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!

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. 

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...

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!