New costume ... and the yawn quotient of rendering

Well, I said I was going to get this Genesis 8 dud something to wear, and this was on sale...! It's a kind of Mad Max - Road Warrior style thing; I'm sure I saw something like it in one of the movies. I also changed the hair color and eye color ... am having a kind of love-hate relationship with IRay, partly because it actually demands a more powerful machine than I posses right now (and the system I need costs upwards of two grand. Ack), and partly because the learning curve is like the north face of the Eiger for someone who's spent ten years in the 3Delight engine. Sure, I'm getting there, but the render times are loooong, there's about 500% more still to learn (including the dForce dynamic fabric thing), and everything is so expensive. *Sigh*

Anyway, we persevere, and come up with fairly nice pictures while we run 4,722 experiments. Like:

These are actually not high-rez images: best I can do -- about 100 minutes per render; that's what you see here. The longest render I've done to date was about six hours, and the computer doesn't like it. It runs too hot ... have you ever seen 'the blue screen of death' on your system? Uh huh. I just saw it, about ten minutes ago. Going to have to be very, very careful with this computer, or I'm going to melt it down! So the object is to treat it gently and not ask the impossible of it. Right? Right.

Not as much art as I'd wanted to share today ... IRay just takes so long, I get through about 25% of what I'd wanted to do! Makes you kind of long for the old days when you could get a raytrace in ten minutes flat. (Or perhaps you just go to the IT Warehouse website and drool over systems. I did that not half an hour ago, and picked out what I want. They call it their 'i5 Gamer Elite;' it retails for a cool A$2,149 and it would do the job. All I need now is a winning lottery ticket!)

More in a few days. Dave and I are taking Monday and Tuesday off, out of town, so I'm turning the machines off as soon as I hit "publish" on this, and I'll be back on Wednesday, all being well. Ciao for now, folks...

Goa'uld eyes fixed! And -- IRay shaders, first try, first look

First things first: fix those damned eyes! And yes, I guessed right ... you can go into the surfaces pane and dull them down with a diffuse color. If anyone else is getting this problem, the chromatic gray I used is 176-176-195, and it works like magic. This guy went from having eyes that looked 100% fake (spoiled the effect of the character, in fact) to looking fairly natural. Very pleased with this. Then --

Starting to experiment with the pack of IRay shaders I bought the other day. Took me about half an hour to figure out how to apply them, because DAZ Install Manager didn't put them in Smart Content or even in some special "shader" folder, so that they'd appear in the surfaces pane. Nope, it just dumped them into the A-Z, 'everything but the kitchen sink' cache of assets ... and how the heck are you supposed to apply them from there? The instructions (yes, I read them!) say that you select a surface and double click the shader of your choice to apply it. Good luck with that: it doesn't work. What does work is drag and drop. I tried everything, and then tried this in desperation, and wham, there you have it.

Now, I need to figure out where these blasted shaders live, inside the Studio filer hierarchy, so that I can top up on free ones, and less-expensive ones, from third party retailers. Can't afford to buy everything at DAZ, which means I can't rely on the Install Manager. Installation has to be done manually, from ZIP files or similar. So ... file structure, please. At the same time as getting it worked out for the shaders, I'll be able to figure it out for other third party content (I hope), so that lots of stuff from the earlier version of the program will pop into the A-Z bin of the Content Library. Then, if this works ... kind people who post freebies at DeviantArt, CG Share, and even Renderosity might just save my financial life here!

Very happy with the way Michael 4 is rendering ... still waiting for tech support to tell me what's going wrong with the file save routine, where the M4 figure drops out and is replaced by a stack of boxes! But yes, I can pose him in Studio 3 and just open/merge that file into 4.11, and ... in fact, here's a project for tomorrow: let's put the Genesis character, Dae (the brooding one with the Vulcan eyebrows) and my own Amadeus into the same scene, render them together. Hmm. Interesting!

I also need to get the Genesis 8 guy something to wear. Right now, he has a pair of slacks, a tee shirt, a dorky pair of shorts, and a sweatshirt of some kind. But this looks promising:

Badlands Gladiator G8 costume

And now ... bed! It's the wee small hours, and I'm tired. Yaaawnn. G'night, all.

Yes, we need another hero! Check this out...

