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 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!

Serendipity! Okay, call him Curt ... and fitting Genesis 3 hair to Michael 4 -- easy.

A few very minor adjustments to his nose (which I thought was too large), and here he is, in his own photo shoot. Talk about serendipity! If you haven't been following this -- "the story so far." Wanting to break Jarrat and Stone out of storage (you know -- from Mel Keegan's NARC, nudge, wink), I loaded up a Michael 4 and applied the Jarrat character preset. If this were Studio 3, it would have worked, but in Studio 4, I didn't get Jarrat at all; I got a whole new character, s Studio 4.15 interpreted the preset, got it wrong, and produced...

And I like what I'm seeing -- a lot. This is a beautiful new character, and he wears the Genesis 3 hair as if it were made for M4. Okay -- let me write a little about how to fit the G3 hair to M4, because I suspect a number of people will be trying to do it, and it can be extremely fiddly.

• Load your M4 figure in the 0 position, meaning 0 valued on every transformation parameter. Unselect the figure. Load the hair into the scene without anything being selected. It loads also on the 0 position, just too low to fit the M4 -- meaning, if you jog it up till it looks good, the scalp cap will fit. You might need to jog the z (back/forward) parameter to make sure the back of the head is well covered; when it is, the hairline should be right. Do this in the Perspective view, so that you can swing the scene around easily without moving the M4 at all. Lastly, in the scene menu, select the hair prop and drag it upward throug the list till you can drop it onto the M4 'head' list item. This will parent it to M4, and now you can adjust the styling and colour to your heart's content. For the best fit, use Genesis 3 hair on Michael 4 or Victoria 4.2 ... and enjoy!

And we call him Curt because Mel Keegan has just given this face and body form the nod ... this is Curt Gable, the Athena's Third Officer, soon to move upwards through the ranks as the series develops! Very neat indeed!

Second major thing fixed today:

Yep, the problem with the visor on the HAAS Armor helmet, by Xurge3D, was caused by an opacity map which Studio was reading incorrectly (it was original configured for the Firefly engine, in Poser, maybe ten years ago). Basically, I just deleted the opacity map from the "Cutout Opacity" channel in the Surfaces pane. Now, if I want a semi-opaque visor, I can either drag the slider to 75% or whatever, or else apply a glass shader. Great -- with this problem answered. I can load the rest of the Xurge3D content without a qualm. 

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! 

Well, rats. Photoshop 2021 updated, and now it doesn't work!

 

Okay, that's not strictly true, but ... Photoshop Elements 2021 updated itself early this afternoon, and now every time I click the Wacom pen, Photoshop CRASHES. Five times in a row. And yes, I've updated the tablet drivers (no joy). And yes, I turned off Windows Ink (no joy). And yes, I contacted Adobe (no reply after an hour on hold on their help page. I had the presence of mind to try the Wacom pen tablet out with Krita (it works just fine), and other programs, soooo ... we know the problem is with bloody Photoshop, not Wacom. But Wacom will have to fix the issue with a new driver, because you can bet your bottom dollar Adobe won't be bothered about third party peripherals, much less old ones. Makes you want to scream yourself hoarse! So --

Here's a new Genesis 8 female skinmap: Zahara. It renders up reasonably well with minimal work; I should be able to do quite a lot with this. I treated myself to this, plus a set of eye shades and textures from DAZ, the Ultimate Eyes for Genesis. Both were on sale, so ... what the heck? We were going along quite swimmingly till Photoshop auto-updated itself, and that was the end of that! Sometimes, you just can't win. So I'm calling it a day and heading for bed! 

Face morphs and Iray lights

Today's experiment ... start with the Genesis 8 base figure, then mix and match skinmaps and eye maps, create a new face -- and not a "perfect" face that looks like it just walked out of a magazine; a "real" face that you could meet on the street, please. And then set up the Iray lights to make a render really pop. By George, I think I've got this. I've got the lights figured out! So, what's the resolution like on the Genesis 8 figure? Meaning, how close can you get to it, before you start to see the polyons? That used to be a big issue with the generation 4 figures. As much as I really do like Michael 4, you had to be so careful about getting to close. So, let's have a look...

