When all else fails -- shaders!

 

Very seldom does something defeat me, but this did. The assignment was to reconfigure the Xurge3D Medieval Royalty costume for Iray. It shouldn't have been difficult, much less impossible. It's designed for Poser, but in a raytrace it looks very good in Studio --

I did that back in 2019, in Studio 4.12, albeit as a raytrace; so I know what it's supposed to look like! I tried everything. I mean -- everything. No joy. So in the end, what can you do?

I hit three different shader packs for this: one of the leathers, one for the fabric, one for the metal. Some things are destined to give you an afternoon-long fight, and in the end, you wind up what you could have done in the first place, in ten minutes! Next was to install an old set, DM's The Lair --

-- and this also was a tussle. What you don't realise in a raytrace is that this set is HUGE. It's like trying to illuminate a soccer pitch! Anyway. I did get it sorted in the end, and learned a thing or two while I was at it. Next ... merge the Michael 4 in costume into it:

You'll need to see that at full size to see the details, they're not going to come out in the small-size that can be accommodated on the page here, but I uploaded it large. I'm not unhappy with the render, but it's nowhere near as dramatic as it ought to have been, and the more I messed about with the lights, the more drab and confused it became. Hmm. In the end I settled for this, which isn't bad, and I'll come back to the project later. Well, fiddlesticks. Some days, it's just not going to go according to plan! 

In a mood for fantasy!

One thing about working with Genesis ... you never have to worry about the mesh crumpling! After working so long and hard to fix the M4 Stone figure (actually, his face), I needed a couple of days' respite from wrestling with that problem! So I went right back to Genesis, and did this the easy way. Actually, there's an experiment going on in these pictures. At this late, late date, I'm actually getting to grips with the dForce engine, which takes a costume and makes it fit and drape properly. I've avoided dForce items till now, because a) I have little experience with how to use the engine, and b) the couple of times when I did run it, it took sooooo long to drape the costume, even before one could start the render. These, above, were not so bad, which inspires me to experiment further. And...

This was actually a quickie this morning. It took no time at all, because that only looks like a set. In fact, it's just a backdrop and a couple of foreground bushes, and an HDRI light. The dress is resurfaced with a silk shader ... and (yay!) I have definitely cracked how to install Renderosity content into Studio 4.15. Phew. Now I can shop my favourite store without fear, for Genesis stuff. The old DAZ and Poser content was never any problem --

This is a V4 designed for Poser ... SASE's Nicole, bought in a sale at Renderosity yesterday, along with two other V4's. Installation is a breeze, and as soon as the skinmaps have been run through the Iray converter for Gen 4, they render beautifully. (Also lit entirely with an HDRI.) Call me nuts in this day and age of Genesis everything, but I'm having a flirtation with the Gen 4 characters. They are definitely a challenge, but they look ... different --

-- not to mention that a heck of a lot of stuff that was designed for Generation 4 hasn't been updated for Genesis. Even now, 85% of everything I own is for the G4 figures, and short of dropping about two grand on 3D shopping ...! So it's a good thing I like working with Michael and Victoria 4.   

The boys are back in town!

 

Well, that was a marathon, but I did it! Safe to say, the boys are back in town -- meaning, I have working Jarrat abnd Stone models that are viable in Iray, so we can be seeing them as they've never looked before. But if I thought I'd had problems getting Jarrat "out of storage," Stone turned into a nightmare. Oddly enough, the character preset applied properly, and in preview it looked fine ... but as soon as I saw the render, I groaned. This is the same character preset as renders perfectly as a raytrace, and even LuxRender (Reality) was kind to it -- in Iray, you see immediately, the mesh on the brow line has crumpled, collapsed, whatever you want to term it. If I didn't get in there and uncrumple it, I'd have to paint out the crumpled mesh every single time I rendered Stoney. Yee-ouch. Sooo...

