July 2018 - Daz 3D New User Challenge - Portrait Rendering

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Comments

  • dracorndracorn Posts: 2,333

    Version G here. Just increased the lumen of the pointlight by 50% if I remember right.

    It's just beginning to get there.  I found I need to set the lumens to 30,000 to 50,000 or so, maybe even hair. So make a HUGE change.  You can always back off if it's too light.

  • dracorndracorn Posts: 2,333
    Linwelly said:

    Thanks for the feedback. Here's the B version. I scaled down the rose and changed the lighting completely. I changed the hand pose too and added nail texture. Didn't mess with the camera and expression. Hope this version has some improvement.

    You did a beautiful work with this render, The rose fits better in size and the lights work really nice with this. I like as well the correspondance between the red of the rose and the lips/nails.

    Now for some critique. Your character and everything connected to it is on the cool colour palette, the only thing that is on the warm colour palette is the background. I have the feeling that this woudl be better with some green tone on the cold palette as well. If you pick up the colour of the green rose parts probably.

    It's not generally a bad thig to mix cold and warm colour but it need to be a consious decision to make it work.

    For everybody interested about colour theory this might be a good read:  https://cios233.community.uaf.edu/design-theory-lectures/color-theory/

    I've got bigger roses than that in my garden!  laugh

  • dracorndracorn Posts: 2,333

    I abandoned the other image after messing with it for awhile. I think the hair and expression were messing with me the most. Tried different hair but could not seem to get anything to look right in the image. I decided instead to do a Hi-key image:

    Hi Key July 2018

    Wow I really like this.  The oversaturated light and hint of bloom is striking.  There isn't much I can offer to make this better - other than make her expression a little more assymetric to add realism.  I do see some assymetry in the face: the tilt of the nose, the left eye being slightly more shut than the right and the right ear protruding a little more.  

    So Google some images of women looking straight at you and use that as your guide.

  • dracorn said:

    Version G here. Just increased the lumen of the pointlight by 50% if I remember right.

    It's just beginning to get there.  I found I need to set the lumens to 30,000 to 50,000 or so, maybe even hair. So make a HUGE change.  You can always back off if it's too light.

    Thanks for the advice Dracorn. I bumped the lumen by 4 times the amount for version H. Besides that I also changed the settings on the lens of his HUD (What was thaught to be an eye patch.) and tweeked the color of his scar some.

    july2018h.png
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  • FishtalesFishtales Posts: 6,039
    dracorn said:

    Version G here. Just increased the lumen of the pointlight by 50% if I remember right.

    It's just beginning to get there.  I found I need to set the lumens to 30,000 to 50,000 or so, maybe even hair. So make a HUGE change.  You can always back off if it's too light.

    Thanks for the advice Dracorn. I bumped the lumen by 4 times the amount for version H. Besides that I also changed the settings on the lens of his HUD (What was thaught to be an eye patch.) and tweeked the color of his scar some.

    The light is focusing attention on the dog tags rather than his fsce. Select the spotlight in the viewport so you are viewing through it and tilt it up a little so that his face becomes the focus of attention.

  • The hair is so much better this way.  Thank you, Dracorn, for your advice and your time. Your render was a great inspiration.  

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  • Fishtales said:
    dracorn said:

    Version G here. Just increased the lumen of the pointlight by 50% if I remember right.

    It's just beginning to get there.  I found I need to set the lumens to 30,000 to 50,000 or so, maybe even hair. So make a HUGE change.  You can always back off if it's too light.

    Thanks for the advice Dracorn. I bumped the lumen by 4 times the amount for version H. Besides that I also changed the settings on the lens of his HUD (What was thaught to be an eye patch.) and tweeked the color of his scar some.

    The light is focusing attention on the dog tags rather than his fsce. Select the spotlight in the viewport so you are viewing through it and tilt it up a little so that his face becomes the focus of attention.

    I'll have to take a look at things after I get home from work. But I am using a point light, not a spotlight.
  • SaphirewildSaphirewild Posts: 6,648
    edited July 2018
    dracorn said:
    Linwelly said:
    barbult said:

    Here is my second try at the portrait because Sam seemed to be lonely all by herself,so I added Margo to the mix.

     

    You have an interesting pose on Sam, and did a good job with getting her eyes to look at the camera. I much prefer your version where she is alone. The second character is drawing the eye away from Sam. Since there are no shadows in the second image, the girls appear to be floating.  The closer crop of the first image avoids that issue, too. I do like the more toned down background of the second image, though. 

