Llynara's Loony Bin (WIP Thread)

145791046

Comments

  • IceDragonArtIceDragonArt Posts: 12,548
    Llynara said:

    @DarwinsMishap Running out of things to buy in your store. Chop, chop! Need more victims to bobble!

    Just teasing. Hope you sales are going well! 

    That's what mine looks like lol  Except I have Alexander and don't have the character for Lee 7.

  • dracorndracorn Posts: 2,333
    Llynara said:

    Narcissus

    So I was looking through some renders and came across this guy I created a few months ago. Hello, handsome! The render needs a lot of work, but he turned out very well. He's a majorly tweaked out Gianni 7. I was trying to create Narcissus, the most beautiful man in the world, who fell in love with his reflection and broke Echo's heart, driving her to her death. The myth is at the center of a book I want to write. The theme is redemption. Is it possible to redeem a narcissist? What would it take? Probably something...supernatural wink

    Wow, great job on the face - yes, this is Narcissus, definately.  I don't like Gianni 7 as much as I like Gianni 6, but great morphing job!

    Incidentally, what hair is he wearing?

  • LlynaraLlynara Posts: 4,770
    edited January 2017

    Thanks, I forgot what a looker he was. I like the lighting here too. Almost like a painting, just needs some tweaking. The scenery around him needs to be totally redone, but worth it.

    The hair is SAV Ades hair (Rendo). It looks fantastic on men and women. And you can make it pretty bushy if you want. It's a lotta hair! LOL

    Post edited by Llynara on
  • dracorndracorn Posts: 2,333

    Really?  I guess it depends on how you style it.  I OWN that hair and didn't recognize it, LOL.

     

  • IceDragonArtIceDragonArt Posts: 12,548

    I love SAV's hair.  I have several although I don't have this one.  Off to wishlist...

  • dracorndracorn Posts: 2,333

    I own all of these hair by SAV:

    Zero Gravity Hair
    Ades Hair
    Alpha Moikana
    Alpha Scalp
    Dynasty Hair
    Greek Fantasy
    Lynn Hairsets
    Semiramis

  • LlynaraLlynara Posts: 4,770
    edited January 2017

    I'm slowly buying up SAV's store too. I was so sad to hear she passed away last year. So much talent. I always looked forward to seeing what new things she came up with. Didn't know her personally but loved her work. A couple of my characters were inspired by her art, particularly Shane, a major character who enters the series in Book 2: Playing with Fire (should be out in October.) He was inspired by SAV's Adonis model. I'll be dedicating that book to her.

    Here's are some old mockups I did for that book several months ago. These are some of my very first renders in Iray. I had no idea what I was doing! I've learned a lot since then and seriously need to redo them. 

    And I tried every hair I had, he still looks better in the hair SAV designed for him. So I ran with that in my series, and made him a bit Goth/Punk. He's an M4 but if I can port him to G3M, he'd look awesome in the Elvis suit! 

    playingwithfire.jpg
    741 x 741 - 58K
    Shane.jpg
    906 x 906 - 86K
    Post edited by Llynara on
  • Be careful- Lambert's publicity/managerial company had one of my 'fan arts' pulled down off of Redbubble; I used M4/V4 and a V4 skin and a lot of tweaking- but they still had it removed because it was too much like his brand, or it looked close enough that they sported copyright infringements. 

  • LlynaraLlynara Posts: 4,770

    I wondered if she based Adonis on Lambert. Surprised this model is still selling if it comes close to copyright infringement. Thanks for the heads up, will definitely keep that in mind!

  • LlynaraLlynara Posts: 4,770
    edited January 2017

    Woohoo, excited! Just ordered my "EVGA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti SC" card! It's only a 4GB card, but a vast improvement from 2GB and will get me through till next year, when I build a monster computer. I'll stick the old card in another computer, making it DAZ-friendly too, Maybe just barely, but nice to have options.

    And I don't know how I missed this lovely Lily Fae outfit, but it's one of Ryverthorn's, who is a featured vendor in the Giants sale. It works in Poser and DAZ: 

    Also picked up an adorable Ninja Sprite Bundle. Will try to stuff them in the Elvis suit too!

    Post edited by Llynara on
  • Moving to a 4GB (GTX 970) card made a huge difference for me when I did it.

  • LlynaraLlynara Posts: 4,770

    Thanks, Jack! I can't wait- it gets here Monday. So excited!

  • LlynaraLlynara Posts: 4,770
    edited January 2017

    A quick render of the Ninja Sprites. They are super cute! They render great in Iray and 3Delight. They're made for Poser, will try them in there tomorrow. All of their stuff is in the two RDNA sales, and EvilInnocence has free poses on his site for the female. They're not hard to pose or work with. Supposed to be easier in Poser with more custom dials for them.

