Sports car in Iray ... and luck with a great skinmap for M4 in Iray, too!

Iray ... a quick Bryce 7 Pro sky used as a backdrop ... sports car ... Michael 8 ... nice! This is far from the first car I've rendered, but it is the first time I've done a car in Iray, and -- I like it. I didn't even have to switch out the materials: the original materials as supplied with the model rendered just fine. It's called the f612 Italian Sports Car, from the DAZ marketplace -- I bough it about eight or nine years ago, and it's still available. Here you go:

Catalog image. See this.

It's low-poly enough that even my old system was able to render the car and set in an hour, and when I added the Michael 8 figure, plus hair (Shavonne) and costume (Cool Style) and a shader on the shirt, and a chrome shader on the wheel rims, I went to 90 minutes. The car still only $12.95. and -- thumbs up on this.

I can't remember the fantasy novel I'm trying to think of right now, but the name of Lackey comes to mind, and part of the blurb was, 'There are elves out there, and they drive too fast.' It was some urban fantasy, tall elves in our world. So you have got to know what I'm thinking right now. Ahem! Stay tuned.

Also -- at last! -- a little luck in the hunt for Michael 4 skinmaps that don't look 'dead' in Iray:

That's the Jagger skinmap, which you usually see on Kevin Jarrat (in the NARC renders ... one of my all-time favorite characters -- him and his other half, Stoney, nudge, wink, and cheers to Mel Keegan as the creator of same). You also see this skinmap on the Vampire Amadeus ... so I really, seriously, put it to the test in Iray the other day. I slapped it onto an old character of mine, 'The Conjurer,' and gave it an hour in Iray. Thank gods, here's a third skinmap that looks terrific in Iray. The other two are Ferendir and Atlas; virtually everything else I've tested to date will render, obviously, but the results is disappointing, especially when you're trying to render the old Generation 4 figures half the time, because Genesis 8 is so high-poly, your computer is having a hernia, LOL! Sooo...

Here's the old Conjurer character in Iray, wearing Jagger. very nice result ... I used the "hairy" and "bearded" options, which is different from Jarrat and Amadeus, who're smoothies. I like this, so now I have a pale (Ferendir), a swarthy (Atlas) and a medium (Jagger) skinmap for Michael 4, all Iray-friendly. This, we can work with.

One thing that bemuses me, though, is the way one face morph can change utterly as it's processed in a different render engine. Here, above you see my Conjurer (actually, he has a 'stage name' -- Cassandro; I guess in this render we're seeing him at home, not on-stage). That's the exact same face morph, I didn't do anything to it. But here's the same face, in LuxRender, back in 2012:

And here's the same face in 3Delight about ten months ago:

You may need to see "Snake Charmer" here at larger size to see the face clearly. I'm still shaking my head, that one face can come up looking so different as it passes back and forth between Iray, LuxRender and 3Delight. Go figure.

Anyway, we are now officially having fun, and Michael 4 has his oars back in the water, for Iray! It's taken me eight months to answer enough questions to know what I'm doing, and can do, with this computer; and we're now also officially on the count-down to The New Computer, in about a year from now. It'll either be my birthday pressie or Christmas, and since those dates are only 51 days apart, there's not a lot of difference. 😃 (Yes, I just had a birthday. Yesterday, in fact -- one of the reasons I didn't post yesterday: was out gallivanting.)

More soon!

A swordsman in the snow ... whooo!

Hunting around through the "assets" I bought a long, long time ago -- and never had the harddrive space to install! -- I came upon this skinmap: Ferendir, by a designer called "SixthSense." It's a gorgeous skinmap, and renders beautifully ... though I do admit, I painted the eyebrows, which are too pale and thin for my liking; and I also applied the SAV Atlas displacement mapping on the torso and arms to bring up good venous mapping. But just take look at this skinmap in closeup -- if you can, see it at full size:

That's superb. A pleasure to watch it rendering! Using the Atlas displacement maps adds an extra dimension to it; and I designed a new face to go with this map. This is not the Ferendir face morph, as packaged by the designer. To be honest, the original face doesn't do anything for me. You might like it, and the good news is, it's still available from Renderosity.