Hey ho, it's only money, right? Yep -- a skinmap for Genesis 8, and I've also used the face and body morph in this set of test shots. (These are comparatively quick renders: I let each cook for an hour in IRay, and because it's just one model, one garment, one hair prop, the CPU handled it just fine.)

I'm about 85% of the way there with this character ... it's not absolutely right, but it's close. I confess, the eyes are painted in three out of four of my shots today, because the scleras (the white parts of the eyes) are glaring like searchlights ... they make him look like a Goa'uld! There's no built-in control to tone them down, so I'll have to muck about in the materials pane and dim down the diffuse color, or specular color, or specular values, or reflectivity, or whatever it turns out to be. That should be a comparatively minor fix ...

...and I have to admit, he's kind of pretty just as he is; although I have a feeling I'm also not getting the body shape quite as depicted in the catalog images. This is probably because I don't yet have the Genesis 8 Body Morphs. Now, the product page at DAZ does not say that you need the body morphs in order to load this body shape, but I think maybe it should, and you do, because...

catalog imagage. Dae for Genesis 8

... that body is a fraction different from what I'm getting, and frankly, the only issue that could cause the difference is that I don't have the body morphs. Anyway, that's by the by. I'll have them soon enough, then you can expect the body to load up and be identical. Also --

DAZ catalog image. Dae for Genesis 8

The catalog images show the eyes rendering the way they ought to ... those scleras do not glare like searchlights! So the solution has to be in the materials settings. That's a challenge for tomorrow.

I also bought a pack of (gasp!) IRay shaders for fabrics, so there's a lot to play with. I confess, right now I have only the vaguest idea of how to handle IRay shaders, so there's a lot to learn.Since I don't yet have a tonne of costumes for Genesis, I thought I'd try pasting the shaders onto other stuff and see how it renders up. This will be interesting!

Also, I ran an experiment to see if Terragen would render a figure exported out of DAZ. The answer is, it will ... but it imports only the diffuse map (ie., the image that makes the visual pattern or texture on any surface), and ignores everything else. Which makes a character look weird indeed! You do get a drop-down menu, where Terragen asks for the correct shader for every single surface on the OBJ you just imported. Ooof. In other words, it would take a day or two to organize the simplest image you can imagine. Hmm. Not worth the time it takes.

Quite happy with today's work! More tomorrow...

Gypsy eyes, IRay adventures, and the Reality fizzler

Well, phooey ... best laid plans and all that. Boy, have I learned some stuff since the last time I posted! Some of it good, some of it not so good! The good stuff first: above -- we'll call him a gypsy boy, I think. That's the Genesis 8 base figure, no special skinmap or shaders added yet, because I don't have any -- that's the next thing we're about to fix. But I did buy him some decent hair to get rid of that dorky hairstyles which was the only thing that came prepackaged with Studio! This looks lovely-- the Elan hair, which was on sale via the DAZ marketplace, so I grabbed it while the going was good! Next, we'll get a proper skinmap or shaders; but you gotta start somewhere, and --

The fact is, Studio 4.11 is still doing this to me:

You set up your scene, with the Millennium Falcon in a hangar, and two guys, one of whom is the Genesis 8 base figure, complete with the dorky hair, the other is Michael 4...

...you think to yourself, "this is great, we're halfway there, even if the Genesis 8 boy looks like the undead -- flat white eyes. Okay, he's a zombie. Zombies need love too." But then you save the file so you can come back to it the next day and ...

When you open the file, instead of getting your Michael 4 + costume + hair, you get ... a stack of boxes and a warning about missing files; and when you describe this to tech support, you get the email equivalent of a blank stare. They are on the problem, but it seems that the issues I'm experiencing are vastly unusual Anyway, we're working on it, but Studio 4.11 is jacking around massively. It's already been uninstalled and reinstalled; one wonders what happens next! So...

Last I posted, I had a render that was going on and on and on, six hours and counting. I left it rendering all night, and it didn't look any better in the morning, so it was abandoned on account of "I don't have time to let IRay own the computer any longer!" What I ended up with was --

Raytraced figure added to IRay rendered set: Mog Ruith

Don't get excited: that's the raytraced figure set into the IRay rendered set (images manipulated in Photoshop), because after seven hours the IRay render of the figure was just a blizzard of grain. But on the other hand, the set itself rendered rather nicely, even if if did take seven hours. So I deleted the figure and left it to render just the set alone, and we got this:

It's okay, but it's nowhere near near as high-rez as it should have been, after six or seven hours; and IRay didn't give me a "resume" option, so ... what you see is what you get. Hmm...

