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@jcade Of course agreed on energy conservation, that happens whenever we use add. Then with the principled shader there's no other way to get translucency for surfaces. But you can always use solidify instead at the cost of more geometry.
heres a fun example of breaking conservation of energy
Its a pretty known limitation of Cycles that it does a craptastic job of caustics and if you add some refraction roughness there isn't a path tracer out there that doesn't struggle a bit
so I break physical accuracy and energy conservation to fake caustics because I know the appoximations of the rendering algorithms in this instance lose more light than reality
sad gross looking honey
sexy beautiful honey
refractive materials are in general the one area where I really tend to cheat "physical accuracy" - largely down to the afformentioned fact that Cycles is currently deeply not good at caustics, which are a large part of the look of refractive materials. making the cornea and eye moisture not cast shadows is a physically inaccurate cheat but one can observe one's eyes and notice that the cornea doesn't cast anything resembling a harsh shadow + remember that Cycles glass has known limitations with its glass losing a bit of energy and limited castics and go "yeah I can cheat a bit to counteract this"
Hopefully this works - I need to make a looping version somehow
and I like your sexy honey
edit. Hey I was walking around the shop right now when I said "wait a minute this is @jcade !". Did you pose for Marcius there ? If not the coincident resemble is pretty scary.
https://www.daz3d.com/mr-gaya-for-genesis-81-female
I was experimenting a bit this morning, I wanted to try and work more with Eevee and though the character looked alright, she looked much better in Cycles and surprisingly only took about 30 seconds to render at 500 iterations, I did the background separate which surprisingly also took about a minute to do. I need to write a short film for this character, I want to see what adventures she goes on!
Holy cow. The renders are getting absolutely fantastic!
Hi to All,
I've been exploring NPR in Blender, particularly the stylized toon look using the Lightning Boy Shader. Here are a couple of head shots. My goal was to get a fair representation of skin tones common in the Far East.
Figures are G8 exported using Diffeomorphic.
Cheers!
I love the videos that lightning boy puts out on toon shaders, looks great! Please post more of how their shader works, I love toon stuff and wish I'd see more. Yesterday I picked up for like 1.60 on the artstation market a Blender toon shader based off the Genshin project anime look. I have to play around with it this weekend. I also got for like five bucks brushes for photoshop that look like Studio Ghibli trees, grass, and clouds that I want to overlay on renders. Can't wait to see more!
Great job; totally buying into it being honey.
Here's another render using the Lightning Boy Shader, which I'm fairly new at. Only the text was added by means of Photoshop; everything else was Eevee. I'm getting the hang of NPR shading, but there's still a lot to learn about working in the Blender environment.
@benniewoodell - The videos on the LBS Youtube page are great tutorials. That's pretty much how I picked up this shader, with a lot of trial and error. The folks behind LBS are pretty generous in talking about the ins-and-outs of their shader, particularly with how they used it to develop assets for their animation film. I'm waiting for them to follow up on how to use LBS to create scene environments.
Cheers!
Wow amazing guys!
I haven't posted much lately because I went back to working on my original project, which is NSFW - and not something I can really post here. I did at least get the skin shader about right though. I did post a preview on DeviantArt, though the lighting is really not so good, which I have corrected in the current version of what I'm working on.
It's on my DA page: https://www.deviantart.com/highstrangeness
Playing around with volumetrics and such now that I have a better understanding of what makes them work.
Also, I posted another preview image on my DeviantArt page, of the project I am working on... since it's NSFW, as I mentioned, I can't post it here. I wish DAZ wasn't so prudish. Oh well.
In any case, I'm trying to improve the lighting. It's not bad, but I feel it could be more realistic, and it's one of those things I struggle with. Currently my setup is using weak HDRI lighting, filtered so it only comes in from the right-hand side (using the 8K Lapa map from HDRIhaven.com), with an additional HDRI light, and a few fill lights.
https://www.deviantart.com/highstrangeness/art/Another-test-render-Blender-2-91-2-WIP-880751890
I realized the lighting may be a little dim, and I may try other HDRI maps to see what happens. I am using the Photographer addon, though, so I can set ISO/shutter speed/F-stop, etc. FWIW it's a pretty useful addon.
