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Comments
I think her hair turned out really good. How did you get the layered look going over her shoulder?
It's actually PhilW's Sidelong hair. I did do a little brushing to better fit the figure's pose, as opposed to draping it, which would have taken forever on my old compy.
I forgot to post here that the submissions thread is now open! :red:
You can find it here: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/46190/
Made some changes. Here is a screengrab of the final lighting set up and the final render.
- Replaced the Jill with a new Genesis 2 character, mixing Riven with Stephanie 4
- Made her custom clothing and used Poser cloth room to drape it on the G2F figure, as explained in "best practices" thread
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/45361/
- Replaced a number of textures
- Added another replicator of plants and rocks
- Made a smiling morph for Jack
- Added a pair of shoes in the grass and a crown in Jill's hand (because Jack broke his crown)
Here's a forum sized copy of the image I applied to the billboard. If this works the way I hop it does, I'll share why I did it the way I did.
Very nice! You do a great job on getting a winsome, girl-next-door look to your female characters.
Thanks. Now that my entries are in, I can really focus on learning from everyone else. And oh boy! There is so much great information this month. Keep it up, everyone.
I talked about the fake GI light rig before. It's a simple sphere with a single replicated light. I excluded the all the hair and the plane from that light. The hair was excluded because all the lights would have substantially increased render times. The plane was excluded because I used that for my billboard with the cloud image. I did set the plane to not cast or receive shadows, but the light was still washing it out.
The billboard with the cloud picture was enlarged substantially and moved far away from the airship. I did this, because I used one of RingoMontfort's atmospheres and I wanted the image to have the feel that it was effected by the haze etc. in the atmosphere. To help with that, I actually doubled the amount of haze, and the haze height from what Ringo had set it up as. This was to basically create an atmospheric forced perspective.
I should add that there is no GI and per the challenge rules, no postwork.
Holy crap, this place is dead today! Did I not get the invitation to the party that is keeping everybody away?
love the render evill, thanks for the ixplication of the lights, I like how the green man is patting her breasts and not mauling her as a less well controlled green man might
for me the image would look more reallerererer if there was lens flare because the camera is pointed pretty close to the sun and normally you would get a little flare in the top left and in that right hand corner ???
Nice EP - I like how you did the background, and the detailed explanation/how-to for the lights is great too!
I got another idea - so I just had to do it. The attached image is the base concept - Vicky (5) in the Photo Studio with a .........
This image shows V5 with the base Bree texture as loaded into Carrara and rendered in Octane (no modifications). The unmodified skin shaders actually look pretty good, but I want to improve on it. I also need to figure out what to put in the scene with her. I'm thinking a chair or stool - something that would fit the photo studio part of my theme.
The bikini is Nata's Bikini, which has only undergone a modification to the displacement so far. The bikini magically disappears when rendered after loading (shows in the assembly room but disappears when rendered in either Carrara of Octane). I turns out the disappearing act is due to the way the displacement is handled in Carrara. vs DS, and the entire bikini was displaced inward, leaving poor V5 neeckid! Anyhoo, I really want a blue bikini for my entry, so I'll see what I can do ;-)
The studio backdrop is from Photo Studio by InnaneGlory. Unfortunately it is an older product and only has .dsf file so it can't be loaded directly in Carrara. I saved the paper role backdrop with the blue texture as a .duf file from DS, then imported it into Carrara. The moire pattern that can be seen is caused by the bump value being too high.
Here is the lighting setup. The scene will be lit with an HDRI, the "hdri-20_color.hdr" that comes with Carrara. I added one mesh light as a rim light. I had to make it fairly large to help create shadows where the feet (shoes) meet the floor. The major light source from the HDRI is on the right hand side of the figure (the viewers left hand side). The placement of the chair blocks the main light source from the HDRI at the feet, as a result the shadows were very faint. I used the rim light to provide some desperately needed shadow to the area.
Here is the final render.:Vicky in the Photo Studio with a chai........... DONUT????
I used the DAZ_skin_material_299 from the Octane LiveDB as the starting point for the skin shaders, then replaced the texture maps in the shader set with the Bree (V5) textures, I used the diffuse, Specular, Bump, and SSS texture sets for both the Glossy and Diffuse (mixed) materials in the shader set. Then tweaked various settings to get the look I wanted (mainly specular and roughness).
For the Bkini I changed the color for the Octane materials to dark blue, and used a mix material in the specular channel (node) to give light blue specular highlights, and increased the index to 2 to give the shader a bit more reflectance.
I made mostly minor changes on the Chair shaders, the most important being adding specular to the legs. The legs had no specular, and looked totally flat and featureless before adding some specular. I also increased the roughness to give them a bit more sheen.
