Willow Creek -- now, this was a challenge!

 

Stonemason's Willow Creek set is enormous ... so huge, it gave me a major challenge. The first time I rendered it, I saw something I haven't seen yet on this PC. The GPU "choked" before the render was complete. Say, what?! That shouldn't happen. So I took the scene apart and figured out what was eating up the GPU space ... swapped out the water shader and changed the lighting model. Phew! With that done the set renders in something like a quarter of an hour. So it was time to get creative! 

The boat was a prop from Cornucopia, back in the days when I dabbled fleetingly in Vue; new shaders and so forth -- it renders nicely in Iray. Our elven hero is CC Foster, slightly tweaked as an elf; and having designed the character specifically for this scene --

Now, that's nice. I like this character a lot. The planes and angles of his face suit the role so well ... must come back to him again soon!

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. 

A grab-bag of goodies

 

Old OBJ models and new shaders ... it's an adventure in Iray, with results that can be astonishing ... or not so good. Depends on a lot of random factors. The question is always on my mind, "What can we do with the old generation four models, since almost everything I have was designed for Michael 4, and while the new Genesis stuff is terrific, I just don't have another three or four thousand dollars to spend on renewing everything in the 3D cupboard! So what do we have here? Well --

This, above, is Iray's rendering of the Jagger skinmap for M4; he's wearing Neftis's Ricardi hair and Sickle Yield's track pants; but I resurfaced the trackies with Iray shaders, so they look pretty good. The results here are not so very different from the Genesis figures -- with one exception. M4 ain't as posable: wait till you start to bend the limbs, and you'll soon see that they don't bend realistically; they just sort of fold, and tend to crease, which Genesis limbs usually don't.This effect is very, very noticeable with Victoria 4, also --

Now, this is Victori 4, wearing the HR Donna skinmap, and one of the Neftis wigs ... it's actually more of a test of the costume, which is one of Powerage's old fantasy sets, the Fantasy Cult costume. It depends on metals and transparency maps, and it was never designed for Iray! But it turns out the transparency maps worked wonderfully in Iray ... the metals? Nope. So I resurfaced all the metals with a gold shader from Mech4D's immense pack of shaders, and the result is actually very nice...

The crystals are a prop from an old fantasy collection, Magic Containers, which I think came from Renderosity about the time Noah was launching his ark. Obviously, it was never going to work well in Iray, but I used a volumetric diamond shader from Mech4D's collection (from DAZ), and the result is very nice. I can use this prop, and many others ... we're happy!

The Elven Merchant Ship was from Renderosity too; and I'm not enormously fond of this prop, which is why I've never used it much. It was made using textures rather than materials, so the surfacing on it is disappointing; and no templates were provided, so one can't go in and paint a material. Soooo ... I put it into silhouette by placing the key light almost behind it, and did some overpainting in Photoshop, which increased the realism. Cool.

On that render, the water was the big, big challenge. I don't own a "water prop" (yet) for Iray, and of course it's totally different trying to work with surfaces in Iray than in 3Delight. This is an Iray render, so ... what the heck was I going to do? Well, displacement maps DO -- NOT -- WORK in Iray. Or, if they do, I haven't found the trick, and I don't think anyone else has. Normally mapping works, but it won't get you where you need to go, if you start out with a created primitive (plane) and try deforming it into a choppy surface with a displacement map. No joy there. Harrumph. So (he he he) I used an old OBJ I made in, and exported from, Bryce 7 Pro, about eight years ago. Mmm. The "water" is actually a terrain, onto which I slapped one of Mech4D's volumetric water shaders. Even then, it took one heck of a lot of work with all kinds of maps to break up the surface and make it less than a mirror. There's a trick to this, which I have yet to learn ... but this is quite nice, so I'll post it and make notes to myself about figuring this out!