I'm impressed. That's pretty much the raw render; all I did was give the gamma a little tweak in Irfanview after it finished, and the rest is "just as it comes." The eyes are in shadow, so they're a little dark; I thought, what happens if you brighten up the shot, and get in really close, will it still hang together? You'll probably have to see this at large size to get a good idea of the resolution of the skinmap and geometry; I uploaded this at 1000w ...

And I'm actually pretty impressed with Genesis 8 at this level. Now I need to get in there and design some faces that appeal to me, LOL, because, by and large, the stock characters just don't. That'll be the next thing we do, I think! Well, that and starting to install the 270+ items from Renderosity, and making up a catalog of my DAZ "assets -- because it is utterly impossible to find anything in the new "improved" content menu/window system. It's beyond hopeless. If you don't know exactly what you want, and exactly what it's called, you will not find it. And if you should happen to have about 600 items in your collection... uh huh. (I've even doing this for over ten years, so yes, I do have a lot of 3D gear.) So -- looking forward to tomorrow's project! 

Woodland elf ... enchanted forest, Yaoi daydreams...

A woodland elf ... and I'm getting distinctly Yaoi vibes off this! The character would bear some more exploration, yes??! (nudge, wink)

Just daydreaming today ... still playing with the Ferendir skinmap, exploring ways to get the most out of it in DAZ Studio without -- yet -- seeing if Iray loves or hates it. You can't know till you try it and see what happens. This is "just" a raytrace, with the render settings cranked way up; and I also played with the tattoos packaged with Ferendir. The face and body morphs are my own design, though, using Morphs++. I'd forgotten how much I used to enjoy making new characters -- and this one is a beaut:

Sooo, because it take a fraction of the time to get a raytrace (rather than waiting all day for Iray), let's go again -- same character, new scenario, telling a story, or at least hinting at one:

Treasure -- a hunt for the stuff, by the looks of this! A ruin, a lantern, something sparkling with jewels. And take a look at that skinmap. This is marvelously responsive, and with a slight adjustment in the lighting it can look either very pale or deeper colored, almost Hispanic. Me like. I also really like this new face morph:

So, what you have here is Michael 4, custom face and body done in Morphs++, Ferendir skinmap, plus the facial tattoos, M4 Displacement to achieve the vascular mapping, Neftis's Danyel hair set to black, one of DM's columns used as a plinth, and the lantern from DM's Pyrago. In the top render, I used the Euros skirt with lots of surface mapping, plus two of Merlin's trees sized to be bushes, and the menhir from DM's Elven Rock. The backdrops are just that: backdrops. If I'd done this as sets (which I could have), they'd have been rendering for three times as long. Backdrops save a ton of time.

That's it for me, for today. Must sleep! Also, thunder is rumbling and it's probably wise to turn the computers off. Lots more to play with -- the only new toys I got around to today were the tattoos, the lamp and the backdrops! The toy box is overflowing with goodies! (Boom goes the thunder ... it really is time to log out and turn off...)

Sunlight, moonlight -- and a pirate, in Iray

Natural sunlight ... and pretty darned convincing ... I even remembered to have the character squint a little, which he would in these lighting conditions. I'm very impressed with the Michael 8 skinmap -- I rarely if ever use the M8 face of body morph, but the skinmap itself is wonderful. This face and body you see here --

-- is a dial-up / dial-down of so many different features to create a new face and form. I'm glad I got the G8 head and body morphs; they make it so easy to create new characters. There's only one light on this scene, representing the sun; the rest of the scene was lit with IBL lighting to "fill in" the environment. It works well. The magic is in the details:

So, having got the hang of conjuring sunlight in Iray, let's test the theory with a completely different scene and see if it works every time! Try this -- a (very cute) pirate:

And this lighting trick -- the balance between a single distant light and a specially chosen IBL environment light -- does work every time. The character is interesting: mix and match. This is what happens when you apply the Kingston skinmap and Rex face morphs to the G8 base!

And you have to admit, that's extremely ... appealing. A bit of set, a couple of props ... a shader on the shirt; Varun hair styled differently from the previous project. Very nice indeed!