The donuts needed to have some specular added too, especially for the sprinkles and frosting. I added some very very light specular to the donuts to give them a lightly glazed look. The cup and plate needed to have specular added, and I increase the index on both to give them better reflective qualities.
I even edited the shaders on the shoes. I was surprised to find out the specular was "faked" with and odd map for some of the materials. The changes weren't real noticeable, but I like the results better than the original shaders.
Also note the pose is a lot different from the original "concept" pose. All of the pose modifications were done in Carrara. I really like how the pose(s) on both hands came out. On the right hand the fingers follow the contours of the chair.
The only post-work done was to reduce the size to make the image small enought to post, and to convert it from png to jpg.
some great WiPs happening in here... and frisky frogs an all!.. nice palm plant
it's taken me a while to read back thru the pages... so much to take in... these challenges should be collated into one post and stickied for references..
GREAT WORK :-)
It's finally time that I had a go, LOL!
Not 100% sure where I'm going to go with this, but, take one tower...
The tower is just a group of vertex objects - four boxes for the walls, basically so I could easily take a wall out and work on the inside, and a "spiral" staircase running up the inside.
Again, the staircase is just box objects - one stair, duplicate, move, repeat. Some extra boxes for the framing and handrail. One vertex object makes a side to the next landing. Duplicate the vertex objects up and around the tower until we reach the top. The wood and painted brick shaders use textures straight out of Filter Forge. I still need to tweak values for shininess etc.
I've positioned the camera at the top of the stairs looking down. Vicky will be at the bottom, and another character will be at the top, with probably just a an arm/hand in shot.
Still to do: Finish up the tower - some textures missing and the windows are just slots in the wall. I need to make some inserts for those. And the lighting. I've tried sunlight, but even with the intensity turned right up. nothing gets through the windows. I think partly that's because I haven't built the inserts (& they'll channel/bounce more light inside). I might also try PhilW's idea from the tutorial, and put glowing boxes right outside each window. For now, I've gone with low intensity bulbs, positioned on each landing.
Great perspective and lighting!
Tim_A :- Glad I don't suffer vertigo after looking at that picture !!!!!!
Great stuff, makes me want to learn more how to use Carrara even more.
Looks like everyone else is ripping into the Challenge.
Update from me (Please remember I'm a newbie to Carrara)
Title:- Vicki6 in Provence with Nightstorm (ConceptCar)
Had a break for some real world stuff, then bought some Carrara goodies, but back into the Challenge.
I'm happy with the shaders on the car, but still need to increase the reflection on the paint and reduce the reflection on the windscreen.
If I get time I also want to model a few details so the car looks more like a concept car rather than a toon car.
Vicki6 needs to gain about an inch to get her out of that wet concrete look.
Next I need to adjust the shaders for Vicki6's skin as she's looking a bit plastic, as well as final adjustments to her clothes.
I also left the hair off then added it last, should have added it first - OOOPS, one for the learning curve !!!!!.
Sunlight still working for a best look, want to get some better shadows.
Again if I get time I also want to experiment with the shaders for the buildings, footpath, and road.
Should I also have a go at a HDRI reflection look for the shop windows, or is that too overboard ??????
Finally, a big sigh, Howie's new Harpsburg scenery is very tempting, but I'll stick with Provence so I can learn some Carrara techniques.
Lucky me, I've just lost a pretty big and complex scene I was working on for the challenge, worked on it for about 2 weeks now. It's not even Carrara's fault, it was a Microsoft auto update and computer restart that did me in :( I should have been saving more often as I went, so my fault too, but the scene was getting so memory-large that I was gunshy about saving it because I was impatient and didn't want to wait (one of the few gripes I have with Carrara, which I otherwise love, is how slow it is at saving complex scenes).
Got a little depressed, but also a little irked/fired up, so I'm going to dive back in to see if I can recreate my scene (or maybe make a new and more exciting one) in the short time remaining.
I'm terrible about sharing renders as I go though, I guess I don't like putting test renders out there :) But I'll try to change and share more...
Here's some initial hair texturing tests I did. There are some great Carrara hair products out there, but most of the time they use too few hairs, which I think is why some carrara hair models can make your character look like they've got thinning see-through hair. A quick google search reveals that the average number of hairs on a human head is 100 thousand, for some blondes it is an average of 120 thousand, but very few hair models have more than 50 000 and many have much less.
So I tend to go to the hair in the assembly room and go to the 'hair group' tab and add number of hairs to get it higher (doesn't seem to have much render cost, and I don't have to use a hair cap to ensure my characters don't look like their balding as a result).
The tests below show the progression of changing the shininess and highlights to make it more realistic. For this one I ended up going ridiculously high with shininess (more than 93%) to keep the spread of the highlights low, and very low in the highlight intensity level (like 5%). Carrara hair is *very* reactive to highlights, but I think if you take the time to find the sweet spot it can look very realistic.
