 3 working, and all the rest, and now that I have oodles of hard disk space I can delve into the truck loads of models I bought as long ago as 2013, and install them! Yep, new toys to render, even though you'll only see those renders in raytraces, until Tech Support gets this sorted out for me. Sorry, guys. Bear with me.

I'll keep you posted when I know more myself!

Nope, not yet. Grrr.

As the post title suggests ... nope, not yet, no call from the workshop to go and collect the computer ... which means Tuesday is the next earliest date I can expect to have it back. Whimper.

But the time hasn't been wasted: I downloaded manuals. And read them.

Which means I ought to be able to hit the ground running, and have also thrashed through a number of the problems which beset users -- not least of which being in the download itself. Fortunately, one of the things I paid for (and it wasn't cheap) was a full upgrade on the operating system. This should give me all the bang up to date drivers to run something called dForce --

-- and dForce is the next generation on from the old dynamic cloth idea. I was never able to get into that, since I toughed it out with Studio 3 for many, many years. Now, I'll probably leapfrog dynamic  whatever and go right for the dForce engine ... I hope. What's it do for you? Well --

-- with any luck, it ought to drape fabrics like this, above, which is a catalog image (credits printed into the picture: not my work. I think it's from the DAZ shop: it certainly looks familiar). It does automatically what you'd spend eons doing by hand, and comes up with results which follow gravity and so forth...

Catalog image: track it down here

This is all absolutely virgin territory to me, but thank heavens, YouTube is just loaded with tutorials; so, so long as my drivers are all sorted and I can get nice, clean downloads of the software and plugins, I ought to be in business.

In the meantime, the desktop has taken most of my programs with it: DAZ, Bryce, Photoshop, Krita ... I've got nothing on this laptop except Amberlight and Terragen. Am playing in Amberlight because it's soooo easy, and if I tell the truth, I'm too tired to make Terragen do anything. It's winter now, dark and cold, and when you're nursing a huge backache and listening to driving rain ... urk. So --

You won't (can't) see any new art from me till the desktop is home and everything is up and running. My arms aren't long enough to reach IT Warehouse from here, and even if I could, I imagine they have the case laid wide open and cables dribbling out of it. One last Amberlight image, and I'm going for dinner. *sigh* Maybe, a phone call tomorrow? If not, Tuesday?

It's worse than being an expectant father. I think. 😶

There. Dinner, here I come, then a DVD, and call it a day. Too, too exciting, right?

It's all happening! Whoooo!

If you would refer to your left ... ahem! Please note the large empty space where the brain box used to be. The CPU is currently some kilometers away in a workshop, being thoroughly upgraded -- just to a slightly different plan than I'd originally imagined. Clone the old harddrive onto a new one: no problem. For A$178, I'm getting a solid state 1TB internal harddrive, so she's going to be screamingly fast. But it turns out, the case is too old to fit a new USB Front Panel unit ... the only one that might have fit wouldn't plug into the old motherboard. Ack.

This is a 2012 system, and in seven years, the manufacturers confidently expect that all the only machines will be dead and gone. Nope. This one has never been connected to the Internet (!) and is therefore as fresh and fast as it was on Day One. Uh huh. Tells you how and where your computers are going wrong, doesn't it? Anyway, the fix for that was to get a USB hub, and a long extension cable ... it'll be plugged into the USB 3 port on the back, the cable comes over the top and gets taped to the case, and thereafter I will have seven USB 3 ports, rather than 2 USB 2 ports, on the front. Neat. Done.

Pause for a little eye candy, or what's the point in this being an art and photo blog? 

Bryce 7 Pro: Highland Dawn

Raytrace: Leon and Roald, the courtyard scene

With any luck I'll get the system back on Saturday or Sunday, and then it's all about installing stuff and learning new interfaces. Now, I never liked the DAZ Studio 4 interface ... but I also haven't really looked at it since 4.1.5 or something in that bracket. I can't even remember the last time I turned it on, if I tell you the truth! I did use it now and then to send something to LuxRender, such as this, below --

Now, that's not so bad at all, but I was using the old version of LuxRender, Version 2.x, I think; so it would have taken something like 5 - 6 hours to get that render. I couldn't help comparing it with something like this one, below --

-- which is a painted raytrace. Now, yes, that's obviously ART, while the LuxRender image is trying very hard indeed to be a photo. But the raytace would have taken a matter of twenty minutes, plus half an hour to paint; and I obviously asked myself if it was worth the bother of tying up the computer all day to get one simple image!

Back in 2015, however, the new(er) versions of Lux were already coming out: touted as being seven times faster; so a seven-hour render was doable in an hour. Now it started getting interesting ... but by then I was out of harddrive space, and couldn't do a darned thing about it.

Obviously, at this point real life intervened: my mother entered her final days and passed away; my pancreas blew up in my face, literally, and I was in hospital twice; you name it, it went chaotically wrong, and four years went by so fast ... well, I'm still disabled, but getting better! So.

