As you like it...

Genesis 8, Iray

Michael 4, raytrace

Digital painting, Photoshop

One factor has characterised the last month or so here in South Australia: heat/drought. The rain stopped. The heat came. It's been ... interesting, to say the least. Not fun, but -- interesting. No, I haven't done very much art in that time. Most days, I couldn't even turn on the computer. The PC enjoys the hot weather about as much as I do. In other words, not at all.

But for what it's worth, we're close to the end of this nonsense now. It's been autumn, officially, for two weeks, and we've had some actual rain (enough to end the drought, though it didn't go on for more than a day). Temperatures will be down by ten and fifteen degrees Celsius in the days and weeks to come, and I'm looking forward very much to getting back down to some art. Also writing.

For now ... these are repaints of old renders, some of which never even saw the light of day. They were done as tests and experiments, and appear to have been shelved, several years ago. Digging back through the archives is like hunting for buried treasure -- and finding it. 

So, what's your fancy? Iray, raytrace, painting?? It's tremendously interesting to compare results across a couple of engines. For instance:

Amadeus: firelight ... raytrace; and

Amadeus, identical costume -- Lux Render

Amadeus; same costume but the textures
have been switched so shaders ... Iray is different

What makes me chuckle a little is that the textures on the costume in the raytrace and Lux renders -- well, the pants he's wearing appear to be made from the cushions on the couch we had about ten years ago, and his shirt, I kid you not, is the crochet handbag I used to carry around 2012! Ooooh, I used to enjoy making textures and the displacement maps and opacity maps and reflection maps ... why did I ever stop?! 

Must get back to this. Start up Studio, go right back to good old Michael 4, finish reinstalling all my oooold Renderosity content (I only got about a third of it reinstalled before Genesis lured me away and everything started going awry again) and just ... have fun.

Note to self: have fun this time!

Happy afternoon's painting -- and here's a face you might recognize...

 

posted at full size -- enjoy

Edit: I wasn't happy with the face on this one, so I 
went back into it and ran another experiment:
face replacement. Hey, it worked!

It's been a day for experiments ... and most of them worked! Here's a face that might be familiar ... in fact, it's an old character I created a lot of years ago, but this painting is brand new: painted from scratch, from an old raytrace, with a new sky which began as a photograph I took about six weeks ago. It's painted in four layers, and ... it worked! The "blue goddess" is another kind of experiment, and that worked too.  Starting to feel like I'm making some genuine progress here, and these paintings can afford to start getting more complex. It was really gratifying to begin with work that began in DAZ Studio 3 about ten years ago, and end up with a full on painting. Nice! Guy candy. Call it what you will. 

Meanwhile, I'm trying to fathom how to paint feathers. I keep getting fur, not feathers, lol. Working on a painting of a couple of cute Tawny Frogmouths, and the plumage ... well, birds that look like owls don't have fur, but these do. Back to the drawing board and start again, I think!

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 Lair of the Goblin Queen -- and so forth

 

Please see this full size -- it's quite a visual feast! Taking inspiration from Frazetta, I've put the G8 Female, and a G8 Male, into The Throne of the Barbarian King, and then lit it largely with its own torchlight. The G8F is Ginnie HD, wearing the Crimsoneye costume and Axarra headdess. The G8M is Michael 8 with the Dae face turned on 100%, and the Angelic Fallen tattoos added. All else is lighting. Oh -- Conan, here, is wearing the AS Hair for G8F; the prop works well on the male, though it's very glossy. I need to work out how to make it look less like a shampoo commercial -- or else, as I did here, zap it with some virtual paint to "paint it down." I'll come back to this barbarian soon ... I rather like the Conan thing we've got going on here!

And now for something completely different ... an android. doubtlessly. Compete with mauve hair and purple fingernails, and a costume that's been resurfaced with (!) car paint! The car paint shader was a freebie from Deviantart, and I went back to the page to find the link, to be include it here. Its a fabulous set of colors, shades, gloss, the works. Highly recommended -- click here to go there. And here's something pretty...

