Digital Art Zone

Very interesting stuff, I’m stuck on one render myself, but I like this.

A couple more:

1. This character is 10% each of: A3, S3, S4, S5, V3, V4, V5, Basic Female, Basic Child, Faerie (Creature Creator). Not sure what to call her…she almost seems like a Stephanie 6, doesn’t she?

2. This character uses the same formula, with the following character head and/or body morphs applied: Addison, Candace, Keira, Naoki, RileyS5, Feminine Touch, Valea’s Summer, Priestess, BenjaminM5, JamesM5. Some of these were dialed in a negative direction. I think I’ll call her Nadia. She kind of has a Halle Berry look, but that wasn’t intentional.

1. My entry for the October New User Contest: “Would you like fright with that?” I had fun playing with the Supersuit and its shaders (the red clown hair is a modification of the fur shader from the fantasy pack), with Mr. Sparky’s Halloween food freebie (www.poserdirect.com)—which came out just in time for my fast-food-themed Halloween render, and other new stuff I had picked up during the Published Artist sale and PC sale. The king is Phoenix1966’s Thomas. His beard and brows are from Mec4D’s Neanderthal. He’s actually wearing the Magus jacket, with a Totally Bazaar shader applied, and a modified Supersuit fur shader applied to the collar. The clown’s skin and makeup are from Penelope for K4 by ARTCollaborations. I wasn’t satisfied with how the lighting turned out, but otherwise I’m pretty happy with this one.

2. The fur shader strikes again, in combination with SciFi Bunny and one of the face paint options from Penelope for K4. This was going to be my second October New User Contest entry, and/or my entry in RawArt’s Halloween contest…but I didn’t get it done in time and wound up abandoning the project. I may revisit this at some point…it amuses me. Depicted are a family of Raw Oagres getting ready for Halloween. Once again, the lighting was causing me major headaches…and the massive amount of pokethrough…

This was my entry in RKane_1’s normal character contest. It was selected as one of two runners-up. Basically a self-portrait, though it would up being a younger and somewhat more awkward version of myself.

My first* play with the new Joanie skin for Stephanie 5. The character is base S5 with a few modifications to the head. I used the light preset from Chablis for V4 and Genesis…my favorite portrait light preset. Click to expand…I think this one is worth it.

*all right…technically this was the second attempt…

You are getting so good at this Scott! Love your characters, well done man!

Do you have DA? (Deviant Art) I’d love to add you there

@Spyro: I’ve joined DeviantArt but haven’t posted anything there yet…I’ll put a link to my DA page here, once it’s up and running.

This was my entry in the November New Users Contest. It wound up coming in second place, which I am very happy with.

This render began just as an experiment: an attempt to create a realistic, older Genesis character. I was inspired by the work that Zev0 is doing on his aging set, (see here: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewthread/11534/) and wanted to see what I could accomplish based on the products I already own (the key ones being the textures from Aged for V4 and M4, the aged morph from SickleYield’s conversion of the DieTrying morphs, and the hag shape from Creature Creator). As I was working on her, it occurred to me that she bore a certain resemblance to the avatar of one of our esteemed moderators. So I started intentionally moving in that direction, just for fun…

Independently of this, around the same time (Thanksgiving Day) I was thinking of how thankful I was for the advice and support I’ve gotten from all the moderators, community volunteers, and other helpful people here on the DAZ forum. I had been working on two other projects for the November contest, but the one was looking unwieldy and on the other I was getting bogged down in character design (my favorite aspect of rendering) and hadn’t even started to put a scene together. So considering all of the above, I finally decided to set those two projects aside for the time being, and use this one for the contest.

So thanks to Zev0 and chohole for inspiring this one (incidentally, just yesterday I purchased Zev0’s Face Weight morph set at Renderosity, and I’m sure it’ll pop up in this thread in the future)!