    Iray with an UltraGenesis bg/hdri:

    3Delight with no background and just the headlamp (I was lazy. I'll get fancier tomorrow):

     

     

    Ninja Sprites3.png
    1000 x 800 - 621K
    Ninja Sprites3Del.png
    1000 x 800 - 456K
    Post edited by Llynara on
  • LinwellyLinwelly Posts: 5,780

    I have been looking at those ninja sprites for some time now. Do they require Star as a base figure or are they on their own?

    I reall like that Narcissus render you made, great character you made there.

  • LlynaraLlynara Posts: 4,770
    edited January 2017

    Thanks, Linwelly! I think I'm going to do a lot more with Narcissus. He's just too gorgeous to just leave like that, LOL. He's been sitting there in my runtime waiting for me to come back. And I just double checked- there's a lot of Liam mixed in there too. I can't remember what I did, but I love the results.

    The Ninja Sprites are their own base character, and Evil Innoncence has included CrossDresser licenses for them, so that you can fit other clothing on them. I'm going to play with that a bit. Looks like Cross Dresser will work with V4 and M4 clothes, but I don't see any supported figures more recent than that. Still, that's a lot of clothing options and gives me a chance to play with the CrossDresser program. I picked up a few of his other clothing pieces in the sale, and noice on his site that there are universal fits for almost everything he makes. I like that. (And if he is a she, I have no idea. I am always wrong guessing what gener the PAs are! Sorry!) 

    I don't know about fitting other hair to these sprites yet. I like what they come with, but I'll try out some others too. It's fun to play with something a little different and see what you can do with it. 

    Post edited by Llynara on
  • LlynaraLlynara Posts: 4,770
    edited January 2017

    I'm having a blast testing out The Philosopher's BOSS light set, which is coming out soon. I've posted some test images on his thread. All of them were created on my "barely good enough" computer with a 2 GB card and no postwork. I put Narcissus in that set and had some fun with him.

    Here's that test render with a little postwork to fix his hair and a slight glow. (Click for larger pic, then click again to zoom in. These are big.) 

    I also had fun running him through an oil painting action: 

    Post edited by Llynara on
  • Nice. 

    I like the I Can't Believe It's Not An Oil Painting - version... 

    See what I did there? :) 

  • LlynaraLlynara Posts: 4,770
    edited January 2017

    LOL. I loved those Fabio commercials when they were on. I would suddenly get the urge to buy butter. Lots and lots of butter...

    Post edited by Llynara on
  • @Fastbike1 was right, by the way - about light and Iray. Since I read his post, I've been experimenting more with light - and when I have a slow render, it seems that adding more light usually speeds things up, frequently *significantly*. 

    Everything I had read prior to Larry's advice suggested that adding more lights made a render take exponentially longer, and my early experience with lights confirmed this... 

    I had gotten into the habit of using a single HDRI. The first few tutorials that I did from DAZ used Distant Lights - but eventually those seemed to be more trouble than they were worth. They I read about 3 spotlight photometric setups, and I never really had a lot of luck with those. 

    Lately, I've been relying on Second Circle's free light package a lot. The caveat seems to be that combining photometric spots with an HDRI source, especially with Draw Dome set to on, doesn't seem to be a good idea. 

    Your mileage may vary, I am obviously a novice with lighting - but I just wanted to circle back to say that I stand corrected - lighting doesn't seem to slow down renders in and of itself, and may speed them up. 

     

  • LlynaraLlynara Posts: 4,770

    Good insights, Donovan! Thanks for sharing them. I'm new too and still learning, though I've had experience in real world lighting-  theater, broadcasting and photography. To me, 3Delight seems most like theater and broadcast lighting, and is probably why I took to it so easily. Iray has been a steeper learning curve for me, and I'm finding I have to think the way I do about photography (which I'm an amateur at but have done for years, still lots of happy accidents there!)

    I'm really enjoying the BOSS light set. It's easy to use and very flexible. I feel like I finally have some of my theater lights back!

  • LlynaraLlynara Posts: 4,770
    edited January 2017

    Fun with new toys! Test render, still tweaking lights. This is the new sci fi set Echo Lima Halls, Neive in Tau Ceti Overseer for G3F, and the soon to be released BOSS light set. Trying to get the emissives in the sci fi set lowered to match the BOSS dramatic presets. The emissives in the Tau Ceti armor are very easy to use. 

    Note: Even though I just upgraded to a 4GB card, the textures in this scene loaded at 10 GB (according to verbose mode, I'm told they get crunched down.) I think it's mostly the armor. I ran the reduced textures script on it once, and then it fit onto the card and my computer was much happier.