Right out of a storybook. What I must do (soon) is work out how to get fully photographic results with the horse. This is the exact same lighting set I used for a G8F fantasy gypsy-warrior a little while ago; on the human character, I got a photographic result. On the horse ... pretty, but nowhere near to photographic. This is one I must work out, because I'd love to get photo-realistic horse renders. 

That's all for now, from DAZ, but --

I've just started up Terragen for the first time in several years, and I'm making every rookie mistake! I've saddled myself with a 25 hour render, and it's 97% done by the time I get up next morning, figure something has to be wrong, research it, get a lead on what I did to sabotage myself ... it's not worth stopping it after 21 hours of render time, so I'll let it go, and finish -- and I won't make that mistake again! First experiments are jogging my memory nicely...

The object of running Terragen is to be able to create custom atmospherics for DAZ renders, so the 25-hour booboo I have finishing up sometime today, which involves sunlight sparkling on water, doesn't need to be repeated. From here on, I'll drop the skyline low in the shot, and just render the sky. Oddly enough, Terragen renders the skies quickly. Since this was the whole point of installing it --! More soon, but right now, the system will be tied up all day, finishing a pretty simple picture: mea culpa. My bad, as they say. Aarrghhh.  

 

Morningstar Wings ... not quite happy dancing, but it's nice!

Part of me wants to happy dance -- "Yay me, I got the Morningstar Wings to render" ... part of me wants to groan, because they only 99% rendered, and left me with a bit of painting to do. Not that I mind painting, I do it all the time -- BUT. This is the first time I've had a subject that "choked" my new video card. This is an NVIDIA RTX 2070 Super, and that is the max I'm likely to be able to afford. Period. From here on up video cards start to get into the same price bracket as used cars, and when you're talking about a gadget to support your hobby ... nope. Can't rationalize it. This video card is supposed to be up to the task of rendering top-line games in real time. Well -- I like painting! Good thing I do. 

This one was fun. It's actually Victoria 4.2 in Iray, wearing the Evangelique hair and the ShadowStorm dress, standing in a bit of DM's Kerrick's Throne set. I must say, V4 renders very nicely in Iray. And being a low-poly figure, she renders fast, virtually trouble free. I like the old costume, too -- always did. So when I saw how Iray handles it, I thought, hmmm. And --

Okay, I didn't shoot all the way for G8. This is the G2 Female wearing the V4 dress, and it fits pretty well. She's standing in one corner of DM's Anardhouse set, which renders wonderfully in Iray, too. Not bad at all, that! I don't have much in the way of G2 assets; they don't share between figures as well as the G3 costumes and hair. (The skinmaps don't share back and forth at all, as far as I know). So...

Alas, poor Yorik! A nice sunset shot, with golden light and interesting shadows. The set is Reparation, and I'm rather impressed by how it renders. Must do more with this. Well, there's lots more to share, but ... not tonight. Have been editing all day, and painting all evening, and I'm sooo tired! Calling it a day right here, and hitting the hay. More tomorrow!

Something old, something new, something borrowed --

 

I call this "Gate of Secrets," and it'll get more interesting when I tell you, that's Genesis 8 wearing Micahel 4's costume! Yep. That's either Dae wearing Michael 8's skinmap, or Michael 8 wearing the Dae skinmap, and I've forgotten which! But the loincloth is an eons-old wardrobe bit for M4; and whaddaya know? When you import it through the wardrobe wizard -- it fits! I put a new Iray shader onto it, and there you go. The second interesting thing about this is the prop sword ... and old, old prop with new shaders:

You might want to take a look at that, full-sized, because it's astonishing. If you recognize the pose, you're not wrong. This is a re-render of a Genesis/Iray scene I did just before I realized I was going to kill the computer. At the time, the moment I turned on Photometric lights, the old system had a hernia. At this point, I'm going back into good ideas that weren't really possible back in the day, and doing justice to them. Nice! Sooo...

