Atmospherics, and old faces returning

It's been quite an interesting day, render-wise ... many questions answered, and many more added to the list of questions still to be answered. But first: the Hyborian Age pinup boy is back, via a .dsb file -- albeit looking a little bit different than he did in the raytraces. The SAV Atlas skinmap doesn't render the same, though it does look very good; and I had to switch out the hair. The old renders use the Hermes hair, but although I was able to get it configured for Iray in terms of colour and lustre, I couldn't get the fit right. It looked like ... a coconut. Seriously. So I went back to a style that's almost "no style," so it looks good on anything, anywhere: Neftis's old My Rockstar Hair. It still works; but it looks better in darker tones. This guy used to be blond, but he's going to be raven dark from here on. Still --

This actually looks very, very nice indeed. According to the documentation, SAV's Atlas is also supposed to fit the Genesis figure, but the file path to install it in Win 7 is now obsolete, and I honestly can't find any compatible file path for Genesis. Soooo, this is just for Michael 4, at least for the moment. Also --

I've got about two thirds of an idea about how to get atmospherics to work in Iray. I'm not there yet (this one, above, isn't perfect), but I think I know where 'm going with this. More experiments are in order, while I see if I can get this working properly. This is DM's old Circular shrine, which is a nice standing set, but I can't seem to get it properly configured for Iray. I've adjusted everything, but the surfaces still have a tendency to be glossy, even with gloss, reflection and even refraction turned off. So ...

I wanted to render again, with a character (this is Dae for Genesis 8, wearing the Landis hair, and The Huntsman costume for Genesis 3, which fits G8 well), so I took the opportunity to re-do all surfaces with shaders. These are a few of the Construction shaders from the Mech4D pack (from DAZ). It's not absolutely perfect, but  it's pretty darned good. I could paint it, to take care of the slight deficiencies, but ... nah. It's very lovely as it is. And --

I rendered this at 3000 pixels high, so you can cut into it and still get a really good image ... you can get close enough to get a good look at the figure, costume and hair. In fact, let's get even closer:

More atmospheric experiments tomorrow. I have a couple of ideas that just might work. It's not a million miles away from the tricks I used to get up to in Studio 3 and 3Delight to make fog and mist! In fact, I'm dying to see if I can get this to work. Also, I'll be trying some "shader mixer" stuff, and I'd love to see if I can get the Hyborian Warrior dude (he needs a name) and Leon coherently into the same shot, in Iray. If not, then we'll play with some raytraces. Haven't done that in a couple of weeks. This is fun!

Hey, see who's back -- and in Iray!

 

Now, here's a face you ought to know, if you've been with me for any length of time ... but it's the first time he's rendered really well in something other than 3Delight ... and it turns out, Iray just loves him, whereas he was tough to work with in LuxRender. I designed this character way back in 2012, when I got a new desktop PC that would (ha!) actually let me a) turn on shadows, and b) raytrace, without crashing to the desktop! Back in the day, here was the best raytrace I could ever achieve -- and it's "Leon," of course, in a scene from the future story of Abraxas (which got abandoned when my Mom became so ill, I had no time for anything else but caring, and then I became ill  myself ... fast forward years and years, and I'm only just beginning to recover) ...

Oh, this is going to be fun, seeing what I can do with this character now -- and maybe, just maybe, I can get back into Abraxas? It's a good story, if I can just DO IT. Anyway, here's what was involved in bringing the character back, in Iray:

• Go back into an old project file in Studio 3, on the old computer;
• Select Leon/Michael 4, and --
• Save as ... Character Preset (it's a .dsb file format).
• Save to a jump drive and import to the new computer.
• Load a new M4 figure and select it;
• Go File - Merge --
• Click on the .dsb file...

And voila. Leon appears, just waiting for his skinmap (Michael 4 default, not even the HR skinmap -- Stoney wears the HR skinmap; remember Stoney?!) and hair (Midnight Prince, set to black) and eyes (the Tony Stark dark brown, from The Eyes Have It collection for M4 and V4).

