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Hi Diomede64,
I felt bound to re-check my findings regarding the lights turning the dragon green in case I was talking nonsense.
The Assembly Room view of the dragon shows it as drab brown. But when rendered in white light it is more yellow ochre/olive.
To offer comparisons I took renders with:
both lights coloured white and positive;
the bulb white and the spotlight blue;
the bulb white and negative and the spotlight white.
You can see that the blue light is mainly what turns the dragon green but the colours are less 'acid' when the bulb is only white - unlike the original render.
The chief difference in my renders is that the negative light very much darkens the parts of the dragon that are in the shadows of the cave. (I only ticked the negative box to see what might happen in the first place!)
Some nice stuff you all!
I haven't had much time to work on my scene the last couple days, but I've done a little. I'll try and post an update tomorrow.
@Marcus, thanks for the clarification and the screenshots. I will have to make time to experiment a little with negative lights.
I reopened my first project for this month's challenge, Clue. After looking at it with fresh eyes, I decided to make a few changes to the lighting. I added spotlights behind each of the pieces with the light restricted to that piece. I also used the spline modeler to create a candlestick to put in the ballroom with the white piece.
Here is my second WIP as well as a screencap showing the lighting setup. Pretty much the standard 3-point, plus a sun and a weak bulb to get some definition on the face.
Still needs some work to get the lighting better - the helmet and sword are too shiny and lack definition - any assistance will be greatly appreciated :)
The technical qualification bits:- The sword I originally intended using didn't work, so made my own. The helmet was made by mehilov, from ShareCG. The trees are Xfrog weeping willows. I'm using gamma correction of 2.2, which washed out the colour on the leaves, so i had to modify the original shader by lowering the yellow channel in Gimp. The water shader is totally original - I used a photo of a stream, added transparency, a ripple bump with some turbulence as well as refraction.
The grasses and cattails are from Runtime DNA and the hair is modified Mitsu hair for A3.
Couple of technical questions - Firstly, I see we can use an external renderer, such as Octane - what about using Cycles with MCJ's teleblender script? Secondly, what definition do you guys normally use for your final entries?
Cheers
Aaugh! Ever have one of those weeks where it seems the world conspires against you having any free time or getting anything accomplished? This is one of those weeks for me. I had hoped to have some stuff to post today, but between power outages Thursday, stupid amounts of stuff to do yesterday and today, then a screwy internet connection tonight, which I just resolved, I didn't get S&#T done!
Great work, Roygee. Sorry, I can't answer any of your questions about resolution and outside renderers. I think our leader Dustrider is incommunicado for a few days. Hopefully, you can wait. There is plenty of time.
Sorry about your week, EP. Hope it gets better.
I am not posting just to bump the thread up, no, that is not what I am doing. Here is a screengrab of my lighting for the Jill on a hill with a pail of water project. Just a sunlight and one spot light. I am very happy with how the terrain shader worked out. Having a few issues with the grass and plant replicators, but making slow progress. The plants are Lisa Botanicals with the texture maps turned into mixers with gradients. I have another version in which the path up the hill is more defined, but I like this one better.
Thank you, Diomede :) Your's is looking great - I too prefer your road less traveled.
Forgot to mention that another advantage of importing G2F as .obj is that there is no poke-through to deal with - what you see in DS is what you get in Carrara. The shaders need tweaking and you have to be spot-on with the pose and morphs, but it works great for those of us who still cling to C8.1 or earlier:)
How about a toad less travelled? ;-)
I decided to go the romantic scene route, because I wanted to show off the procedural skin, and it is a bit creepy. Here's a low res light test. When I finish setting up the various lights I'll post a detailed explanation.
One thing I can say right now is that I used lots of light linking and no GI of any sort, including skylight.
First of all, thanks for this challenge. I don't use Carrara all that much, and this is really stretching what small skills I have and getting me back into it. And, there's a lot of inspirational images here! It's very helpful to see everybody's process.
So I started with the G2 character Caoimhe. Poke through! And weirdly shiny. I ended up not figuring out how to fix the poke through and abandoned the suit all together. For rendering, I wanted to use the Octane plugin I just got, so the next step was to send it to Octane, set up lighting and see what I had to work with.
