I got back to Xurge 3D, as intended, and got those extra costumes for Michael 4. This is the Adventuring Leathers -- it renders up beautifully. All I had to do was add a bump map; a displacement map is supplied with the costume, but it's in the TGA format, which DAZ refuses to read. It's too late tonight, and I'm too tired, to track it down and convert it (to the JPG that DAZ is looking for), so I just slapped a generic leather bump map on all the leather, and so forth. This is a very good costume indeed!
Also, I left this one rendering overnight, last night:
Well, I guess there are some things I just can't render ... the satin shader is one of them. After five hours of render time, it was still nowhere near "cooked," so I painted it in Photoshop to get rid of 247,993 unresolved pixels. Ack. Don't expect to see this shader too often before the end of 2020, when I get a computer that's 5x more powerful than this one is ... too much work, painting.
And really, seriously, there's stuff you just can not render with the older computers --
This is the Starcarrier set, which I used for the hangar bay in the NARC images. It looks pretty decent at this size, but it you look at it full size, you'll see that it really isn't anywhere close to "cooked," and this little image was a four hour render! Can't wait for Christmas 2020, and a new computer!
Anyway, we can certainly have a lot of fun along the way ... I actually like the raytraces. They have the feel of artwork. They also take a matter of a few minutes to render, LOL. Anyway -- next thing is, I want to put the Adventuring Leathers into Iray, via a OBJ export/import to get the costume out of Studio 3, and see how it looks with a set of Iray shaders, in Studio 4. I just wish I could find a way to make Studio 4 add a simple diffuse map! Or install 3D assets from third parties -- but it won't; and I tore the directory structures apart till I found out why.
If you've ever tried installing third party content to DAZ Studio 4.x, you'll know it's a terrific crapshoot. Why do some things work, and some don't??? Because some 3D assets have "data" files, .dsf files, which make Studio 4.x recognize what they are ... and some don't. Without those .dsf files, saved to the \data folder, you're sunk. Nothing is going to work. Uh huh. So ... OBJ export and import is the way to share files across the great divide ... and then whack shaders onto everything, because ... if there is a way to make Studio 4.11 add a simple diffuse map, I can't find it! How weird is that?