Now, with that lot done, set up the Iray lights ... and the magic of the generation 4 figures (pre-Genesis) is that they're soooo low poly, you can get a 2000 x 2400 render, with the Iray settings cranked up high, in about ten minutes! Then, pop it into Photoshop for some effects to give it the look of a studio photo done to promote a new film, and -- done. And following that theme along, just to see how fine the Iray render is, let's really do a movie promo still. Monochrome:

Right now I'm thinking, "Ooooh, what did I miss, what new movie's coming out soon?" But the magic is in the details, so we'll zip back into colour and have a closer look at this:

Now, to get that level of realism on the hands, I used Aged for M4, from the Morphs ++ pack, and pulled the slider over to 100%. You actually see bones and veins in Iray, which is amazing ... because Iray loves to ignore displacement, bump and even normal maps. Meaning, I can't render vascularity on M4 in Iray ... yet. There has to be a way, but I might end up touching down on the DAZ Forums for enlightenment. I bought some really good vascular maps for M4, and they work brilliantly in a raytrace; but in Iray they disappear. (Have a look at the last image in this post: that's a raytrace with the vascularity turned on.) How to fix this? Dunno. Yet. Put that one on the Must Do list, along with dForce -- and also rendering "godrays" in Iray, when, technically, Iray won't/can't do atmospherics. I found a tutorial, and as soon as I have a free afternoon, I'll be following the cookbook method and seeing if I can get atmospherics going. This is the effect we're looking for --

NOT my render: see link below

--and it turns out, there's two or three ways to "fudge" it. We shall see. For now, I'm going back to another old project file in Studio 3 and seeing if I can resurrect another character I used to like a lot. It's this guy here --

I've gone through the process to get the .dsb character preset file, merged this onto M4 (no problem so far), and am just trying to get the hair and skinmap to look good in Iray. He's wearing the Atlas skinmap, from SAV, and the Hermes hair; and neither of them performs the same in Iray as they do in 3Delight (and presumably Poser). So I need to configure everything ... two hours later, I'm 75% of the way and out of time, LOL. Back to this tomorrow. For now, I have to work, so -- here we go.

An elven prince in Iray, and ... wild native orchids

Shall we call it an elven pinup?! This one was a looong render; I left it cooking last night when I went to bed, and had to give it another couple of hours this morning. Iray is an exercise in patience! This is a high-poly figure (Genesis 8) and hair (Shavonne Hair for G8), with a low-poly set (DM's Elven Shed) and props (Deluxe Trees as the vegetation), and even so, the render times are agonizingly long. But --

-- worth it in the end! That's actually a Michael 4 costume, the loincloth from the Wood God set; Genesis 8 is not wearing it, as such: it just occupies the same space in the 3D world inside the computer, so it looks okay. To the best of my knowledge, this kind of costume isn't yet available for the Genesis 8 Male. I've been looking at the pages at DAZ and Renderosity for months now, waiting to see the range of fantasy (and maybe glamour!) costumes for G8M, and they just aren't there. Yet?? So I decided to play around with some simple M4 stuff and see what could be done. Yes, I know: using dForce you can actually fit anything and make it work, but my computer doesn't have the brains to run dForce. That'll have to wait. In the meantime, this ... ain't bad.

The part of his render I'm really pleased with, mind you, is this:

It's post-worked in Photoshop to add the atmospherics -- evening light rays and motes of dust in the rays, and it works beautifully. What you have there was done in four layers. The bottom layer is a photograph that's been color balanced, faded and blurred for depth of field. This was stripped in as the backdrop for the character and set, which were rendered as the second layer -- so far, so good. The third layer is all about painting: sun rays, motes, shadows, quite a lot was added at that point. Then the painted version was stripped into Studio 3 (!) as a backdrop and all the vegetation was added, with lights and camera, DOF set and rendered again. Then this version was passed back to Photoshop to be color balanced.

Doing a complex render this way (adding foreground objects as a separate render) takes hours off the render time. Seriously. To test the theory, I have another one going through Studio 4 as I type this and upload the earlier render ... it's already up to six hours, and I'm going to leave it rendering another two as I head to bed, because it is nowhere near finished yet: the mid-tone areas are full of unresolved pixels, firefly sparkles. (Even when it is finished, it's going to take a lot of painting to finish it, because Iray is actually rendering little triangles in/on the Genesis 8 figure, and big triangles in the Michael 4 costume. This is an effect I haven't seen in years, but it's happening, so ... Photoshop to the rescue.)

Only one image today, because the damn thing has been rendering all day! But we'll stay on the subject of woods and forests, and I'll include a set of photographs: Dave and I went "orchid hunting" on Wednesday. This is the season when these rare treasures bloom in the woods not far from here. They're gorgeous, exotic, and discovering them wild, almost in your own backyard, is a delight. Anybody not like orchids? Enjoy!

Touching base: we're back ... "only" photos here. Art tomorrow!

The last note I wrote here, Dave and I were packed and running out the door for five days in the Grampians, based in Halls Gap. To quote Samwise, we're back ... I still have to go through the photos I took with both cameras, but I've sorted the stuff I did with my new phone and blogged a short version of where we went, what we did. This has been a great opportunity to put the phone through its paces, see what it will do -- also what it won't. I've been pleasantly surprised.

