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Yup, I read it before lol.
Working on a scene for Llola's challenge, which will have two teen brothers rough-housing in their bedroom. The bedroom is done. Here are the brothers, so far.
I'm using the G8M version of Growing Up, and dialing in amounts of G8 characters to get the body and head shapes I want. They both have Giuseppe in the head, for the family resemblance. The older boy has more. If this old memory serves, that is the only character they have in common. I used the head morphs and the "200" product to make some minor variations to both heads. The skin is the G3M Growing Up Skin resource, with a bit of light gray in the Base Color channel for the older boy.
It's been too hot to spend a lot of time in the office, and impossible to run both computers for more time than it takes to transfer a few files. I'll count myself lucky if I can get this scene done and rendered in time for the challenge! (Fingers crossed!)
He actually looks like a really nice older character. He blended very well.
Very cool. I loved the shot showing the camera and its angle.
Thank you, @Knittingmommy. I think Ollie is so versatile mixed in to other characters, more so than most of the other male figures/characters I own. I got Edie, too, for the same reason, though I haven't tried her with other characters yet. Not enough hours in the day… I'm sure you understand.
I'm glad you found the screenshot interesting. I'm trying to keep this more of a "here's what I'm working on" rather than a "here's how I did it" thread but, sometimes, I just can't help myself! lol
I agree, Ollie is definitely great for the gene pool. I had to wait on him although I did pick up Edie. I think your brothers look great and look forward to seeing the finishes scene.
@IceDragonArt, The weather cooperated on Saturday, and I got to work on the scene all day. Here's a wip of the boys getting along as brothers often do… which is to say, the older boy is teasing the younger, playing "keep away" with the boy's baseball cap. This render showed me some issues with the Alex hair on the younger boy and the pocket on the older boy's pants. These have been corrected, and I've set the beast up to render the scene overnight.
And the final image:
Brothers
August has been a very difficult month, where I live, due to high temperatures, (mid- to high-90s ºF,) and more recently, very unhealthy levels of smoke from wild fires across Oregon and beyond, depending on the prevailing winds. I didn't even turn The Beast on this month until the 16th!
I then spent the better part of four days, maybe five, trying to change settings in Windows 10 to get The Beast to connect with this computer. Holy BLEEP! Microsoft, in their illusion of infinite wisdom, have apparently decided to prevent Windows 10 from connecting directly to other PCs via the network. They removed Homegroup altogether. And none of the tips and tricks I found online, or the suggestions from a Microsoft community forum, were able to trick The Beast into connecting to this PC. I can see it, I just can't connect! And Microsoft wonders why folks like us don't want to run their "updates"!
Fortunately, this computer is running Windows 7, and I can communicate with The Beast via the network from here. However, I had things set up on The Beast that made moving files back and forth very easy, a work flow that worked for me, and I'm "not happy" (big understatement,) that I've had to come up with a work-around that lets me move files back and forth when connecting from this computer, even if does take significantly more time.
Anyway… I finally gave up on the tech stuff and got back to working with DS. I recently bought Skin Builder 8 and was tinkering with a new skin material set, with makeup/lips, eyes, and so on. Of course, that ended up taking more time than I had planned, so I set it aside to work on images for Llola Lane's render challenges, both here and on PDFLives. With only a little over a week until the end of the month, I'm feeling rushed. Especially as the shapes are getting harder to get creative with.
Images to follow…
I feel a bit like I cheated on the first image, utilizing images from the Hubble telescope for the background, but there defintely wasn't enough time to try modeling a "shooting star," as I had originally envisioned. (Not sure I could have succeeded, anyway, being far from adept in Hexagon.)
There is a story in my mind that developed as I worked on the scene, about a woman who signed up to work off-world for the opportunity to fly space vehicles. She got more than she bargained for, being assigned to a colony on a dead planet thousands of lightyears from Earth. More a mining community than a colony, where people live and work underground in an articial environment. There are other such communities on this "rock," not all friendly with each other, and now the woman is as much a law officer as a pilot. It's a harsh life, one she may not survive, with the real benefits of this job coming after her 10 year contract is fulfilled.
In this image, she takes a break and watches as two of her co-workers take a ship out on patrol, knowing there is always a chance they won't return. In a few minutes, it will be time to go back to work, back underground. Until then, she enjoys the one immediate perk of the job, a splendid view of the not-so-nearby Tarantula Nebula. So very far away, it still looks close enough to reach up and touch…
Between Tasks
(It's a really lame image title, Have you guys got any ideas for something more… powerful, appropriate, catchy…?)
