Further adventures with Genesis 2 and Victoria 4

 

Iray Render, Photoshop painting

Okay, so having looked at Genesis 3 yesterday, I took a look at Genesis 2 today. Fair to say that you shouldn't actually render the base figure ... which is odd. You can render Michael 4 without a qualm, but Genesis 2 and 3 males load up looking uncomfortably like adolescents; you need to add characters to them, to get anything out of them. (In other words, pay some biiiig money!) I like the look of Michael 5 and 6 -- they fit the Genesis and Genesis 2 base figures respectively; one day, if I'm floating on cash, I might do something with them. They're not running away ... God knows, you can still get everything right back to Michael 3! Anyway, this, above is just the Genesis 2 base figure, which is actually preferable to the version 3, in terms of looking like a man, not a little boy. Then, when you add a character to the base figure -- it comes to life. Here is Michael 5, slapped onto the Genesis base:

...and while we're on the subject, we might as well follow the logic train to the end of the track! So, here is Michael 6, which fits the Genesis 2 base figure:

The weakest link regarding the early figures is the hair. It's no better than it was back in the days when Michael and Victoria 4 were on the cutting edge ... in fact, I don't think the very early toupees for Genesis and Gen 2 were as good as some of the best M4 and V4 toupees. Go figure. Then there's Michael 7 ... which is weirdly not really to my taste ...

...and you see what I mean about the hair being the weakest link, even by the time you get to Mike 7, which fits the Genesis 3 base figure! Soon after this, something went "pop" and 3D hair got very good indeed ... just in time for Genesis 8, Michael 8, and ... here we are:

Michael 8

Now, the next bit of news is that people are starting to talk about -- wait for it! -- Genesis 9. Well, okay. But I still haven't caught up with Genesis 8 yet! I'll have to wait on this. Meanwhile, let's come back down to Earth and look at what we can do in the real world. As I began, I've been exploring the possibilities of the generation 4 figures, largely because most of what I own, as per 3D assets, dates from that era and fits Michal or Victoria 4! So let's see what we can do in Iray...

That's Victoria 4, wearing the Angel skinmap, the Mimi eyes, the Chaos Seed costume with new shaders by Sveva, and a cyclorama in the background. IBL environment lighting, plus one photometric spotlight. The only thing that lets it down (and Genesis mesh would solve this!) is the unrealistic bend in the left elbow. Pretend you don't notice. I set off to design a whole new character this morning, and came up with this. I like this face a lot, so -- expect to see more of her! The eyes were the biggest challenge in this project --

 

Now, I usually opt for eyes from the "Eyes Have It" for M4 and V4 pack, which work marvelously with raytracing. But in Iray they're a disaster ... the sclera (the white of the eye) renders charcoal grey, and so far has resisted every trick I know to correct this. So I tried the Angel eyes, belonging to the skinmap. Worse! Angel renders flat black, iris and sclera alike, and nothing I did could fix this (and I did it all, believe me). In despair, I turned to a skinmap called Mimi for V4, from eons ago, and -- guess what? The eyes just work. Now, I need to get into settings for these eyes, in the surfaces pane, and reverse engineer what's there to fit both the Angel eyes, and The Eyes Have it. But not today -- or tomorrow, in fact. Tomorrow I'm out of here early. Dave's day off, and we're on a road trip. More soon. 

Misadventures with displacement maps and Iray surface parameters

 

Michael 4 in Iray; Elite Lee skinmap

Today I'm revisiting the fourth generation figure -- good old Michael 4 himself. I'm loath to just abandon the figure, because 80% if all the resources I own are for M4, and all the characters I ever designed over ten years are for M4! So the question is, what can be done with Michael 4 today, in Iray? Turns out, you can do quite a lot with the old figure, though it's also a lot of work. The Genesis figures are pretty much "plug and play." With minor exception, they load up ready to render, while M4 takes a whale of a lot of configuring, to make the old materials and maps work well. This, above, is an HD map, Elite Lee, and it renders well in Iray. But when you use a skinmap that's not HD, you work hard...