(Pause for a little more eye candy ... Elven Boat on the River, in Bryce 7 Pro, in 2011)

So, indeed! The PC has gone into the shop and will be back in 3 - 4 days, with 10x the HD space it used to have, all-new USB 3 ports, and a USB wifi adapter that'll let me jump online for a vry brief time, go get something I want ... like the installers for Studio 4.9.9.whatever, and the new Reality 4.3, which offers renders like this, for US$49.95:

That image is used as the showcase render for Reality 4.3 DAZ Studio Edition ... and you can only be impressed. This is what decided me to stick with Lux/Reality and not go out into IRay ...well, that and the necessity to buy a new NVIDIA video card before I could run IRay; which would necessitate putting in a new motherboardl which would mean buying a new PC case. In other words, I'd have spent upwards of A$1,000 to rebuilt the whole system, just to run IRay, when Reality will give you renders that look like this:

Thanks very much, NVIDIA, I do believe I'll keep my money and run with Reality, which will use the same video card and motherboard! Soooo, I spent a fabulous (not) morning backing up my weeny little boot drive and browsing around the Genesis figure "assets" on the DAZ Studio marketplace. It's many years since I shopped there, and things have changed, but this is going to be fun! (See the Lux Core Renderer Gallery here.)

I'll keep you posted in the next few days, and then ... new art. Uh huh. New interfaces to learn first! But this is good for your brain. The work-space might not be quite as aggravating as it used to be. By Studio 4.7, the use interface looked like this:

I can live with that. It's a million percent better than the early "Mickey Mouse" interface that drove me nuts -- drove me away, literally. But what is hugely irritating is this:

Yep. Those are the Genesis 0 and 2 and 3 and 8 "people" .... and it looks like every single "person" in the CG world is female. What is wrong with this picture?! And this is one of the reasons why I, as an artist, don't work with female characters very much: because you're bloody inundated with them. As if female is all that exists. [Rolls eyes] Browsing through the "Genesis 8 Items," you simply cannot find a man, a male, a he. You have to deliberately search the store for "Genesis 8 Male." Aggravating, but there is it *Sigh*  Anyway ... this will be fun. I'll need the Genesis 8 Body Morph and Face Morph plugins, to create my own faces and bodies; then, toupees, costumes, skinmaps ... and away we go! I hope.

More soon. Stay tuned.

Something old, something new...

Okay ... not new art -- I ran out of time, and I do want to touch base here today because the computer is about to get pulled apart and go to the shop. So I've delved back into the ancient archives and rebalanced a few of the very best from many years go. Top: Colorado Smith. Look at the shadow on the wall behind him!! I think anyone in the world would recognize that shadow, LOL ... the shadow is actually more important than the figure! Bottom: this is a Vue image in the background and a DAZ render in the foreground. I should do this kind of thing now, using the Terragen atmospheres I'm learning now...

Top: Stormweaver ... the background started life as a photograph and went through multiple processes to become artwork, which was used as a backdrop. The trick is to set up the lighting on foreground and background match. Bottom: Barbarian Princess. Always loved the reflections in that floor. The trick to getting them wavy is to apply a "wavy" bump map to the super-reflective surface -- almost any bump map designed for water is perfect...

Top: Elven Lover. Middle: Guard Duty. Bottom: Storm Light ... which was one of the first shots I was able to wrangle, in 2010, where I could pull sophisticated tricks, like transparencies on the fabric. Guard Duty was a long, long, long render as I recall. By 2012, most techniques were in place; the only things left to nut out were depth of field, special lighting, that kind of thing.

This, above, as I remember, was an experiment ... I'd just gotten GIMP and some brushes, and was happily painting my own backdrops. The hair is Spartacos and the skinmap is Atlas ... those, I would recognize anywhere, even after eight years! Ouch. Has it been that long?!

And some science fiction to round this out...

Three out of four of these, above, were done for book covers! The chromium "Fembot" was for a novel published by a company than ain't even there anymore ... the cyborg was a work-up design for the character that ended on the cover of More Than Human, and the space cities -- yep, you recognize those from Scorpio. Book covers are always a challenge.

The rainy-night-in-the-city scene is interesting: that's a photographic backdrop that's reflecting in the wet 3D ground ... which isn't actually possible, is it? Okay, here's the trick: create a plane (primitive), slap on the photo as a diffuse map and sit the plane right behind the figure. Add a ground plane and make it as reflective as a mirror ... yep, the background plane with its photographic diffuse map will reflect. Neat trick, and sooo useful. You're welcome.

Anyway: tomorrow the desktop gets taken to pieces and goes into the workshop. I spent this afternoon backing everything up, and ... it's time. I hope to get it back, blazingly fast, on Friday or Saturday. Then we'll get the new DAZ Studio, the new Reality, and we'll tale a look at Genesis... 😵