Basically, I've managed to resurrect about 95% of the character. The brow line in "Stoney 2.0" isn't the same, and can't be, because those morphs -- applied legitimately with Morphs++  -- cause the mesh to buckle and look baaad in Iray. Harrumph. But 95% is pretty good, and I'd happy. That's still Stoney as we remember him from years ago, and much closer to photorealism. Now, you're never going to get 100% photorealistic renders from the Generation 4 figures ... there's just not enough polygons in the old mesh, end of statement. But these guys now look at least as good as the figure work we saw in Final Fantasy II The Spirits Within, and we were gobsmacked --

-- it's up to me, now, to light, pose and render them in a way that does the figures justice. And even though they're Gen 4 figures, I can do that. Here's a case in point --

No, that is not a Genesis figure. That's old Victoria 4.2, albeit wearing Genesis 3 hair, which illustrates perfectly what you can do with the old figures, if you're smart, and careful. (In fact, the only thing I don't like about the Stone model is the way Neftis's GQ Event Hair renders in Iray. I do have another hairdo which I can try on Stoney, and we'll see if it renders well without changing the way he looks too much (or, if it does change him, it's an acceptable change). If that doesn't work out, I'll try some Genesis 3 hair on him ... but if Stoney ends up wearing G3 hair, it means Jarrat will have to get the upgrade too, because if they're posed together, the old hair will really be noticeable. We'll have to see. Also...

That's a re-render of something I did in Bryce 7 Pro back in 2014, and it's another case in point. The old Bryce picture was good, and a great idea, but the Iray render is far, far better, and illustrates what can be done with sheer cleverness, opacity maps, tone mapping, photometric lights, shaders, whatever. So, take this degree of sophistication and apply it to the Gen 4 figures. Yeah. Let's do this. One area in which the Gen 4 figures way outperform Genesis is in the render times. You can render a whole crowd of Michaels and Victorias without choking your graphics card (GPU); or render one of them at high-rez and large size in under five minutes. Try that with Genesis. Ahem.

Stay tuned!

How good is Michael 4, even now? Takes a bit extra work, but --

 

I'm going to be honest. I enjoy working with Michael 4 a lot. Genesis makes everything easy, but the Generation 4 figures, especially M4, are so rewarding. Also, 80% of everything I own in terms of assets was designed for Gen 4, so even now the Genesis figures are somewhat restricted. Assets such as wardrobe and hair are expensive, and I don't have the bucks to buy everything all over again -- even if the really cool stuff that was designed for M4 had been re-jigged for G3 or G8, but it hasn't! The fact is, some really good shaders will get the oars back into the water with most of the old props; and these images, today, are shader-heavy. So --

How good is Michael 4, even now?! This one, above, I call "Last Stand," and this was a massive experiment in lighting. Genuine daylight was achieved with the environment lights but not with an IBL image. I used the Sun And Sky Only option, which lets you set the time of day, sun position and brightness. Now, this could be brighter and more contrasty --

-- which might be more in keeping with a photograph, but frankly, I prefer the richer, more colour saturated version. Either way, it's true daylight! I'll enjoy playing with this trick of Sun and Sky Only again! One more interesting thing --

I've reprocessed this as a movie still. That is so neat! I ought to do more in monochrome. It can produce some startling results. That's all from me for today ... my head is full of ideas, but tomorrow is a day off, so I'll be back in a couple of days!

"Brokering a deal" ... too many visible polygons!

 

Call this one "Brokering a Deal." Two Michael 4s, and I couldn't be happier with this render (see it full sized, please). On the left, that's the serendipitous new character who just appeared spontaneously, when Studio 4 mis-read the character preset file for Jarrat; I called him Kurt. Now, today's experiment was to see what we can get from the HD skinmap for Michael 4...

Sooo, he's wearing a new face and custom body form, designed quickly in Morphs++, and that's the HD M4 skinmap plus the Iray Converter for Generation 4; and the result is dandy except for the sheer number of polygons visible in the M4 figure, after rendering in Iray --

-- and the left shoulder has a major problem too. Now, sure, you can paint them out, and I've done it in the past (ran into this problem for the first time in LuxRender, long ago), but that's a lot of painting, and frankly, I couldn't be bothered. So a put a jacket on him, LOL. If there was one reason for using the Genesis figures rather than the Generation 4 characters, this would be it. Iray can really, really show up the polygons! And speaking of Genesis --

"Personal Demons" ... a half-hour quickie because I had time to kill last night. And it goes to prove that viewers relate more to human figures than to other kinds of images; and female characters get more response than male. I slaved for about three hours to complete the industrial site render yesterday, and it's going largely unnoticed at the DAZ Creative Art and Renderosity groups on Facebook; but this one romped its way into double-figures at Renderosity, when in fact it only took a few minutes to put together and fifteen minutes to render. (Incidentally, if you can get into double figures, you're doing well. Hunh. Go figure.) I like the new M4 character a lot. Call him Simon, I think. And he also is wearing Genesis 3 hair ... it works on Michael 4! 

