November 2022 - Daz 3D New User Challenge - Materials and next level kitbashing

2

Comments

  • Intermediate Submission

    Title: New Rules (Reupload)

    The coven has a new leader, and all the rules are about to change.

    (Zero post work, all done in Daz Studio)

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  • LinwellyLinwelly Posts: 5,795

    nice adaptions @marconft6 yes DAZ studio has a bit of a steep lerning curve at the start (and then you can find more about it while you go, I still learn new stuff about it) Light settings is usually the topic in our February New user challenge, so you will get there soon, in the meantime you migth find soem useful information in last February's challenge: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/547701/february-2022-daz-3d-new-user-challenge-lighting-and-light-effects/p1

    In the meantime adding Depth of field might be another thing you want to look into which was topic in September:  https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/517751/september-2021-daz-3d-new-user-challenge-depth-of-field-and-canvases/p1

  • Linwelly said:

    nice adaptions @marconft6 yes DAZ studio has a bit of a steep lerning curve at the start (and then you can find more about it while you go, I still learn new stuff about it) Light settings is usually the topic in our February New user challenge, so you will get there soon, in the meantime you migth find soem useful information in last February's challenge: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/547701/february-2022-daz-3d-new-user-challenge-lighting-and-light-effects/p1

    In the meantime adding Depth of field might be another thing you want to look into which was topic in September:  https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/517751/september-2021-daz-3d-new-user-challenge-depth-of-field-and-canvases/p1

    Thanks for the information! I didn't even think to look at past challenges for information. This will be a great resource. I really appreciate it.

  • aprilshowers2065aprilshowers2065 Posts: 702
    edited November 2022

    Thanks for the feedback, @Shimrian and @Linwelly! I've added a subtle smoke effect around the creature

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    Post edited by aprilshowers2065 on
  • Title: Charging This Laser

    Beginner - Materials

    He found it in the drawer. It looked just like a toy gun that would go "pew pew" when you pressed the trigger. So he pressed it. But instead of silly sound effects, some parts of the gun started to glow. He heard a humming coming from it. The cyan light near the the gun's barrel was growing brighter and brighter. LIke it was charging up for something big. He was afraid to let go of the trigger.

    Iray Render: followed the tutorial for making surfaces a light source. The surfaces of the suit are using a non-standard texture/shader. There's also mild F/Stop, if that's what it's called, being used to draw attention to what's in the foreground.

    I'm not much of an artist but I have fun making images using Daz3d. I'd like to start doing these challenges in order to improve my skills.

    2022 nov material.png
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  • katywhitekatywhite Posts: 414
    edited November 2022

    Title: Let's See What's Inside

    Software: Daz 3D

    Challenge: Intermediate

    I ripped open the planet with geometry editor and added the blood using layered image editor. Feedback welcome!

     

    Let's See What is Inside Redo.png
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    Post edited by katywhite on
  • LinwellyLinwelly Posts: 5,795

    darkseam said:

    Title: Charging This Laser

    Beginner - Materials

    He found it in the drawer. It looked just like a toy gun that would go "pew pew" when you pressed the trigger. So he pressed it. But instead of silly sound effects, some parts of the gun started to glow. He heard a humming coming from it. The cyan light near the the gun's barrel was growing brighter and brighter. LIke it was charging up for something big. He was afraid to let go of the trigger.

    Iray Render: followed the tutorial for making surfaces a light source. The surfaces of the suit are using a non-standard texture/shader. There's also mild F/Stop, if that's what it's called, being used to draw attention to what's in the foreground.

    I'm not much of an artist but I have fun making images using Daz3d. I'd like to start doing these challenges in order to improve my skills.

    welcome to the new user challenge, always great to have people join this is already looking great, love the glow effect and the look on his face, only thing that I woudl suggest some changes is the lamps in the background which look like light is coming out but not through the lamp screen.maybe you can work that to a more real looking light as well?

  • LinwellyLinwelly Posts: 5,795

    katywhite said:

    Title: Let's See What's Inside

    Software: Daz 3D

    Challenge: Intermediate

    I ripped open the planet with geometry editor and added the blood using layered image editor. Feedback welcome!

