A grab bag of September goodies

Another grab bag of recent goodies. Sooo many images, and so little time to post them here. If you're interested in seeing most of what I do, I'm on the Renderosity group on Facebook; most of my images land there. I don't work in Studio every day, but several times a week, when I get the chance, I go fifteen rounds with Iray. The truth is, it isn't working properly yet, and one could grow old and die, waiting for DAZ Tech Support to answer. I've been waiting three weeks so far, just for an email reply. Something about being patient?

The images accumulate to the point where it's actually quite difficult for me to figure out what I've posted here, and what I haven't! I'm trawling through folders, wondering what I forgot. And yet I'm getting about half as much done as I would if Iray were working properly. It's ironic. We built a system so powerful, it should render anything -- one doesn't believe how fast it is ... and yet with the render engine misbehaving, it's as if the computer is doing less and less faster and faster!

With Iray refusing to shake hands with the rebuilt PC, I'm starting to wonder if I should investigate Blender as a render option. DAZ has a "bridge," via which you can export items to Blender, and then o course the other program has a built in, proprietorial render engine called Cycles. I've had a look around the work Cycles produces, and it's ... impressive. But questions remain. How much work is involved in redoing all the surface textures? Because Cycles won't recognize Iray shaders! And I know for a fact, the learning curve is a steep line pointed straight up. Which is why I'm still wrestling with Iray...

There's more ... a lot more ... but that's enough for now! I'll upload again, when I get the time to blog. And in the meantime, if you're interested, this link will take you to my specific page on the Renderosity group on Facebook, and you'll see most of what I do right there. As they say, "Thanks for looking!"

Baby dragons ... how cute is this?

 

The assignment began as the chore of breaking the Consulting Mage out of storage as a Character Preset, running the whole thing through the Iray Converter, and seeing how he'll render up in Iray ... and I guess I got side-tracked! Can't have the Consulting Mage without his pet, right? Right. So ... next, load up the Dragonling and convert that also for Iray. This was such fun, I wound up posing him as if he were a kitten, and the render was so delicious, I wanted to come back for more. So --

The experiment grew. I had an intuition that the Demon Wings would look better on him than the wings shipped with the Dragoning, so, having fitted them, well, then I had to paint a whole new shader for them, so they matched the rest of him. Diffuse and Displacement, translucency ... okay. And doesn't this just look grand! Then, just as I was closing down for the evening a little idea ran through my mind of having the Dragonling chasing butterflies in the sunshine, since he's like a scaly, smoke-breathing, flying version of a kitten (ye gods, what a thought), and the top picture happened! This was a lot of fun. I think I'll come back to these characters soon...

Staying on the fantasy theme, I went on to these ... and you know something momentous is going on here, but I'm not sure (yet) what it is! The Gypsy Wagon is enormous fun to play with...

...and I treated myself to a pack of "greens" to make it easier to get really good landscapes. I still need some great trees, but they can start to get very, very expensive. I have some wish listed, and am keeping an eye on them, because trees are the factor that can make or break a photorealistic scene. If they're "storybook" trees, you'll end up with art, not a photo, no matter how clever you are with the lights. I did some other renders of the wagon, too; but I think the figure I placed into the scene is out of scale, so I'll re-do that ... the lighting is too gorgeous to just ditch the project because of a problem that could be pretty easily fixed. Hmm. I might do this, this afternoon! And right now --

https://www.renderosity.com/rr/mod/bcs/the-wizards-wagon/72818/

--Sveva's Wizard's Wagon is on sale at Renderosity. I think I'm about to give myself a treat! I just have to be a bit careful with spending, because it's soooo easy to spend way too much. This month, I already bought characters, poses, shaders, two greens prop sets, and a fantastic set of homewares for a fantasy house. An inspired designed has modelled Bilbo's hobbit house, and filled it with all his possessions. You buy it room by room, set by set. LOL, all you need is money! I bought one set of props, and the rest are wish listed. Oh, one day.  That's all for now ... there's a load more to post, but we'll get onto SF and so on tomorrow. 

A little SF, a little fantasy

 

She's the boss! Or, "This alien tomb is eight thousand years old, you are not blowing it up!" There's a story idea running through this sequence of images. A field archaeologist has her dig invaded by the military, and naturally their idea of getting things done involves explosives! I've been installing more old goodies from yesteryear ... DM's Pyrago set as never looked better, and the Xurge3D space armour renders so well. That's actually Jarrat wearing it ... I wanted to put the scene together quickly, so I merged in an existing figure...

And the other day I bought a new Genesis 8 Female character -- on sale for about $7.50 and too good to go past. It's Fumiko, and it renders like a dream -- soooo easy, literally no way for it to render poorly with this HD skinmap:

And the other thing I've been playing happily with is the hair shaders, by TwiztedMetal, which are a little tricky to use, but can give some amazing results, like this Genesis 3 hair prop, which fits Michael 4 perfectly...