Not quite Tattooine!

 

There's a story going on here, and it's quite a good one. This young lad -- "working glass hero" -- signed on for a job on one of the new agricultural colonies. He's from a farm background back home on Earth, and figured, make a new start on a new world, onward and upward; a farm's a farm, right? And he'd have been onto a good thing, if the deal had turned out the way it was advertised. The problem is --

View at large size, please!

When you get where you're going, and there's no way home, it turns into this. It's not a farm, it's a mining colony. It's all dark and dust, corrosive chemistry and space armour, not quite the life a farm kid would have wanted. And the mining company running this scam knows they're safe to do it, because they control the colony transmitters, there's no way to get a message out, and nowhere to run to --

Even if you can get away from the mines for a while, the planet is hostile, with bad atmosphere, massive storms and all around desolation. Now, what's a likely lad from a farm community supposed to do? The company offers a deal: do this job for five years, and you get your ticket -- onward, not home. It's passage to a new colony, the real deal, which you've actually earned with five years of hard labour. The question is, does one believe this story? Because it sounds like the carrot and stick. They promise you this to get the work out of you, but the next colony on down the line could easily be just another hellhole like this one, and it starts again ... or is that cryogen casket with your name on it merely a coffin, and you're jettisoned in the outer system, when the colonial mover ships out? Hmmm. So --

Here's our hero -- working class hero, if you like -- stuck between the proverbial rock and a hard place. But of course there's a rebellion brewing against the company in the workers' camps. The plan? Take control of the colonial mover, when the next one is in, and make it to the next colony, see what the deal actually is, and at the same time, transmit to Earth and make sure the news services carry this story, warning migrants that it's a scam. Oh, and don't get caught, because if you do, the company can execute you, within the law!

(That's Yoni for G8M, wearing Dax hair, as our hero. That's Station 3000 and the Powercargo sky tug, in the industrial site, four Michael 4 figures added, wearing the Xurge3D ATES Armour. Pretty neat ... not a bad story at all!)

Serendipity! Okay, call him Curt ... and fitting Genesis 3 hair to Michael 4 -- easy.

A few very minor adjustments to his nose (which I thought was too large), and here he is, in his own photo shoot. Talk about serendipity! If you haven't been following this -- "the story so far." Wanting to break Jarrat and Stone out of storage (you know -- from Mel Keegan's NARC, nudge, wink), I loaded up a Michael 4 and applied the Jarrat character preset. If this were Studio 3, it would have worked, but in Studio 4, I didn't get Jarrat at all; I got a whole new character, s Studio 4.15 interpreted the preset, got it wrong, and produced...

And I like what I'm seeing -- a lot. This is a beautiful new character, and he wears the Genesis 3 hair as if it were made for M4. Okay -- let me write a little about how to fit the G3 hair to M4, because I suspect a number of people will be trying to do it, and it can be extremely fiddly.

• Load your M4 figure in the 0 position, meaning 0 valued on every transformation parameter. Unselect the figure. Load the hair into the scene without anything being selected. It loads also on the 0 position, just too low to fit the M4 -- meaning, if you jog it up till it looks good, the scalp cap will fit. You might need to jog the z (back/forward) parameter to make sure the back of the head is well covered; when it is, the hairline should be right. Do this in the Perspective view, so that you can swing the scene around easily without moving the M4 at all. Lastly, in the scene menu, select the hair prop and drag it upward throug the list till you can drop it onto the M4 'head' list item. This will parent it to M4, and now you can adjust the styling and colour to your heart's content. For the best fit, use Genesis 3 hair on Michael 4 or Victoria 4.2 ... and enjoy!

And we call him Curt because Mel Keegan has just given this face and body form the nod ... this is Curt Gable, the Athena's Third Officer, soon to move upwards through the ranks as the series develops! Very neat indeed!