So, not wanting a teenager, I designed a face and body I like, and came up with this:

This is what I love about working with Michael 4: it's so easy, and so quick, to get results. Sure, Genesis  can be significantly closer to full-on photo-realism, but it takes soooo long to get anywhere, especially on a slow system like mine. With M4 you can create new characters on the fly in a snap. I rather like this face -- and the eyes are the brilliant green item from The Eyes Have it set:

The hair is hand-painted, based on the old Mario's Hair for M4, from Neftis Hair Salon. That doesn't render up so well (well, it's quick, but the downside to that is, you pay for speed in low-rez results: human hair isn't supposed to go around corners, and so forth), but it does give you a good base to paint over, and ... Photoshop to the rescue again.

The snow is an old .ABR brush, Ron's Magical Snow, from the days when Ron's brushes could be used with Photoshop Elements. Alas, his new brushes need the full on Creative Suite version, or whatever it is these days ... I can't use them. I'm still running Elements 9! It works, I own it outright, and I've no reason to change it, since it does everything I want it to! The only thing is, sometimes people come along with fabulous new brushes which I can't use; but there's a free site, All Free Download (dot com), which is loaded with old fashioned brushes. They are absolutely free and this is not one of those sites plagued with viruses and such antisocial rubbish. It's perfectly safe, and the worst thing you might have to do is look at a couple of pay-per-view commercials in exchange for downloading some very good .abr brushes. Enjoy!

This sword is Merlin's Katana ... but I've been unpacking loads of props from years ago, and just discovered that I own Xurge 3D's Ranger weapons! I had no idea I had these -- expect to see them very soon. I honestly have no idea what I have stashed away from 2013 or so. Even though I didn't have the harddrive space, I shopped a lot of sales, grabbed fantastic special offers. Now's the time to bring them out, dust them off and play! The Ferendir skinmap is one such stashed item. It renders as well as anything I've ever seen, and with the pixel and shadow sampling settings cranked way up on 3Delight, the resolution is brilliant. That skin absolutely glows.

The costume is the bottom half of Xurge 3D's Medieval Royalty cossie; you saw the whole thing yesterday. Now I've got the surface texture adjustments worked out to get good results in Studio from an item configured for Poser, it's easy to work with...

And so to bed. More tomorrow! 

Genesis 8 gets new hair ... and I discover new depths to 3Delight ... whooo!

Been amusing myself making new faces with Genesis 8. I rather like these ... might use them agaibn. They were just done quickly to test-drive the new wig I bought the other day. I wasn't 100% sure the hairdo prop would work, since manual installation is still a little bit iffy, but there's the proof of it -- it works!

The hairdo is "Side-Part Hair for Genesis 3 and 8," from DAZ. It has six different styles and numerous colors, so you can mess it about, make it long or short, tousle it -- stand it on end. It works well, and I got the installation figured out, first jump out of the gate. I think the basic file structure is going to be the same for newer DAZ materials (not Poser formatted files, of which Michael 4 himself is one). In the case of hair props, it's this:

My DAZ 3D Library \ People \ Genesis 8 Male \ Hair \ Side Part Hair  ... with extra drop-down folders with \!!Styles and \Materials sorted for Iray and 3Delight.

These two snapshots were done in Iray, obviously, before I changed projects. I wanted to get back into 3Delight; and I haven't said that in yonks. In fact, I've spent the last four years or more trying to escape from 3Delight, which was the one true bugbear of Studio 3, if you ask me. The freebie installed in the interface was too rudimentary, and the pro version was too expensive. Well, that was then and this is now --

Iray was yanking me about so much the other day, I got so cross with it I said, 'Nuts, I'll just raytrace this!' And I stumbled into previously unknown depths in the Studio 4.11 version of the old engine; additional features which appear to be specific to Studio 4.x, and possibly even to the later versions of 4. Soooo...