Aside from the products mentioned above, I used Light Dome Pro for the backdrop (not the lighting itself), 3 Raven Court, 5 Toadstool Lane, and Moon Gate for the set. I think the foreground ground plane is from DMs Courage Realm. The outfit is Onyx for Genesis Female plus the hat from Juggling Act for V4. MachPack and Totally Bazaar shaders were used on the hat, and Supersuit Fantasy Pack shaders on the boots. I started with lighting from Lantios Lights 2 but ended up making numerous additions and tweaks to it. Postworked in GIMP. The cats are Millennium Cat LE with textures from Content Paradise, and the crows came from CP also.

After submitting it, I decided it might be cool if I replaced the cat in the lower left corner with the feet of a troll. Maybe I’ll do that version at some point.

The Troll Hunter
(or, “I defeated the DAZ (Forum) Troll and all I got was this lousy club!”)

This is probably as good a time as any to announce that I’m taking a step back from this hobby—don’t worry, I’m not leaving permanently or even temporarily…it’s just that I’ve come to the realization that I need to be spending significantly less time and money here, as it’s starting to impact other aspects of my life in ways that I’m not happy about.

With a heavy heart I’ve left the Platinum Club for the same reason that I joined it in the first place—doing so will save me a lot of money. The plan going forward is to spend a lot less time in the store and in the commercial parts of the forum, and the same amount or slightly less time rendering and in the art-related parts of the forum. So I’ll definitely be seeing you around…just maybe not quite as frequently.

My hopes at this point are to focus my energies on improving my renders rather than expanding my runtime, to start writing again, and maybe to have some spending money for PA items when March Madness rolls around.

Also, on a perhaps happier note (and admittedly somewhat conflicting with the general theme of this post*...), I’m planning to sponsor a contest of my own in the (possibly near?) future. It will be a character creation contest, with small prizes for the best character portrait; best likeness of a celebrity, public figure, or famous fictional character; and most creative or inventive formula. If anyone is interested in co-hosting/co-sponsoring, feel free to PM me. So that’s something to look forward to, and I’ll keep you posted as plans develop.

*Not entirely in conflict though, as I see it as part of my ongoing transition from an obsessive 3D consumer and dabbler to a serious 3D hobbyist/illustrator and occasional shopper.

I hear you Scott. I think over the last 6 months I have rendered less, bought less and generally not bothered with putting the effort it. So instead of churrning out render after render I am working on one big image which will take a good few months to do..it is a big one. I said to myself a while ago that I will use what I have got and to learn more about techniques instead of filling my library with stuff I may of may not use.

Yeah… There needs to be a good balance between expanding the runtime and developing the skills to use what you have. It’s easy for one to be obsessive in expanding the runtime, and loose the time to actually make use of it all. I only buy if it’s something I need, and something I ‘Know’ I will make use of it.

And then there is also a balance that needs to be upheld between art production and social life… Spend too much on one, and the other fades away. Many artists loose their skill by giving all their time to social, but then there are also many who spend too much time on their art and neglect social activities (I’ve been the later to be honest)

Hope to still see you around my friend. You’ll find your balance

Well I am lucky I don’t have a social life.

Well yeah, that makes me lucky too

Thought I’d share this one, even though it’s not as polished as most of the renders in this thread. My first time using Gregoria Hair…it’s gorgeous, but sure takes a long time to render! (I forgot to check the settings before clicking “render” and…70 hours later…here’s how it turned out).

My god, 70 hours?!? damn. I would have canceled after 8. Always ensure you tailor the render settings to each render lol

But looks wonderful! Well done man, my first thought was its almost like Garibaldi hair. Looks great

Thanks, guys!

By the way, I finally started a gallery at Renderosity and have uploaded a new image there. My plan is to continue to post most of my better renders in this thread, but the ones that I think would be more appropriate for Renderosity will go there instead. Then at some point soon, I’ll have a DeviantArt page which will feature selected images from this thread and from my Renderosity gallery, plus any non-3D illustrations.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/browse.php?user_id=732031