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!

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!

"Brokering a deal" ... too many visible polygons!

 

Call this one "Brokering a Deal." Two Michael 4s, and I couldn't be happier with this render (see it full sized, please). On the left, that's the serendipitous new character who just appeared spontaneously, when Studio 4 mis-read the character preset file for Jarrat; I called him Kurt. Now, today's experiment was to see what we can get from the HD skinmap for Michael 4...

Sooo, he's wearing a new face and custom body form, designed quickly in Morphs++, and that's the HD M4 skinmap plus the Iray Converter for Generation 4; and the result is dandy except for the sheer number of polygons visible in the M4 figure, after rendering in Iray --

-- and the left shoulder has a major problem too. Now, sure, you can paint them out, and I've done it in the past (ran into this problem for the first time in LuxRender, long ago), but that's a lot of painting, and frankly, I couldn't be bothered. So a put a jacket on him, LOL. If there was one reason for using the Genesis figures rather than the Generation 4 characters, this would be it. Iray can really, really show up the polygons! And speaking of Genesis --

"Personal Demons" ... a half-hour quickie because I had time to kill last night. And it goes to prove that viewers relate more to human figures than to other kinds of images; and female characters get more response than male. I slaved for about three hours to complete the industrial site render yesterday, and it's going largely unnoticed at the DAZ Creative Art and Renderosity groups on Facebook; but this one romped its way into double-figures at Renderosity, when in fact it only took a few minutes to put together and fifteen minutes to render. (Incidentally, if you can get into double figures, you're doing well. Hunh. Go figure.) I like the new M4 character a lot. Call him Simon, I think. And he also is wearing Genesis 3 hair ... it works on Michael 4! 

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!

Shamanic Visions, and an Elf about town

 

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

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

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

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

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

A character created from scratch! This is neat --

 

Spent the afternoon experimenting with raytracing ... yes, raytracing! This, above, is not a raytrace, obviously. This one is an Iray render, using one of Sveva's backdrops to save time, and a lot of Merlin's grass (from the Wild Borders set) to make the foreground and background kind of "smoosh" together till they look contiguous (I just invented a word). What's interesting about this render is that I created the figure from scratch. It uses a skinmap called called Zander for Genesis 8, and the Landis Hair for Genesis 3, but the face and body form were designed on the fly. This is good. I can do this. I rendered it at 2000 pixels high, rebalanced it quickly to brighten it up (a lot faster than trying to figure out the Gamma in Studio, though you could do it that way, if you wanted to), and called it good. Oh -- the backdrop had some work done to it; I Gaussed it quite a bit to soften it, give the impression of a focal drop-off into the distance... Now --

This one is your raytrace I'd been hoping to get raytracing working properly in Studio 4.15, and I think we can call it job done! Everything is performing properly --

-- the vascular mapping is on and working, that's Michael 4's High Resolution skinmap, there's a displacement map on the costume, custom eyes, DOF on the camera, the works. Plus, I cranked the settings up sky high on the raytrace to pump the most quality out of it that's possible. This would have been an impossible, 10-hour render on the old computer (the reason I shut it down a year or so ago). How long did this take? About twelve minutes. Yes, I'm happy. Good old Michael 4 is back. And --

-- the resolution on the Genesis 8 character is pretty amazing. I believe there's an add-on you can get, which will "age" the Genesis figure. I might get this next, because the one thing about these figures is, try as you might, you always end up with a twenty-something, or even a teen, and I tend to like a guy who looks like he's been around the block a couple of times. Let me see what I can find, something like "Aged for Gensis 8." I have two lights plus an environment light on this, and the result is pretty darned good. Good enough, I think, that if I were using a photographic backdrop, you'd have a hard time picking this for a render. You could assume it's a snapshot. More soon! 

Further adventures with Genesis 2 and Victoria 4

 

Iray Render, Photoshop painting

Okay, so having looked at Genesis 3 yesterday, I took a look at Genesis 2 today. Fair to say that you shouldn't actually render the base figure ... which is odd. You can render Michael 4 without a qualm, but Genesis 2 and 3 males load up looking uncomfortably like adolescents; you need to add characters to them, to get anything out of them. (In other words, pay some biiiig money!) I like the look of Michael 5 and 6 -- they fit the Genesis and Genesis 2 base figures respectively; one day, if I'm floating on cash, I might do something with them. They're not running away ... God knows, you can still get everything right back to Michael 3! Anyway, this, above is just the Genesis 2 base figure, which is actually preferable to the version 3, in terms of looking like a man, not a little boy. Then, when you add a character to the base figure -- it comes to life. Here is Michael 5, slapped onto the Genesis base:

...and while we're on the subject, we might as well follow the logic train to the end of the track! So, here is Michael 6, which fits the Genesis 2 base figure:

The weakest link regarding the early figures is the hair. It's no better than it was back in the days when Michael and Victoria 4 were on the cutting edge ... in fact, I don't think the very early toupees for Genesis and Gen 2 were as good as some of the best M4 and V4 toupees. Go figure. Then there's Michael 7 ... which is weirdly not really to my taste ...

...and you see what I mean about the hair being the weakest link, even by the time you get to Mike 7, which fits the Genesis 3 base figure! Soon after this, something went "pop" and 3D hair got very good indeed ... just in time for Genesis 8, Michael 8, and ... here we are:

Michael 8

Now, the next bit of news is that people are starting to talk about -- wait for it! -- Genesis 9. Well, okay. But I still haven't caught up with Genesis 8 yet! I'll have to wait on this. Meanwhile, let's come back down to Earth and look at what we can do in the real world. As I began, I've been exploring the possibilities of the generation 4 figures, largely because most of what I own, as per 3D assets, dates from that era and fits Michal or Victoria 4! So let's see what we can do in Iray...