Michael 4 in Iray; Ferendir skinmap

This, above, is Sixth Sense's Ferendir, which looks fabulous in a raytrace, but looks very, very flat indeed in Iray; I pulled every trick I know to get a halfway decent result out of it, in Iray! You would not believe, would you, that this, below, is the same skinmap, raytraced --

Raytrace, in Studio 3

...and there's one other thing that Iray will absolutely, positively NOT do for you: displacement mapping. Iray utterly ignores displacement maps, which means the easy way to turn on the vascularity (venous mapping ... to throw into relief the veins in the skin) is off the table. So I did a lot of research, and discovered that Iray will recognize a normal map, which is something; and it allowed me to work with a simple prop and get better results:

Normal mapping...

That's not bad: the normal map brought up the bark very nicely. I'm now asking the question, would a normal map bring up the vascularity in Michael 4? I'd have run the experiment today, but I ran out of time (ie., wasted over an hour) when Studio began to jack around, mis-cue and generally be weird. Right out of the blue, after having no problem with lights for weeks, Iray ceased to recognize the light pumped out by a photometric spotlight! I mean, I ended up with a searchlight about a foot away from the dude's face, the preview was glaring with light, but when you clicked "Render," the Iray engine couldn't see the light. The figure rendered flat black! Say, what?!! So I lit the whole this with IBL lights and then painted it in Photoshop, to make the most of a short foray into Genesis 3, and the result is like a storybook illustration:

Genesis 3 ... such a child!

You can tell "something is wrong" with it ... if this was supposed to be photorealistic, it's more of a painting. And Genesis 3, right out of the box, is such a ... a child. That's a little boy, which is not to my taste at all. I imagine you can make something of him by adding character morphs?? Maybe so, but I've trawled the DAZ store, and I can't find any! Hair and costumes, yes, but as for character morphs and skinmaps specifically for G3? Nope. Go figure. So we'll be leaving G3 pretty much alone...

Tomorrow, I'll see if I can figure out what Studio is doing with the lights (not rendering them); and I'll see if normal mapping will make the venous detail appear in M4 ... and I'll have another go to see if I can get a coherent raytrace, and perhaps we can get back to this kind of work -- which is a raytrace, and you can tell that because M4 has the vascularity on and working ...

Raytrace, in Studio 3

Mix and match costumes, shaders and all

Today's experiments were about mixing and matching bits of different costumes and then making them match up though the use of Iray shaders ... it's actually a lot of fun. You don't see it so much on the Rex character, above, because its just the leather jacket (for Genesis 1) and the jeans (for Genesis 3), and the Varun hair (Genesis 8); but when you get into the female character ... well, I'll admit there's a lot more to work with! Here we go --

That's a mixture of four different costumes, all made to match with shaders ... and then we get to the woman herself. That's G8 Female, right out of the box -- wearing Georgia's makeup and eyes, and the Side-part Hair for Genesis 2. (For these images, I'm not beating my brains out with sets and props; these backgrounds are lifted right out of the packs by Sveva -- you can find them on Renderosity. At this moment, I don't have time to run every experiment in the book with lights and shaders, and mess about with setting whole scenes ... besides which, I haven't (yet) got down to the installations! I still have 250+ things to install. And finally, when you set up a huge scene, you blow out your render times.) I played about with it a little bit ...

A tree by Flink, a bunch of other props, a backdrop out of Terragen, Iray lighting to simulate sunset. It's okay ... but the problem with 3D trees is that the leaves are the size of hubcaps or dinner plates. I'm honestly not that impressed with anyone's 3D tree models. Terragen is fine, till you bring in trees, and then unless you can afford the XFrog tres, which only work in Terragen, you're back to the same problem pf hubcap sized leaves, which rob the tree/scene of realism. And the thing that makes me relictant to spend hundreds of bucks on XFrog trees is that since they only work in Terragen, it locks you into working with Terragen -- which, in turn, is a subscription service, if you want to get away from the limitations of the free version. Its not cheap, and I don't have the bucks, in the long term. So, we'll just use backdrops, for the moment, I think! In any case --

Today's experiments were a big success, with one exception. The Wardrobe Wizard that worked so brilliantly yesterday failed today ... and this is weird, because it failed on the same costumed and figures it worked with before. Restarting the software did NOT work ... restarting the computer might, but I don't have the time. So ... another day, for that. So, there you go --

-- the magic of shaders. I like it! More soon. There are eight thousand more experiments to run. And I must get around to installing all those other goodies...