This is a re-render of a Studio 3 image done five or six months ago:

I have never seen such response out of 3Delight ... this is a fairly quick raytrace, just ten minutes; and what I'm seeing is already getting fairly comparable to the work delivered by the Firefly engine built into Poser 9 and 10. I'm still 75% clueless as to what I'm doing as I configure the raytrace engine, but I'll work it out. You can configure this version ten ways from Tuesday, and I've barely started, but I like what I'm seeing! Can I persuade you to look at this, at full size (roughly double the size you see on the page here):

Even with just a little nudge in the pixel sampling and shading rates, gamma and gain, there's easily twice as much response in the skinmap. Whooo! Exciting, innit? Michael 4 is wearing Xurge 3D's 'Untamed' costume. I painted a new diffuse map for the metal parts, to make them gold; the original costume has steel gray, which looks a bit drab, I thought. The good news is that the new map applies itself automatically on the old UV coordinates, so -- cheers. 

And if you want to take a look at the hairstyle Genesis 8 is wearing in these snapshots:

Catalog image. See this. 

The good news is, this wig renders much faster than some other G8 styles, and at the same time it looks more realistic than the Landis Hair -- I'm having a tussle with that wig, trying to get it to look more like hair, less the a plastic hat. I know it can, and should, look great; but I'm not getting good results so far, to the point where I'm wondering if I'm missing a map. Is an opacity map not working out?? That would do it. Must look into that.

More soon -- probably not tomorrow, because we're going out for the day. The day after, I think, because I still have a Wilverine-style leather jacket for Genesis to install, and an SF costume ... and I'm dying to get back to playing with the raytrace engine into which I blundered by chance, LOL. 😎

Michael 4 fantasy, in and out of Iray ... and feeling optimistic --

As promised yesterday, we'll step back a couple of paces, go back to simpler things and work back toward what's doable in Iray (for me, with my hardware). So -- for a start, we'll do a raytrace! And here's where it gets interesting. I've never really delved into the 3Delight engine in Studio 4 -- why would you? You to to Studio 4 to get access to Iray, right.? But I did "go backwards" for a while, and wound up noticing that 3Delight is a lot more fully featured than it used to be --

The version built into Studio is the freebie. The full-on pro version of 3Delight is about A$2000, which is dumb, when you realize NVIDIA Iray is free, like LuxRender, and you can even get Maya, from Autudesk, for about a grand, Aussie. The major thing Poser users always held against DAZ Studio 3 wasn't the interface, which is fine, but the very rudimentary render engine built into it. The truth is, by comparison with Poser's Firefly engine, 3Delight is extremely limited. Disappointing. Soooo ... I was intrigued to dig around in 3Delight, as built into Studio 4.11, and discover a lot more ways to configure it... Hmm.

You can now squeeze a lot more out of raytracing than you used to get out of it. There is a downside: as you crank up the sampling and so forth, render times blow out massively. Duh. You have to look for the sweet spot, because you could wind up with a raytrace that took longer to render than an Iray image! Anyway, this raytrace, above, was done at much higher settings, taking about an hour. I can tell the difference.

Curious to see what Iray could make of the same material (all of which is low-poly: two Michael 4 figures, a couple of props, a set), I gave the picture one hour in Iray, at half size:

Very different, isn't it? The same render time as the raytrace, albeit at half the size. Seeing the result here made me wonder how our avenging angel might render in closeup, so --

That's an hour in Iray, too -- and the beauty of this is, there renders are finished, whereas the Genesis 8 work I've been tackling in the last week or so chokes my system after about five or six hours and can never be finished on my current hardware! I do like Michael 4 a lot, actually. With this character here, the only thing that's missing is the vascular mapping: the venous, or vein, mapping. Soooo...

I'm 99.75% sure I have the manual installation thing worked out now. Seriously. I've got the old content working tolerably well in Studio 4 (even though I still can't actually save a file in Studio 4!), and I was feeling optimistic enough to shop a sale DAZ is having right now. One of the things I just got was this:

Catalog image. See this.

This is a very, very nice displacement map for the Michael 4 figure. It was on sale at about 70% off, so how could I not get it? (I also got some Genesis stuff, including a new wig). I just have to slog through the process and get this installed and working ... tomorrow. Then we'll mix and match skin maps, hairdos, costumes, and we'll see what we shall see! This is going to be fun ... stay tuned!