I was thinking to myself, "if you were using Reality, you might do better, because you don't need all those pesky shaders," right? And I stumbled into the website for preta3D, the company behind Reality, which was having a special offer on Reality 4.3 -- US$17.48 instead of US$49.99 via the DAZ store. Got it. Installed it. Tested it. WFT? The whole reason I went with Reality was that Version 4.0 was reputed to anything up to 20x faster than Version 2.0, right? So why is it just the same speed as the old version I was using in 2012?! And it turns out, when I dug deep down into the research --

Reality used to fly, up till a very short time ago, when PCs got their new video driver updates, and suddenly the acceleration didn't work anymore. So ... yep, you guessed: Reality 4.3 is as now as slow as 2.0; and that is sloooow. Like this:

Left: Reality render, abandoned after SIX HOURS, at which point it wasn't even 'cooked' as much as a fifteen minute IRay render. I just plain don't have the time to do accommodate thirty-hour renders! And since the Genesis figure was also rendering with zombie eyes (plain white -- check it out at 600x900 and see what I mean there!) even in Reality, I just stopped the render.

So what's the deal with the eyes? I went into the textures and maps and all, and it turns out Studio 4.11 isn't loading a diffuse map on the Genesis 8 base figure's eyeballs. It's that simple. No diffuse map, no detail in the eyes. So my next trick was to scrounge around in the Studio folders, which are somewhat chaotic (Install Manager stuck anything anywhere: Michael 3.0 ended up in the Genesis folder, M4 and V4 disappeared altogether; Genesis 3 base ended up filed with shoes!!!), and I found some diffuse maps for Genesis 3 eyeballs. Soon as I applied a diffuse map to the Genesis 8 cornea, bingo, Genesis 8 suddenly has eyes ... not very good ones (because they're not made to fit), but at least it doesn't look like a Zombie. This suggests to me that proper shaders for the eyes will cure the problem permanently, with betters results --

GP Eyes for Genesis 8, catalog image

Yep, there's another US$20/A$30 ... starting to chuck quite a bit of cash at this already, and the oars aren't even in the water yet! But we'll persevere: one problem at a time. Get the eyes sorted, and get a proper skinmap for the poor boy, and see how we go from there.

Render times are the major issue for me right now. It's dead easy if you just want to stand a model in front of the camera, set up a light and come back in an hour. I can do that. But if you want to render a scene, or a complex set ... better come back tomorrow, or the next day. I peeked into the log file to see what DAZ is doing, and had a major "hmmm" moment. In order to get SPEED out of IRay, you need to be rendering on the NVIDIA card -- and since I have a pretty good middle of the road NVIDIA card, I assumed it would be working. Nope. As good as my card is, it doesn't have the top-end performance and CUDA capacity (look it up) to handle IRay. So it turns out, I'm just rendering on the CPU, and that explains why IRay "owns the computer" while the render is, uh, rendering. Ah, so.

Solution: get a faster NVIDIA card? Sure; but they retail for A$800 - A$2,000 ... it won't be happening for me anytime soon! So I'm going to be a bit restricted in what I can render in IRay (and Reality is way too slow to be feasible). It looks like I can't do large images; and I can't do big, complex sets.

As I began -- I have learned soooo much in the last couple of days! Why things aren't working, and short-term solutions; Reality is installed but shelved; back to IRay, needing shaders and more shaders. But here's some better news: it dawned on me (duh) to go to Ma Google and run a search on 'free IRay shaders,' to see if there's anything out there. And it turns out that wonderful people on DeviantArt are making shaders available to save the lives of people in the same boat as myself! So ... the experiment continues.

Next: a skinmap for Genesis 8. And with any luck, said skinmap will have good eyeball shaders as part of the package! Stay tuned... 😝

Chasing photorealism ... how good is this?

You might remember the "screen test" of the new tweaked design for the vampire Amadeus, which was obviously raytraced five or six months ago. Starting to get some traction with IRay -- not 100% liking it, mind you, but it's what I have, so let's use it! I still can't make IRay 'honor' any bump or displacement map applied to a surface, but --

The problem of the eyes rendering flat white in IRay (and flat black in a raytrace) seems to have gone away by itself. You're waiting for me to tell you how brilliant I was, and how I fixed it. Wish I could, guys! But I closed the eyes to do the Daydreamer render a couple of days ago, and when I opened them again to give the job another shot ... the problem had gone away by itself. Uh ... right. That's a weird one. 😵

But the photorealism of the render of Amadeus is rather good! For comparison purposes, let me give you this:

You'll seed to see that at larger size to get the full impact, but ... very pleased with this.