That's Victoria 4, wearing the Angel skinmap, the Mimi eyes, the Chaos Seed costume with new shaders by Sveva, and a cyclorama in the background. IBL environment lighting, plus one photometric spotlight. The only thing that lets it down (and Genesis mesh would solve this!) is the unrealistic bend in the left elbow. Pretend you don't notice. I set off to design a whole new character this morning, and came up with this. I like this face a lot, so -- expect to see more of her! The eyes were the biggest challenge in this project --

 

Now, I usually opt for eyes from the "Eyes Have It" for M4 and V4 pack, which work marvelously with raytracing. But in Iray they're a disaster ... the sclera (the white of the eye) renders charcoal grey, and so far has resisted every trick I know to correct this. So I tried the Angel eyes, belonging to the skinmap. Worse! Angel renders flat black, iris and sclera alike, and nothing I did could fix this (and I did it all, believe me). In despair, I turned to a skinmap called Mimi for V4, from eons ago, and -- guess what? The eyes just work. Now, I need to get into settings for these eyes, in the surfaces pane, and reverse engineer what's there to fit both the Angel eyes, and The Eyes Have it. But not today -- or tomorrow, in fact. Tomorrow I'm out of here early. Dave's day off, and we're on a road trip. More soon. 

Installing third party shaders in DAZ Studio 4.14 ... done!

One thing at a time! I wanted to be sure all the old Studio content has installed properly, so -- can we get Victoria 4.2 to load properly, and render nicely? Answer --

-- yes. That's Victoria 4.2 rendered in Iray, with one of the old costumes given a makeover with Iray shaders, Not bad. In fact, the low-poly models render FAST; just keep in mind that when you get very, very close to them, Iray shows up all the cockroaches. You will see polygons, if you get too close! So keep these figures for background scenes, presumably.

The next question was, since the old 3Delight render engine is exactly that, old, does that mean simpler renders -- raytrace! -- will go fast, because they're not Iray renders? Answer -- a resounding no! Not only do raytraces take about 4x longer than Iray renders, when you see the results side by side, they're disappointing...

 That's still just the old low-poly Michael 4, wearing Neftis's Mon Chevalier hair (which is a Poser prop), and Xurge3D's Mediaeval Royalty costume (also optimized for Poser). So the surfaces had to be adjusted for Iray, which turned out to be tricky but far from impossible. The thing is that M4 renders up quite nicely in Iray ... in four minutes. The raytrace is cartoonish, and was at least 20 minutes, even with The Hulk running "high and hot." Hmm.

I rather think I'll be sticking to Iray from here on out. So that's another question answered. Next: how in the hell do you install all your Renderosity content into Studio 4.14, under Windows 10? I knew the answer to this for Studio 3 and Windows 7, but this is very, very different. Well, one step at a time. I installed a pile of shaders first, and it turns out, they work just fine. So far I've applied them to many props, costumes and so forth, and they look a treat:

I did the ground, the column and so forth, in shaders to make the simple old props look good. This little scene here has 10 props and four lights ... I think I've got the photometric lights worked out (bear with me; I'll write about this as we go, when I'm sure). Right now, the only thing I can pass along with confidence is the answer to this:

Where do you put third party shaders from Renderosity into DAZ Studio 4.14, to have they work properly?

Here's the file path:

C:\DAZ 3D\Applications\Data\DAZ 3D\My DAZ 3D Library\Runtime --

After which, copy shader sets (or packs) into Runtime\Iray or Runtime\Shader Presets.

It gets more complex if you're installing props, because you need to know if the assets you're installing are DAZ 3D format, or Poser format. In the case of the Xurge3D (Poser) costume Michael 4 is wearing here, I've got it to work, but I want to check the installation process a couple more times before I quote you exact addresses. It can be bloody confusing!

More experiments to come. I need to thrash out a lot of questions about lighting, and then I need to install about 500 Renderosity items, from shaders to lights to poses to hair to costumes and props. This will take a wee while. Patience! 

Touching base again

Touching base with some re-posts ... eye candy really ... because it's been how long since I posted here? That's about how long it's been since I was able to do some fresh art. Have been sick (again), and on top of that I have (damnit) computer issues. For some time my desktop has been really struggling with Iray, and it's not a happy machine. What it can render is limited, and frankly, I'm pushing it too hard. If I don't watch out, I'm going to burn it out -- which doesn't alter the fact it'll be a year before I can get a new one! So...

I have a sneaking suspicion I'm going to have to revert to raytracing. Iray will have to go on the side burner till I can update the hardware ... that's the bottom line. Now, there's actually a lot to be said for old fashioned raytracing. Like this:

Sure, Iray is going to give you superior results (duh!), and also the Firefly engine built into Poser will give superior results (ditto) than the old 3Delight raytrace engine built into Studio ... but not when you're limping along with hardware that doesn't want to play nice anymore. Hmm.

Bear with me. I'm starting to recover my health a bit, and am juuuust about at the point where I want to see how far I can push raytracing, to get that last little bit out of it, before we get to Christmas 2020, and I'm breaking open a new box, spending two days installing software! I mean, get real here: this is a raytrace:

So let's give the poor old computer a break: stop trying to render stuff that looks photographic, and just turn out some lovely artwork. Yes? Yes. Okay. I used to enjoy the heck out of raytracing! It's over eight years since I did these:

So! Artwork coming up, rather than experiments in photo-realism ... let's just go out there and have fun, at least till I'm breaking open a new box!