Genesis 8 (the Dae character wearing Varun hair, in fact), standing in the old Reparation set -- which renders up well in Iray, by some complete fluke. Half the time, the old materials don't work in Iray; and half the time they do. Curiouser and curiouser. Anyway, this was Take One on an idea I've been pursuing for a couple of days --
Very nice render quality on that -- but the strength of the image is in the lighting and camera settings; and those I did in Studio 3 (!) before sending the whole thing over to Studio 4. In fact, I designed and built this set, lighting and camera around a scene using Xurge 3D's Medieval Royalty costume, on Michael 4 ...
Again, that's a heck of a nice render -- it's "just" a Studio 3 raytrace, because ... well, the guys at Xurge are not joking when they warn you, their costumes are optimized for Poser and may not work in DAZ Studio. Some do, some don't; and this one really doesn't. It took about an hour of working around and around it, to come up with a compromise, where the costume might not look as if would in Poser, but at least it looks terrific.
Borrowing a catalog image from Xurge, this is what it ought to look like:
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| Catalog image. See this. |
...in another hour I might have got it, but I'd had enough of fiddling about, for a couple of reasons. The best I was going to get was a Studio 3 render on this, because in Studio 4 it would have to be reconfigured all over again ... and I can't save a file out of Studio 4, so any work I put into renders on that platform is ephemeral: one shot. Soooo -- I decided to call it right here and be satisfied...
Well, okay, not quite. Just for fun (ha!) I let Iray have a go at rendering this same costume, and the results are idiotic. Laughable. I actually spent another half hour trying to get Iray to "shake hands" with this costume, and it utterly refused, so -- stuff it.
The set rendered beautifully, though, so I left the set, camera and lights just as they were, deleted the Michael 4 and put in a Genesis 8 in his place ... which is where you came in, today!
The last image for this post is left over from yesterday. I didn't get to an upload because I had the headache from hell, but I did finish out the work with Xurge's Druid Shaman costume...
Now, that's a Studio 4 raytrace, with progressive rendering turned on and all the settings cranked up till it took about half an hour to render. Oh, yeah ...
I actually find myself wondering if Iray can make sense of this costume??? No way to tell, without trying it! I'll come back to this in a few days. I have a couple of things to render while they're burning in my imagination, so we'll set this one aside for a little while and come back to it.
Also, I treated myself to some new toys from Renderosity right before I came up with the aforementioned headache from hell. I'd love to get them installed tomorrow. So -- more soon!