Shaders, Iray, Photoshop, and the Genesis 8 female

So -- the Genesis 8 female, with a character (face morph and skinmap) added. This is not Victoria 8; this is Georgia HD, on special the other day at about $11.50 or so, well worth the investment. This is the Bardot dress, which was free with Studio 4.15, but I changed the fabric for a shader acquired from Renderosity last lear -- Sveva's Shimmer and Shine Satin, I believe it is. This is the Shavonne Hair for Genesis 3 and 8. And this, I like.

I'd been trying to order the Body Morphs for Genesis 8 Female too, but DAZ's shopping cart was veru squirrelly. After five attempts and two rounds of emails from their5 Help Desk, I still couldn't order. Weird. I'll play around with what I have for a while, but from what I'm already seeing, I like it!

More experiments ... this is the old Reparation set, a cenotaph, wearing the Requiescat materials ... and I'd been wondering how (or even if)  it would render in Iray. Very nice indeed. I'm stumbling around in Studio and Iray, relearning a lot of what I seem to have forgotten in a year, and learning a great deal I never knew. Lots of questions remain to be answered, but I'm getting there. Slowly, LOL.

After spending weeks trying to find the tools in Affinity Photo to do things I used to do so easily in Photoshop Elements 9, back in 2010 -- and in Micrographx Picture Publisher, in 1997! -- I discovered that the tools are not actually there. (Boo, hiss, to Serif for taking the tools away that were in their early programs! Why would they do this?) The only solution to the problem was to shell out more cash and buy Photoshop Elements 2021, and then learn a new interface. Safe to say the oars are back in the water; if I had a single grumble with Elements 2021, it's that the interface seems to have been designed for children. It looks juvenile, tinker-toy, while the elements 2009 interface was adult, businesslike and professional. Go figure. I'll get used to it.  So --

-- again, piling in the experiments. Here's about forty things I used to use every day, all rolled into one, a digital abstract based on a picnic we took at Sellicks, on the clifftop, a week or two ago. The big questions were, Can I use my .abr brushes with this version? Yes? How do you install them? There's two or three ways; I might have done it the hard way, but it got done quickly. How to you access them, select them and paint with them? That was more of a challenge, and I only stumbled over the answer, with Dave's help. (If you're going through this, just ask, I'll go into this in detail). So --

This outtake from "First Snows of Winter" shows .abr brushwork (Ron's Magical Snow), and there's also a bunch of painting done on the mane ... and the mane is a CWRW addon, which needs to be manipulated ten different ways to work and look good -- meaning, you better know where the tools are, and how to use them! I think I'm just about caught up! Couple more questions to answer in Studio 4.15 ... how do you get soft(er) shadows on photometric lights??? ... and how do you use dForce for dynamic clothing, hair and props? With those questions asked, I do believe I'll be back where I was years ago, but using the Genesis 8 models and rendering at light speed. Am starting to smile now!

Experiments in Genesis: what's the compatibility with earlier figures and props?

Genesis 8 in NVIDIA Iray

Am spending a week or two back in DAZ Studio, before I start to commit to another writing project, and this really is time to make all the experiments that'll let me catch up quickly. I bowed out back when the Genesis figures were just making their debut, for various reasons, all of them good. The first was, my hardware wouldn't handle Studio 4 The second was, I hated the new interface. But now I have the hardware and the time ... okay. So. First experiment: I'm working with Genesis 8, which is the new generation, but so much of the content was designed for earlier forms. Now, there's a converter running, when you load the hair and costume, so -- can Genesis 8 wear something designed for Genesis 1? The answer is, yes. This is a Genesis 8 figure (mostly designed my me), but the hair on his head, and what he's wearing, were deigned for the original figure. Okay. And yes, Genesis 8 is a vast improvement over Michael 4 ...