Being on a roll, I decided to take a look at a Generation 4 figure, hunt down one of V4's old costumes, install it, and see what Iray makes of the ShadowStorm dress. Hmm.

Well, here's Victoria 4 wearing the Angel skinmap, the Gypsy hair, and a a face and body morph designed by me. The dress was far, far harder than the figure! Iray didn't like it at all, and it was a major challenge to get it looking good. But worth the work --

The good news is that Iray likes this skinmap; it renders up very nicely indeed. I'm not saying the Generation 4 figure (or its mesh!) looks like G8, but there was a time when this would have knocked your socks off --

Since I had some more time (not doing anything much today; should be doing housework, but I'm so sick and tired of housework, I just can't even look at tidying and cleaning), I hunted down the skinmap for the HZ Victor character. Iray isn't as happy with it as with the Angel skinmap --

It's not bad, but it doesn't have the realism one expects and demands these days. Yes, I applied the Uber Shader. And it's ... okay; but it's very flat and "off" somehow, and the closer you get to it, the more you can notice that it's "off" by comparison with the Genesis skinmaps we're accustomed to now:

...and we won't even talk abouy M4's notorious elbows, which never looked realistic, even ten years ago, and these days? Phhhttt. Okay ... next experiment (after Dave and I get back from our road trip to Millicent, Robe, Naracoorte, Mount Gambier, and with any luck at all, Halls Gap), I'll get the Iray Converter for Generation 4, and see if it livens up all these old skinmaps that, frankly, could be so much better. Look at the velvet and lustre on the G8 skin. Yeah, that. 

Water, and a new dress for the lady

Water! I've been going fifteen rounds with Iray in the last couple of weeks, trying to get it to do realistic water by means of all those nifty tricks we knew and used in the old render engine ... no real joy. So in the interests of sanity I gave up and bought a great set of shaders, Easy Water and Fluids. Now, when they say "easy," all things are relative. First, although you can just slap the shader on a plane and hit "render," you really, really want to configure the water to be just what you want ... and that takes a bit of learning. No problem: in half an hour I had it figured. But high rez rendering is another question! This is the first render I've done on the new system that took over an hour! Well worth it; but if I'm rendering on 10 cores threaded as 20, and it still took 70 minutes to get this, I can just imagine how a slower system would struggle. 

Anyway -- the rock and water prop is the Daz freebie, Garden Pond, which I massively rescaled into a small lake, and then I redid the rocks with a shader. The tree is Flink's Tree 6d (from Renderosity), and the grasses are from Merlin's Wild Borders set (Daz). That's ... not bad. Not bad at all, especially for a very simple old prop. This is filled with possibility, and I've only just started to experiment! Also --

Finally, I actually bought a costume for the G8 female! So far I've been working with the freebies supplied with the Essentials kits for the Genesis figures -- and that's fair enough; they'll take you quite a long way, if you spritz them up with new shaders. This is called a "sun dress," but it would also do as a top or lingerie, depending on how it was textured. I paired it with the pants from a G2 costume, and had fun with the lights. That's the Georgia skinmap, but I tweaked the body morph a lot. 

One thing this costume isn't is dynamic ... and I really, really have to get into the dForce system. Shopping for a dress for the G8 to wear, I had to search long and hard to find something I liked that wasn't dForce. Seems like all the cool costumes and hairstyles are dForce now, so this is one of the very few things I need to catch up with. I guess I'll put this next on my list of Must Do jobs!

I have numerous images swimming in my imagination, and I should have the time to do some renders next week. The last couple of weeks have been waaaay too busy with a writing project -- a novel, done now and beginning the hunt for agency representation -- wish me luck; and the week after next I'll be away from the computer the whole time: Dave and I are "doing" the Limestone Coast over six days, so it's going to be about photography, travel, spending some quality time with by hubby on and around our wedding anniversary. It's been 22 years. I don't believe it, but it has!