And lastly for today, after all that pushing and pulling with old models, I wanted something that would make life a bit easier (especially since it's over 100 degrees in this neck of the woods, and almost too hot to even think, much less wrestle with problems). So this is a set called Shady Haven, from DAZ, already configured for Iray. I have an environment light and one spotlight set, and this render, at very high resolution, took about fifteen minutes. Next, I'm going to see what happens to the render times we we stand a couple of Genesis figures in the set. So --

Let's have a closer look at how Iray handles the Jagger skinmap on the Michael 4 geometry ... and then I'm going to get a cool drink and relax in front of a fan. Yes, the a/c has been blasting away since before dawn, but it's just too hot. One thing that's definitely on my agenda: a new monitor. I'm still using an LG monitor from 2010, and it runs so hot, it feels like you're sitting in front of a heater! Not what you want, in this weather.

Mister Versatility himself -- and a boat! Terragen, Iray, and more...

It's always tempting to see the 3D characters as actors, and if they're actors, they can walk out of one movie and right into another. Hmmm. So --

Yesterday's Conan is today's undercover cop, roughing it in some slum zone, busting the kind of people who sell firearms out of the trunk of a car. Neat! (Just a raytrace, set up to look like a flash photography shot. A closed set, and somene just popped a flash in the dimness. Very effective. Also, am very pleased with the bump mapping on those hands: they look realistically battered, as any adult's hands usually are! Garbage as set dressing is also interesting ... a wheelie bin, an abandoned chair and an old pallet! It was fun overdriving the bump and displacement maps on everything. Very pleased with the floor...)

Say, this is a still from a movie that hasn't been made -- which leads me back to remembering the b&w 8x10 movie stills we used to collect back in the days of yore:

It actually looks very good in monochrome. I might see what Iray can do with this tomorrow --

Speaking of which, I did feed yesterday's Conan into Iray, and came up with this:

The best thing about this render is that floor! IRay also did a great job on the Anubis statue and the ax blade ... but every bump and displacement map dropped out, and nothing, repeat nothing I could do, in this project, would get them back --

That's just the basic diffuse maps on everything; and adding whatever shaders were supplied along with DAZ Studio 4.10 didn't work or help ... and I do not intend to spend several hundred dollars on shaders, and work all day to get a single picture ... not when the shaders are free with Reality 4.0, and they're configures with a single click. Aarrggh. I blew a couple of hours on forums, following a Google search: "bump maps not working in IRay." Uh huh. So I'm not the only one to have this problem? And it turns out that overdriving the bump values is not the solution after all: I tried it on this guy, here, and it didn't work. Back to the drawing board. The forums, incidentally, were (to quote Jack Sparrow, enormously not helpful. Ten people made suggestions which didn't seem to work, then the thread petered out ... in 2016. Every single time, the bottom line with IRay seems to come back to buying shaders, which may or may not even exist (they don't for Michael 4), and if they do, they cost a packet! Ack.

Mind you, this is a fairly good render; it's not quite photographic, because (duh) no shaders are available for M4, and even if they were, I don't have them. But this picture is still trying very hard to be a photograph, which made me wonder...

Yep, a movie still from a film that doesn't actually exist! Nice one.

Also -- soooo pleased with this picture, in Terragen:

Elven Boat at sunset, in Terragen

In that past, I've rendered this boat prop a couple of times in Bryce 7 Pro, and never been very thrilled with the results. It just looked ... flat. Here's the best I was every able to squeeze out of the Bryce engine, with this model and its maps:

Same model, in Bryce 7 Pro. Hmm. 

You'll see what I mean if you take a look, full-size: flat as the proverbial bikkie. Bryce images so often look like tabletop dioramas. So imagine my pleasant surprise when the Elven Boat prop began to render in Terragen, and I saw this coming up...

...whoa! Check out the texture in the wood, and the reflections of the lantern in the water. Now, that is impressive. This is the first time I've rendered something man-made in Terragen, and only the second time I've rendered an OBJ. The other one was a tree, a few days ago. This could get exciting! 😀

Anyway, that's been my day, art-wise. And so to bed, before I go to sleep here and my face hits the keyboard. More soon!