Varun Hair for Genesis 3 male, fit to Michael 4, with shaders by TwiztedMetal

Must play with these some more, and really get the hang of them. Tomorrow, I'll be installing the set of ceramics shaders I bought the other day, too. From the catalog pictures at Renderosity, they look amazing ... this will be fun! 

The Little Demon returns ... and hair shaders!

 

Now, here's a character we haven't seen in a long time! I got back into Studio 3, exported a whole bunch of the old characters as presets ... ran them through the Iray Converter for Generation 4 to get them ready for Iray, and here we go! "Magic Hour" -- the Little Demon, in the Ruined Church set by AppleJack. And the thing I'm proudest of about this render is ... the shader on the wings is mine. Yep, I made a shader, the whole thing, with the mapping and everything. Whoo! Also...

I treated myself to some shaders from Renderosity this morning, and boy, do they work!At least, so far, so good. These are the Hair Shaders 2, by TwiztedMetal, and they just look so good on hair props right across the spectrum from Genesis 8 back to Generation 4. Above, this is Georgia HD for G8 Female, and good old Victoria 4, wearing a face designed by me and the Angel skinmap. The hair in both cases is resurfaced with the new hair shaders ... now, I'm impressed! The possibilities are endless. There's more, but it'll wait till tomorrow. Stay tuned!

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.   

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?!

Shaders, shaders everywhere; and new hair on new characters

With DAZ having a 55% off sale, who could resist? New Genesis 8 Male character here -- Yonni. This is one of the very few that look good (to my eye) right out of the box; I didn't do anything to him, just posed, lit and rendered him. Am extremely impressed with the skin tones and the eyes. It's well worth taking a look at these eyes, close up:

That's absolutely wonderful, and there's no drama in configuring this. Some characters are very difficult to light (such as Rex, who renders almost too dark to see details in the skinmap), and others have facial angles that can just look "wrong" when they render up. But Yonni is close to perfect. The hair is the Deck Hand hair, which renders marvellously ... and it fits perfectly, too! You wouldn't think fit was a lot to ask for, but it is. Next ...

Shaders! Here, I'm playing with some fantastic shaders I just got from Renderosity ... I may never have to buy fabric shaders ever again! This pack is amazing. I call this picture "Autumn Breeze." The hair is new; Dax Hair for G3 and G8. It's much tougher to work with, but when I get it figured out, it'll be very good. The falling leaves to the left were added with transparent .png clip pics from a free site: https://www.vhv.rs ... it's a massive site, so I assume it's legal and above-board; there's almost 900k items in their library, and that didn't happen overnight, so... anyway, the clipart is free and top quality. And --

Shaders! I've got shaders on everything here, from the floor to ... well, everything. This was a lot of fun to set up, though I have to say the shaders on the costume are very difficult to light, because they're so glossy, they burn out as soon as you put a spotlight on them that's bright enough to render skin tones properly. I'll try again tomorrow, and perhaps light them only with IBL environment lights. They're fabulous shaders, but you can't put a bright spotlight on them! The vehicle is the old Thunderbike, which I resurfaced with car paint -- Shelby Monza Red. Big wow factor. And...

The oars are juuuust about back in the water with Terragen! I've jogged my brain about 55%, still have some things to work out, and I'm not driving it without long, hard thought, but I should be able to generate the atmospherics for Studio work without further ado. Am still making a lot of rookie mistakes; managed to saddle myself with a 25-hour render, when it should have been about two! But I know what I did, and won't make that booboo again. So ... looking good! 

Shamanic Visions, and an Elf about town

 

It might look like a simple image, but it's actually very complex! Took an hour to set it up, an hour to cook till the fireflies resolved, and then an hour to paint the next morning --

There's every technique in this one, from an under-painting generated specifically for this project, to the render itself, to 2D graphical layers (Renderosity to the rescue again -- so long as you really know what you're doing with the resources!) and photoshop brushes. I love the graphical layers:

This project was huge fun -- to begin with, playing with new 3D toys. The headdress is the Axarra Headdress for Genesis 8, and it's the most amazing prop to work with. The only downside is that, in closeup, it takes 12,500 samples to resolve all its fireflies, it's sooo poly-heavy. But it's worth the work, and the wait. I'll be using this again, often, I think ... there's so much you can do with it. I'd had my eye on it for some time, and when it popped up on sale for half price, well --!

I call that one Shamanic Visions, and it was big fun ... but there's more! You want fun? Try this:

That's our elven archer, from yesterday's Archer in the Dawn project, but this time it's a street scene, with leather jacket and shades. Elf about town. How realistic is that? It's almost, almost at the level where you'd just accept it as a snapshot or selfie in the street. Moreover, that's G8 wearing Michael 4's sunglasses; I redid the surfaces for Iray with shaders, and they worked just fine. Well, there's more, but I'm tired so I'm calling it a day. ack tomorrow, with pretty things!