Anyone ever take shortcuts for simplicity?
Toobis
Posts: 990
I was working on a render earlier and I came across a few problems I had to deal with. It involbed trying to make it look like someone was grabbing someones shirt sleeve and. I worked using d-formers and just could not get the effect looking like the shirt sleeve was being grabbed properly, I could only really get it half right. I
Another example; I had an issue before with using boots on a figure and although they were fitted to her her feet were somehow still poking throuh very slightly which made it look wierd. I just made her feet invisible so they would not do that anymore. I also sometimes angle render cam shots a tiny bit extra more to maybe keep an issue out of site that I could not rectify.
I just wondered how many people work on renders in Daz/poser and do things the more unorthadox method just for the sake of simplicity and saving time whilst still giving the near good enough illusion in the render of what you want to show.
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All the time! I will take any desperate measure to fix stubborn problems. And definitely the composition solution, and sometimes it can result in a more inventive camera angle. It isn't just we amateurs who resort to these solutions, either. I had a friend who was a fashion photographer working for big name magazines—he told me I wouldn't want to see what the back of some of those dresses looked like: a mess of sticky tape and safety pins! Anything to make the garment look perfect from the front.
I do things like this all the time, you really have to when working with mesh. I am amazed all the time that the meshes work together as well as they do, LOL. If it wasn't for the dynamic script, deformers, the smoothing modifier and collision, I would be lost.
I have a scene I am working on with a female centaur using an old V4 combo that I really didn't think was cutting it. So I went about trying to redo it with G3F and the Mil Foal body. I got it looking great except for the mesh in the neck warping really bad where G3F intersected that I ended up exporting the foal mesh out and then deleting parts of the mesh in Max and reimporting it since i couldn't fix it with just a deformer.
Another trick I use, even though there is LAMH, I sometimes use a tiled noise map with displacement and subdivision to simulate short hair or tinsel on animals/objects at times.
Guess what...they do it in movies, too.
Planning the shot to keep something that would become a problem out of the frame has been around as long as photography has.
It's all about ROI, whether your 'return' is money, time, or just enjoyment.
the hell is ROI?!?
Return on Investment
Say you are doing a render...and you are chraging $100 for it. If it takes you 10 hrs do it then you are making $10/hr...but if you spend 50 hrs (40 of them trying to get that last bit of pokethrough) then you are now making $2/hr...
And then figure in the learning...more often than not, getting 'lost' in the little things can teach a lot...so how much is 'wasted' time/effort?
didn't even think you could make any money with renders.
I do this often as well. Keep in mind that it has the potential to cause problems later, for example if you just slap in a few primitives to hide flaws but then radically adjust the lighting their shadows might cause problems, or if you change the angle your fixes might not work, etc. so it might be better to make sure your scene is halfway stable before you start doing things like this.
The key idea is that to fix an issue the "right" way may take, say, 10 hours. But if you tilt the camera to hide the imperfection you can get it done now for no extra time, but it's not 100% your original vision. So what is that 10 hours worth to you compared to the value of getting it "perfect". If you value perfect alignment to your original artistic vision and nothing less will do then the return on the 10 hours invested is well worth it. On the other hand, if it's not that critical for a given render and the work arounds dont bother you, then spending that 10 hours would be silly, not worth the investment of time.
And yeah, I think most of us make these sorts of trade offs all the time. Don't forget the classic "to heck with it, just render and fix it in post work" aspect as well. Whatever it takes to get the image to your satisfaction!
I do it all the time too, and don't usually think of it as 'saving' myself some work, although I think of spending ages trying to eliminate an issue when adjusting a camera angle or making a part invisible would do instead as 'making' myself some work. That's not to say I'm in favour of 'sloppy' (which is just as much of a waste of effort because the end result is unlikely to sell or be of much use anyway), but I'm not in favour of knocking myself out for nothing or wasting valuable beer-drinking time either!
It's all about the illusion, right? Whether in the movies, or photos... or 3D. It doesn't matter if there's poke-through on the side away from the camera. And so what if one figure's hand is in the shoulder of another figure. (Yep. Done that.) As long as the camera supports the illusion the hand is on the shoulder. Back when Paisley Hair was a PC+ new release, I did a contest render of Paisley Hair on the base G3F, riding bareback, naked. Why naked? I didn't have much of anything for her to wear, and nothing even remotely "fantasy." I'd call that a shortcut! lol...
I've also made corrections to a scene and used the spot render tool set to open in a new window to render just the change and the immediate area around it. Then I use Photoshop to put the layers together. Takes a lot less time than rerendering the entire scene. I do that a lot when, too, when using Real Hairy: render the entire scene with all the hair in place, then hide the hair and spot render.
Seeing as we're all owning up to taking a few shortcuts, I'll come out and admit that I have NEVER posted a render to ANY gallery that I didn't iron out some faults with postwork. And you know what... I don't feel guilty about that one little bit.
I've never understood the anti-postwork brigade. It's like limiting a traditional landscape artist by telling him that his work has to be started and completed during the brief window when the light stays the same. He has to recreate exactly what he sees, because there's no going back and adding to his work once the shadows are ten minutes longer. Just daft.
I never use to post work but now I do all the time. I have even rendered with out SSS in the skin and just post work the skin to make it look good.
Anyone who is anti-postwork has lost sight of the goal. The ultimate point of all these tools is to create art as imagined by the creator. Some of those visions simply can't be realized without postwork due to the limitations of the software.
But you see this attitude in lots of disciplines, in music with people who don't consider composers who don't play yet can program a symphony on an electronic keyboard a musician. Isn't the finished composition the point? Or in filmwork with the people who constantly go on about what something was filmed on . The audience doesn't care if you shot on 4K, HD or an I-phone as long as the finished film engages as it was intended to, and the same with 3D art.
Making the feet invisible to prevent poke-through on shoes is pretty common. In the real world, your feet would squish to fit in the shoes. 3D model's feet don't work that way, so making them invisible is a quick and easy solution.
I've got another example of return on investment. The light is perfect, the camera angle and the pose are perfect, and after a 10 hour render, you notice a small mesh rupture on the model's clothes. Do you spend an hour fiddling with the clothes, or moving the camera, and then waiting another 10 hours for the render, or do you spend 2 minutes in postwork with the clone brush? That was a no-brainer for me.
It is not unusual to come up with alternate ways to acheive a goal. Happens all the time.
Since I always render in unbiased renderers I try to always let what i see in the render being done exclusively by the lighting algorithm and not by my eyes. It might be easier to change things during postwork, but those changes would be based on my opinion and perception and not mathematics, so I try really hard to never do postwork unless that is a part of the type on image. Also coming from a photography background, I find it more of a callenge and more satisfying to set the scene and material surfaces up right for the renderer rather than 'fixing" things in an image editor.
Your analogy is off. The traditional artist is reproducing what he wants totally from scratch on the canvas, the photographer is using the camera and it's settings to capture the perfect moment. Both art, but made in different ways.
I always take shortcuts - what can't be seen in the final image, doesn't exist
In regards to postwork, there's a time and a place. The only time I disagree with postwork, is when the artist is being lazy and using it to hide an otherwise poorly created image. Personally, at this point in my learning curve, I try not to postwork, simply to push myself into creating the best possible image, from the outset.