So here's the challenge: how do you pour enough light into a scene to simulate full sunlight? And it turns out to be a balance between a skylight set dead overhead (or offset at an angle, if you want more of an afternoon or morning look about the shadows), and an HDRI image set as the Environment, or IBL light. Soooo, I went to HDRI Haven (Google it) and picked an image that looked like it would generate the kind of lighting I wanted, and then just cranked up the settings, higher and higher, in the Environment Pane, until I had it reasonably close -- like an overcast day. Then you make a distant light (a spotlight would have worked just as well), put it high overhead, adjust it to about 500k lumens, turn on shadows. Result -- well, check it out. I did two different virtual exposures on the shot, to be sure...
With a bit of work in the Tone Mapping Pane I was easily able to either burn out the highlights and brighten the subject, or else balance the shot for "outside," and let the subject be darker, which is exactly what you'd get if you were there in person, and taking photos. (The Tone Mapping pane gives you access to ISO, Vignetting, Gamma and Saturation, all of which I use a lot before doing the final render. And of course, with the DOF turned on you get that extra level of realism. This worked out perfectly --woohoo! (The set is The Gate, by DM; the model is Dae for G8 Male; the hair is Varun Hair for G8; and incidentally, the same hairstyle works on the G8 Female. I was just about to do a render using this when Studio announced that it had to "update Genesis 8 Starter Essentials," and launched into a process that is going to take up to sixty hours. This effectively ties up my system, soo... Grr.)
Speaking of hair -- I was going through old renders from my previous foray into Iray and G8, and I stumbled over this. It's Dae again ... but he's wearing a Michael 4 hairstyle, and it looks good on him. This is Neftis's Mon Chevalier Hair for M4. You just load it, jog it into place, parent it, and then tweak it in the Surfaces Pane to make it Iray compatible. It looks great on G8.
That's it for me, for the moment. The computer is slogging slowly through the process. After several hours it's up to a whole, whopping 13%. Oooh, ahh. Patience, Grasshopper.