If you like trip pictures from amazing places, here's the post ... and I ought to be back tomorrow with art. For now ... mountains, waterfalls, stormy skies, amazing vistas. The weather didn't cooperate this time, but we had loads of fun. Home again, home again, and back to work tomorrow, LOL.

I have images swirling around my brain, am full of ideas -- and I got a couple of emails from DAZ tech support, which have some actual value, even though they don't answer, or solve, anything. Hmm. I'll get my oars back in the water tomorrow.

The cover model, the Thing ... and the Highlands

Just starting (and I stress that, starting!) to get Studio 4.10 under control ... still messing about with IRay, because still waiting for DAZ Tech Support to help me get get the installation problems squared away, and ... well, I don't know about you, but I can't quite bring myself to put my hand in my pocket for something like $400 for odds and sods, like skinmaps, costumes, hairdos, plus Reality, when I'm not even sure they're going to install properly! So ... here's a whole new Michael 4 character created this afternoon...

That render took about 35 minutes. I could have left it cooking for a lot longer, but this answered pretty much everything I wanted to know about IBL lighting within Studio 4.10. Uh huh. The last thing that's got me scratching my head with the IBL lighting is, how the heck do you get proper shadows?? And yes, I've set a spotlight as well, to try that. And yes, I've been into the tone mapping controls and said, "crush shadows, burn highlights." Hunh. More experiments tomorrow!

This is a quite useful character, and I used this physique in, uh, this:

I wanted to know just how far you might be able to drive Michael 4 in IRay, because I've been looking at book covers ... romance book covers ... and am thinking to myself, "I can do that." Some of those male models you see on the book covers, they are CG, not photos. Michael 4 is almost good enough. Not quite, I think. It's going to take Genesis 3 or 8, or both, to get juuust what we need. Hmmm. So, the best you can get with the old model and the new render engine is this:

...and the truth is, I'm actually quite impressed. With the head cut out of the shot, and the venous mapping worked out, and a looong render to get rid of fireflies and whatnot, you're hard pressed to decide if this is CG or a photo. (This is a crop from the book cover image, just as it rendered, no touch ups or Photoshop work.)

Anyway, that mockup book cover is a 150 minute IRay render of M4, Photoshopped in post, against a Bryce sky, with typography in Serif. It's not bad at all, actually. You'll notice, I got the venous map to show on the model! The trick is this: you overdrive the settings, to the point where, if you raytraced the image on those settings, it would look like this:

And that is just so ghastly, it looks rather like the character in the Marvel movie, what is it? Fantastic Four, is that right? The rock dude. The Thing? I think his name was Ben --

LOL, if you compare poor old Ben there with the overdriven bump map that's necessary to get IRay to show any venous detail at all on the Michael 4 ...! 😱

While messing about with raytraces, I'd already put the book cover model through that process too, for the sake of interest:

The raytrace has its own charm, doesn't it? But what really annoys me is the way the POSE changes when you send the Studio 3 file into Studio 4.10. Look at the angle of his head! Also, the boots and the gnarly trees dropped out in the file transfer ... but I've had a humongous headache today, and couldn't be bothered going through the process of adding them back in. Ack. I leave it to you to figure out which you like better, IRay or raytrace, and I won't blame you if you choose the raytrace!

Last item for today: "Here in the highlands, the Highlands if Scotland," to quote the opening song from Brigadoon --

Terragen ... with a gorgeous sky, lovely water, perfect atmospherics (see the way the distant hills go hazy), and the tree right where I wanted it, LOL! Actually, I blew off about a hour, trying to work out how to add populations of things like grass and small plants, but it's waaay too complex for a day when you're full of pills and occasionally the headache punches right through the fog and slugs you. So we'll call this one done, and will see if we can figure out populations another time! Fortunately, YouTube is full of videos, like this one, and if worst comes to worst, I can always admit defeat and watch the tutorials! ("Instructions? We don't need no steenkeeng instructions!" 😀😁)

More soon...

Computer is back!! And, but ... harrumph. Anyway, new art.

Michael 4 in person. Call this character Jack

Yes -- the computer is home! Meaning, new art today, beginning with the leading man, hero type, above. Is it just me, or does he remind you of Captain Jack? As in, Harkness. Something about him just makes John Barrowman come to mind! Anyway, this character -- call him Jack, and expect to see him again very soon! And...