Second major thing fixed today:

Yep, the problem with the visor on the HAAS Armor helmet, by Xurge3D, was caused by an opacity map which Studio was reading incorrectly (it was original configured for the Firefly engine, in Poser, maybe ten years ago). Basically, I just deleted the opacity map from the "Cutout Opacity" channel in the Surfaces pane. Now, if I want a semi-opaque visor, I can either drag the slider to 75% or whatever, or else apply a glass shader. Great -- with this problem answered. I can load the rest of the Xurge3D content without a qualm. 

Hello, beautiful ... but not what I expected! And breaking the armour out of storage...

 

First, the good stuff: the Xurge3D armour installs smoothly, loads perfectly, resurfaces easily, and renders beautifully in Iray. "Mirror black armor," all that kevlex-titanium ... sound familiar? Look familiar? It should! Sooo, I was inspired to break Jarrat and Stone out of storage along with the armour, and things didn't go quite as smoothly -- more on that in a second! The HAAS amour itself is great, with one exception, a problem I couldn't solve today. I'll take another crack at it tomorrow. In Studio 4.15, the helmet visor is ... missing. Yup, gone, not there. Say, what? Now, we know this suit has a great visor. This is the raytrace done for Event Horizon a few years ago --

Same armour, just different configuration and surfacing. Check out the helmet visor -- all present and correct in Studio 3. But in Studio 4.15, the exact same prop loads without the visor. It'll have something to do with incompatible opacity masks or some damned thing. I'll need a couple of hours and a clear head to work this out. Hmmm. Tomorrow. So, getting past that, I left out the helmet and thought, I'll render Jarrat wearing the hardsuit with the helmet off, right? So --

I go to my folder of Character Presets, load a Michael 4, merge the preset onto it, and I get --

-- somebody else entirely! I mean, he's beautiful, and renders marvellously from every angle; and he's wearing the Varun Hair for Genesis 3 as if it were made for him. But that ain't our Raven 9.4, not by a long shot. The last time you saw Jarrat and Stone in fresh renders was 2019, and this one here might have been it --

Well, there's another Bermuda Triangle style mystery. Though some sorcery and alchemy involving two computers, two versions of Studio and some old project files, I was able to get out Captain Jarrat back (phew!) ... now this was what I'd been expecting, and it's well worth seeing at full size:

So I was able to recover Jarrat, and had a chance to play with a great cotton shader by TwiztedMetal, for the tank top, and re-re-reworked the Mon Chevalier hair, which suits this character so much (and which renders well in Iray, if you just change the lighting model to matte!). Tomorrow, I'll see about working out the problem with the helmet visor; and if I can't, I'll figure a way to either make something to fit the helmet and do the job, or else work out a way to paint it in Photoshop -- which I do not want to do, because it turns into a major painting assignment every time the armour is rendered. Argh.

In the meantime, we got Jarrat (as I said, phew!), and we also scored a new and very attractive character, which I like a lot! Serendipity, I guess. Tomorrow, helmet or no helmet, I'll try from Stoney. Stay tuned. 

Ruins in the dying light -- and browsing for a new leading man.

Here's an unexpected pleasure! The sale at Renderosity never stops, and since there's been a few things I've wanted (can't actually say "needed") for a while, I decided to take a look. This is AppleJack's Ruined Church, and it renders brilliantly. I added some skies photographed in the Flinders Ranges last week (where the sky is overwhelming, and gets very dramatic several times a day), and then got clever with IBL lighting, actually using the same images for backdrops and lighting. In this one, above, I added a hugely bright, warm spotlight, angled off to represent the lowering sun, and two copies of Merlin's crow, from the Wild Borders set.

The Ruined Church set may be old, and low-poly enough to render like lightning, but the finished result is more than good enough to feature on a book cover, for example -- and with careful lighting and camera work, it can be indistinguishable from reality. Neat! Very glad I shopped this sale! I also got a boat and a bridge, and you'll see more of all this in days to come. 