More soon ... I have a couple of images clamouring to be rendered. 

Mix and match costumes, shaders and all

Today's experiments were about mixing and matching bits of different costumes and then making them match up though the use of Iray shaders ... it's actually a lot of fun. You don't see it so much on the Rex character, above, because its just the leather jacket (for Genesis 1) and the jeans (for Genesis 3), and the Varun hair (Genesis 8); but when you get into the female character ... well, I'll admit there's a lot more to work with! Here we go --

That's a mixture of four different costumes, all made to match with shaders ... and then we get to the woman herself. That's G8 Female, right out of the box -- wearing Georgia's makeup and eyes, and the Side-part Hair for Genesis 2. (For these images, I'm not beating my brains out with sets and props; these backgrounds are lifted right out of the packs by Sveva -- you can find them on Renderosity. At this moment, I don't have time to run every experiment in the book with lights and shaders, and mess about with setting whole scenes ... besides which, I haven't (yet) got down to the installations! I still have 250+ things to install. And finally, when you set up a huge scene, you blow out your render times.) I played about with it a little bit ...

A tree by Flink, a bunch of other props, a backdrop out of Terragen, Iray lighting to simulate sunset. It's okay ... but the problem with 3D trees is that the leaves are the size of hubcaps or dinner plates. I'm honestly not that impressed with anyone's 3D tree models. Terragen is fine, till you bring in trees, and then unless you can afford the XFrog tres, which only work in Terragen, you're back to the same problem pf hubcap sized leaves, which rob the tree/scene of realism. And the thing that makes me relictant to spend hundreds of bucks on XFrog trees is that since they only work in Terragen, it locks you into working with Terragen -- which, in turn, is a subscription service, if you want to get away from the limitations of the free version. Its not cheap, and I don't have the bucks, in the long term. So, we'll just use backdrops, for the moment, I think! In any case --

Today's experiments were a big success, with one exception. The Wardrobe Wizard that worked so brilliantly yesterday failed today ... and this is weird, because it failed on the same costumed and figures it worked with before. Restarting the software did NOT work ... restarting the computer might, but I don't have the time. So ... another day, for that. So, there you go --

-- the magic of shaders. I like it! More soon. There are eight thousand more experiments to run. And I must get around to installing all those other goodies...

Experiments in Genesis: what's the compatibility with earlier figures and props?

Genesis 8 in NVIDIA Iray

Am spending a week or two back in DAZ Studio, before I start to commit to another writing project, and this really is time to make all the experiments that'll let me catch up quickly. I bowed out back when the Genesis figures were just making their debut, for various reasons, all of them good. The first was, my hardware wouldn't handle Studio 4 The second was, I hated the new interface. But now I have the hardware and the time ... okay. So. First experiment: I'm working with Genesis 8, which is the new generation, but so much of the content was designed for earlier forms. Now, there's a converter running, when you load the hair and costume, so -- can Genesis 8 wear something designed for Genesis 1? The answer is, yes. This is a Genesis 8 figure (mostly designed my me), but the hair on his head, and what he's wearing, were deigned for the original figure. Okay. And yes, Genesis 8 is a vast improvement over Michael 4 ...

Michael 4 in NVIDIA Iray

This is Michael 4, as rendered by NVIDIA Iray. First, yes, you can render the old figures in Iray. They're quite nice; and they're low-poly enough to render fast. But they're also low-poly enough to not quite give you the photographic realism we want today. This is the Jagger skinmap, an almost random face morph -- and the other experiment I'm running here is, "Can I install my old Renderosity content into studio 4.15, AND find it, AND have it be fully functional?" Answer, yes. The hair on M4's head is Akaste Hair, from Renderosity. You just have to know where to look for the old stuff in the content menus! Studio likes to hide things away. Renderosity content is most often Poser content, so, by and large, you find it in Poser Formats > My DAZ 3D Library ... and here's the kicker: Michael 4 himself, the base figure, is hidden away there. Took me a week to find it, at the outset! You really have to get the hang of this. So, if this is Michael 4, what about the old Victoria 4?