Michael 4 in NVIDIA Iray

This is Michael 4, as rendered by NVIDIA Iray. First, yes, you can render the old figures in Iray. They're quite nice; and they're low-poly enough to render fast. But they're also low-poly enough to not quite give you the photographic realism we want today. This is the Jagger skinmap, an almost random face morph -- and the other experiment I'm running here is, "Can I install my old Renderosity content into studio 4.15, AND find it, AND have it be fully functional?" Answer, yes. The hair on M4's head is Akaste Hair, from Renderosity. You just have to know where to look for the old stuff in the content menus! Studio likes to hide things away. Renderosity content is most often Poser content, so, by and large, you find it in Poser Formats > My DAZ 3D Library ... and here's the kicker: Michael 4 himself, the base figure, is hidden away there. Took me a week to find it, at the outset! You really have to get the hang of this. So, if this is Michael 4, what about the old Victoria 4?

Victoria 4.2 in NVIDIA Iray

Yes, I know, I haven't done nearly as much with Victoria 4 has with Michael 4 ... one of the reasons was that 90% of everything features the female models (still true today; have a look at 3D art, and it's rare to see a male, and far more rare that the male will not be old, ugly, or a cartoon. It's almost as if artists are worried about being categorized as gay if they should render beautiful men! Meh). This, above, was done in Iray about eighteen months ago, before computer problems caused me to put art away for almost a whole year, till I could get a new system. Compare Victoria 4.2 with...

Genesis 1 in NVIDIA Iray

That's the original Genesis figure, Genesis 1. There's not a wealth of visible difference between this and Victoria; in fact, many times, Victoria looked better. There, I've said it. There was a ton of room for improvement with the original Genesis, and it didn't take them long to come out with Genesis 2 --

Genesis 2 in NVIDIA Iray

That's Genesis 2, rendered in Iray; and we're starting to get into the ballpark now. I've been installing and cataloging content for the past week, and have stumbled over tons of Genesis 1,2,3 content that was packaged along with DAZ Studio. The quality isn't startling, but it's enough to give you a feel for the model and props. Before Genesis 3, I was more impressed with the render engine than with the figures! And of course I entered the field again when Genesis 8 was new ... 8.1 is out now, with improved mesh; but I doubt you could see any difference unless you were animating, which I'm not! But since we started with a Genesis 8 male, let's end this look at the figures with the Genesis 8 female:

Now we're' cooking! I can work with this ... in fact, I promptly went to DAZ and tried to buy the body morphs for Genesis 8 female, and a character (skinmap and morphs), but there's some kind of error going on, server-side. It won't let me pay. Hunh?? So that'll have to wait for another day. More soon.

 

A boy and his horse

This one is a combination of so many elements. The guy is Genesis 8, with a face and body form designed my me, and he's wearing the Dae skinmap, with the venous map turned on. So far, so good. Now, the horse ... I don't (yet) have the HiveWire horse, but the Millennium Horse is rendering up quite well, and it's also compatible enough with Studio 4 that you can pose it along with a Genesis 8 figure, and it looks okay, except for the mane and tail, which are (not to put too fine a point on it) crap. But wait, there's more -- 

Having rendered the horse with the mane and tail turned OFF, the next step is to paint the mane in. Now, I would love to tell you I hand painted this from scratch, but it's be a barefaced lie (and you know me better than that, LOL. No, no, this is the old CWRW Manes and Tails Pack Volume 1. which is 2D and manipulable in Photoshop, or Krita, or Affinity Photo (and since I can no longer use Photoshop, I did this pic in both Krita and Affinity, bouncing the image back and forth via the Windows clipboard, since neither program, on its own, has the functionality to do what I need. Ack).