Barbarians sack a fantasy Ancient Egypt ... plus Terragen and wallpaper

The barbarian is back! Conan who? Seriously, I'm just in a mood for Conan, something like a happy cross between Frank Frazetta and Boris and since I've got the biiiig new harddrive I have the space to install loads of 3D models that I bought anything up to four and five years ago, and couldn't install for need of harddrive space. This picture is full of experiments, too...

It's just an old fashioned raytrace out of Studio 3. I might see how this renders up in IRay tomorrow or the next day ... I just didn't have time to mess about in Studio 4.10 today. Studio 3 is so fast by comparison, the fact that the raytrace takes a bit longer means nothing. The job can still be done so quickly, you're done in half the time. Take a look at this big beauty at full size (1200x1800), and see the venous mapping in the torso and arm. Oooooh, nice!

Last night, around midnight, I was messing about with Terragen --

Am delighted with this -- for a start, I was in control of it, LOL, it didn't just "happen." The water is very shallow; that green color is the lake-bed, and I set that surface shader before flooding the terrain! The clouds have bulk and structure. Sooo nice. Almost reminds me of the River Iss segment of John Carter of Mars.

One more thing for you today: another wallpaper at 1920 x 1080 size:

Park that on your desktop, set all your icons off on the right side ... neat! It looks a treat ... you're welcome! Tomorrow, with any luck, let's see what my barbarian looks like in IRay! I do like the new battle-axe; it's part of a collection of antique and historical weapons that's been waiting for installation for about five years! Good gods, where does time go?

More soon! 

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...

Night duty at the spaceport, fall colors, poetry and comics!

It's another episode in the "Dirty Night at the Spaceport" series! The last you saw of this cop, he was summoning Amadeus to come and retrieve his android (and pay fines and fees associated with damage done by a run amok drone). Here we are again ... still raining! Possibly the same night. And the guy we saw on the street in the city has arrived at the port, with a ship waiting...

Looks to me like the young guy might be an informant ... or possibly an agent. A street agent who's been tracking someone through the city, and he's arrived out at the port with the news that the quarry is about to escape. Hmm. That's not bad. These look like stills from a movie that doesn't exist ... and that's what I was after! Very pleased with the lighting in these shots -- and the wet concrete, puddles, reflections of light in the puddles. Wet is not the easiest thing to achieve in 3D, but here, it works. Lots and lots of post production painting, of course ... you might actually be dismayed by how "plastic" the raw renders look! It's digital trickery that makes them appear compelling. These are merely raytraces in the old, old software...

Speaking of movies -- you couldn't have missed the news that the Avatar series is picking up again at Christmas 2020; but I wonder if you know about the Dark Horse graphic novel being issued in five parts at this time. Normally I'm not a huge fan of comics; the art is kind of "on again, off again," and if it isn't what I was expecting, the whole thing tends to fall apart. But this is great, well worth a look, if you can track it down:

The best art, obviously, is on the cover. Duh. Those are full-on paintings, over which the artist(s) would have labored for hours, possibly a day or more on a single image. Usually, the cover of a comic will be startling and then the interior art ... leaves one somewhat underwhelmed, but this continues good throughout:

As I said, well worth a look ... bit expensive, but then again, everything is expensive these days, so -- what the hey? It's only money.

Speaking of money, I put some hard numbers to the computer rebuild. With even the slightest bit of luck, we're "on" for next week!!! The hard drive should be under $100, and the new USB Front Hub, about half of that. Plus a wifi adapter, the cloning of the original hard drive, update (from disks) of Win 7 to the absolute most up to date version ... after this, it should fly. 😎

Finishing off the "fall colors in the forest" images I promised ... again, they're wallpaper sized, and they do look terrific as wallpapers. Help yourself:

We were so lucky with the weather, the day ... everything. Winter is right around the corner -- as I write this, I'm thinking how cold it is! Need to get the heating on. And dinner. Yes.

So with autumn on my mind I'll leave you with this for today:

More soon!