Victoria 4.2 in NVIDIA Iray

Yes, I know, I haven't done nearly as much with Victoria 4 has with Michael 4 ... one of the reasons was that 90% of everything features the female models (still true today; have a look at 3D art, and it's rare to see a male, and far more rare that the male will not be old, ugly, or a cartoon. It's almost as if artists are worried about being categorized as gay if they should render beautiful men! Meh). This, above, was done in Iray about eighteen months ago, before computer problems caused me to put art away for almost a whole year, till I could get a new system. Compare Victoria 4.2 with...

Genesis 1 in NVIDIA Iray

That's the original Genesis figure, Genesis 1. There's not a wealth of visible difference between this and Victoria; in fact, many times, Victoria looked better. There, I've said it. There was a ton of room for improvement with the original Genesis, and it didn't take them long to come out with Genesis 2 --

Genesis 2 in NVIDIA Iray

That's Genesis 2, rendered in Iray; and we're starting to get into the ballpark now. I've been installing and cataloging content for the past week, and have stumbled over tons of Genesis 1,2,3 content that was packaged along with DAZ Studio. The quality isn't startling, but it's enough to give you a feel for the model and props. Before Genesis 3, I was more impressed with the render engine than with the figures! And of course I entered the field again when Genesis 8 was new ... 8.1 is out now, with improved mesh; but I doubt you could see any difference unless you were animating, which I'm not! But since we started with a Genesis 8 male, let's end this look at the figures with the Genesis 8 female:

Now we're' cooking! I can work with this ... in fact, I promptly went to DAZ and tried to buy the body morphs for Genesis 8 female, and a character (skinmap and morphs), but there's some kind of error going on, server-side. It won't let me pay. Hunh?? So that'll have to wait for another day. More soon.

 

A swordsman in the snow ... whooo!

Hunting around through the "assets" I bought a long, long time ago -- and never had the harddrive space to install! -- I came upon this skinmap: Ferendir, by a designer called "SixthSense." It's a gorgeous skinmap, and renders beautifully ... though I do admit, I painted the eyebrows, which are too pale and thin for my liking; and I also applied the SAV Atlas displacement mapping on the torso and arms to bring up good venous mapping. But just take look at this skinmap in closeup -- if you can, see it at full size:

That's superb. A pleasure to watch it rendering! Using the Atlas displacement maps adds an extra dimension to it; and I designed a new face to go with this map. This is not the Ferendir face morph, as packaged by the designer. To be honest, the original face doesn't do anything for me. You might like it, and the good news is, it's still available from Renderosity.

So, not wanting a teenager, I designed a face and body I like, and came up with this:

This is what I love about working with Michael 4: it's so easy, and so quick, to get results. Sure, Genesis  can be significantly closer to full-on photo-realism, but it takes soooo long to get anywhere, especially on a slow system like mine. With M4 you can create new characters on the fly in a snap. I rather like this face -- and the eyes are the brilliant green item from The Eyes Have it set:

The hair is hand-painted, based on the old Mario's Hair for M4, from Neftis Hair Salon. That doesn't render up so well (well, it's quick, but the downside to that is, you pay for speed in low-rez results: human hair isn't supposed to go around corners, and so forth), but it does give you a good base to paint over, and ... Photoshop to the rescue again.

