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Rob and Dave without specular maps worked, I tried my other dark skinned textures and they weren't quite so good, never mind, one I can work with is better than none!
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I tried Bjorn and he looks good. You know what occurred to me is that all these fancy lights and shaders that AoA came up with make everything in the viewport look like it does in the render. Did they think that was what users wanted!? I mean, you look at scenes like the ones I've been doing and they look really strange in the viewport and yet look right when they render. At the end of the day, surely it's the eventual render that really counts, isn't it!?
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I have no idea, on both fronts, but in general viewport previews are generally bad in all 3D content creation apps. :)
Of course, I would absolutely love a viewport render that gives you close to the quality they have on game engines now. Even if they're full of hacks, cheats and biased as hell, they look very nice and fully uses any GPU. :)
I hear you,
I had a look at my UE2 light and I realised there was no HDR attached, oops! I remembered that Omni used Kitchen by default on the old UE so I stuck that on and I made sure the quality was set to Hi. I think they look even better now. What HDR do you use?
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Actually, none. :)
But I do rely on KHPark for testing outdoor scenes and KHKitchen for indoor.
Oh, I liked the contrast better with one. Still, when I get PSK2 I'll be using your lights anyway.
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Another thing, what is that backdrop with the reflective floor in your PSK2 promos and where can I get it/find it?
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I think it was a freebie called 'Nike's Art Corner'. Basically, just two walls and a floor. Btw, Photo Studio Kit 2 doesn't use UE2, but UberArea Lights. The first kit does though as is the next one. :).
That's actually pretty simple to do...replace the OpenGL shaders with something more modern. The set Blender uses seems to be more advanced than the set Studio uses...and they aren't as advanced as those used in games (the games ones are proprietary and aren't usable outside the game). But I have no idea how to hack in a new set...
I think it was a freebie called 'Nike's Art Corner'. Basically, just two walls and a floor. Btw, Photo Studio Kit 2 doesn't use UE2, but UberArea Lights. The first kit does though as is the next one. :).
Here's the freebie...down at the bottom of the page.
http://nikeimage.hu/free.html
It's all in the artist, not in the tool.
Looks good, if a little soft focus, I'd like to see a bit more detail in the skin.
Thank you! And we're talking "artist" here again (although I, having no training, cannot claim to be one; I just make images). Softness is a choice, for me; first of all, I do not use diffuse over SSS (which means the details on the texture map will be softer in the render than in an image editor, all because of the SSS "smudging" them), and then, I switched to a lower-width Catmull-Rom filter instead of "DS Standard" 6x6 sinc - it's less sharp and hence less prone to aliasing in high-contrast regions. I also find it gives a more "film"-like style.
What really needs to be done separately from the skin material is the brows. The best choice would be RiCurves (think LAMH). Proper eyebrow definition tends to make a lot of difference in the perceived "detail".
With Iray, you might be able to put eyebrows on the top coat. Hrm
...unless the eyebrows are a separate mesh or material zone, that will not work. In most (if not all facial textures save for toon characters), the eyebrows are painted directly onto the texture map. Genesis has no separate brow region like Gen4 had.
Cool, I found it! UberArea eh, ooh, not delved into that one much.
I had a look at Muskie's tutorial and updated my bump settings according to what I read, not much difference really. Anyhow, I tried out Nevio and then did a body shot of Bjorn. Looks like a beach shot, though I spent so much time messing with the skins that I never bought any trunks!
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I hear you, I think I'm trying to work out what my style is and I know what you mean about eyebrows. I seem to remember somebody doing some in Garibaldi but I don't know what came of the project.
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Just tried Bjorn with a Catmull-Rom of 3x3 and I didn't notice much, should I have?
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...the real power behind AoA's lights is the flagging, which is partly broken in versions of Daz newer than 4.6 (especially regarding SSS).
Also when I apply SSS with the proper settings to a character, in the viewport it looks nothing like it does in the final render. On the Realistic....Not thread I attached two versions (one bucket and the other progressive render) of a rendered scene using 3DL with SSS and AoA's Advanced lights set to the correct intensity for the time of day and they looked fine.
