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The "boring" product promos I do myself. There are other PAs that I share my stuff with on a regular basis, and oftentimes they'll do some images before I submit the product and offer to let me use those as artistic promos, to which I happily grabby hands at them :D I try and force myself to do one "artistic" promo myself for each product, but I tend to like their images better than my own and use them.
@Mattymanx You are special. Every content creator took time to build skills and get something into the marketplace. I find that special. I don't feel I am at a stage to even consider such a task. Every artist is special because they took something created and used their own touch to produce something unique with the product provided by the content creator. We all have a part to play and sometimes the parts change as time goes on.
@Zai Thank you for the suggestions. I'll poke around and see what that is all about. The more information I can get, the better adjusted my goals can be for the future.
@Astracadia I totally agree with you. I use the promo art to see what seed starts growing within my own imagination. Where can I take this? That's the question I like to pose when considering a purchase.
@DrNewcenstein You have some very good points. I have forgotten to ask some of those questions when purchasing only to be disappointed later. I assume the successful tester and/or promoo artist have check lists or references to consult while doing their tasks to ensure the best results. I'm just not at a stage to know what to include on those checklists.
@ChangelingChick LOL at the term 'grabby hands'. I can relate. I feel like I am all grabby hands for advice right now and everyone is being very generous.
I always cringe when I see people say that they want to see what a product looks like "Straight out of the box".......because that means nothing.
"Straight out of the box" means you drop it in the scene unposed without lights and hit render. Sorry that obviously will not sell the merits of a product....and obviously is not what you mean.
So where do you draw the line of "straight out of the box"...can you add clothes?...add a pose?...how about some lights?.....then what is the difference between that and throwing an environment in the scene?, adding a nice camera angle? etc?
What we do with our promo shots is to show what can be done with our character, to inspire people to make art with our character, to show it's full potential. Sure not everyone has the same skill sets when it comes to making art, but the promo is there to show what is ultimatly possible to be done with the product....or at least as best as "we" can do with it (because I have seen people make my products look even better than I can make for my promos)
Also, when we make characters, we design them to work in environments, we design them to work with good lighting. So simple out of the box renders are absolutely meaningless, because that is not how the products were designed to be used anyway.
I appreciate my testers, a great deal. They often find things I overlook; sometimes it's because I've been at this for so long, I forget at times that not everyone has been doing this for years on end and miss simple things. Othertimes, people have a deeper understanding of some aspects of Studio than I do (understandably, since it is an invloved program) and catch little things that I admittadly don't know about, or in the end forget to look at.
I do provide the final files to each one of my testers, and rotate them for each product so not one person is responsible for all of my testing- I don't want to burn anyone out and cause this to go from fun to work.
If the tester provides artistic renders that I feel will pass through Daz's QA standards, I ask if I can use them as artistic promos as well.
@Rawart I can understand that. It's like someone saying 'I want to see the rough in of the house'. A lot of what's behind the walls, so to speak, is not important. That there are rooms and certain utilites are. I like the one comment where it was stated that a combination of the images seems the idea of having are some basic, unaltered images of the products (one recently showed me the boots were not an individual piece but were rather part of the whole) and some artistic renders to show the item in action works. A balance is probably the best idea.
I'm not dissing any one idea. I'm learning a lot and am being able to articulate a bit better some pros and cons on either side of the fence (artist render vs not).
@DarwinsMishap As a writer, I have to have readers who are not familiar with the document read through it. At some point, I start reading through issues because I'm so intimate with the document. I expect it's soemtimes the same for content creators. A fresh set of eyes (during testing or during final promotion) can be very helpful.
I can guarentee that there are no PA's who will spend 60 hours in photoshop on a promo render. There is rarely any cause for doing anything more than adjusting the brightness or curves to ensure that the render will look fine in browsers...and thats it. The rest is what can easily be done in render.
:raising hand: Yeah, I spend that kind of time on my artsy promos. While a single one would never equate to 60 hours, the bulk of them can easily.
That said, I always include both. There is merit in both plain promos that show exactly what ur getting and artsy ones that show its potential.
My environement scene are always, what-you-see-is-what-you-get promo renders. I include the lightset, I include the camera angles. No post work. Be it poser (earlier sets when supported) or 3DL, or Reality (when it was all the rage) or Iray. Promos need to show what can be achieved with the product. Nothing builds a solid customer base than reliable product promos that show clearly what the product can deliver.
Ok..you are a freak then :P
But then it comes down again to "what do you call a plain render"? Which is what my initial comment is about.
LOL hey, its when I finally get to play with the thing I slaved for mos on. I just happen to be a postwork junkie, so I can spend hours on one image.
What I call a plain render is straight out of the box, no post (except maybe slight contrast/brightness/saturation adjustments) on a plainer bg. More or less the secondary promos on any of my sets.
My promos are always as rendered in Daz Studio. If I do anything in Photoshop, it is usually just "dehaze" and brightness adjustments. I don't even generally do composites in Photoshop, but render with lighting and environment directly in Studio (unless I am showing a lineup of props or outfit textures, in which case I will composite in Photoshop). I also make sure to include lighting and cameras in my environment products (the recent ones, anyway). So, a user can expect to load in the included scene file and either use one of the provided cameras or set up their own angles, then hit render and get a good result.
I do my own promos because I am a control freak and tend to re-render the same scene 5-10 times as I see something small that I want to change. And I do test render after test render after test render. My render folder can have upwards of 50 or more test renders in it.
Newb.
In my render folder for Sahel there are 740 images. She has amassed 150 scene files during production as well.
lol... not exactly a newb, having done this since 2002, but ok :D I don't save every test render
Just kidding! I'm sure you're just more efficient than I am. I basically render almost from the first moment of production, pretty much everything revolves around renders.
My postwork on promos consists of adding a little black border, mild brightness/contrast, and adding the "rendered in" watermark.
It remains true that, at least for characters, 'just out of the box' produces something that 1.) can't go up on Daz because of TOS and 2.) is usually also bald. I mean-- to get those 'clay renders' actually requires a bit of adjustment to what you get when you click 'load' (and clay renders strip away the skin which is what a lot of people buy anyhow). So I can see the puzzlement: people say they want 'load and render' but for characters at least, that can't actually be correct.