     

     interesting work! maybe you can make the crack line down the front less straigt as well? and there is somethign odd going on with the clothing on the character on the shoulders? Hard to tell with the crass contrating light (which is a good effect)

  • Update - Beginner Submission
    Title: Uknown Beauty

    Thank you @Linwelly. I didn't know about LIE but with it and your advice I could change how the shader is applied on the right side of the pedestal.

    @Shimrian I picked up your idea and turned the pedestal core into stone, so that the light installation serves as bordering element.

    statue_museum-update.jpg
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  • LinwellyLinwelly Posts: 5,795

    This looks so elegant, very good work @apprentice ! I'm glad my tips were helping

  • Shimrian said:

    Linwelly said:

    Shimrian said:

    Title: Among the Hibiscus and Elderberries

     

    Intermediate challenge - Next level kitbashing

    This is my second attempt at this image. I did play with dforce, but after finally removing everything that caused explosions, I just didn't like what it did to the cloth. I also made adjustments to the jewelry and removed the ball that was having issues on the earring when fit to G9.

    I added some additional fauna with the flora since hibiscus attracts butterflies and hummingbirds love Turk's cap and visit it frequently so hopefully you'll see one in there. 

    I really want my images to look like art so I did some postwork in photoshop to try and give it more of an artistic look. Hopefully I didn't overdo it.

    yes sometimes it's hard to make the d-force do what you would like it to do, some things can be arranged with the cloth parameters in the surface tab but it takes time and experimentation.

    about the postwork there is something that's rather irritating me about it (not postwork in general) that is the "canvas structure" you added seems to be mostly noticable on some places of her skin (arms) and with that looks more like a render artefact than an intended. maybe you find something better there

    Thanks for the feedback! I love layers! It was easy to just click off the layer with the canvas texture even though I had tons of other layers on top of it. I wasn't actually sure if I liked that particular texture before posting, but it reminded me of acrylic and oil paintings I've done in the past, so I left it there. 

    Here is the image without that texture added:

    Girl sitting in nature

    Link to the image in my gallery

    Now I'm off to see what I can create with the new G9 and Michael 9 HD! Not sure I'll have time to create a second entry before the month is over, but I'll try!

    I agree with @limwelly that that canvas postwork was a bit off. As for the postwork, in my modest opinion you went a bit hard on the "contrast enhancement". I admit that I commit the same mistake sometimes, the trick is that sometimes  "less is more". Nice composition :)

  • Daedalus-7Daedalus-7 Posts: 198
    edited November 2022

    aprilshowers2065 said:

    Thanks for the feedback, @Shimrian and @Linwelly! I've added a subtle smoke effect around the creature

     

    I really like the effect you created with the "ghost". I think that I preferred the version with no depth of field, though. If you want to put the monster more in focus maybe it would work with shadow over the sleeper? 

    However, for monsters stuff, I usually prefer to have humans "in the light" and monsters "in the darkness" or vice versa. :)

    Post edited by Daedalus-7 on
  • Daedalus-7Daedalus-7 Posts: 198
    edited November 2022

    Well, I wasn't getting inspired all month...until I made this :) 

    I did quite some kitbashing to create the snowy environment, but I am quite happy with how it came out, and I also applied a Geoshell on the arm of the elf for a frost effect on it. 

    Rendered in Daz Studio, Iray.

    Intermediate Challange: Kitbashing

    Winter Magic

    Winter Magic [JPG].jpg
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    Post edited by Daedalus-7 on
  • ShimrianShimrian Posts: 475

    Great job @aprilshowers2065, I really like your image! The smoky effect makes her a little bit creepier! I have to +1 to what Daedalus-7 said on dof, but that contridicts what others said so didn't mention it before. wink 

    @darkseam - Great job on the dof. I think you have just enough. I think having the right eye closed is great, but you need to have him squint. You can usually do this with dials, but I’m not sure if you need the head morphs or expressions for that. 

    @katywhite - I love the colors and how you have lighting on her face coming from the globe. One thing I think might help the image is to have the dragon a little bit more immersed in the light so it looks more like he is pushing out of it? I’m not sure how to do this, but maybe add smoke or do it with postwork editing?