The snow is an old .ABR brush, Ron's Magical Snow, from the days when Ron's brushes could be used with Photoshop Elements. Alas, his new brushes need the full on Creative Suite version, or whatever it is these days ... I can't use them. I'm still running Elements 9! It works, I own it outright, and I've no reason to change it, since it does everything I want it to! The only thing is, sometimes people come along with fabulous new brushes which I can't use; but there's a free site, All Free Download (dot com), which is loaded with old fashioned brushes. They are absolutely free and this is not one of those sites plagued with viruses and such antisocial rubbish. It's perfectly safe, and the worst thing you might have to do is look at a couple of pay-per-view commercials in exchange for downloading some very good .abr brushes. Enjoy!

This sword is Merlin's Katana ... but I've been unpacking loads of props from years ago, and just discovered that I own Xurge 3D's Ranger weapons! I had no idea I had these -- expect to see them very soon. I honestly have no idea what I have stashed away from 2013 or so. Even though I didn't have the harddrive space, I shopped a lot of sales, grabbed fantastic special offers. Now's the time to bring them out, dust them off and play! The Ferendir skinmap is one such stashed item. It renders as well as anything I've ever seen, and with the pixel and shadow sampling settings cranked way up on 3Delight, the resolution is brilliant. That skin absolutely glows.

The costume is the bottom half of Xurge 3D's Medieval Royalty cossie; you saw the whole thing yesterday. Now I've got the surface texture adjustments worked out to get good results in Studio from an item configured for Poser, it's easy to work with...

And so to bed. More tomorrow! 

Moody lighting, fantasy sets ... Genesis 8 and Michael 4

Genesis 8 (the Dae character wearing Varun hair, in fact), standing in the old Reparation set -- which renders up well in Iray, by some complete fluke. Half the time, the old materials don't work in Iray; and half the time they do. Curiouser and curiouser. Anyway, this was Take One on an idea I've been pursuing for a couple of days --

Very nice render quality on that -- but the strength of the image is in the lighting and camera settings; and those I did in Studio 3 (!) before sending the whole thing over to Studio 4. In fact, I designed and built this set, lighting and camera around a scene using Xurge 3D's Medieval Royalty costume, on Michael 4 ...

Again, that's a heck of a nice render -- it's "just" a Studio 3 raytrace, because ... well, the guys at Xurge are not joking when they warn you, their costumes are optimized for Poser and may not work in DAZ Studio. Some do, some don't; and this one really doesn't. It took about an hour of working around and around it, to come up with a compromise, where the costume might not look as if would in Poser, but at least it looks terrific.

Borrowing a catalog image from Xurge, this is what it ought to look like:

Catalog image. See this.

Well, after an hour of work, I was about halfway there and decided to cut my losses and call it good! It's fairly reasonable:

...in another hour I might have got it, but I'd had enough of fiddling about, for a couple of reasons. The best I was going to get was a Studio 3 render on this, because in Studio 4 it would have to be reconfigured all over again ... and I can't save a file out of Studio 4, so any work I put into renders on that platform is ephemeral: one shot. Soooo -- I decided to call it right here and be satisfied...

Well, okay, not quite. Just for fun (ha!) I let Iray have a go at rendering this same costume, and the results are idiotic. Laughable. I actually spent another half hour trying to get Iray to "shake hands" with this costume, and it utterly refused, so -- stuff it.

The set rendered beautifully, though, so I left the set, camera and lights just as they were, deleted the Michael 4 and put in a Genesis 8 in his place ... which is where you came in, today!

The last image for this post is left over from yesterday. I didn't get to an upload because I had the headache from hell, but I did finish out the work with Xurge's Druid Shaman costume...

Now, that's a Studio 4 raytrace, with progressive rendering turned on and all the settings cranked up till it took about half an hour to render. Oh, yeah ...

I actually find myself wondering if Iray can make sense of this costume??? No way to tell, without trying it! I'll come back to this in a few days. I have a couple of things to render while they're burning in my imagination, so we'll set this one aside for a little while and come back to it.

Also, I treated myself to some new toys from Renderosity right before I came up with the aforementioned headache from hell. I'd love to get them installed tomorrow. So -- more soon!