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Here's some renders using Google's Nik Collection filters. FREE DOWNLOAD! Free is good.
https://www.google.com/nikcollection/
Using the same NGC 5189 background, I added Dominator with Reflective Radiance for 3DL. I changed all the orange lights to emissive shader and retained the maps. It wasn't what I was expecting, but I'm still getting used to it. Could also be the fact that the Dominator is so large that the scale of the render nixed the effects. I compensated with a heck of a lot of little point lights, plus some accent lights, 'cause they look cool. I added an engine glow in Photoshop, plus additional touches to blur all the glowy lights.
So here's the render before the Nik filters:
And here is the render after the Nik filters. I really like the effect there... but didn't save the recipe or write down which filters I used (noob mistake). It calmed down the brightness of the nebula and gave richer tones to Dominator, adding depth.
I'm having WAY too much fun with the Nix filters! They add a dimension that I have been missing. Here's another one:
I revisited my portrait of Valaine Vorrinhaardt, the elvish vampire. Here is the render without filters.
Here is the revised render with the filters:
My favorite NIK filters that I use consistently seem to be these from the ColorFX:
Classical Soft Focus
Contrast Color Range - love this one!
Detail Extractor - I love using this one with the Detail up to about 50%, Contrast at about 68%, and the Saturation almost all the way off or almost all the way up depending on the look I want, set mode to Overlay, and blend that into the original at about 50% Opacity. You have to play with it a little bit as each picture is a little different. I love how it brings out the details and makes things pop.
Once in awhile, I'll use the High Key if I find things are too dark and I need to add some additional like that just brightening won't do effectively. Depending on the look I want I'll use all three in layers at varying levels of Opacity trying to find the right balance. It's fun just seeing what you can do with those things. It can be a little addictive. I'm still not sure that I'm using them to their best advantage, but I keep trying. :) I like exploring all of the other filters, too, though.
One of my favorite things to play with as well. I use the Nik filters on at least one version of any render I put into photoshop. I usually end up with 5 or 6 by the time I'm done because I can't make up mind which I like best lol.
Ice Dragon Art - You mentioned the special effects in your comment on my Gallery about "Cast Down." I used Ron's Impressions - the PSD files for the magical effects.
https://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/240316
I have those, but I don't think I ever would have thought to use them like that. Very interesting.
Ah interesting, I have those but haven't had a chance to explore them. They look great!
I tend to use cross processing & darken/lighten center the most.... but sometimes I might have 4 or 5 in a stack on a single image. I also use the strength or opacity sliders a lot.
I just took a peek at your gallery at DeviantArt - wow. Some really nice stuff.
Kaori
I loved the beautiful skin of Warrior Maiden Okami and wanted to convert it to G2F. I used V4 Skins Batch Converter to G2F to convert the materials. Here's the straight conversion of the Poser materials - doesn't look too good.
I used Omnifreaker's Human Surface Base, and then had to play with the subsurfaces to get rid of the weird reflections, dark eyes and black nostrils. I ran into problems with strange distortions and had to exit D/S and reopen it. (Just so you know, I had brought in Mei Lin to compare the settings - that's her shoulder and arm going through Kaori).
Finally I had to scrap it and start from scratch and it finally started to work.
Next the lighting. I wasn't happy with the results from AoA's Advanced Lighting - it didn't have the character I wanted.
I added UE2 - and more weird distortions.
I finally added Marshian's Reflective Radiance for 3Delight, portrait preset - and wow, that turned out great. My new favorite portrait lighting.
FINAL:
That's an interesting character. You did a great job on that final image. I can see some potential in the one that has a starker b&w feel to it. I can see why you would go with it if the last one was the look you were trying to achieve, though. It's a nice image. I like the pose and how you showed off the unusual skin.
Beautiful character and final render, Dracorn! Very well done!
I have noticed the same problems with batch converted V4 Poser Materials and have seen this plastic skin multiple times. For some reason the Specular Maps are not applied and the parameters Specular Strength and Glossines are at 100%. First things for me are changing the Lighting Model to Skin, set Glossines to Zero and loading the Specular Maps. Now I can play with the Specular Strength until I like the outcome. Afterwards I will raise the Glossiness step by step.
