Just playing in Iray -- a new set and costume

Playing in Iray again. Bought a new set, and a new pair of jeans for G8 ... slowly starting to put together a bit of variety. I need a really good jacket, and I would love to get some fantasy costumes, but there's not much to choose from for G8. (Yet?) At least, not at the DAZ marketplace; and I spent some time searching Renderosity for G8 Male fantasy ... not much anywhere. It's weird, but all the really good costumes go back years! I guess I need to buy some G2 stuff, on sale, and see how it fits. Sometimes it seems to work, but not every time, so ... experiments! Anyway --

Quite happy with the lights, depth of field, what have you, on this. It's mostly lit with IBL lighting ... am using my own images at this time, and having pretty good results with them. This one, below, is another image "lit with an image" -- one of my own -- and it has just one other light added, to make it interesting, as if the hangar door is standing open to the morning sun:

That's actually pretty good, and well worth having a look at, at large size. Of course, being an old model, I can't save the scene in Studio 4.11, but it's easy enough to reload it, and I didn't use shaders on this, so I can get it back quickly.

Was going to mess about with Iray shaders on it, but the fact is, you'd lose all the surface detailing. No matter how great a shader renders, it actually isn't a substitute for a high-rez purpose-designed diffuse map. Must come back to this soon, maybe play with a shader on the glass. I would love to figure out how to combine, mix, or blend shader ... am fairly sure there's a way to do it (I know how to do it in Bryce 7 Pro, LOL), but I'm not there yet!

Mix and match character design -- wow! And Genesis 8 wears M4's dreadlocks?

A whole new character, yep. High time, I thought, that I started creating my own, since I got the face and body morphs, and I now have something like ten skinmaps. So here's "first try, first look" at something created by me, right on the desktop here. I like this so much, he needs a name so we can come back to him and see a lot more of him (uh, literally). It wasn't even difficult to put the character together, though it took a bit of painting to fix (and I'm astonished to say this) an incongruity in the skinmap. You can't see it till your four hour render is finished (I left it cooking when I went to bed), but then you can see a terrific "tidemark" where the shoulder diffuse map joins the arm diffuse map: they seem to be at two different "exposures." Anyway, it's an easy fix, so, what the hey?

The skinmap itself renders beautifully. It's the Kingston for G8, and you see it right here. Lovely. The face morph is also good, but not what I wanted for my own character --

Catalog picture. See this...

...so I applied the skinmap to the Genesis 8 base figure and worked from there. Result: wow.

About ten days ago I discovered that at least one Michael 4 wig fit Genesis 8 so closely, it takes minimal tweaking or post work to make it look good on G8. The question was, did the Yannis Rasta Dreads fit Genesis 8? Soooo ...

Answer: yes, they do! The hair prop was from Renderosity, years and years ago. I did track it down there today, and ... sorry to say, it doesn't look the same by a very long shot. You can still get a version of it, but I think it's been updated; and I do prefer the Jack Sparrow original. Take a look, anyway -- cheers. It's for the Michael 4 base figure, but you see the proof for yourself: M4 and G8 are sooooo nearly compatible, it's a crying shame someone doesn't do a conversion script for the costumes and hair!

Treated myself to some new shaders, and am playing happily ...

Metallic leather ... this is one of about a hundred combinations you could use, and it'd slap on a costume just as easily. Now, there's a thought!

The File-Save problem continues, into Week 10 now, with DAZ Tech Support still chasing it down. If we can't get there in the end, so be it. Am spending a tonne of money on sets and so forth, all geared for Iray. The oars are not quite back in the water, but in about $1,000 they will be. Ouch! For the moment, my one challenge is (still) how to get EYES to render reliably in Iray. One day "Plan A" works, the next day it doesn't, so you can never be sure of what you're going to get. I confess, from time to time I'm still painting the pupil, iris and highlights in Photoshop ... also, nothing I do will make the G8 eyelashes turn on, on some characters. On others, they're automatic. WTF??? Photoshop to the rescue.