Same with the lights. The Advanced Spot and Distant light look no different in OpenGL than their standard Daz counterparts. True, the Advanced Ambient does have a different effect, however, there is no corresponding "basic" Daz light source. The only way to mimic it with the normal Daz lights is to do like Dreamlight did for LDP/LDP2 and create an array of 24 -28 low intensity distant lights pointing in different directions.
As I create full (and fairly complex) scenes and don't do portraits, using UE tends to involve extreme render times since the scenes usually involve a number of other elements that drastically bog its performance down. This is why in 3DL I choose to use the AoA lights and fake the GI (after all, one of the beauties of 3DL is that you can "bend the rules" to get the results you want). I find rendering such a scene in 14 - 15 minutes preferable to 4+ hours.
I do hear what you're saying and maybe I will notice a lag in speed with more complex scenes, but, that last render of Bjorn took just over 2 minutes and featured a UE light. I've found UE complements US and gives me what I'm looking for. Mind you, PSK2 uses UberArea so I'll see what that does. With the improved 3DL in 4.8 I should be going great guns. When you don't have much money you learn to make the best of what you've got.
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Going back to what we were saying about brows, I had a plug in in Poser Called EZ Skin. It generated its own procedural bump maps and ignored the brows. Look how good they look in the close-up of Lana. Is there an equivalent of EZ Skin in DS?
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Mike 3 is looking pretty good there. Always preferred David in the Gen3 male line myself.
I do hear what you're saying and maybe I will notice a lag in speed with more complex scenes, but, that last render of Bjorn took just over 2 minutes and featured a UE light. I've found UE complements US and gives me what I'm looking for. Mind you, PSK2 uses UberArea so I'll see what that does. With the improved 3DL in 4.8 I should be going great guns. When you don't have much money you learn to make the best of what you've got.
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...when there's no transmaps or heavy transparency/reflectivity to deal with yes UE is just about as fast as using either the Daz basic or AoA's lights. Try a female character with something like Mentha Piperata's hair (if you have the character) and it will bring your system close to a grinding halt. In the pic I did with the character a couple years ago, I had to turn off the ray tracing for the hair as it just made the process seem to hang indefinitely. (after over two and a halt hours only a small percentage of the hair rendered). Didn't look as good though.
That backdrop in PSK2, it wasn't Nike Art Corner. What you appear to have is a simple grey backdrop with a reflective floor, none of which are featured in Nike Art Corner. I think I've found what it was though, there's a Simple Backdrop by Flesh Forge and you can make the floor on that reflective, it's a case of getting the wall and floor to match.
I think I got close....
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...there's also a set of portrait backgrounds for the Cyclorama
That there is, never really liked them though, I like the simplicity of what I just did.
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Ah yes. You're right. Just checked the scene file and it's just a plane as a ground floor. I used Nike Art Corner for another product.
No worries, what I did was to set the backdrop as glossy metallic and the floor as glossy plastic, I matched the diffuse and reflection colours, et voila! I really like it and will set it up as a studio scene where I'll put all your stuff.
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As the (in)fanouse Hannibal Smith would say, "I love it when a plan comes together."
About 4 and half minutes at 1080p. Pretty much everything is with UberSurface2, except for the environment sphere (KHPark) and that fire hidrant (which I forgot to convert)
Sorry I didn't notice your post before now... Here is a screenshot of the content path; select the UberEnvironment2 thing in your Scene tab and click this:
I'll need to take an EZSkin material apart to say for sure, but what the guys may be doing is multiplying a "de-coloured" diffuse map over "map-free" SSS (then the map does not get "smudged" by the scattering). It can be done in a 3Delight shader (what cannot?!), but it's just not what I prefer =)
I'd rather get those LAMH brows finally done. There are fibermesh brows for Genesis on ShareCG, too, by JoeQuick.
You will, when you start using backlighting and Fresnel attenuation on specular. Then the edges will be lit very strongly (100% reflectance), and with 6x6 sinc, there will be aliasing (stepping) and "ringing" (black borders in bright regions and white borders in darker ones). I find I go for 2x2 Catmull-Rom these days. Here's a screenshot from the documentation I'm writing for my kit...
So cool =) Is the coat using an opacity map or just constant values?
You could probably try upping pixel samples by 1 or 2, to get the DOF somewhat smoother (but it will add some render time, of course).