What's continuing to bug me to death is that I cannot fathom how to get IRay to put a texture into a surface ... and after spending some time on various forums, I'm far from alone in this. People are tearing their hair out with the same problem, glad to say it ain't just me being dense! I'm racking my brains, trying to remember if I had this problem with Reality/LuxRender, and I don't think I did. So this, more than anything else, has 98% convinced me to get the Reality plugin. Also, I like the way you can re-re-reset the lights during the render in Reality; and I like the way you can pause and resume a render in Reality ... you can't do this in IRay. Lastly, IRay is a hog for system resources: once it's going, it owns the whole computer. Is it super fast? Yes and no. Yes, on simple scenes, where you just stand a character in front of the camera, like Amadeus here, and give it an hour. But for a big set, plus character, plus complex lights? Well --

I have something very complex and delicious cooking in the desktop right beside me. I'd wanted to upload it with this post, but three hours later it's still nowhere near done, so it's going to have to wait till tomorrow! It'll also take some painting in Photoshop to save it, because there are noooo textures on the wings. They look like shiny black plastic, and nothing I can do will make any texture appear in IRay! Photoshop will rescue it, but I gotta confess, I'm already very tired of this battle. The whole surfaces/materials/shaders issue in IRay is a major pain and a vast headache. If you want a glimpse, see this, and weep. Or roll your eyes. You think I'm going to be able to remember all that?! Maybe if I was doing this for a living, and/or was 17 years old with that kind of brain. Uh, Reality, I think. Very soon.

Anyway -- watch out for something delicious tomorrow, after it's cooked a lot longer, and after the surfaces have been rescued in Photoshop! It's a re-render of an old raytrace, and you won't believe how it's coming up! One thing I am so pleased about: the way the old figures render. Michael 4 looks brilliant.

Daydreamer ... and this is pretty good!

I call this "Daydreamer" because I've closed his eyes ... there's a reason his eyes are closed: in a raytace, they render flat black, in IRay they render flat white, one looks weird, one looks blind! But having said that ... this is a two hour render in IRay, and this is Genesis 8 with a very few tweaks applied to the body, which are permitted by the rudimentary controls available in the program.

I'm just going to post the one image tonight, and invite you to see it full size (1200 x 1800) and go all over it. It's ... pretty good. I think I have the IRay lights just about worked out, after 4,427 experiments. I did the lighting for this myself, didn't load anything automatic. And I think I might have worked out how to make IRay "honor" the textures in fabric ... those shorts look very real and all the maps on them are my own. Now, if I can just solve the eye problem, I'm down to chucking great gobs of money at hair and costumes!

To cut a long story short (because it's the wee small hours and I'm tired), the uninstall, reinstall of DAZ Studio went fairly well. 80% of problems are solved, and I can just about live with the remainder. So ... oars back in the water?! Maybe! I surely hope so. I've been wrestling with this for over a month now, and it would be wonderful to have it all working properly!

Anyway: Daydreamer. Genesis 8 base figure, two hours in IRay, my lights, my textures on the costume, nothing "out of the box." Not bad at all. There's space for real optimism here! Am very happy with the luminous skin textures on this, and the render is a beaut. 😀

Big decisions -- and tech support

Time for the big decisions: do I start chucking wads of cash at IRay shaders? Or do I buy Reality and run with Reality's built-in materials? So -- an experiment. I've been re-rendering old Reality/Lux renders in IRay to see which I prefer. And I actually like both. Reality/Lux is better for some things, IRay is better for others. I'm seriously yoyoing from one choice to the other, genuinely unable to figure out which to run with...

The only thing I can say for sure is ... I do love the way IRay renders eyes, and I hate the way it ignores any attempt on my behalf to add bump and displacement maps (textures) to, say, fabrics. This render, above -- a double portrait, Leon and Roald against a Terragen background -- was abandoned at the 50% mark ... it could be a lot smoother, if I wanted to wait another hour or so for it to cook, but it already told me everything I needed to know --

Yes, my textures have dropped out on the fabrics (again!) which leaves them looking very flat. No, the old Neftis Hair Salon wigs don't look so good when you see them in extreme closeup in the IRay renders. Yes, Michael 4 renders up very nicely -- but those fabrics are too flat to be worth the extra hour of render time!

