Novica & Forum Members Tips & Product Reviews Pt 8
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I have used that and really like it. In fact I think those are my preferred water shaders. I used in the "get well soon image in my gallery." The full water preset shaders are my particular favorite. So easy to use.
Here's the Iray Glassworx as portrait backgrounds, tweaking metallic, glossy, and bump settings. Use a darker color for the Diffuse, and put lighter colors in your glossy settings. By adding metallicity, your background will change depending on the camera angle. It's like embossed tin, really neat!
This is MRL Isabis with First Date Outfit for Genesis 3 Female(s) and Krayon Hair for Genesis 3 Female(s). This also uses the Pro-Studio HDR Lighting System and the original Iray Ghost Light Kit.
You can see how the metallicity changes the look of the background just by changing the camera angle. Rather neat!
So, it's more frosty and swirls. I suppose the colors could be set differently and still have the patterns.
That makes some very cool renders. The floral glass has come great posibilities.
The water looks great. I'll have to add this to the tool kit.
Recently got "The Forest" and the water don't seem to render with Iray. Looks just like a path in the forest and not a stream. Maybe I need to do something different. But, I like the forest and looking for water that will meet my needs..
One thing I can recommend with regard to water. Is buying the Bridge of Chierocroates https://www.daz3d.com/bridge-of-cheirocrates
It is like 80 cents if you are a PC member. It has a really good water plane in there. I use that one for most of my water renders. You can just add that to a scene to flood your image with water. Put a seond flat plane under it to get darker water. Then use one of SF design's water full presets on the Chierocrates water.
Nudist island on rendo has a dumb name but nice water too and looks good out of the box.
which one is SF Design's water presets?
The shaders are here: https://www.daz3d.com/easy-liquid-custom-liquid-shader-and-presets-for-iray
I'm not keen on rigged water either and usually just use Ron's brushes. For flat expanses of water, you can get some really good looking stuff quite quickly using Squirlz Water Reflections if you've no problem with postwork, and it's dead easy to use. This is a freeware program for creating animations featuring moving water from still images. Because of this, it will only save an image sequence rather than a single image, but before I run it each time I just reduce the number of frames to two (the minimum allowed) and pick the best one. There's a ton of stuff you can do - choose the size of the ripples, the water colour, transparency and more. You can also make circular ripples (for rain hitting puddles or pavements etc) as well as add the falling rain or snow that creates them. Even better from the point of view of me and my steam-driven computer, once you hit the button, the effect appears within a minute, two at most for larger images. This is a big improvement on the 4-8 hours that it's not unusual for me to see with a render involving a lot of water!
It's not going to be suitable for every image (what is?), but it's well worth having in your toolbox, especially since it's free. I don't expect the program is news to many people as it's at least fifteen years since I first encountered it (and I don't think it's changed in all that time!), but there's a Youtube video here telling more for those who have never heard of it.
The first image below shows my original render, featuring just terradome terrain, some trees and some rocks. No water. I used a plane to help me postion the trees and rocks roughly along where I wanted my waterline to be, and then deleted it. I did take it into Photoshop afterwards to quickly add some reeds along the waterline, but that was only because I couldn't be bothered to add them in Daz Studio. Still no water. Then I took it into Squirlz and five minutes later had me a lake, as shown in the second image.
Thanks Serene. I was half asleep when I read your post, so totally blanked on what SF Designs was. :) :)
No problem. I've bought a lot of water products but I think those are the best water shaders.
This looks very interesting thanks for sharing!
That looks like an awesome program! I'd never heard of it. Thanks for telling us.
Here's the Iray Glassworx again, I posted this in the Commons but will put it here too. The floor materials are irregular looking when you use the glass shader, which I really like (it's not render noise.) The product also did the back wall, default load. You can tile to get it to have smaller squares.