If you load the Uberenvironment Base, by default the UE2 Parameter Shading Rate is set to 32 and the Parameter Occlusion Samples at 8. You can improve your render result by lowering the UE2 Shading Rate and raise the Occlusion Samples. Be careful both parameters have dramatic impact on your render time. It is depending on your PC and scene setup, but as a reference point for you, I use Shading Rate 2 and Occlusion Samples 48 for the test renders. For Final Quality, I tend to keep the UE2 Shading Rate at the same value as the Shading Rate in the Advanced Render Settings. Again for final render reference, my PC can handle Shading Rate values at 0.5 and Occlusion Samples at 128 very well.
What a great tip MN I am going to try it out myself next UE2 render I do.
I do see what you mean by the skin going wonky on ya I have had that happen to me as well when I was trying to change skin tones around from one charactor to another.
The last one though WOW turned out amazingly!!!
Thanks, MN!
I noticed myself that some of the maps were missing and I had to manually load them. Thanks for the tip on render settings - that's going in my notes.
There are still some dark shadows on the flower in her hair, as well as on the inside of her mouth and her eyes. I couldn't figure it out when I was looking at the surfaces - unless maybe it's the specular maps as you said. I'll have to go back and check those out again. Usually when I apply AoA's Subsurface Shader Base I get good results, but in this case it went really weird (Pic #2). I still couldn't get the highlight on her lips to look the way I wanted. I did change the lighting model to skin.
[Edit] That's a great tutorial on UE2, by the way. I'm going to have to go through it.
I agree that the last one is quite lovely! And I learned something new.
Not sure what happend in Pic#2, but maybe you have to check the Group IDs in AOAs Subsurface Shader. If surfaces share the same Group ID 3Delight calculates those as being part of one object. This may cause some unwanted color bleeding effects. Please see this post and the image attached by Age of Armour: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/331295/#Comment_331295
At least this could be an explanation for the flower in her hair. Because the dark hair color is bleeding into the white flower?
Thanks MN-150374. I will have to fiddle with it some more. You had to go and show me that thread... and I had to go skim through the whole thing. Took some notes and screenshots along the way. There were defiantely questions answered concerning problems I was having.
Custom Character - White Elf
I've been trying to create a character with white skin - a white elf, by starting from scratch with a merchant resource. I'm using G2M (not a fan of G3M). My first attempt was with Michael 6 skin resource. The problem with that was all the black body hair. While I was able to remove the stubble from the face, the leg hair became too much to deal with. So I found another merchant resource on Rendo where the actor had shaved. That was easier.
So after removing the eyebrows and fading the freckles in Photoshop, I tried my hand at desatruation. Had to fiddle with that, because I didn't want gray skin. I also wanted a little lip color, with more flesh color on towards the inside of the lips, where the melanin is less strong. My thoughts here is that he has white melanin rather than a lack thereof.
I manually loaded the new face texture onto Michael 6 and brought in some light. Woa! Glowing white wash out! This first view is after fiddling with both the lights and some settings, and I hadn't done the lips yet. This is harder than I thought. I can really appreciate the work that PA's do to get this stuff looking good.
I applied my shaping preset and started fiddling with the eyes. The skin is still too washed out.
Oops, accidentally applied Project Eyeris tear setting while the face was selected. Well, as funny as that looks, it was also less washed out, so it was a happy accident. Kind of a neat effect, though. Now I had to fiddle with Specular and Specular 2 (3Delight) settings.
Except when I hit the undo button a couple of times and the eyes turned really spooky.
So I went back and applied an SSS eye texture to get the sclera, then manually changed out the iris texture. I'm using an eye from Fantaseyes for V4 which I used the batch converter V4 to G2. Some of those old V4 eye textures are stunning. It had sparkly pupils so I changed the pupil color to black. So this is my last version before heading off to bed. While it does seem pink, I wanted a little flesh tone hue. I tried a blue texture, and he looked undead. His blood is red underneath the skin, after all.
Here's a comparison between the original human texture and the new white face (stopped at 90% because I'm impatient). The ear shape is from DD Resource: Ears for G1, a combination of 3 different morphs which I liked so much I converted using GenX2.