Terragen skyscape: Dawn Light

Yep, Terragen 4 is on and working: a 100% clean download, no problems whatsoever. The computer is working fine. Surprise: it didn't come home any faster, which is a trifle odd. I'd expected it to be screamingly fast with soooo much "swap disk space." Then again, it was always like greased lightning, so, no complaints there. Also, although this gorgeous Terragen evening sky did take twenty minutes to render, the desktop never got up above a normal working temperature, whereas the laptop, which (having eight core processors) would have rendered it in the same time, but would have been HOT. I mean, fry eggs type hot. So I'm happy. And...

Bryce 7 Pro abstract art: Mountain Lake at Dawn

Bryce 7 Pro, abstract art: mountain lake at dawn. A quickie render finished in Photoshop to bring out the fabulous reds in the sky. Which tells you that Bryce is on and working, and Photoshop is on and working. So --

What ain't working? Ahem. DAZ Studio 4.10 was not, repeat not, a clean download. It gave me one of those virtually meaningless error messages, installed its framework and then refused to install any content into that framework, on account of a "PostgreSQL CMH Connection error." Like that's going to mean anything to me. Double Dutch. Except ... if memory serves me, SQL is a programming language developed to handle online stores. Uh huh. So 4.10 failed to set up its umbilical cord to connect my computer to the shop??? And, having stumbled right there, it refused to install any content, even though my Product Library has ten pages of goodies I bought many years ago. As I said, harrumph.

Soooo, I chased the problem to their Forums, and Help Page. Found the instructions to 'fix' this --

Oh, yes? What a shock: no joy. The instructions don't work. Next?

Tech support, submit a ticket, and wait. Wait. Wait. 

And that's where we are, regarding DAZ Studio 4.10, Genesis and all: waiting. But I've got Studio 3 working, and all the rest, and now that I have oodles of hard disk space I can delve into the truck loads of models I bought as long ago as 2013, and install them! Yep, new toys to render, even though you'll only see those renders in raytraces, until Tech Support gets this sorted out for me. Sorry, guys. Bear with me.

I'll keep you posted when I know more myself!

Red dwarf homeworld, Terragen atmospheres, gorgeous gay heroes and Photoshop brushes. Yes!!

Yep ... Jarrat and Stone ... and this picture is chock full of experiments. You might not believe it, but even now, after how many thousands of images, almost every picture I render and/or paint is still an experiment! I'll yack a bit more about that in a second, but for those of you who can't open the image at bigger scale (small phones, for a start), here's a closer look at our heroes:

(Credit where it's due: all kudos to Mel Keegan for creating Jarrat and Stone and the NARC universe, without which these gorgeous gay SF heroes would not exist, on these pages or anywhere else.)

Okay --

One thing I do love is "old fashioned SF" where writers like Poul Anderson (my absolute favorite of the Old Brigade ... he created Nicholas van Rijn and David Falkayn, for a start!) would not only spin great yarns but also build alien environments designed on solid science. Keegan is on my mind again lately, not merely because I'm up to Scorpio this time through (!), but also because he's writing again (!!!😁!!!), and he describes the current project as "At last, a 'Golden Age' romp without the 'warts' ... gay heroes and up-to-date tech." It's going to be great. Seriously. And what Mel is doing here really is as if someone like Poul Anderson or maybe Brian Stableford just decided to write a full-on gay adventure/love story on a fabulous alien world. Yeah ... wow. Which got my own imagination to working, and I found myself daydreaming about a fertile planet circling a red dwarf star (meaning a smaller and dimmer and cooler star than our own sun). So --

Into Bryce 7 Pro, and let's model it. The sun is small and dim and cool, so a warm, fertile world has to orbit close to it, right? So the angular size of it in the sky is somewhat larger than our sun appears; this planet sits in the "sweet spot" where the world is just warm enough to be fertile ... the cool sun looks yellow, not white, when you look right at it, and the red end of the spectrum puts a bloody wash over the sky and everything else. Makes for a very nice picture, too.

All of which got me interested in atmosphere, so --

Terragen sky: late afternoon, and ...

...right on sunset; and...

After sunset, when the sky is bronze and dimming rapidly, and the world is becoming dark, you expect the stars in a few more minutes. Nice.