We talked about the Digital Touch characters looking a lot alike, so to be fair, I wanted to take a very close look and then pick ONE to try. For me, it was a toss up between DT-Cindy For Genesis 3 Female(s) (shown below) or Eve based on the thicker, slightly more natural eyebrows. Cindy has poofier lips, but they can be slimmed easily with the morph sliders. Yolanda has nice lips and more natural eyebrows (where they start, more individual lines) and I would simply turn the nose tip and nostrils down (I don't like noses where the nostrils are really prominent.)
Shopped for four years, and I will admit it's my first Digital Touch female, I think it backfired on the vendor to have all the women in dark hair to look alike. They look TOO much alike IMO. This is Cindy and I shrank the bottom lip 14%, and I like her! Her materials aren't ultra ruddy, they are easily lit. It's Sapphire Hair and the chaise is included in the Bella Donna Poses, Chaise, and Shaders The pose is from that product also. It's really nice, one click and she's on the chaise and in position. (Both the pose and the chaise load World Center.)
I'll do a closeup of Cindy, then I'm headed to the barn (It's 6:15 and a lovely day, nice and cool at this time of day.)
Whoa- in case you didn't bother looking at the thumbnails, this "normal" character has a sci-fi makeup too, in case you're interested. On sale.
Here's DT-Cindy for Genesis 3 Female(s) with the lips thinned and the bottom lip widened a bit, and less volume/heart shape. She has cute dimples!
Here's DT-Cindy for Genesis 3 Female(s) with the lips at default, and wearing Elven Princess for Genesis 3 Females and Galene Hair for Genesis 3 Females. That works great with the head jewels/crown, no adjustment needed. Again, it's Iray Glassworx for the background and floor on the last two.
Does anyone know if there is a way to manually backup a copy of DIM? I'd like to backup copies of DAZ STudio, and DIM, so in the event of an emergency I can reinstall. Alla dvice is appreciated.
does anyone know if there is a way to manually backup a copy of DIM? I'd like to backup copies of DAZ STudio, and DIM, so in the event of an emergency I can reinstall. Alla dvice is appreciated.
The files are zip files when downloading from DAZ you can back those up to a folder. and then save to DVD etc. Is that what you're looking to do?
I also backup my CMS database. I've connected to the database via PostGreSQL(seperate from DAZ) tool and do reports with excel and an other tool. I've been writing about content management for DAZ. Depending on OS you can create small script to copy to an external drive automatically and adjust the times you want things copied. Then set up as a scheduld task to run.
Is it just me, or do the promo renders for these "people and plant" "billboard" items look a little like old school poser renders for the price that is being asked?
I mean, from what I can make out of it, it is kind of like a blob that you would use for something like a candle flame that always points at the camera in Carrara - basically a flat image placed on a plane and the plane always points at your cameras.
I just noticed you need the plugin first, too? That is confusing:
https://www.daz3d.com/billboard-nodes-plugin
https://www.daz3d.com/insta-crowd-billboards
https://www.daz3d.com/nature-billboards-for-daz-studio
So, are the plants and people billboard backages for ~$20ish made with the billboard plugin that costs $11, but the billboard plugin isn't necessary with the packages? It seems like the packages claim that the content will point at the camera without requiring the user to manually set the planes to point at camera.
If you buy the billboard plugin, can you make, package and resell your own billboards? Is content created with it a merchant resource?
I'm really confused about these products.
That's an interesting thought. I remember last year when for several days, the site was glitching and folks couldn't get to their products, and going through render withdrawal LOL. I have all my content downloaded and in an external, so I just cruised along as normal. It's always a good idea to have what you own on your computer and not rely on anyone to keep it for you. I do have a laptop and like the idea of it being portable too. As long as my laptop is charged, I wouldn't even need electricity to use my studio. Awesome to think about being in the middle of the desert, rendering away.... (in an air conditioned hotel, that is....)