So, okay ... that's sunlight. How about starlight, or moonlight? I don't have it completely worked out yet, but early experiments are promising. I used Michael 4 for this, because I wanted quicker renders. The lower-poly figure renders in a quarter the time:

I think I'd buy that as starlight or moonlight, and this was done completely in Iray, rather than just rendering the scene as it comes, then creating starlight in Photoshop. Sure, you can also do it that way, but I'd love to know how to do it "properly" before I start to cut corners. Neat. I resurfaced Merlin's Katana with new shaders, and that's a backrop rather than a bit of set. This image rendered in about 45 minutes, as against six hours for the guy sitting in the field, and 150 minutes for the pirate. You might remember the figure and pose from a couple of other renders across the years ... the original 2010 picture, and the Lux Render version from something like 2015. Now, what about if we put a Genesis 8 figure into that project?? Hmmm!

One more image for today; just a bit of creative doodling:

Couldn't resist! "Then something happened that the ring did not intend..." It's based on a photo taken at Hindmarsh Falls a couple of years ago. The stream was running, deep in the chasm, and Dave and I did a couple of "ring" images as a chuckle. I promptly forgot about them, and only found them this morning while I was clearing flash cards, setting up for the Grampians trip we're about to take (leaving this time next week). Just had to do this...

Alas, computer problems again: I've lost my connectivity on the desktop, 100%. So I can't buy anything new from DAZ until I somehow (how???) get the computer back online. It might end up going back to the workshop. Until then, I'll just be working with the new things I've bought since May or so, and also working through the dragon's hoard of old 3D assets that I bought back in 2013 and couldn't install for want of harddrive space. The new shaders resurface the old models beautifully. Can't even think about tackling the computer till we get back from this trip, so I don't expect to be back online with my desktop till October. Rats. 😮

A little spring romance, anyone? It's spring down under!

I treated myself to a nifty set of props a couple of nights ago. Merlin is one of my favorite content providers, because his stuff is so different, and so well done -- and at the same time, priced where I can afford it, and it's render-able with the PC I have right now. So --

The flowers look so convincing, how could you resist? The model is CC Foster, for Genesis 8 ... which can sometimes work, and can at other times be a bear to work with. When it works, the results are very good indeed -- though I've adjusted the gamma and balance on this render to put some tone into his skin, which tends to render up very pale indeed, in anything remotely similar to natural daylight. Still, take a long look at Foster if you're looking for a very useful Genesis 8 guy:

Catalog image. See this.

I ought to use this character, or parts of him, more. Hmm. Expect to see elements, and versions, in the very near future! In the 'spring romance render, he's wearing the Landis hair, which I got last week along with the Varun hair, but this is the first chance I've had to play with it:

Catalog image. See this.

Good news and not-so-good news with the Landis hair. It looks fantastic, but after six hours of render time I still had to paint a little here and there to get around a lot of unresolved pixels. It's high, high poly, and with a slow(er) system, it could be rendering for the rest of your life. But if you don't mind painting on it a little bit, it does look great in the final product.

The props are what make this shot, honestly. Otherwise you just have another Genesis 8 with its kit off. Cheers to Merlin for crafting a really fantastic set of wild flowers -- I find myself wondering if they might just work in Terragen, too! Can't see why not -- Flinx's trees work in Terragen, so... 

I only used a few of the wild flower props to create the 'Spring Romance' picture, and these will be showing up in sets and scenes everywhere. Lovely! I did a CU shot on the cow parsley, which rendered for about two hours to get to this point, at 600x900 size:

Now, that is nice. It's also a full-on 3D rendered shot, no a backdrop -- everything in here is from Merlin's auto-load (ie., load the whole thing with one click), but you do have to set up the lighting; the lights packaged with the auto-load scene make it look like a raytrace. 

I'm thrilled to bits with the results, dying to work more with these props. They're on sale as I type this, and they're not expensive to begin with. If you're interested in this kind of thing, take a look --

Catalog image. See this

Images springing to mind everywhere, right? Now, the challenge will be to see what's doable with a system that's not exactly on the cutting edge of desktop PC tech today! Speaking of which --

I've been wanting to check out the dForce dynamic fabric function of Studio 4.11, so I went over to YouTube and had a look at the tutorials. Phhht. Ahem. Not on this computer, sorry, guys. Anything dForce is going to have to wait till Christmas 2020, when I can run it. Right now, it would just be a time-waster and (another) source of endless frustration. So, for fifteen months, we'll stick to the old morphing costumes and hair, and let the rest slide on by. 😜

More soon!