(Does anyone else find Terragen a bit overwhelming? There is so much to learn that, frankly, I've decided on the old KISS rule: Keep It Simple, Stupid. AKA, one thing at a time. I've learned about all I can for now about "heightfield terrains," and "proceedural terrains" continue to baffle me a bit. Atmospheres are the next thing I need to master, then I'll come back to proceedurals, and, when the computer is rebuilt (soon!) I'll see about working with populations: adding forests and so forth. Ack. Soooo much to learn here. But it's fun. It's good for your brain, especially at my age. Put it this way: I ain't gettin' any younger. 😒

Now, going back to the experiments in today's main render! As I began, the picture is full of them, and they work! For a start --

Look at the forearm on the left, and the hands on the right. This is a combo of bump mapping and painted highlights, using a blend mode (thank you, Photoshop), plus a touch of "aging," using the special morph in the Morphs ++ package. That's ... not bad at all. The hint of veins makes this so much more realistic, yet it's subtle. Your eye expects to see this; it doesn't hit you in the face, but it makes the figure that much more "real." Well worth the extra minute or two it takes to switch out the bump maps and do a few test renders to get the settings just right. Then, this, below, was the big experiment...

...and I don't know why I didn't do this a long time ago. It's the hair. Jarrat wears the Mon Chevalier hair from Neftis (via the DAZ marketplace; you can still get it, but it's a bit more expensive than it used to be, from memory). The one thing about this toupee that always annoyed me was that, "fresh out of the box," as it's applied, it looks awfully fake, as if it's ... plastic. Eventually (rolls eyes) I thought, "I wonder what would happen if I overdrive the bump mapping on the hair???" Uh huh. Duh. A bit of overdriven bump mapping, and the hair "pops" into an effect that's far, far more realistic than the results I've been getting across the years. I could kick myself, honestly. 😝

Then, the last thing I did differently on this is...

...I hand-painted Stoney's hair. There's nothing much you can do with the GQ Event Hair when it's set to a shade near to black (as Stone's hair is described in the books). You can't see detail in it, ever. But the shape of it is always 100% identical, in every single render ... which is not really realistic. Nobody's hair stays the same for ten consecutive minutes. So this one is hand-painted, to give Stoney a slightly more tousled look for once!

The brush I'm using for the hair is a (free) download from a very, very talented artist and brush creator at DeviantArt. I want to give a plug to "para-vine," and say thank you, thank you for this brush set, which has been terrific. (For clarification: no, I don't know para-vine personally, but I'd like to shake him by the hand and say thanks for these brushes. Wow.)

That's all from me for today. Back soon -- hopefully tomorrow, because on Wednesday the computer goes into the shop and you won't see new art for a few days while it's upgraded. Whoooo!

Glam, a battleground, Terragen skies, and fall colors

An autumnal mood ... and a bit of Michael 4 glam. I was in the mood for glam, snarfle. The first picture tells half a story. I call it "Relics" ... Oh, a battle was fought here -- Orcs and Dwarves, perhaps; and here's one of the scouts from the borders of the Shire, come to find out what became of friends who never returned home. Hmmm. That's not bad. The second picture ... well, I wanted to play with color casting. That is, throwing a bucket-fill into the top layer of the Photoshop post-render work, and then blending it to see how the color cast changed the mood and tone of the image. Well now! There's no reason the experiment couldn't be run with a bit of beefcake, is there?!

If you're interested -- the artists among you might be -- the location was set up first with a background landscape; here's what you could call the background plate:

That's the location without any depth of field set, though it is lit -- just one light. The terrain is was made in Bryce and exported as an OBJ, then imported into DAZ Studio, and the textures added. I did a diffuse (surface) map -- basically, a fairly small picture of leaf litter on the ground, tiled into an enormous 3000 x 3000 pixel image -- plus a displacement map (made from the diffuse map ... you drop it into monochrome, yank the contrast sky high and sharpen it a lot. This technique is pretty darned effective. The result is extremely realistic, even if you view the render at large size, in closeup ... and it's dead easy to achieve!

The sky was a custom Bryce render ... but while it was taking about 20 minutes to come up with something that was fairly blah, I thought to myself ... "You know, Terragen ought to be able to generate something better, and probably faster anyway." Soooo...

Terragen atmospheres -- no landscapes to speak of, because I just tilted the virtual camera to look UP at about 25-30 degrees of elevation, which puts the landscape on the horizon ... just right for use as backdrops in CG composite shots. Terragen skies are very, very easy to do, and fast! These renders took from 30 seconds to three minutes each! Ahem.

And speaking of autumnal moods (well I was, a moment ago!), fall has certainly arrived in this neck of the woods, about two weeks before winter is due to begin, according to the calendar. We took a hike in Belair NP this morning, and I'll share some of the photos here, and again tomorrow. I've always maintained that there's a line where photography and art blur together, and this is it:

Those are uploaded at 2000 pixels wide -- they make lovely wallpaper (you're welcome) and they do look so nice at large size -- please click so see them that way.

Back soon with more!