    Post edited by Llynara on
  • LlynaraLlynara Posts: 4,770
    edited January 2017

    I'm really happy with how this is coming along. I decided to switch out Neive for Roxanne. I love Neive, but her glitter makeup does crazy things under all those lights. Like really crazy things! I tried her barefaced and decided to go with different features for this one. I figured out the balance in the lighting better and made a few tweaks. The BOSS set is so easy to use, and fun to play with. Combining it was emissives was fun. I haven't done any postwork except add my siggy. 

    To do: 

    • DOF so Roxanne stands out from background a bit more
    • Tweak the render settings a bit so it's not so grainy close up. Going to try to incorporate some of Darwin's settings (especially the high sharperning and F-stop settings from his walkthrough) and see what happens.
    • Could do some fog or something spooky in postwork, not sure. She looking towards the source of the bluish light to the lefthand side of the screen, concerned with a noise or something she's sensed over there.
    • The reflections in her eyes would go well with tears, but I think she's too tough for that.

    Click pic for the full image, it's pretty big.

     

    Red Alert.jpg
    1500 x 1414 - 2M
    Post edited by Llynara on
  • LlynaraLlynara Posts: 4,770
    edited January 2017

    Final for now. Someone said the last one was too dark. It looks okay on my computer, so I don't know if it's my monitor or not. I added DOF, upped ISO and details, turned samples way up and shutter speed down to let in more light, though not a huge difference here. The extra sharpening looks good, but took 10 hours to render. I think I'm calling it done for now. Click on the image for a bigger view.

    Postwork:

    • Brightness/contrast layer added to up the brightness a little more
    • Cropped for composition
    • Siggy added

    Red Alert2.jpg
    1347 x 998 - 985K
    Post edited by Llynara on
  • LlynaraLlynara Posts: 4,770
    edited January 2017

    Quick test render of Redz' Shadowborne character from Rendo. OMG, it is hot in here or what? Always had a thing for the white haired fantasy guys, and this one is amazing. So far I've managed to pull ideas for an entirely new fantasy series out of his promo pics. He makes a lovely muse. 

    I used the BOSS lights (dramatic front preset) which I'm coming to absolutely love. They should be out very soon. Can't wait to see what everyone does with them. They are quite versatile. 

    I'm also testing Serum's 220 camera presets for DAZ. He's got some great freebies at his site and also has a store with some very nice offerings. I'll be exploring these presets a lot next month during the Food Porn challenge. I got into food photography a couple of years ago and loved it. Should be interesting to translate that into food renders. Right now, elves are more tempting...Click for full drow goodness! (I stopped it at 90%, so it's a bit grainy. Need to tweak the hair.)

     

    shadowborne1.jpg
    2400 x 1800 - 3M
    Post edited by Llynara on
  • LlynaraLlynara Posts: 4,770
    edited January 2017

    In love with this character. Just gorgeous! Not sure where the red on the nose is coming from, need to figure that out. I used the extreme closeup BOSS lights and camera setup, didn't change any colors, but he's still crouching down. I'll have to check to see what's causing it. Probably user error- it's the same color as the sci fi lights I was using. Maybe I accidentally changed something. Who knows.

    Otherwise, very happy with this render. I could look at it all day...Click for bigger pic. Sigh.

    BOSS Shadowborne2.jpg
    1500 x 1234 - 1M
    Post edited by Llynara on
  • LlynaraLlynara Posts: 4,770
    edited January 2017

    The Philosopher helped me figure out the red nose issue. It's not the lights, it's in the SSS settings of the drow's skin. I turned down the "Transmitted Measurement Distance" under the Volume from 2.0 to .25. That fixed it. Made some interesting mistakes along the way, including turning my drow a different color at one point! (Hint: Do NOT mess with the transmitted color!) At least I got there in the end. Will post the render when it's done. 

    Shadowborn red skin issue3.JPG
    356 x 413 - 36K
    Post edited by Llynara on
  • LlynaraLlynara Posts: 4,770

    Ah, much better! Meet Tyrren (TEER-ehn), main character of Eternia, my dark fantasy and comedy series about the quest for immortality and its terrible price. Love the BOSS set, makes it very easy to do extreme closeups for characters. Click for a full pic, then click again to zoom in. Original render is pretty big.

  • In the first picture, he looks like a dark elf that has been drinking too much.

    You sobered him up nicely for the second render. :)

  • On the space one, I like the atmosphere in the second render best. I don't know why, but I always like darkly exposed images with a lot of reflected light from emissives doing most of the lighting in a render.

  • LlynaraLlynara Posts: 4,770

    Thanks, Donovan! Yeah, that magically red drinking nose had to be dealt with! I'm loving how he turned out. I like the low light sci-fi renders too. Space is dark and if we've got technology in space, it makes sense that the light should come mainly from the equipment. That was a fun one! 

    Now I need to get back to faires and Elvis...so many renders, so little time!

Sign In or Register to comment.