The effect is quite nice, though nowhere near photographic. We'll shoot for photographic later, when/if we upgrade to the HiveWire Horse. For the moment, I'm happy to work with the old Manes and Tails packs by CWRW; if nothing else, they give be fantastic practice at using the new paint programs. I've already learned a lot. I was hunting around for the "skew" controls, and couldn't find them ... found out that this has been replaced by something immeasurably better: the Mesh Warp Tool. Woooow. Okay, so there's one big thing I've learned LOL ... and I'm happy enough using CWRW's packs of 2D add-ons, I might even treat myself to Manes and Tales 2 and 3, and perhaps even the poses and some new skinmaps for the old horse! If you're interested, they're at Renderosity; just get into the marketplace and search on "CWRW." The thing I like most about the Millennium Horse is, it still renders well in Iray, yet it's so low-poly, it renders fast. Meanwhile --

-- DAZ has upgraded to the Horse 2, which actually renders up much better than the MilHorse. But it's expensive ... As in, forty bucks for the figure, and not much in the way of skinmaps and morphs. If you want to morph this guy into a Frisian and Clydesdale, you have a problem. The starter bundle is a bit better, for $70 ... still few morphs or skinmaps, but you do get a swag of tack and add-ons. Hmm. I have to decide if I want to go with the DAZ product, or the HiveWire product ... and it's no easy decision to make! So...

The backgrounding for this piece is another 2D resource, one of the 2D/3D backgrounds which are produced by the raft by Sveva, and also available at Renderosity for around $10 per pack. So I took my cue from the 2D background, when I came to design the Iray lights for this one. (He's wearing the Landis Hair for G8.) And the last hurdle to be fallen over was finding a way to make Photoshop brushes work in Krita ... easy answer: they really don't. You can import them, but all the import gives you is the "tip," or raster image from which the brush was created. In other words, if you have about 2,000 .ABR brushes (which I have), you'd have to import the tips into Krita and then make the brush presets for 2,000 brushes. Uh, no. Thanks, but no. Too much work. So, if I'm going to switch to Krita 100% for painting, I need to get the brushes to do it with, right? Right. The hunt is on ... and I think it's going to start here. But not today -- it's so hot! It's 40C in the carport, and the a/c is struggling, so ... signing off for now. 

Face morphs and Iray lights

Today's experiment ... start with the Genesis 8 base figure, then mix and match skinmaps and eye maps, create a new face -- and not a "perfect" face that looks like it just walked out of a magazine; a "real" face that you could meet on the street, please. And then set up the Iray lights to make a render really pop. By George, I think I've got this. I've got the lights figured out! So, what's the resolution like on the Genesis 8 figure? Meaning, how close can you get to it, before you start to see the polyons? That used to be a big issue with the generation 4 figures. As much as I really do like Michael 4, you had to be so careful about getting to close. So, let's have a look...

I'm impressed. That's pretty much the raw render; all I did was give the gamma a little tweak in Irfanview after it finished, and the rest is "just as it comes." The eyes are in shadow, so they're a little dark; I thought, what happens if you brighten up the shot, and get in really close, will it still hang together? You'll probably have to see this at large size to get a good idea of the resolution of the skinmap and geometry; I uploaded this at 1000w ...

And I'm actually pretty impressed with Genesis 8 at this level. Now I need to get in there and design some faces that appeal to me, LOL, because, by and large, the stock characters just don't. That'll be the next thing we do, I think! Well, that and starting to install the 270+ items from Renderosity, and making up a catalog of my DAZ "assets -- because it is utterly impossible to find anything in the new "improved" content menu/window system. It's beyond hopeless. If you don't know exactly what you want, and exactly what it's called, you will not find it. And if you should happen to have about 600 items in your collection... uh huh. (I've even doing this for over ten years, so yes, I do have a lot of 3D gear.) So -- looking forward to tomorrow's project! 

The black horse returns, and not without drama!

Spent the whole afternoon on this piece, finding out what Affinity Photo won't do, as well as what it will, LOL. There's a few things it just doesn't seem to do -- or am I missing something?? Good thing I know how to paint, and have a tablet, because a couple of the things I'd counted on being easy turned out to be impossible. Anyway -- done. And now I'm exhausted, and looking for dinner. (First thing I has to do was go to DAZ and buy the Millennium Horse!