    I have taken your advice and removed the second character @Barbult

    dracorn said:
    barbult said:

    Here is my second try at the portrait because Sam seemed to be lonely all by herself,so I added Margo to the mix.

     

    You have an interesting pose on Sam, and did a good job with getting her eyes to look at the camera. I much prefer your version where she is alone. The second character is drawing the eye away from Sam. Since there are no shadows in the second image, the girls appear to be floating.  The closer crop of the first image avoids that issue, too. I do like the more toned down background of the second image, though. 

    Hey, Saph:

    I agree with Barbult on this one.  Your second figure detracts from Sam.  The closer crop is better for portraits.  I had two versions of a portrait in my gallery, one full and one of just a face.  I received more likes on the face.  Closer is just more personal for a portrait.  Links to my two renders so you can see what I mean:

    https://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/606441
    https://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/606446

    The second background looks better than the hot pink one, which is so bright and busy it demands its own attention.  By the way, in the future when you want to do a full portrait, turn your background upside down so that it is darker at the bottom.  This gives the illusion that there is ground beneath her feet.

    Lastly, add a spotlight to shine on her right side, and turn down your environment lighting.  This will bring up some shadows and add interest to her face, as the lighting is a little flat.  Let's see how it looks after that.  If necessary, you can add a linear pointlight to bring up the lighting on her face (see my post to Shinji Ikari 9th above).

    I tried to follow your advice @dracorn but not sure how to turn down the environment lighting. I am using UE2 for 3Delight. Could you help me out with that?

    Here is my 3rd attempt

     

    This background works better for her and I think it was a good decision to give her space alone for this one. Now you make me put on my thinking cap to remember UE2 light settings (computer is busy atm so I try from memory, but I will look it up once the render is done)

    So you go to your lights tab and select the UE light. the slider on top should be light intensity, I suggest you try with 30% and while you're on that tab have a look at the shadow intensity. If its not on full I would suggest to go up to at least 80%. There are some other sliders there which will make your redner more crisp, but I really need to look their names up. I will come back for that.

    As for your spotlight, I suggest you give the shadows some softness (5%-20%) Its a bit of testing around until you have the settings that really fit your scene.

    Edit: UE2 lights: Intensity 30%,  environment mode Occlusion w/softs hadow, turn the shadow bias to 0 ; max error 0.2

    for the spot: intensity on 80-100%; shadow softness 5-20%, shadow type raytraced; shadow bias as low as possible

    In the render settings experiment with gamma correction on and off, depending on the material you use they might not be adapted to gamma correction, so atm, just test which way it looks better to you.

    I like her smile and I want to see it  flash into the camera :D

    This is pretty detailed, so unless you need some aditional advice, give this a try, Saph.

    I did try to give this great advice a go but my laptop would have none of it, it took about 2 hours to get half way through the render and then the left eye looked like she had been beat up pretty bad and then Daz coped out and shut down on me. Is there maybe another setting I could try @Dracorn or @Linwelly?

    Post edited by Saphirewild on
  • dracorndracorn Posts: 2,333
    dracorn said:

    Version G here. Just increased the lumen of the pointlight by 50% if I remember right.

    It's just beginning to get there.  I found I need to set the lumens to 30,000 to 50,000 or so, maybe even hair. So make a HUGE change.  You can always back off if it's too light.

    Thanks for the advice Dracorn. I bumped the lumen by 4 times the amount for version H. Besides that I also changed the settings on the lens of his HUD (What was thaught to be an eye patch.) and tweeked the color of his scar some.

    Ah, there he is!  Much better.

  • LinwellyLinwelly Posts: 5,780
    edited July 2018
    dracorn said:
     

    I did try to give this great advice a go but my laptop would have none of it, it took about 2 hours to get half way through the render and then the left eye looked like she had been beat up pretty bad and then Daz coped out and shut down on me. Is there maybe another setting I could try @Dracorn or @Linwelly?

    UE2 tends to be a hog when its comes to workspace, two things to consider: if you want to try again with UE2 you should make sure you are on progrssive rendering in the render settings and you can trya to reduce the sampling settings. As well make sure wou have some sort of skydome even if there is nothing to be seen from that in your render ( If nothing else you can create a gian sphere and tint it in light blue) 

    All renderers, but 3delight more than iray, work better when they have some sort of outer limit and when you use UE2 that is even more needed. This relates to the "Max raytrace depth" in the render sampling settings (3delight) which is the number of times a light ray is reflected on surfaces and is calculated for that by the program. So for a render with simple non reflectant surfaces that number can be rather low. For good looking eyes the standart setting of 4 is really advised and if you render lots of glass or water you need to increase that number but it will but the mashine down. But it really has trouble calculating when there are no surfaces to work with. So give it a skydome or something.