Since you're using the Octane plugin, I'm not sure how it is controlled, but I think the issue is reflection. If you were using Carrara's standard renderer, the shiny look is usually caused by the Highlight being set high in the skin's shader.
evilproducer, yup it was a reflection issue. It was set to 100 out of the box - I just dropped that down all the way to 0.
So here's what I ended up with in Octane. For lighting I'm using a Skies of Economy jpg as a texture environment with the power ramped up just a bit. That alone provided some nice very even lighting but was fairly flat looking, so I added a large mesh plane to the left of the figure. I converted that to a light to provide some better defined yet soft shadows. I liked the black shiny material in the mask, but it was pretty heavy. Those flat grey parts above the eyes maybe could be more interesting, and the glass needed a bit of work too.
Octane provides an interesting scratched metal surface, so I thought I'd try that for the mask, although I didn't like the red in this context. I changed the grey blocks above the eyes to a more subtle clear blue plastic. I also changed out the glass in the goggles to an Octane material. Getting there, but still needs tweaking.
I think PhilW ( or was it Ringo or both?) suggests using a teeny tiny amount of reflection on the skin- something around 2%. That's with the Carrara standard renderer, so I'm not sure how it would look in Octane.
No matter, it looks really good so far.
Thanks evilproducer, I'll add that - her skin does look very dry.
So here's where I've ended up - Vicky with a sultry stare in sci-fi goggles :-) . I found the channel that was providing the red color after some digging around, and changed it to a subtler blue. I made the glass a bit more opaque, but maybe not enough. Now I'm not sure that there's enough contrast in the image. There's also that weird line around the lips that normally I'd try to fix in post. There's no postwork at all on this image.
Looks good!
The line around the lips may be due to the textures using Fast mipmap. It was introduced with one of the C8 betas as the default for some reason. Try a different method. As soon as my scene is done loading I'll see what the old default method was.
If it matters to Octane, the old default method for displaying texture maps was Sampling.
Looks good!
The line around the lips may be due to the textures using Fast mipmap. It was introduced with one of the C8 betas as the default for some reason. Try a different method. As soon as my scene is done loading I'll see what the old default method was.
Thanks! You're right about fast mipmap being the default. I tried the three other option for both the face and lips but unfortunately it doesn't fix the line. I've tried making sure the setting are the same on both the lips and face and still no luck....
That's a bummer. Could it be the texture set?
Beautiful! I hope you get the shader issue sorted out, but fantastic job in any case.
evilproducer, yes it was the texture set! Thanks for that suggestion. I swapped it out with the Cassie texture, and look! No weird lip lines :-).
And thanks diomede64! Got it sorted. Phew!
No good in Octane, but here's the link to my procedural skin shader.
http://www.sharecg.com/v/77436/view/7/Material-and-Shader/Carrara-V4-Procedural-Skin-Shader-and-hair
Here's a bit of a higher resolution test. The skin is the above linked procedural.
I used a home brewed light dome for atmospheric light. It's basically a sphere with the normals reversed to point inward. I used a surface replicator to place the the lone distant light. I have about 120 replicated lights set to 4% brightness, with the color set to match the sky. The light uses a 90% shadow intensity. The shadows are hard. the number and intensity of the lights diffuses the shadows and gives the impression of using and HDRI. So that my render will complete in this century, I excluded the dynamic hair from the light.
To help with the impression of indirect light, I used to low intensity, high falloff green lights aimed at Vickie's torso and face to mimic Hermit the Amphibian's reflected light. I excluded Hermit the Amphibian from the lights, so I could place the lights within the mesh and still get the desired effect. The final render will have one more light for this purpose, aimed back at Vickie's hand cradling his head.
I used a high intensity spotlight to create a rim light and provide the impression of reflected light from the airship. I colored it to match the sky light. I restricted the light to only Vickie, her wardrobe and Hermit the Amphibian as I didn't want any weird shadow artifacts alerting the viewer to my "cheat."
I used two rectangle shape lights (C7.2 doesn't have the new light avatars) in exactly the same spot and with identical settings, except that one excludes the hair and uses raytraced soft shadows, and the other is restricted to the hair and uses no soft shadows. I use those for a little fill.
The sunlight is actually two lights, set up the same way I described the shape lights above. One is set up to have soft shadows and exclude the hair, and the other is set up to use hard shadows and include the hair. Both are set to 125% intensity.