This is a new one on me. I've been rendering it for ten years and more ... obviously it was free with Studio 3, waaay back when, so I never bought it. Never had to. Well, the Mil Horse ain't free anymore, so when I installed Studio 4 on the new computer, all the tonne of horse stuff I had bought installed, but no base figure! Ack. Anyway, $15 solved that problem, and here we are. 

 

This is a render out of Studio 4, passed into Affinity Photo to be painted ... next time I paint, I might have a bash at painting in Krita instead, because Affinity isn't nearly as friendly toward painting as the old Photoshop was. I rendered the old Millennium Horse without the mane and tail, and added those separately. I also hand-painted the shadows, because this is a backdrop, not a set ... and set up this way, the old low-poly figure rendered in seconds, even at max quality in Iray. That pleased me greatly! The adventure continues...

IBL and Photometric lighting -- which, or both?

 

IBL and Photometric lights

Today's experiment was to work out the best way to light a set. In the olden days (ha!) of raytracing, you were always working around the old tried and true method of "key, fill and back" lighting, which basically meant that if you had three lights on any one thing, the scene would "pop," and if that didn't work well enough, you added a "bounce" light to simulate light reflecting off the floor/ground, or whatever shiny surface. Then came unbiased rendering, environment lighting, and ... okay, how does this work now? So --

Photometric light only

In the top render, that's a combination of an HDR image used to light the scene, using Image Based Lighting (which is controlled from Studio's Environment menu, inside the Render Settlings pane. This thingamajig here:

I can't show you exactly where on the screen it'll be, because the interface is free to float, you can park the panes anywhere. But if you know where to find your RENDER SETTINGS, click on ENVIRONMENT, then look for the thumbnail pic of the default image. Don't use the default. The results are just not that good. You need some genuine HDR (High Dynamic Range) image that suits your project ... and there's a great free place to get them -- problem solved, give this a shot:

So I used their image of an artificially lit factory floor, and with only the HDR image set to generate the lighting, I came up with this:

IBL (Environment) lighting only

To get that effect, I had to crank the settings to Environment Intensity = 10, Environment Map =10, and Lighting Resolution = 2000 (all parameters to be set inside the aforementioned Environment menu). It's actually great, but a bit flat. I might have wanted more dynamic shadows??? So the idea was to look closely at where the soft shadows are falling in that image, and create a spotlight ... look through the light while positioning it, to make sure its angle matches the fall of shadows in the IBL-only render, and then (!) crank the Luminous Flux to 5,000,000, plus 100% on the blue end of the scale, to simulate daylight --

Result -- nice! And (which is just as good) I'm 100% in control of what's happening. Put another way, Studio isn't taking m for a ride, I'm driving! Then, out into my favorite Irfanview to give the render a few dramatic tweaks, just in case we want an astonishing image...

Okay. This was a success, and I learned a lot. Also, the new computer handled this fairly easily; with maximum render settings pumped into the first of these renders, it was about 25 minutes, and that way way more render time than it actually needed. I scaled back the settings for other renders, and the time was more like 15 minutes from "go" to "cooked." (test renders at 600 pixels wide, an minimal settlings, were about two minutes.) Neat!

Now we're cooking!

Now we're cooking. Shaders, lights, the works. I'd been a bit worried that the interface was going to confound me, but it's feeling reasonably good in a day. This one isn't even touched up, just the raw render -- five minutes in Iray. Two big challenges are ahead: one is to get 280+ objects installed into Studio, and since they're third party, they have to be installed manually. Ouch! The second thing is, working out where the DAZ auto-installer has put everything. Right now, I can't find anything! Props, costumes, poses, textures ... I imagine it's all there, but the old Studio 3 content seems to be exploded in every direction, without rhyme or reason. Finding it all, and getting it cataloged for ease of access -- now, that will be the job.

The other thing I find myself extremely interested in is post work, and rebalancing images to turn one picture into another. This is something I've barely looked at in he past, but it's fascinating -- like this, above. This, below, was a nice but "ordinary" photo; some post work in Affinity Photo, and it's considerably more interesting...

This is going to be a lot of fun!