    For the image you have here you can try to reduce max raytrayce depth to 2 and see if its still ok, You can as well try to reduce the pixel samples to 6 and the shadow samples to 16. but the quality might be lower.

    I hope that will help.

    ps if you happen to have the AOA lights using the environmental AOA light instead of UE2 might be helpful. Otherwise you can replace an UE2 light with a set of distant lights coming from different directions, (remember adding shadows turned to soft completely and reduce their light intensity to max 30%  give the one that comes from your main light direction a sunny tint and more intensity and the other ones a bluegrey tint and a lower light intensty. I used that trick many times when I was still on my old computer and UE2 would push it over the border in pre iray times)

    Post edited by Linwelly on
  • no noseno nose Posts: 297

    Is it to late to join the challange? Cause while not to complicated, and idk if it counts as a portrait, i'm personally really happy with this render. Took me way to long to figure out how to make the lightign work though.

  • LinwellyLinwelly Posts: 5,780

    @tupe12342  welcome to the challenge and its not too late, ther is still almost half of the month to get somewhere and the main point is to have fun and learn.

    You have a nice start there, I like the light coming from behind and the way she looks at the camera. I would suggest you try adding  background of some sort so it will tell a bit more of a story, doesn't need to be complex. And I suggest for the future to add the image to the post so we can look at it in a larger format.

  • dracorn said:

    I abandoned the other image after messing with it for awhile. I think the hair and expression were messing with me the most. Tried different hair but could not seem to get anything to look right in the image. I decided instead to do a Hi-key image:

    Hi Key July 2018

    Wow I really like this.  The oversaturated light and hint of bloom is striking.  There isn't much I can offer to make this better - other than make her expression a little more assymetric to add realism.  I do see some assymetry in the face: the tilt of the nose, the left eye being slightly more shut than the right and the right ear protruding a little more.  

    So Google some images of women looking straight at you and use that as your guide.

    Thanks for the suggestion!

    I may get back to this at some point before the end of the month but am playing with the denoiser feature in the new Beta release alot so am distracted like a kid with a new toy!

  • no noseno nose Posts: 297
    Linwelly said:

    @tupe12342  welcome to the challenge and its not too late, ther is still almost half of the month to get somewhere and the main point is to have fun and learn.

    You have a nice start there, I like the light coming from behind and the way she looks at the camera. I would suggest you try adding  background of some sort so it will tell a bit more of a story, doesn't need to be complex. And I suggest for the future to add the image to the post so we can look at it in a larger format.

    Thank, I added a background now. (though a bathroom scene would have probs worked better if I had one)

    18th shot (background).png
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  • no noseno nose Posts: 297

    ok I fixed it slightly since I wasn't a fan of the angle

    18th shot (background).png
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  • LinwellyLinwelly Posts: 5,780
    tupe12342 said:

    ok I fixed it slightly since I wasn't a fan of the angle

    Much better with the background. Maybe you can try to adapt the light colour to the light in the background. My guess is that your light has a temperature around 5000-6000 K, for the light in the scene I would suggest something about 4000

  • no noseno nose Posts: 297
    Linwelly said:
    tupe12342 said:

    ok I fixed it slightly since I wasn't a fan of the angle

    Much better with the background. Maybe you can try to adapt the light colour to the light in the background. My guess is that your light has a temperature around 5000-6000 K, for the light in the scene I would suggest something about 4000

    where can I change that? I looked all over and through the user guide and I wasn't able to find any references to temperture

  • SaphirewildSaphirewild Posts: 6,648
    Linwelly said:
    dracorn said:
     

    I did try to give this great advice a go but my laptop would have none of it, it took about 2 hours to get half way through the render and then the left eye looked like she had been beat up pretty bad and then Daz coped out and shut down on me. Is there maybe another setting I could try @Dracorn or @Linwelly?