My secret weapon is PhilW, I tend to use his Crista Hair shaders as a jumping off point, I think he uses a very realistic length and width for the hairs themselves, and I like his coloring schemes. :)
Oh I was also texturing this guy's teeth at first, which is why the mouth is open in the first couple of test renders. After I got them like I wanted them I closed the mouth so the test renders would go faster.
I think you're off to a great start.
Regarding the HDRI thing, are you talking about using one for just reflections, or do you want to use it as a light source as well? In Carrara it is very easy to use an HDRI, color, color gradient, image map, sky or realistic sky as a light source.
To use a sky preset, select Scene, and then either choose the Misc. tab in the Browser, and drag and drop a thumbnail onto the Atmosphere section, or click the preset button. You can also choose to start your own by using the pulldown menu.
To use an HDRI, color, color gradient, image, etc. Make your choice from the pulldown menu under Background. This wraps your choice around the virtual universe, so spherical images and HDRIs will look better, although you can hide them by rendering an alpha channel or putting something in the scene's Backdrop.
To use the above listed options as a light source, go to the render room and enable Skylight. You will also want to make sure that both Light Thru Transparency options are enabled. One is near the top of the screen and is part of the default renderer, and the other is much lower down and is part of the GI (Global Illumination) renderer.
A couple notes about Background and Backdrop. A Background wraps around the scene, shows up in reflections and can be used as an Image Based Light (IBL). The Backdrop is meant as a quick compositing tool. The Backdrop does not reflect and cannot be used as a light source. It does not wrap around the scene. If you use an image, it will 100% fill the production frame, so it is important to make sure that the final rendered image is the same aspect as the image used as a backdrop, otherwise stretching and distortion of the backdrop image can occur.
Both the Background and Backdrop will appear "behind" the atmosphere if a realistic sky is used. This can come in handy to create effects, such as a planet rising above the horizon with clouds and atmospheric haze and clouds in front of it. Both can also use movies or image sequences for animations.
One other suggestion for your scene, would be to either lower the amount of Ambient light or turn it off. If you use the Skylight or Indirect Light, then absolutely turn it off, as it was originally meant as a way to "fake" GI. If you use Skylight or IL, then you're using real GI, so no need to fake it.
If you decide to not use GI, and you need the ambient light, then try lowering it a bit, as the default is set fairly high. If you use a sky, there's an option to set the ambient light to use the sky's color, or you could just adjust the color by clicking on the color chip.
Thanks for the comments, EP and Bunyip02 :)
Bunyip02, I'll encourage you to get hold of Howie's Harpsburg scene while it's in the sale - if you can. Howie's products don't get discounted very often, and they're built in Carrara for Carrara, so they are utterly awesome for pulling stuff apart and figuring how to do things really efficiently. While Provence is a really good scene (and I'm not suggesting for one minute that you abandon it), it isn't Carrara native. ;) I know for sure the previous scenes that I bought of Howie's were really instructive. :)
Back on the plot...
I've put in the windows, although without glass at this stage), & turned down the lighting a bit. & generally tweaked around. I reduced the DOF, as that gave it rather a miniature feel. I've also added a looking up shot from the ground floor. And I've thrown in my reference photo too.
I'm more or less happy with that as a model, but if I want to stick with the indoor lighting, I ought to have some light fixtures. You can see bulkhead-style lamps fixed to the walls in the photo, & I've got a very similar prop I can use that I made for another project.
Ah, the last image, I really like it !
A little less intensity in the “external” lights would be welcome.
Beautiful work!
LOL that's the real photo! ;)
Oups !
I don't thing so but, If it's true, you are very close to the reality, congratulation!
Some great new entries, Tim, Jon, and Bunyip. I don't have much to offer other than encouragement. I mean, once again, one of my fellow Carrara-ists managed to make someone with a very good eye mistake the render from a photo. Y'all are tremendous. And, Jon, that is the best hair I've ever seen by anyone not named PhilW.
There is plenty of time so I hope everyone who has posted sees it through - and anyone else thinking about the challenge joins in. There have been some terrific initial posts when you look through the earlier pages.
Sorry to hear about your problems Jon, but glad to see your entering the challenge! Your WIP's look GREAT!
Very cool idea Tim - looking forward to seeing the final render!!
Looking really good Bunyip! I'm glad your sticking with it, we all have to start some where! You're doing extremely well for a Carrara newbie.
looks wonderful Tim, sorry about your file Jon Stark!
I tend to get corrupted car file when my disc is getting really full, or if I cancel a render then car sometimes crashes - so I always save before render, and of course never save during closing if carrara asks me to. Most of my files are huge so I hardly ever save incrementally :( So you are not the only one.