Have been absent for a week from this blog -- sorry! So sick, if I was a dog, you'd have shot me. Getting better now ... not 100% yet, but up to playing in DAZ and Photoshop. Sometimes it's frustrating, but (mostly) it's also fun.

More very soon: I have images swimming in my head, trying to get out...

A fantasy swordsman ... adventures in Iray shaders

The assignment was to switch out all the textures on a costume for new shaders -- and this turned out to be the easy part, though I have to admit, I haven't yet figured out how to get the metal shaders to behave themselves reliably, predictably. I'm getting there. Leather, lace, silk, glass -- no problem; but metals are tougher to squeeze good, predictable results out of ... which is why it was 'Photoshop to the rescue' again on this sword. After four hours rendering, I still had flocks of 'fireflies' in the gold ... unresolved pixels. Ack. This processor and video card are too slow! Before I can render metals properly, I'll need to upgrade ... uh, end of 2020 sounds doable. About a year and a half. 😭

Having said that, Photoshop rescued the metals and a bunch of apparently unrenderable pixels in the hair, so the net result is a rather good image: the Dae face, body slightly tweaked, wearing Michael 8's skinmap, a G3 hairdo that doesn't actually like G8 as well as it's supposed to (Shavonne hair), and the Dark Prince costume with every texture changed, right down to the rivets.

The sword is an old prop -- one of hundreds that can't be saved into a file by DAZ Studio 4.11, though it can be loaded. Go figure. Tech Support doesn't know why either. [Rolls eyes] But with new shaders, the old props look pretty neat. Now --

If I render the metals in an image that's 600 x 900 pixels, in two hours, it's finished. This one, above, is the proof of it! But if I put metal shaders into a 1200 x 1800 image, well ... I'll be in Photoshop rescuing the picture! Sticklebacks, to quote Uncle Bilbo.

Anyway, we're playing happily...

... and there's only a few shaders I still need to track down. Wood, bone, ground, satin, organics, so forth. I just wish Studio 4.11 knew how to save the old props into its files. That would make life soooo much easier. Still, I was smart enough to keep Studio 3 on board, so we can run both back to back, to get access to the props and characters that Studio 4.11 can load, but not save. So strange ... 'tis a puzzlement.

Pinup boy ... and Morning in Gadomar ... whooo!

Now we're cooking. Playing mix and match again. That's the Dae face, boy tweaked by me, he's wearing Michael 8's skinmap, Michael 4's hair, a fabulous rose silk shader on the shirt, big blue GP Character Eyes, Bryce 7 Pro sky behind DM's Gadomar set, from years and years ago  ... and a four hour render in Iray, after I went to bed. Take a closer look --

Now, those are the skintones we've been wanting to achieve. Four hours, is it? O...kay. I can live with that. The second picture --

That's a two-hour render -- Dae face, body and skinmap, wearing the Elan hair for G8. It actually needed to cook about another hour, but I just didn't have the time to let it go and go. That's the downside to Iray: it takes over the whole system, and while it's rendering, you just walk away and let it do its thing.

Anyway, we're just starting to get into the rarefied atmosphere where exceptional renders happen ... and I shopped another sale at DAZ, for two colossal packs of shaders. They'd have been A$105 for the pair of them, and in the sale, I got them both for $35, which I can just about afford. I now have something like 700 new shaders to play with, LOL: and there is so much to learn!

Having some serious fun with this, even though the file-save problems continue: I can't save anything. You just have to put the scene together, render it and dump it, because when you try to save something, when you reopen it, there's a pile of boxes where your 3D assets should be! DAZ tech support is still trying to figure this out, but -- no joy so far, and it's been on an open ticket with the help desk for two months now. Ack.

Anyway, back soon with more. But I'm grinning somewhat ... I have Iray halfway tamed. Wahoo.