Fun with scripts - experimental renderings

BlackFeather1973

It's no secret that i love goofing around with Daz Scripting. Usually i write small and simple tools that make the boring stuff a bit easier or faster, sometimes it's just a fun idea that i need to pursue.
Recently i've started exploring how to interact more directly with figures and meshes. I haven't figured out yet how it all fits together, but the fun part is that i can actually render out my experiments.

For this render i started with a genesis figure, i deleted the parts i didn't need and created a small mirror cube. Via scripting i placed an instance of the cube on each vertex of the mesh.
Played around a while with random scaling and tilting of the instances, but even in small amounts that quickly became a mess and distorted both faces too much.

Feel free to add your own experiments to this thread. I'd love to see them !

JimmyC_2009

Interesting effect!

I am sure a lot of artists would find it very useful, renders would definitley be unique :)

BlackFeather1973

Thanks JimmyC !
When i get some workable code out of this, i'll happily share. It would be interesting to see how different artists implement a method like this in their renders.

Did another one, same principle, a bit harder to digest for the hardware :-P
The first test had almost 3000 instances of the butterfly and my pc ran out of ram. Had toedit the mesh of the hair in Hexagon to get a better spread and enlarged the butterflies. There are now 520 instances of the butterfly in the scene, the rotations are randomized within a given parameter.

Edit : turned out the butterfly had a 4k polycount, that kinda explains why it was so hard on my pc :lol:

Jaderail

WOW, that looks cool as all get out. Finish the script and a Interface please.

BlackFeather1973

Jaderail said:

WOW, that looks cool as all get out. Finish the script and a Interface please.

Thank you, Jaderail !
I hadn't planned on taking it that far as these are just "educational experiments" for another project i'm attempting to do.
But yeah, challenge accepted :-)

For effects like the butterflyhair, you're probably better of with the LAMH-plugin. I don't have it myself, but i know you can instance props with it. I assume you can paint density maps on a surface with LAMH and that the instancing is done on rendertime with RiCurves, so that would be a lot easier with better performance.

Jaderail

That is true, But I was not just thinking of HIAR as a target. I still think it would be a neat Script for people to play with.

WendyLuvsCatz

replication like we have in Carrara for studio!

BlackFeather1973

Jaderail said:

That is true, But I was not just thinking of HIAR as a target. I still think it would be a neat Script for people to play with.
The more i play with it, the more possibilities i see and the more options i want to add. I might be able to get an alpha-version out by the end of next week. It's definitely fun to play around with.
The downside is, once you get creative you're likely to bring your machine to its knees. Started a testrender yesterday, 12 hours later it's at 71%. Apparently 7225 shards of glass take a long time to render :)

replication like we have in Carrara for studio!

Didn't know Carrara could do that too. I picked it up in the snowball savings last year, but me and Carrara don't get along. Tbh i only fired it up about 3 times and couldn't get anything done. Now it's just sitting there, unused and unloved...

BlackFeather1973

For this one i modelled five shards of glass and applied the glass shader. I ran Freak5 in a running pose through Zbrush's qRemesher to get an even distribution of vertices an let a script add over 7000 instances of the shards to the mesh. Rotation on all 3 axis are randomized and I gave each instance a 20% chance of a random Z-translation anywhere between it's original place in the mesh and world center, to get the trailing effect.

BlackFeather1973

And one more...

Ivy

awesome results .

FirstBastion

BlackFeather1973 said:

For this one i modelled five shards of glass and applied the glass shader. I ran Freak5 in a running pose through Zbrush's qRemesher to get an even distribution of vertices an let a script add over 7000 instances of the shards to the mesh. Rotation on all 3 axis are randomized and I gave each instance a 20% chance of a random Z-translation anywhere between it's original place in the mesh and world center, to get the trailing effect.

That is a seriously cool effect!

BlackFeather1973

Thank you for the kind comments, Ivy and FirstBastion. Much appreciated :)

BlackFeather1973

A small teaser for those who want to play too...

Jaderail

YES!! Nice tease...

Pendraia

Awesome work! Can't wait to see where you take this next....