    @apprentice - Oh, I really love how your image turned out! Great lighting btw! I really works well with this image.

    @Daedalus-7 - Thank you for your feedback. For this image I was very much trying to pull away from the image looking like a render and more like a painting. It could be that I totally failed in this, but the “contrast enhancement” on the face was actually painted on with a brush using my tablet. I was looking at renders that I really liked in the gallery and on deviantart and noticed a lot of the images had quite a bit of texture and used a lot of lights and darks, so I wanted to try that out for myself. I’m still learning though, so I probably completely failed! I’ll keep working on it and trying out new stuff and hopefully I’ll get better eventually.

    As for your image, Winter Magic… I’m so glad you were finally inspired to make this! I always enjoy your images and this one is wonderful. I really like the two forms of magic balancing each other out, or maybe they are just comparing notes? They don't look like they are mad at each other or want to fight and that's a good thing! I like how you have the frozen tree and the tree with fall leaves to cross balance the two people. If anything, I’d like to see you add more to that so the ice mage has a fall background and the fire mage has the winter background with the two backgrounds blending together in the middle for transition (in other words, the tree with fall colored leaves should not be white, but instead brown). The snow and fallen leaves can be on both sides, but the ground on the right should have a bit more melted snow (or fall background). Haha, no idea how easy that would be to do though! It’s still great as is!

  • LinwellyLinwelly Posts: 5,795

    Daedalus-7 said:

    Well, I wasn't getting inspired all month...until I made this :) 

    I did quite some kitbashing to create the snowy environment, but I am quite happy with how it came out, and I also applied a Geoshell on the arm of the elf for a frost effect on it. 

    Rendered in Daz Studio, Iray.

    Intermediate Challange: Kitbashing

    Winter Magic

    very nice work with the snow layers, that's always a challenge to get right, al lot of very interesting aspects in your image have already been named so my comments will go more into the story aspect of your image, currently the two of them look more like they are in a friendly banter testing their magic, if that' is what you wanted you're golden, if you want to show a fight I miss the aggressiveness, the strain on their bodies that they do something challenging. So the posig and expressions might need some adaption then.

    one idea you might test with the ice mage is to add a metallic glitter layer to her skin in the surfaces tab

  • Daedalus-7Daedalus-7 Posts: 198
    edited November 2022

    @Shimrian For a quick postwork I would reccomend using Camera Raw in Photoshop (it's in Filters). It allows you to have a lot of control over contrast, colors, etc all with simple simple sliders. That's much faster than going at it with brushes :)

    As for my image thanks for the feedback. I do like your idea of split backgrounds, but that may be for a furure project (going, for example for a more intense fire vs ice theme).

    @linwelly Thank you for the input. I was indeed going for a more peaceful encounter, so I left things at a more "teasing" level. I did try to put some glitter on the elf (she even had emissive eyelashes on by default), but I was getting a lot of noise from those. Even this image is quite noisy, but luckily pictures rendered at high resolutions don't show off a lot of noise when viewed at lover resolutions. 

    I did try to pass the image through an AI denoiser, maybe it's better? I does produce a few artefacts here and there.

     

    Winter Magic-DeNoised2.jpg
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    Post edited by Daedalus-7 on
  • aprilshowers2065aprilshowers2065 Posts: 702
    edited November 2022

    Thanks for the feedback @Daedalus-7 and @Shimrianlaugh I tweaked it a bit as a mix of the two images; keeping the DOF but reduced it slightly so it's more subtle 

    Let Me In11.png
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    Post edited by aprilshowers2065 on
  • LinwellyLinwelly Posts: 5,795

    @Daedalus-7 yes the denoised images looks better, render artifacts are often an consequence of too short render times though, so you might think of increasing that amd thry to use a pixel filter radius of 1 or 0.95, with the standart setting of 1.5  I often heve the impression it's all noisy You can find that setting in the render tab under Filtering

  • LinwellyLinwelly Posts: 5,795

    Looking good there @aprilshowers2065

  • Linwelly said:

    Looking good there @aprilshowers2065

    Thanks! laugh 

  • Daedalus-7Daedalus-7 Posts: 198
    edited November 2022

    @Linwelly The artifacts I was talking about were from the denoiser, unfortuantely. Not much, just a few pixels here and there.