I suck at naming my stuff lol. I love the image, and the story behind it. I don't consider that cheating either, I consider it as using all available resources to build the image that I see in my head lol.
It seems like I get the most powerful emotional response, (from myself,) when I can use a single word for the title. I liked "Reflection" as the woman is actually reflecting on her choices, at the same time she's experiencing a deep emotional response as she reflects on the beauty before her. But with all the reflections in the glass, it would be easy to miss the reference to her mental state.
I don't usually think of using photo backgrounds as cheating. As far as I'm concerned, whatever tools it takes to create the vision. Right? But the challenge was for the shape "star," so in this instance it feels a lot like taking a short cut.
If anyone is interested in the details, I added this latest scene to my Kitchen thread here. Feel free to ask questions, if something isn't clear.
Title suggestion posted above. A very lovely render!
Ah I missed the part about the shape being a star. (been one of those weeks)
@Novica recently issued a challenge to use the Sketchy shaders product on existing scenes we'd rendered, if we already had the product..
Although I keep a released version of Daz Studio installed, I usually use the latest Beta for most of my work. However, not all the shaders of Sketchy worked correctly in 4.11.0.196, so I used my 4.9 install for these. (Images and titles link to their respective gallery pages, except for the one hair closeup, which links directly to the larger image.)
So far, I've published two reworks. First is…
At Peace Reimagined
I was slightly baffled at first, that some things were outlined and some things were not. But I figured out why, and it makes a lot of sense. Outlines are actually caused where the object curves! So things that are essentially flat, like the grass, flower petals, and leaves in my scene, won't get outlines. (Niether do sharp corners, as you can see in the second image, below.) The patterns are Iray decals, and have their own limitations. But when both are combined, you get some interesting effects.
I rendered this scene without a background, because I used an HDRI for both lighting and background. I then rendered the background separately. In Photoshop, I played around with various filters until the background looked less real and more like the render, (easier to see full-size.) I didn't do any postwork to the scene layer beyond adding my signature in an inobtrusive spot.
I think this image was too busy to fully take advantage of the shaders.
At Peace, (original)
I chose the second Image because it is less busy, with large, flat areas for the decals. This image is…
Repose Sketch
With this rework, I liked what Sketchy did to the set, so I repositioned the camera to show more of the scene and used RSA's Look At Me script to have Michael look into the camera. I used the same pattern on the wall as on the steps, but the lines went at an angle and didn't look right with the horizontal lines on the setps, so I tweaked the angle parameters in the shader. The clothing was took the most work, finding the best combination of pattern and line size, and adjustments to the decal parameters. The hair was pretty straight forward. I hid the scalp, and I removed the trans map from the hair's Cutout Opacity setting. For this hair, and this scene, I felt I got a better result this way. (The brown is actually part of the shader; the hair started out blonde!)
Here's an image I shared on Novica's thread, of the hair without the trans maps, no shaders, not textures:
Repose, (original)
I haven't tried it yet, but I think it would be possible to use one of the "toon" cameras to get lines around the "flat" objects and then layer that render over the Sketchy image.…
Real life has been persistent these past weeks. (We're in the long, slow process of getting the house ready to put up for sale. So many things we ignored for years, due to lack of funds, must now be taken care of first. Anyway…) I have made time to work in Daz Studio and now I have something I can share here.
First, I did a quick scene showcasing Jepe's newest product, the V8 Art Deco Statuettes package. I loaded one of the premade props, changed the face morph, added some hair and then tried different shaders on things until I liked the effect. I tinkered with both of LY's Leonine Pro lights sets until I found a light/background that set off the statuette and added one of the light presets to produce highlights. I'm pretty sure the HDRI and lights are both from the second set, LY Leonine Pro HDR Lighting Vol.2. The whole thing from opening DS to finished render took less than a day. For me, that's lightning fast. You can see the finished image in my gallery here. (Currently sitting at 23 likes. The best I've seen since "The Royal Mouser" last February!)
The statuettes product is awesome. The included poses are for V8, but they applied just fine to both Edie and Ollie. I assume they will apply nicely to any G8 character or figure. The pedastals have their own presets, but the other props used to create the 15 premade statuettes are only available with those presets. I think that's a smart move, though, as most of the time you're going to want them in that configuration. In spite of the "Prop" designation for the presets, these statuettes load multiple props parented to a fully functioning V8. You can modify the pose, change the shape with any morphs you own for G8F, even replace V8 with another figure and apply the same pose from the included poses.