Next thing on my list of gotta-have items is this:

https://www.daz3d.com/michael-4-for-genesis-2-male

Rather speaks for itself, doesn't it? Basically, you can dial the exact-same body morphology for M4 into the Genesis 2 Male, which means that all your costumes and skinmaps will work. What won't work, of course, is the Morphs++ for M4; and you lose the head morphs. So the old characters (Jarrat and Stone, Leon, Sebastian, Amadeus, the list goes on) will be much, much harder to resurrect in the high-poly figure; though I wonder if it might be possible to go a step further. For US$50 there's a face transfer system, whereby you put in a clear full-face image, and it drops it onto the Genesis 8 ... mind you, not the Genesis 2! So there's a major compatibility clash, and to date no one has offered to resolve this. Hmm. US$50 is a a lot, but supposing Jarrat and Stone and the rest leapt into being as Genesis 8 characters. Lemme think about this. You have to wonder if there aren't better ways to go ... do what Hollywood does, and "recast" the parts. Try this for size:

See that full-sized, please ... I uploaded it large. This is Ragnar for Gianni 7, for Genesis 3 Male, by GypsyAngel, who also designed the Rex and Dae characters I use so much. Hmm. I really go need to think this through before I run hither and thither, chucking $$$ in every direction! Gianni 7 bundle for $90, and the GM3 Body morphs for $20, and Ragnar for $20. You're out US$130, but see where you are at the end of that spend! Huh.

See where your imagination goes, on a lazy Sunday afternoon?!

A little SF and fantasy ... why not?

 

Generation 4

Genesis 8

Six months after the new PC was installed (yes, it really has been that long!) I'm getting around to installing the Xurge 3D content. Started with the Druid Shaman wardrobe props, which have a really cool "Green Man" mask, which I love. They're designed for Poser, and when they land in Iray they tend to look verrrrry flat indeed, even with the Uber shader applied (which you should do immediately that you import anything to the workspace that wasn't designed for Iray. So... 

The trick is to dive into the Surfaces pane and dial up, or down, the values here and there. To test this, I exchanged half of the metal surfaces on the Shaman costume for MEC4D shaders, then dialled up the metallicity on the others ... both look grand. We'll call this piece "Mistletoe Dawn." 

(If you try to do this and don't see the metallicity slider for the surface you want to adjust, select that specific surface in the Surfaces pane, and apply the Uber shader to it a second time --

-- then look back at the item in the Surfaces pane. Click the carrot beside the item in the menu, drop down the sub-items. Choose General --

-- the metallicity slider will be there this time, absolutely guaranteed. This is also 80% of the trick of turning any surface in the scene into a light source. The Uber shader makes available suites of new parameters you can fiddle with; you just have to have the guts to dive into the Surfaces pane, LOL.)

The second piece is "Back in the Hangar," which is a return to a project I did a month or so ago. G8F wears the Hadron Suit, which I've resurfaced in car paint shaders (!), and I re-did the Thunderbike in a new colour (again, car paint), and stood the pair of them in the Level 19 set, then got clever with the light. I have a soft blue environment light (HDRI image) on this, plus one phenomenally bright golden spotlight (colour set with the photometric colour temperature); the only thing I had to fudge was a soft, cool point light to bring out the character's face, which was rendering a bit too dark. 

So today I'll install more of the Xurge 3D items, and see how they perform ... standby for some serious science fiction!

Holiday snaps

 

Genesis 2

Genesis 8

Suffice to say, we're back from Vacation Week! A road trip to the Flinders Ranges, filled with incident, and some really good photos. In fact, I'm using one of them as the backdrop to the top picture today. You'll see a lot more of them in days and weeks to come, as I work through a great slough of ideas that have been backing up, demanding to be rendered and painted, as soon as we were home. So naturally, the first thing I did upon getting back was come down with flu. Oh, perfect.

I actually got back to art yesterday, but didn't feel vaguely like wrangling all the numbers involved in Studio (3D work is all about numbers), so I dove into Photoshop and Krita and painted, came up with something we'll call Enchanted Forest. In fact --

If you go into the woods tonight,

Don't go there by yourself!

If you go into the woods tonight

You'll probably meet an elf,

And pixies three,

And goblins galore,

And brownies, trolls, 'cause 

Here's the score:

Tonight's the night

The faerie folk have their picnic!

Ahem. Sorry about that. It just came to me, couldn't resist.

Tomorrow, the plan is to do what I'd wanted to do today, and couldn't get to because I'm too tired after the virus. I'll be installing a load of Xurge3D goodies, and we're going to get into some heavy-duty SF. I'd like very much to get Jarrat and Stone into Iray. I read the whole NARC series (Hellgate too), right through, not long ago, and it's just amazing, addictive. That universe is so real to me, and I have this urge to render it! Anyway, let's get some Xurge3D space armour installed and resurfaced for Iray, and we'll go from there.