    And yes, I am already using Mitchell with a pixel filter radius of 1, thanks. laugh

    @aprilshowers2065 Looks good! The reduced blur on the sleeper seems to be working better now. 

    Post edited by Daedalus-7 on
  • Daedalus-7 said:

    @Linwelly The artifacts I was talking about were from the denoiser, unfortuantely. Not much, just a few pixels here and there.

    And yes, I am already using Mitchell with a pixel filter radius of 1, thanks. laugh

    @aprilshowers2065 Looks good! The reduced blur on the sleeper seems to be working better now. 

    Thank you smiley 

  • SofaCitizenSofaCitizen Posts: 1,601
    edited November 2022

    Hopefully this image qualifies for the intermediate challenge - I was aiming more into the "throwing assets from all over the place" part of kitbashing but reading the description again I see that I probably should have done some LIE or Geometry editing instead. I did apply a few shaders to primatives, tweaked the carboard box texture and created the whitewash effect for the "Spaceship" in Photoshop and applied it using a geoshell if that counts?

    A Lockdown Spaceman

    Stuck in the middle of lockdown, all little Billy wanted was to fly to the Moon for his birthday. So Mum, Dad & his big sister ransacked the house to bring his wish to life. Kinda.

    So, this is a two-in-one render with the main scene and a "behind the scenes" companion image. The scene is intentionally "rough around the edges" to give the intention of the family using what they can find around the house to put things together and the second one is not really supposed to be lit or composed properly. As I am out of time now, I did have to do a bit of Photoshopping to fix a bit of poke through on Billy's "Space Suit" and de-gloss the Dad's top which for some reason aquired a shiny texture from somewhere.

    Lockdown-Spaceman.jpg
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    Post edited by SofaCitizen on
  • Linwelly said:

    katywhite said:

    Title: Let's See What's Inside

    Software: Daz 3D

    Challenge: Intermediate

    I ripped open the planet with geometry editor and added the blood using layered image editor. Feedback welcome!

     

     interesting work! maybe you can make the crack line down the front less straigt as well? and there is somethign odd going on with the clothing on the character on the shoulders? Hard to tell with the crass contrating light (which is a good effect)

    Thanks for the suggestions, unfortuantely I was quite busy this month didn't get a chance to try them. Maybe later on for my gallery though hmmm

  • katywhitekatywhite Posts: 414
    edited December 2022

    Title: Being Deleted From the System

    Software: Daz 3D

    Challenge: Intermediate

    I used geometry editor to give her the 'being deleted' look and image layer editor for the screen display.

    Being Deleted From the System.jpg
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    Post edited by katywhite on
  • LinwellyLinwelly Posts: 5,795

    Thanks a lot for all the entries, this challenge is now closed, and December challenge is already up

    https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/607041/december-2022-daz-3d-new-user-challenge-open-render-challenge#latest

    The showcase will be up in a few days

  • LinwellyLinwelly Posts: 5,795

    Here come the showcase for the New User Challenge

    Beginners:

    apprentice Uknown Beauty

    darkseam  Charging This Laser

     

     

    Intermediate

    DarkSoul   It's the end of the world as we know it

     

    marconft6  New Rules

     

    SofaCitizen   A Lockdown Spaceman     (I have to apologise, I never commented on your work, must have slipped past me somehow)

     

    new user welcome

     

    Sprucebeard   "If you're not cops. .  ."

     

    well done everybody!

  • Congrats to the winners!

  • ShimrianShimrian Posts: 475

    Congratulations apprenticedarkseamDarkSoulmarconft6SofaCitizen and Sprucebeard!

  • SofaCitizenSofaCitizen Posts: 1,601

    Thank You :)  - Congratulations to all the other winners and participants too!

    @Linwelly, that's OK, I didn't get it finished till just before the contest closed so there wasn't much time between posting and the judging.

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