But yeah, being able to use DIM anywhere, in conjunction with the studio (aka I am seriously out of the desert and thinking hurricanes now) would be a great standby. There was talk about doing away with DIM last year, haven't heard anything since, but it would be nice to have that program. As for the studio, only the current version is available. I have the one from four years ago, on. Don't know why though. For Iray, 4.9 is the solid leader IMO due to tweaking the orange results we got in 4.8
Headed to the barn shortly. @donovancolbert Wish I could help, but I'm not sure how those work.
So I did the Genesis 3 dudes (just the basics) and feel like doing some gals, but with hair and clothes. I'm starting with one of my favorites, GypsyAngel. If you haven't participated in my Render the Vendor, it's rather fun. We all concentrate on one artist and do their products. I'm expanding this a bit to do Gypsy Angel, and since I just did Cindy, if anyone has Digital Art, let's do that too. (I'm picking up another one today, Eve.)
If you think I'm kidding about her being one of my favs, I have forty out of forty three of her products! Somehow, I missed the awescome Brahm, for heaven's sake! So if you can render some and pitch in, let's have some fun. Hopefully her store will come up on sale during this Summer Sale. Tell me what you're doing and I'll fill in the rest first (and see what I've already got rendered.) It doesn't have to be a new render, if you've got some already done, love to see them again.
I'll be at the barn most of the day as due to staff emergencies, the owner and I are doing barn duty (translation Super Dooper Pooper Scooper) so just think, it could be a lot worse- you could be with ME instead of rendering at your computer LOL!) And it's already sticky-humid-hot (over 80 degrees at 8am)
I'll check back later today, I'll see if I can start one rendering.
I'm so non-technical it isn't funny. Every time I try to remember how to back up my stuff, I have to research it all over again.
DAZ Dim can be downloaded here: https://www.daz3d.com/install-manager-info ;
I would also back up copies of your 4.9 installer, downloads, and custom categories, in addition to CMS
I've been backing my whole DAZ library to DropBox. If you have DropBox Plus and add in the Extended Version, it ends up being $140 per year and keeps a year's worth of versions and deleted files. It ate a chunk of bandwidth and took a few days to sync to the cloud the first time. The same would be true if I ever needed to download the whole thing at once. I needed the Plus version of DropBox for another reason and decided to add my DAZ library to it. Here's hoping that's enough. I was running backups on My Library previously, but that eats a lot of space.
My usual method of backing up studio is to keep studio itself and all its content on a single drive and backing the whole enchilada up a few times a year. unfortunatley the e drive is now close to full so I had to create a second runtime with new content so that's a second drive to back up.
In addition to doing that I back up the dim downloads folder monthly, all content bought at other stores, cms and user data. I also backup the Photoshop directory which contains my brushes and plugins and the installers for the additional content I bought elsewhere. In addition to that I also backup the file where I store my custom designed characters and older scenes that I have archived. I have 3 large hard drives I use to do all that.
Serene Night, I also backup Photoshop brushes and plugins
(and my windows/fonts directory)
I keep backups of the install files for the last few versions of Studio and Poser; I also have a drive with all downloaded content zips and exes over the years (I don't use DIM, but download/install by hand), which itself is backed up to an external drive. Because I'm paranoid I also backup my runtime drive to yet another external drive.
I love GypsyAngels stuff! I have 17 of her items and most of the others wishlisted. Her men are just seriously handsome! Her character Eilish is one of my favorite G3Females. The dark elf version is just beautiful. I will be gone most of the day today (going to the Columbus zoo, which is a day trip as its almost 2 hours away) but I will track down some renders of what i have and do a couple more this weekend. Her characters are very well done!
Here's an older render of GypsyAngel's Elijah for G3M (Rendo, RPublishing.)
I've got quite a few of her characters. I'll try to get some more renders up.
Not sure how many of Gypsyangel's chars I have, but I don't have nearly enough lol , working on buying her whole catalog ..... I do have Brahm and Maret.
Brahm for Genesis 3 male first :
And Maret for Victoria 7 :
Edit to add links to the storepages
Oh wow, those are gorgeous renders! I have Brahm and really need to pick up Maret. What outfit is she wearing here? She looks stunning!