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. 

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!

The Raven in Silence

With the old computer turned on, I managed -- at last! -- to get back into Studio 3, open up a lot of eons-old project files, and export a dozen of my characters of yesteryear as presets. This is great news for me, at least ...  Now I've got the Raven (this character here, with the glossy wings), The Conjuror, The Man in the Hat, my Little Demon, The Swordsman, The Ronin, and a few more. The Iray Converter for Generation 4 works so well, all of these characters look grand in Iray. And what with my budget for new stuff shrinking to not much above zero, well, getting access to old treasures is doubly important. (This picture is called The Raven in Silence ... the set is known as Silence.) Speaking of which -- 

https://www.daz3d.com/leather-jacket-for-m4

Am seriously thinking of buying this. It's only $10, and I can see Jarrat wearing it. There's a lot of goodies for Michael 4, and the old figure is very, very renderable, even in this day of Genesis everything. I actually enjoy working with M4 as much as with G8 ... call me nuts, if you will. I also like this one, which is for G8:

https://www.daz3d.com/vintage-leather-jacket-for-genesis-8-males

...and that also isn't too expensive, so it's on the agenda. But a new jacket for M4? Sure. Why not? Anyway, we'll start with "The Raven," and explore the possibilities of Iray and classic characters. This will be fun! 

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!

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. 

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.