I've done some texture work on the blouse, by adding translucency, a little alpha, some bump adjustment and the ever-standard, Highlight/Shininess.
The hair is PhilW's Sidelong hair. I only adjusted the Highlight and Shininess on it, as well as brushed it a bit to better match the figure.
I added some noise to some of the texture on the Zeppelin as well as Highlight/Shininess work.
Hermit the Amphibian's texture is a color gradient with noise. The noise is copied and pasted in the Bump channel and the Highlight channel.
Edited to add that I need to add volumetric clouds, fix the hair collision with the head at the part, and do something with the green running light so it isn't so prominent.
That's looking fantastic! I can't wait to see how it comes together.
I'm gone for a few days and I come back to some great new WIP's, and a new entry!!!!
Welcome to the challenge Dievans! Your mats/shaders are looking really good. Octane actually makes it quite fun to mess with your shaders.
I was just checking in to see how things progressed, I've got to run again, but will be back later.
Got some time and started to work on my setup.
This is Queen Victoria IV, with court, and in audience.
The room is created in the vertex modeller.
And there is a lot of things to add and adjust.
My first WIP of second entry
Mike
Coming off
His bike
inna forest
My Haiku isn't that good, either :)
Got the bike as a freebie - I'll post the link when I find it. This was a single .obj, so I had to cut it up into about a hundred pieces to make it animatable and give it shading domains. Everything else was made by me.
Thought it would be amusing to post a render in the raw state, with placeholder shaders, clothing not yet fitted.
Carrara, oh why, oh why can't I export an .obj and bring it back in at the same size!.
Just a few changes to the final render. I changed what V4 (in the stockade) was wearing and edited all of the Mats/Shaders. Some content comes in to Carrara (and Octane) with texture sets that are a bit to dark to work well. When this happens you can typically reduce Gamma just a bit on the texture in the Octane shader portion of the shader tree and the work much better. For V4's Ella's Cloths I reduced Gamma to 1.8 and it made a huge difference. I also increased specular and bump on the cloths.
I chnged the shaders on the chains and shackles by replacing them with shaders from the Octane LiveDB because like a lot of Poser content - they had burned in highlights in the texture maps :bug:
For the final image I also moved the HDR just a bit, and added a bit more vignetting to the image (through the Octane Imager).
I have started to create the people in the court.
These are the ones in the background.
First setup the figure in Studio, with costume and pose.
Then export it out as an .obj.
The export scale is Poser scale.
Under write groups, I use : Use Figures Name(S). This way the jacket is named jacket, pants is pants etc....
I'm also collecting the maps. They will be stored in a sub-directory to where the .obj is stored. Then when adjusting the shaders I don't have to go hunting for the maps when adjusting the shader in Carrara.
When importing into Carrara, I only create one .obj. This way I have fewer objects to keep track of. But the shading domains are intact, so I can then start to adjust the shaders.
Thanks for the detail on the settings, Varsel. I hope you don't mind that I put an edited version of your post in the best practices thread.
Very nice stuff. More importantly, it's pretty informative.
I feel it's important to show some failures as well as successes. Here's a failure. I used a vertex cumulous cloud I found on ShareCG. The way the shaders are done is quite cool, however, in this attempt, it didn't work so well for a couple reasons.
I used network rendering with an Intel iMac and my old G5. Something is different about how lighting or gamma or SSS or something is handled between the two architectures or OSes. Not sure which. You can see the render bucket artifacts in the cloud.
The other issue is the glow in the cloud shader. It is the wrong color for the warm sunset look. It's a bit blue.
The final issue is that for some reason, with this cloud and various volumetric clouds that I tried, my fake GI light rig really blows out the brightness. I'm not sure why, as the light that replicated on my vertex sphere is set to 3% intensity. It reacts as expected on other scene objects.
I still want the clouds, so I've found a panoramic picture that I snapped from the top of Rib Mountain, Wisconsin (which is about 45 Miles from where I live). I took the photo into photoshop and warmed it up a bit to match the sky. I then inserted a plane primitive and adjusted the size to match the photo and used it as a billboard for the photo by creating a shader with the photo in the color channel and the glow channel. All other shader functions were turned off. I'll post screen shots of the scene set up, fake GI rig and shader settings for the billboard later.