Sooo -- this was rendering in Terragen while we watched Thor on dvd:

Yep, the Millennium Falcon, by J. Hoagland, a freebie from Vanishing Point -- very nice! I enjoyed working with this a lot, though it was a toughie to find the model in Studio 4.10, which is so thoroughly stuffed up, it can't even find its own so-called "smart content." In fact --

DAZ tech support just recommended that I uninstall it and reinstall it, and then go in and do some other very specific things with hidden files ... all rather hair-raising. Dave will give me a hand with this tomorrow; we'll see if it makes Studio 4.10 work any better ... or if it simply is as it is! Right now, 4.10 is not really functional: there's no content in it to work with, and I can't see, to get any content into it! Everything I do, I do in Studio 3 and then open the file in 4.10 and fiddle with the renders. But you can't do that forever. Can you? Very strange. And if the reinstall doesn't bring it up to spec, well, this is the only thing tech support was able to come up with!

Ack. So -- wish me luck for tomorrow's "brain surgery" on the system! Just a short post today, but -- more soon, if/when I can get the difficulties sorted! I'm still drooling over the image quality other people can get, and I think I'm in striking range of those results, just not there yet. I did manage to get the Genesis 8 base figure to load, and it renders up fine, with one exception: its eyes are either flat black or flat white. I'm going to guess that this is because I haven't (yet) dropped fifty bucks on skinmaps (characters) which all boil down to (yes) shaders. No proper shaders = no proper results, right? Right. *sigh*

And so to bed. It's midnight, and I'm propping my eyes with my fingers.

Mister Versatility himself -- and a boat! Terragen, Iray, and more...

It's always tempting to see the 3D characters as actors, and if they're actors, they can walk out of one movie and right into another. Hmmm. So --

Yesterday's Conan is today's undercover cop, roughing it in some slum zone, busting the kind of people who sell firearms out of the trunk of a car. Neat! (Just a raytrace, set up to look like a flash photography shot. A closed set, and somene just popped a flash in the dimness. Very effective. Also, am very pleased with the bump mapping on those hands: they look realistically battered, as any adult's hands usually are! Garbage as set dressing is also interesting ... a wheelie bin, an abandoned chair and an old pallet! It was fun overdriving the bump and displacement maps on everything. Very pleased with the floor...)

Say, this is a still from a movie that hasn't been made -- which leads me back to remembering the b&w 8x10 movie stills we used to collect back in the days of yore:

It actually looks very good in monochrome. I might see what Iray can do with this tomorrow --

Speaking of which, I did feed yesterday's Conan into Iray, and came up with this:

The best thing about this render is that floor! IRay also did a great job on the Anubis statue and the ax blade ... but every bump and displacement map dropped out, and nothing, repeat nothing I could do, in this project, would get them back --

That's just the basic diffuse maps on everything; and adding whatever shaders were supplied along with DAZ Studio 4.10 didn't work or help ... and I do not intend to spend several hundred dollars on shaders, and work all day to get a single picture ... not when the shaders are free with Reality 4.0, and they're configures with a single click. Aarrggh. I blew a couple of hours on forums, following a Google search: "bump maps not working in IRay." Uh huh. So I'm not the only one to have this problem? And it turns out that overdriving the bump values is not the solution after all: I tried it on this guy, here, and it didn't work. Back to the drawing board. The forums, incidentally, were (to quote Jack Sparrow, enormously not helpful. Ten people made suggestions which didn't seem to work, then the thread petered out ... in 2016. Every single time, the bottom line with IRay seems to come back to buying shaders, which may or may not even exist (they don't for Michael 4), and if they do, they cost a packet! Ack.

Mind you, this is a fairly good render; it's not quite photographic, because (duh) no shaders are available for M4, and even if they were, I don't have them. But this picture is still trying very hard to be a photograph, which made me wonder...

Yep, a movie still from a film that doesn't actually exist! Nice one.

Also -- soooo pleased with this picture, in Terragen:

Elven Boat at sunset, in Terragen

In that past, I've rendered this boat prop a couple of times in Bryce 7 Pro, and never been very thrilled with the results. It just looked ... flat. Here's the best I was every able to squeeze out of the Bryce engine, with this model and its maps:

Same model, in Bryce 7 Pro. Hmm. 

