Yes, a new set: Jack Tomalin's Moon Gate -- and it renders up beautifully. "Evening Rendezvous," you ask? Doesn't a rendezvous requite two characters? Uh huh. Yep. And I had the whole thing ready to render when Studio 4 crashed to the desktop. And since I cannot save a file in Studio 4, the whole thing is gone as if it never existed at all. So what you wound up with is one of the characters (the woodland elf wearing the Ferendir skinmap and facial tattoos), who came here to meet someone. He's, uh, still waiting. I'll try again tomorrow to get the second character into the shot, but the thing of it is, two characters + the set + render settings high enough to get a raytrace so gorgeous you can barely tell it apart from an Iray image = way over three hours render time on my machine; and that opens the gate to the same sort of crash. Soooo...
I might render the set separately and use it as a backdrop, which will take eons off the final (difficult) render. Interested along these lines, I did this:
That's a twenty minute raytrace, and it's beautiful -- very, very happy with this. Moon Gate at evening. As I said, the set renders up like a dream. So, how about this:
Now, that one is Iray, and it's a mix of two sets: Jack Tomalin's Moon Gate and Merlin's Wild Borders (all the plants and grasses, the ground and tree. Very nice sunlight; and I used the skydome to light it rather than messing about with spotlights and whatever. Nice result. So --
Same camera angle, processed into night, complete with stars. Before you get excited ... it's a Photoshop job. Yep, I did one in Iray, but I was rather disappointed with the result, after about two hours cooking; so I went back to the sunlight shot, put it into Photoshop and did "day for night," which used to be the old cinematic trick, where the action was supposed to be taking place in the dark, but it was shot in broad daylight and they slapped a filer on the camera. It worked. You can also do it with bucket-filled overlays and blend modes, in minutes in Photoshop ... save the wear and tear on your groaning old PC!
Okay, so my "rendezvous" ended up as one guy waiting at the gate to meet someone, LOL. I'll try again tomorrow, see if I can get Studio 4 to play nice. If it won't, well, damnit, Janet, I'll shove this whole thing into good old Studio 3 (in which I can save a file!!) and although it will take a lot longer to render, and you won't get progressive rendering, at least you'll get a blasted picture, right? Right.
Back soon with, uh, the rendezvous! Hint: Yaoi vibes, anyone...?!