    UE2 tends to be a hog when its comes to workspace, two things to consider: if you want to try again with UE2 you should make sure you are on progrssive rendering in the render settings and you can trya to reduce the sampling settings. As well make sure wou have some sort of skydome even if there is nothing to be seen from that in your render ( If nothing else you can create a gian sphere and tint it in light blue) 

    All renderers, but 3delight more than iray, work better when they have some sort of outer limit and when you use UE2 that is even more needed. This relates to the "Max raytrace depth" in the render sampling settings (3delight) which is the number of times a light ray is reflected on surfaces and is calculated for that by the program. So for a render with simple non reflectant surfaces that number can be rather low. For good looking eyes the standart setting of 4 is really advised and if you render lots of glass or water you need to increase that number but it will but the mashine down. But it really has trouble calculating when there are no surfaces to work with. So give it a skydome or something.

    For the image you have here you can try to reduce max raytrayce depth to 2 and see if its still ok, You can as well try to reduce the pixel samples to 6 and the shadow samples to 16. but the quality might be lower.

    I hope that will help.

    ps if you happen to have the AOA lights using the environmental AOA light instead of UE2 might be helpful. Otherwise you can replace an UE2 light with a set of distant lights coming from different directions, (remember adding shadows turned to soft completely and reduce their light intensity to max 30%  give the one that comes from your main light direction a sunny tint and more intensity and the other ones a bluegrey tint and a lower light intensty. I used that trick many times when I was still on my old computer and UE2 would push it over the border in pre iray times)

    I think maybe a round in IRay would be best for me there is just too much for my laptop to handle it I think, so maybe giving it over to IRay might help with the lighting.

  • LinwellyLinwelly Posts: 5,780

    @tupe12342 when you have your light selected it depends if you have a mesh light (a prop that emits light) then you choose the light emitting surface and go to the surfaces tab, scroll down until you find the emissive colour (which mostly is pure white) right below is a slider with emission temperature (K) thats the one.

    In case you have a light like a spotlight you select it in the lights tab and the lowest slider of that light says temperature (K)

     

  • no noseno nose Posts: 297

    @Linwelly I was able to find a (not emissive) color slider, but no temperture in sight, both on physical and non-physical lights.

    Changing the value of the color didnt seem to have any effect either

  • LinwellyLinwelly Posts: 5,780
    tupe12342 said:

    @Linwelly I was able to find a (not emissive) color slider, but no temperture in sight, both on physical and non-physical lights.

    Changing the value of the color didnt seem to have any effect either

    can you say what kind of light you are using? best with a likn to the product or a screenshot from the light selected

  • no noseno nose Posts: 297

    Sure, i'm using (what i'm assuming are) spotlights

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  • LinwellyLinwelly Posts: 5,780
    edited July 2018
    no nose said:

    Sure, i'm using (what i'm assuming are) spotlights

    rendereing atm but I will show a screenshot where you can find the setting asap

     

    edit: please see the attachment, I hope that explaines it

    lighttemp.png
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    Post edited by Linwelly on
  • no noseno nose Posts: 297
    Linwelly said:
    no nose said:

    Sure, i'm using (what i'm assuming are) spotlights

    rendereing atm but I will show a screenshot where you can find the setting asap

     

    edit: please see the attachment, I hope that explaines it

    Spread angle is the last option i'm seeing

    Capture.PNG
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  • FishtalesFishtales Posts: 6,039
    no nose said:
    Linwelly said:
    no nose said:

    Sure, i'm using (what i'm assuming are) spotlights

    rendereing atm but I will show a screenshot where you can find the setting asap

     

    edit: please see the attachment, I hope that explaines it

    Spread angle is the last option i'm seeing

    You need to turn Photometric Mode to on for lights in Iray. 

  • no noseno nose Posts: 297

    alright thanks, changed all the temperture's I found to 4k, don't see to much a difference though

    18th shot (background).png
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  • Hope i,m not to late.

    I’m only part of the way through this scene and have a long way yet to finish, I would appreciate any help and tips.
     

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  • FishtalesFishtales Posts: 6,039

    @no nose

    You will be losing the light from the spotlights because of the HDRI used as the background. There is a strong light source in that HDRI which will cancel out all the other lighting unless you either lower the intensity of the Environment dome or raise the lumens on your lights.

  • FishtalesFishtales Posts: 6,039

    Hope i,m not to late.

    I’m only part of the way through this scene and have a long way yet to finish, I would appreciate any help and tips.
     

    I would change the aspect ratio of the image, there is too much space to the left of the character.

    The bush on the right is pushing into the scene at that ratio and is vying for viewing space with the character.

    I would also move the arch so that it frames the character rather than off to the right.

    Other than that the colour scheme, pose and camera angle are fine. Perhaps just tweak the expression a bit.

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