You'll see what I mean if you take a look, full-size: flat as the proverbial bikkie. Bryce images so often look like tabletop dioramas. So imagine my pleasant surprise when the Elven Boat prop began to render in Terragen, and I saw this coming up...

...whoa! Check out the texture in the wood, and the reflections of the lantern in the water. Now, that is impressive. This is the first time I've rendered something man-made in Terragen, and only the second time I've rendered an OBJ. The other one was a tree, a few days ago. This could get exciting! 😀

Anyway, that's been my day, art-wise. And so to bed, before I go to sleep here and my face hits the keyboard. More soon!

Barbarians sack a fantasy Ancient Egypt ... plus Terragen and wallpaper

The barbarian is back! Conan who? Seriously, I'm just in a mood for Conan, something like a happy cross between Frank Frazetta and Boris and since I've got the biiiig new harddrive I have the space to install loads of 3D models that I bought anything up to four and five years ago, and couldn't install for need of harddrive space. This picture is full of experiments, too...

It's just an old fashioned raytrace out of Studio 3. I might see how this renders up in IRay tomorrow or the next day ... I just didn't have time to mess about in Studio 4.10 today. Studio 3 is so fast by comparison, the fact that the raytrace takes a bit longer means nothing. The job can still be done so quickly, you're done in half the time. Take a look at this big beauty at full size (1200x1800), and see the venous mapping in the torso and arm. Oooooh, nice!

Last night, around midnight, I was messing about with Terragen --

Am delighted with this -- for a start, I was in control of it, LOL, it didn't just "happen." The water is very shallow; that green color is the lake-bed, and I set that surface shader before flooding the terrain! The clouds have bulk and structure. Sooo nice. Almost reminds me of the River Iss segment of John Carter of Mars.

One more thing for you today: another wallpaper at 1920 x 1080 size:

Park that on your desktop, set all your icons off on the right side ... neat! It looks a treat ... you're welcome! Tomorrow, with any luck, let's see what my barbarian looks like in IRay! I do like the new battle-axe; it's part of a collection of antique and historical weapons that's been waiting for installation for about five years! Good gods, where does time go?

More soon! 

The cover model, the Thing ... and the Highlands

Just starting (and I stress that, starting!) to get Studio 4.10 under control ... still messing about with IRay, because still waiting for DAZ Tech Support to help me get get the installation problems squared away, and ... well, I don't know about you, but I can't quite bring myself to put my hand in my pocket for something like $400 for odds and sods, like skinmaps, costumes, hairdos, plus Reality, when I'm not even sure they're going to install properly! So ... here's a whole new Michael 4 character created this afternoon...

That render took about 35 minutes. I could have left it cooking for a lot longer, but this answered pretty much everything I wanted to know about IBL lighting within Studio 4.10. Uh huh. The last thing that's got me scratching my head with the IBL lighting is, how the heck do you get proper shadows?? And yes, I've set a spotlight as well, to try that. And yes, I've been into the tone mapping controls and said, "crush shadows, burn highlights." Hunh. More experiments tomorrow!

This is a quite useful character, and I used this physique in, uh, this:

I wanted to know just how far you might be able to drive Michael 4 in IRay, because I've been looking at book covers ... romance book covers ... and am thinking to myself, "I can do that." Some of those male models you see on the book covers, they are CG, not photos. Michael 4 is almost good enough. Not quite, I think. It's going to take Genesis 3 or 8, or both, to get juuust what we need. Hmmm. So, the best you can get with the old model and the new render engine is this:

...and the truth is, I'm actually quite impressed. With the head cut out of the shot, and the venous mapping worked out, and a looong render to get rid of fireflies and whatnot, you're hard pressed to decide if this is CG or a photo. (This is a crop from the book cover image, just as it rendered, no touch ups or Photoshop work.)