BlackFeather1973

Thank you for taking a look at my work and for the nice comments, Pendraia. :)

BlackFeather1973

Spend a little more setting this one up. As usual i started with cutting Genesis up, i only kept the face, front torso, arms and part of the upper legs and then qRemeshed in ZBrush to distribute the vertices (note to self : use a bodysuit next time instead of genesis, much easier). I moved that mesh a bit in front of genesis and populated it with the glass shards that i made for ShardMan (a few posts back).
Ran the instancing script several times on a few low poly primitives, rotating, scaling and moving the primitives around, each time with a different scaling factor for the instances. That way i could control the glass shards's size/position to a certain extent.

BlackFeather1973

Same scene from another angle.
I may have forgotten to set some walls and interiors back to visible when switching angles :lol:

AVU4U

Ur scripts are great. Luv what they do. Need to test them out. U can see my renders here for my upcoming graphic novel NOCTURNES. I've completed 50 pages so far. 150 pages more to go. Its all written, just have to make the renders.

http://avu4u.com/

Just hit the link and then click on the NOCTURNES cover and Ur in. Hope U like what I've done. NOCTURNES is all Daz.

BlackFeather1973

Thanks, AVU4U.
Good luck with your graphic novel, i'll make sure to check it out.

MangeyDesigner

I am loving what you are doing with these scripts. I hope to see more soon as it sure looks like fun.

The funky bikini from the first page is very cool and I would love to be able to get effects like that for some of my renders so I will be watching this space :)

BlackFeather1973

MangeyDesigner said:

I am loving what you are doing with these scripts. I hope to see more soon as it sure looks like fun.

The funky bikini from the first page is very cool and I would love to be able to get effects like that for some of my renders so I will be watching this space :)

Thank you, MangeyDesigner. I'd be very interested to see what you would come up with. :)
I'm still on schedule to have a first version ready by the end of the week. (for my renders i've been scripting on the fly, tweaking code per scene).

MangeyDesigner

well I am sure you will have no shortage of people wanting to test what you put together for your scripts... thanks for taking the time to try and put these script ideas into an interface for others to use... I will definitely be keen to try and learn how you have done this and of course I am really looking forward to playing :D

BlackFeather1973

MangeyDesigner said:

well I am sure you will have no shortage of people wanting to test what you put together for your scripts... thanks for taking the time to try and put these script ideas into an interface for others to use... I will definitely be keen to try and learn how you have done this and of course I am really looking forward to playing :D

You're welcome, glad to have you on board :coolsmile:

Jaderail

I'm a major render in effects type of person. I can see so many uses for this one script that it's mind boggling.

BlackFeather1973

Jaderail said:

I'm a major render in effects type of person. I can see so many uses for this one script that it's mind boggling.

Well, you got me into making it a fully functional toy. That kinda makes it your personal duty to blow my mind :lol:

Jaderail

BlackFeather1973 said:

Jaderail said:

I'm a major render in effects type of person. I can see so many uses for this one script that it's mind boggling.

Well, you got me into making it a fully functional toy. That kinda makes it your personal duty to blow my mind :lol: I already have a couple of Ideas up my sleeve, and if those work I'm very sure this script will be a major part of my work flow in the future. :cheese:

BlackFeather1973

Jaderail said:

I already have a couple of Ideas up my sleeve, and if those work I'm very sure this script will be a major part of my work flow in the future. :cheese:

Now you really made me curious, no television for me tonight, better do some coding instead. :)

BlackFeather1973

The bead-curtain. Made a number of ribbons in Marvelous Designer and draped them over Jazlyn. I instanced the beads over it, unfortunately they were all pointing straight up so i spend quite some time manually rotating a few hundred of them... -sigh-
Really need to find a way to access a vertex's edges via scripting.
For the close-up it looked really weird with the beads floating around, so i send the ribbons to Hexagon, did an edgeloop and extruded that into the cords. Send back to DS and fits like a glove...

BlackFeather1973

One of the most fascinating toys from my childhood must have been the pinscreen.

I set up a small plane to intersect with genesis' face and wrote a script to scan it with Casual's mcjCollider. The resulting grid was then populated with instances of a cylinder primitive.