Show Us Your Iray Renders. Part IV
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Bryce is good at marking night scapes, with and without moons and planets. While the program alone might work for you, odds are you'll want some of the add-ins Daz sells. PA's horo and David Brinnen are among the go-to's here. You can save out the scapes as HDR's, and there are spherical mappers available for it (have not used one myself -- I render to flat planes as BGs because I only use these in post).
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/16980/rendering-hdr
FilterForge will also produce good looking procedural starry-starry nights, Any "moon" created would probably have to use a bitmap, as it's hard to procedurally reproduce the real moon. You can save the file as an EXR.
If I were doing a scene like this, I think I'd use the Environment dome but with no HDRi. Set the Environment Intensity for a low ambience -- cities always have fog or soot or something that captures and disperses light, raising the natural ambient light level. You can set a whitepoint to make it look more like night. Render with a transparency as the background, and save to a file format that supports transparencies. You can then slide in any background you want.
I guess that makes me lazy, but I try to be practical with these things. Otherwise I find myself getting $1.76 an hour as I futz around with unproductive workarounds.
Excellent! There's something very creepy about not being able to see his face.
I've just realized that my monitor shows images way different than my phone or TV, in this monitor images look great but in the rest of devices look too dark. Ok, re uploading previous image.
kyoto kid
Last try with this. I did a bit of demolition work to get the light through from the 'moon'
Moon settings
Environment settings
Another attempt at dramatic lighting in Iray, and of course working with shaders - If your interested you can get more info on the render in my gallery here: http://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/84140
Here's Kathy 7 on duty at a planetary outpost.
DustRider, that's impressive!
Agreed, that would pass for a photograph.
...that is pretty much the effect I am after. So you used the Finite sphere option instead.
I did find a nice free 10K night sky HDRI just before I turned in last night (that is mostly "sky") which looks like what would be seen in an urban setting (a bit of haze and light pollution). Going to extract and give it a try. Had to set up an account on a site to get it.
The Skies of Economy HDRI's I've been experimenting with are actually made for use with Reality so any moonlights/sunlights provided do not work in Iray though they still provide the ambient effect.
...I do have Bryce, but posing characters to fit the scene is a real pain as you have to do it first in Daz then import them (and there's no way to make any last minute adjustments). Lot's of trial and error especially if you have an irregular ground plane. I have used Bryce to make flat sky backdrops for Daz before.
Don't have Filter Forge either (though it's on the wishlist). Seems every time it is on sale at 50% off, I am flat broke. 3D and a fixed income don't get along very well together.
Yes, it works well if going from creation to finished map as hdr. It's a high density, lossless format so you get maximum info saved...plus it can always be reduced or converted to a jpg (yuck) or something else, later. But hdr/exr is probably one of the better 'working' formats.
kyoto kid
If you use the finite dome and look through the distant light and set the aux view port to Iray you can see how much of your scene is covered by it and also the hdri and where the lightest part is. When you turn the dome or tilt it you can also see what effect it has on the position of the hdri. It is then a matter of getting the distant light to approx the the same place as the light from any moon that is in the image.
Yes, meant Bryce for just creating the nightsky. I never pose anything in it other than planets. Bryce output is used for backdrops only.
FilterForge has good deals on their site, though Daz usually drops their price accordingly during the sales periods. But don't buy it now, as they're coming out with a new version in a few months. I don't know if they'll have a special upgrade price if you buy the current version now. It's costing me $60 to upgrade.
A 'Bob Ross' moment.
This just happened, it wasn't intentional but I thought it came out pretty good
The original
Click on image for full size.
I have been playing around with emissive iRay textures to see how they perform as softboxes in portrait work. I have to say I find it a lot easier than using the built in lights, and you can produce some really subtle effects.
This one has a single light interior HDRI for the main lighting and a couple of 'softboxes' made out of primitives for the rest of the lighting and reflections. The figure is Eva 7 and the skin texture is FWSA Frida HD (currently 30% off at the store) which has its own custom SSS texturemap and produces some beautiful translucency.
Nice. Even the hair looks great.
Great effect, it really adds a new dimension to the image. I'm guessing you used bloom for this?
Thanks! Every now and then I get lucky and things work just right.
Just playing around with an old V4/G4 character in Iray. I kinda liked the results so I thought I would share it.
Opps, not sure how I did a double post??
I wish all my skin came out this beautiful.
Been experimenting with various techniques to make renders look more like drawings. Sorta.
Check out my deviantart for a few recent attempts.
Thank you. It is indeed the Bloom filter. I have been experimenting with the different settings on a few renders and when I switched it on in this one that was the result. The bloom is coming from the Milky Way hdri and came as quite a surprise as there isn't that much of a light as you can see from the original..
...Gen 4 actually had some really nice skin maps, particularly the "Elite" ones and those by Thorne/Sarsa.
I've been thinking of picking up some of the elite skins to use with Genesis 1&2, at some point. Particularly to round out stuff I'm missing.
I mean, Benjamin, which is Genesis, still looks awesome with G2M. And my recent V4.2 effort looks quite nice. Hmm. I think I'll try a closeup shot of that, see how it looks.
Just beautiful!! I love both the hair and skin.
This is a closeup of Victoria 4. Skin is Astrid 4 (I think, a Stephanie texture), hair is Pyrit, clothing is Bodice Dress dynamic.
All of this is roughly 10 year old stuff, brushed up for Iray.
And, you know? It looks pretty darn good.
...beautiful.
This is why I am very reluctant to adopt G3 as you won't be able to use any old skins due to a change in the mapping structure.
If you change the light geometry of the spotlight from point to rectangle or disk and change the size (units in cm) you get a softbox. For example, light geometry> rectangle; height> 200, Width> 100, you have a 2 meter by 1 meter softbox.