I still don't really get how these high realism images are being lit, and I think I'm missing something, but I don't know what. It's frustrating.
Edit: I'm starting to realize that overly high contrast (Look) settings in the Color Management panel can ruin the look of the image... I tend to render at medium-high to high contrast, but maybe even medium-high is too much. I'm curious as to what contrast settings others use here.
I figure medium works pretty well, at least from what I can tell in my experiments.
Here's one of a couple of comics style renders I've been working on since last week. Once again, the assets are all Daz, transferred to Blender via Diffeomorphic; celshading courtesy of Lightning Boy Shader.
The first image is straight out of Eevee. The second has a photo filter I applied.
Cheers!
Sorry to answer this so late, I didn't get an email notification and I didn't check back in because I was completing the course. :) The course was updated to 2.8 and I did the course using 2.9 and just recently took everything I learned about the particle system in this course and easily transferred it to geometry nodes.
Finished the Udemy course "how to create 3d environments in blender"... well I finished the 2.8 part of it anyway. Still skimming through the 2.79.
@deathbycannom those are great, I really need to buckle down and do that tutorial
continuing wih sexy refraction
a bottle with some pretty caustics. (I still need to model a cap for it)
as we all know cycles caustics are just sad, so this was rendered with luxcore
@jcade If you don't mind I'd like to see how your bottle come by with diffeo. I don't expect great results but try to enable the "fake caustics" option in the global settings. Use the bsdf option please. It will be useful to see how much the fake caustics will fail compared to lux.
Also iray should be able to get some caustics, that gets better by enabling the "caustic sampler" in the render settings. Though probably it's not the same quality as lux.
To import it with diffeo I'd first have to get it in DS. It hasnt left blender yet :)
I was shocked at how well those caustics turned out in cycles...and then I read it. Really nice though, wish cycles could do that.
Ima give Renderman a go when it comes out. We'll see how it does with glass...
Cycles X
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/13Zo2gafKyIFEyZCBucEfFHrrrwz9RBQoIImC6nBCgEE/edit#slide=22
https://code.blender.org/2021/04/cycles-x/
I'm pretty sure it got implemented soon :)
Oh nice! I didn't know they were working on caustics too. If they get Cycles-x and asset/pose libraries in 3.0, that will be huge. Faster render times for interior scenes, less noise for SSS, and (finally) the ability to easily retrieve materials and assets will be a big improvement. Thanks for the info, I didn't see that Google presentation before...
Hi, to All!
A quick non-photo-realistic render using the Lightning Boy Shader with post-edit filter. I put in warm pastel hues to go with the cel shading.
I've also attached the original Eevee render. My gallery entry has a short list of Daz assets used.
Cheers!
Nice image! Neat shader and an interesting story behind it. Would be great for a comic series or animation.
@Krampus, thanks for the generous feedback. Yes, hats off to the team behind the Lightning Boy Shader.
I'm still new to Blender. Exploring how to use LBS for this comic book story I have in mind is what's motivating me to dive deeper into Blender. I come from a photography background, so a non-photorealistic way of thinking is really pushing me beyond my comfort zone. At any rate, I'm glad that my Daz assets port well with minor adjustments.
Cheers!
So I finally got around to finishing and rendering those Bette images I did, what only a couple months ago
I also figured I should set up an artstation account, Though I'm only going to stick stuff I've actually modelled there and not just my faffing about.
also if you click through the seqin on has a shot of the seqin on as a turn around where you can appreciate how the sequins actually twinkle
These are great renders! Did Blender automatically convert the materials from Daz, particularly the eyes?
Love them.
Latest portrait render. Daz -> Blender via Diffeomorphic, post work in Affinity. :)