Show Us Your Iray Renders. Part IV
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And another...
'NO. I didn't want you to plant the flowers IN the bucket!'
In the original setting, runners were lizard-like bipeds who ran... very fast. They were innate pacifists, always choosing to run from problems (and MAYBE a kick/tailslap/bug out). They were also very dim, although, strangely, had very good memories (just had trouble understanding nuance or putting things together).
Eventually the players discovered that runners were actually immensely long-lived (under ideal circumstances), and would become increasingly intelligent. By their 'adulthood' they became significantly more intelligent than most other races.
They were the original race of Balt, who had used portals to bring other races to their world, or created them outright (dragons and centaurs). They then made a series of mistakes that lead to demons being released into the world. The ensuing massive warfare, then warfare between dragons and other races the runners regarded as their responsibility, lead to a 'civilization suicide' -- they chose to mostly expunge their civilization from the world and abandon all their children to the wild.
In the setting, the runners were the 'nice slaves' to most groups -- they'd work for next to nothing, but you had to treat them half-decently or they'd sneak away.
First portrait...
Photobombed!
Dog pack turned out to be great!
Now you need some LAMH hair for those dogs. I've seen some good hair that you've produced for that other animal.
and another one from me
Barbult: Actually, the first dog has LAMH hair. It's just very short! (Staffies are generally very short hair dogs) The boxer was more of a 'quickie' so I did it without LAMH. I'll have to do a wolf or something... what I love is that changing the hair color really changes the look. I did a golden brown with the staffie and, while it doesn't look like any real staffie that I know of, it looked cool.
Anyway, time for Wednesday update for my webcomic... and a very important flashback...
http://thefarshoals.webcomic.ws/comics/45
Here's my render for the day! :)
Got some First Bastion landscape (land of ice and snow foreground) plus the Iray worldsphere thingie. Trying them out...
This also has fantasy castle bit, dragon 3 with liquid pack for 'smoke' (not sure it came out very noticeable, I probably would have been fine adding it in post)
Note about Land of Ice and Snow -- I was worried about converting it to Iray, since it uses a funky shader to overlay snow. Turns out not to be all that bad -- I made a copy of the terrain. First/lower copy needed Rock plugged into the bump and glossy channels (those channels autoconverted to snow). Second/upper copy needed diffuse changed to snow. Critically, the upper copy is 7x7 tiled -- you need to switch that to 1x1, and then change each image mask individually to 7x7 (because the cutout mask is a single image while the diffuse/bump/glossy is tiled).
I was very confused until I figured that out.
Could have probably done the same thing with a geoshell, but at first I was thinking I'd have to do something funky with pokethrough (IE; change Y scale very slightly on one copy so the other copy pokes through, add some displacement to complicate the edge). Thankfully that was unnecessary, because the process isn't very good (since the 'edge' is always very sharp and reveals geometry).
As an aside, I feel like a dolt for not noticing/using Sharpen tools before now. Holy poot, they make a big difference with Iray renders.
I may be dolt 2. Are you talking about some kind of tool in Studio or the more common Sharpening in an image editor?
Sharpen in image editor.
Here's a quick example... it really helps bring out eyes and hair. I usually have to play with it a bit, because a bit too much makes things look overexposed and a lot too much makes it look really weird (it can be a good way to set up lineart style, though).
In this image I'd probably sharpen the eyes on a separate layer and use a little less for the rest.
This took stupidly long to render (I kept seeing significant errors after letting it render for an hour, nnngh). But I'm very happy with it.
The sky is from Iray world thing, but I added the stars in post. (I spent some time trying to put in a star environment map, but it ended up slowing things down and I couldn't easily make a proper mask for the clouds)
Ugh. Bug in DS 4.8 causes crash. Bug in 4.9 causes certain clothing to teleport a meter to the left. nngh
Finally negotiated the 4.8 bug (certain shapes choke if they have metallicity, not sure why. Ship looks fine without it, so hey)
I recently picked up SFCS Corridor Kit (been picking up a lot of highly reusable/configurable tech interiors to make my life easier for my webcomic): http://www.daz3d.com/s-f-c-s-sci-fi-construction-set
It's an OLD set, SKU 2194! And it's annoying, because the metadata isn't set up for current stuff well so I have to go hunting for the thing in Poser Characters or something nutty (meh). That said, it's currently $7 on sale, and had a bunch of different pieces. I figured I could probably retexture and get good results.
And I think so!
The ship is http://www.daz3d.com/marcoor-fg-c4 , also on sale, since I've been slowly trying to build up a range of ship styles to reflect different groups in the webcomic.
Same materials as the last render but with a different HDRI.
Dynamic table cloth over a cube, Simulation Frozen and Sub_D applied.
Normal map driving the weave with the Iray Velvet shader applied and adjusted to my taste.
This image rendered in a third of the time as the first one and further shows that the quality of the HDRI is paramount for more realistic lighting and render speed, giving a quick convergence time because there is more quality light provided by the HDRI.
I much prefer this image than the previous. It shows the surfaces off better and gives a true representation of the texture maps. Note the Recorder at the rear of the camera. In particular around the blue light readout, see how it is dark in this image as it is on the texture map but in the previous image it is light grey.
This is straight out of Daz Studio as a PNG and saved out in Photoshop as a JPG. No postwork at all has been done. However I did take the image into Photo Effects 8 and did some layered effects but IMHO it was spoiling it. It has a really nice soft box light appeal to it, shame to spoil that.
Thanks...it is a wonderful set.
Just a test render of this set...
Got this playing with burn whites, crush blacks sliders. I really like the end result.
I like the effect too, Rafmer. The skin shows the mottled, varied tones of the texture in a way that looks like people do in real life, instead of being some homogenous spray-paint perfect single color, and the highlights on her cheeks, hands and forearm etc look great, like highlights on actual skin instead of that too-shiny "plastic" sort of highlights that renders can do all too easily. The hotter highlight on that thumbnail reads perfectly. What values did you settle on in the Crush Black & burn white sliders for this render?
Thank you for your comment! If I remember correctly both sliders were at ~0.80, both combined showed the effect of higher contrast I would say.
My last render; just trying to show the armor details.
The mail armor on the arms needs work. It is mising something; bump, normal map, and/or displacement.
Excellent. Nice curves.
Yes, I noticed. Sadly, the armor set didn't include those maps. Maybe I can work something out myself.
It finally occured to me what the Armani Hair that comes with the G3M starter reminded me of. I present to you: Johnny Bravo
Wednesday comic update!
http://thefarshoals.webcomic.ws/comics/46
Artenius is just hanging around!
I discovered I missed placing one of the armor parts. But I changed the material of the chainmail anyway.
Took a few tries to get the settings right in Iray, with the light panels, screens and materials (set only has poser mats), but the result was to my liking and gives off a steampunk feel.
Currently I have another render in mind with three more figures and an addition to make the steampunk feeling even bigger (adding a copper railing in the rear section) and changing the screens.
Orchid
Curious Dragon
Experimenting with lighting.
Rather cool, considering that hair is V4 era... and with good shader, BAM.
(Backdrop is a small part of Winterblack halls)