Anyway, that mockup book cover is a 150 minute IRay render of M4, Photoshopped in post, against a Bryce sky, with typography in Serif. It's not bad at all, actually. You'll notice, I got the venous map to show on the model! The trick is this: you overdrive the settings, to the point where, if you raytraced the image on those settings, it would look like this:

And that is just so ghastly, it looks rather like the character in the Marvel movie, what is it? Fantastic Four, is that right? The rock dude. The Thing? I think his name was Ben --

LOL, if you compare poor old Ben there with the overdriven bump map that's necessary to get IRay to show any venous detail at all on the Michael 4 ...! 😱

While messing about with raytraces, I'd already put the book cover model through that process too, for the sake of interest:

The raytrace has its own charm, doesn't it? But what really annoys me is the way the POSE changes when you send the Studio 3 file into Studio 4.10. Look at the angle of his head! Also, the boots and the gnarly trees dropped out in the file transfer ... but I've had a humongous headache today, and couldn't be bothered going through the process of adding them back in. Ack. I leave it to you to figure out which you like better, IRay or raytrace, and I won't blame you if you choose the raytrace!

Last item for today: "Here in the highlands, the Highlands if Scotland," to quote the opening song from Brigadoon --

Terragen ... with a gorgeous sky, lovely water, perfect atmospherics (see the way the distant hills go hazy), and the tree right where I wanted it, LOL! Actually, I blew off about a hour, trying to work out how to add populations of things like grass and small plants, but it's waaay too complex for a day when you're full of pills and occasionally the headache punches right through the fog and slugs you. So we'll call this one done, and will see if we can figure out populations another time! Fortunately, YouTube is full of videos, like this one, and if worst comes to worst, I can always admit defeat and watch the tutorials! ("Instructions? We don't need no steenkeeng instructions!" 😀😁)

More soon...

A poster boy, trees in Terragen, amazing skies, and -- wallpaper!

If he looks familiar, he should! You've seen him in a raytrace, but I was curious to see what IRay could do with Michael 4 and this skinmap. It's actually reasonably good -- tickling the line where you're getting almost photographic results --

Not quite photographic, but not too far from it, and this one pulls every trick that anybody knows on the community forums knows: simple skin shader, photometric lights, loooong render time, high sample rate, whatever. You name it, the technique was invested in this. The face and body were designed by me; the skinmap is SAV Atlas, I've honestly forgotten what the hair is (!) and the only unresolved question here is ... why IRay is utterly ignoring my added bump map. The venous map is on and cranked to ludicrous levels, and it just doesn't show. I must look into this next. Hmm.

If you're interested (and certainly artists among you will be), here, have a look for yourself at the difference between the IRay render and a brand new raytrace out of Studio 4.10:

 
(Sorry about the download time on the above: the picture is very large, to let you see the differences properly. Much more detail in the skin, from IRay; gorgeous venous map in rayrace. Take your pick!

Anyway -- I bit the bullet and shopped a sale at Renderosity. Yay! After an absence of about five YEARS, the server knew me, logged me right in, and -- Flink's Tree was on sale, so I nabbed it quick, while I could save some bucks too. (Sorry, Flink ... I'll send you my dentist's phone number, you can call up and shout at him...)

The pack contains four trees, and here is #1, rendererd by IRay against a backdrop created in Terragen, with a bit of foreground created in Bryce 7 Pro and Studio 3:

Not bad. That's already the most realistic tree I've ever been able to render, LOL -- so I bit another bullet and decided to "go fifteen" with Terragen, and learn how you do this:

Terragen renders: they took about 20 minutes each, and boy, did I learn a lot here. How to import an OBJ into Terragen. How to position it, rotate it, light it, drive the camera around it. Cool! Terragen also gave me the option of importing this tree as a "population," meaning, it's standing by to paint whole hillsides with them and create a forest. That's the next experiment. 😉

Quite happy with those renders. Sure, I know the tree's still not 100%. The leaves are actually about the size of hubcaps, but seriously, what do you want for ten bucks (AUD) for four tree props? You can go to XFrog and pay A$62 for one tree prop. And one day I will. But "this is not that day," nudge, wink.

On the way in from a day in the national park yesterday, the weather changed the sky was amazing. Managed to grab these shots from the front street while Dave unpacked the car ... life imitates art!

Yes, that is the moon in the first shot ... and yes, the weather was changing. A couple of hours later we had thunder and, today, rain!

I'll leave you with a little something for your desktop. 1080 x 1920 wallpaper -- and it looks gorgeous, I promise you! You're welcome...

1080 x 1920 wallpaper

Park him on your desktop, arrange your icons on the right side. Nice! I'll make up more wallpapers as we go ... stand by to download a collection of them. If you have a request, drop me a line!