That's coming along quite nicely!
Revision 2:
I went back to Photoshop and tried another approach, as my last attempt was too dark. I reduced saturation to zero, and then increased the lightness. I also increased the opacity on the pink lip layer to add more color to the lips.
Next, I rendered, adjusted the surfaces and re-rendered. Again, I can really appreciate the work the PA's put into this. Of course, they know what they are doing, and I'm fumbling in the dark.
My greatest difficulty was trying to get the oily sheen off the face, that would wash out all the detail with overexposed highlights. For this solution I dug into my AoA Intro to Character Surfaces tutorial, as I am using the AoA subsurface shader. To my delight, I found the settings. Had to tweak them to prevent an obvious line between the face and lip surfaces.
Here's my latest on the left, with the last one from yesteray (right).
It looks like an interesting character. Trying to figure out how to do skin texturing is tough. And, I think you are starting out with a kind of really tough skin tone for a first effort. However, you seem to be doing pretty well with it so far. It looks good.
Yeah. Leave it to me to start with the hardest thing first.
But as this is the main character of my book, I need to make him look good. I had tried several times before, and just couldn't find the right look for what I wanted.
He's not an albino, so Prince Albane wouldn't work. Some other V4/G1 textures like Anwyn are for women and looked gray in low lighting. I used SY's Pale One for G1 for a while, but the subsurfaces were designed more for a vampire and I couldn't get it to look right. Also I was having the hardest time with getting makeup for women to look good on such a pale skin, which is why I wanted to start from scratch with my own skin.
Now that I have the face looking pretty good, I need to go to the rest of the body. I still have to add eyebrows. There are no eyebrows out there with the extra high arch, so I will have to warp one in Photoshop. I also want white and black eyebrows, and maybe a little darkening around the eyes, but I don't want it to look like he's wearing eyeliner. Nor do I want the dark on the inside of the eyelid - not sure if that's possible, because I think that is mapped from the skin. The merchant resource skin I am using has the eyes slightly open, so we'll see how it looks.
Oh, and by the way, this character has 6 fingers - so I'm going to learn to do a geograph, and hoping I can make a smooth texture transition on his hand.
Now I'm working on the torso/head/ears.
As I had done before, after I had created my pale skin version, I took a copy of the original skin and isolated bodyparts that I wanted to add some more flesh tone to. That would be to the inside of the ears, the nipples and the groin.
Here's a render before I added the subsurface settings to the torso, so it looks too light. Notice how the nipples are huge and round - men who work out have oval nipples, placed low on the chest.
In order to do this, I had resize the nipples, but transform/scale in Photoshop moved their position (at least the way I did it, and if somebody knows a way to shrink and reshape something without moving it, I will be glad to hear how). So I had to isolate each nipple to its own layer. I but a temporary black backgound underneath, and the original nipple only textures but made them green so I could tell the difference. I'm not going to post the picture here, because Daz may not differentiate between men's and women's nipples and yank my pic. Suffice it to say that I scaled each nipple smaller and made them oval. I also brought them down a little bit. I had to erase the nipples on the torso texture and apply my revised ones after I added the pale coloring.
After Adjustment. Oval nipples, reduced in size and lowered. I couldn't lower them too much without pulling the nipple texture out of the material zone. I am considering finding a breast morph for nipple height for G2F and using GenX2 to convert it.
... Looks like one serious case of T-shirt tan, doesn't it?
Blooper. Ever make a mistake that is absolutely hilarious? When I clicked on the texture in the Surfaces tab, I accidentally clicked on the face texture, and well, this is what happened.
Here's what I'm working on right now -
I used Reflective Radiance in 3DL to achive this Iray-like lighting - I'm really happy with the results. I rendered the figure only.
Into Photoshop for the background and magic effects. I'm playing around with bringing in some photography texture backgrounds from Design Cuts and overlaying them over my background to get the nice effect.
This is sized for my Facebook fan page. I still need to work on lettering to fill in the space on the left side.
That looks really good! Great work with the magical effects.
Your alien is coming along quite nicely! Even with the absolutely hysterical blooper lol!
I love what you did with that last render looks fantastic!
Thanks! Ron's brushes ROCK!