As promised ... the ancient Greek temple set. Above, you see the result of about an hour's work to configure it for Iray with shaders, because the original textures, maps and materials from 2013 do not work in Iray. They look a treat in an old fashioned raytrace --
-- but those textures, maps and so forth go completely bonkers when you send something to Iray. Have a closer look at this version of the image, both in Iray and raytrace:
This is the Iray version, where the temple is build of various kinds of granites, with marble ornamentation. The OBJ imports cleanly into Studio 4.11, and I worked with the "Stone shaders" pack, which I believe might have come from Renderosity. It's pretty good, actually.
This is a detail shot from the raytrace, with Michael 4 standing in it. Keeper of the Temple. Nice render, all in all ... but I have to say that the work of reskinning it with stone shaders was well worth the time invested.
Now, up to this point I'd been working with the low-poly set, and the low-poly figure (good old M4 himself). So last night I thought, what happens when you add a Genesis 8 figure to this? The experiment was too delicious to refuse, so, rather than doing another long shot, I drove the virtual camera in closer, for a good, close look at the set itself. I also kept the costume as simple as possible. What you have here:
Genesis 8
Dae face and body morphs
Michael 8 skinmap
Varun hair
Cool Style pants
Palladio set
Stone shaders
...and a lot of work to make the set viable in Iray
Here, have a closer look at the figure:
Welll, phooey. The Palladio set must be lower-poly ... and also, I admit, I added a low-poly tree, and a whole lot of shaders; and the Varun hair is probably very high poly. Harrumph. The picture rendered for about six or seven hours, then I spent another two hours painting out unresolved pixels -- or, fireflies, or sparkles, as they're also called. No way would this image finish rendering. Soooo...
Don't laugh. The next experiment (after I've had another cup of tea) is to render the background separately, then stand the figure against that as a backdrop, and do a second render. Sure, I realize, it'll still be five hours of render time -- but at the end of it the picture is done, there won't be swarms of fireflies to paint out. Hmm. Let me think about this. I'd also have to eye-match and hand-paint shadows. I can do that. Takes me back to 2009, the very early days, when I'd always have to hand-paint shadows, because the moment I turned them on, in Studio 3, my poor old computer crashed!
Speaking of backdrops, I used a Terragen render as the sky and horizon line for this -- an image I rendered about six months ago, I think:
I haven't don't a heck of a lot with Terragen in the last couple of months. Been too busy figuring out Studio 4.11 and Iray. I'd love to get back to Terragen, but the truth is, Iray commandeers the computer for so many hours, I run out of time. Duh.
My imagination is full of images, and my wishlists at DAZ and Renderosity are full to busting with about five grand's worth of products, LOL. It'll take years to get the lot, but -- what a hobby! It's all about having fun and and keeping the brain functional which, as we enter our Golden Years, is no mean feat. Ack.