And that's exactly what I did, replacing V8 on the left with Ollie and V8 on the right with Edie. I applied one of the mirror poses to Ollie, so his "up" leg was on the same side of the lamp as Edie's, effectively hiding from the camera the fact he has no "junk". This image took a couple of days to set up, as using figures other than V8 resulted in a lot of pose tweaking of the arms and hands, for this particular statuette. Here's the finished prop:
Edie is "wearing" a G2F hair, Lady Florence. It didn't want to play nice on the G8 fogure, so I added G2F to the scene, fit the hair to her, posed her so that her head, shoulders and back were in the right place to match Edie, and then hid her. I could have converted it to a prop, but that would limit my ability to tweak it, if that became necessary. Ollie is wearing the scalp cap from the Short Afro hair, which loads the cap separately and parents the hair to the cap. I deleted the hair, applied the shader to the cap, added a normal map from Mec4d's vol 1 PBS shaders tiled to 10, added back the opacity map for the scalp set to .10 tiling, letting the normal map add the texture for the hair. I also added a normal map from the same shader set to add lines to the Florence Hair.
I'll be adding some close ups soon, but it may take a couple of days. I have to babysit my render machine so can't leave it to render overnight. The fans are trying to die on the water cooling system. (I have a new one on order but it won't arrive for a week or so.)
Anyway… I used this prop—with some modifications—in the image I submitted for the PFDLives edition of Llola Lane's monthly challenge. I hid parts of the lamp, applied a shader from Mec4d's Vol 3 shaders to the remaining metal parts, and added a heart from RDNA Hearts. The heart uses the same glass shader from Jepe's product as the prop shown above, though the pattern doesn't show up in the image:
Faerie Deco Statuette Lamp
I admit, I hadn't set out to create a lamp with a heart for the challenge, but once the statuette was complete, it made perfect sense to use it that way.
The set is Stonemason's Downtown Loft : Living Area with the extra buildings gone and a plane with a stock image of NYC at night outside the windows. I didn't do much to the interior of the set. I removed any props from inside the loft that weren't in the camera frame to make the image render faster, and added an overhead ghost light to give the impression of a ceiling light on in the room behind the camera. I also moved and/or removed various props from the shelves.
Just for the halibut, (yum,) I entered both finished images in the pcrendercontest2018. Wish me luck!
I like both images very much, L'Adair. I wonder a bit though, both images are a bit too revealing maybe - I had to delete half of the promo images of mine cause the figures had no clothes on. And since we're not in Germany or Europe in general where art can be shown as it is and statuettes don't need to be covered - some not so obvious cloth could be helpful maybe? I used the Basic Wear pants and bra in the same metal color for some of my latest images - just to be on the safe side.
@jepegraphics, Thank you.
As for the lack of clothing, I frequently refer to a post by Richard, which the mods referred me to when I asked about posting a specific image where the figure wasn't wearing clothing. (It was the base G3F, and I didn't have any G3F clothing yet. She'd just come out!) Here's the link: Acceptable Ways of Handling Nudity
But here's the body of the post:
I believe these renders are safe for both the forums and the galleries because 1) The pose obstructs view of the groin area for the dual figure lamp, and the drape hides it in the other render, and 2) the breasts of the female statuettes in both images are not flesh colored, and there are no discernable nipples.
I suspect the guidelines for doing promo artwork are far more strict. When it comes to products for sale, Daz has to be concerned with the opinions of both Paypal and their merchant account, (which allows customers to pay by credit or debit card.) It wouldn't help any of us if Daz lost the ability to take our money!
I've entered both finished images into the PC Render contest. I'm sure if there is a problem with either image, I'll be hearing about it soon!
In the meantime, I have some close ups of the "faerie" lamp…
Drumroll, please…
I used Lady Florence Hair on Edie, but to be honest, it really didn't fit very well. Autofit left it distorted, so I cheated and used a hidden G2F to wear the hair, (as previously mentioned,) but no matter how many morphs I tried on G2F, I couldn't get the hair to fit very well. Fortunately, the pose and camera angle conspired to hide the worst of it. These close ups do not, however.
The elf ears were a real problem for the few male hair products I have. As mentioned before I used a normal map to give texture to the scalp from the Short Afro Hair product.
Using Ollie and Edie, I had to tweak the poses. The major areas to be tweaked were the arms and hands. Especially the hands. Here are the hands close up.
When I first decided to use a heart instead of the glass from the original lamp prop, I had no idea how difficult it would be, or if I'd have to do some simple modeling to get what I wanted. As it turns out, the lamp consists of numerous material zones, and was as simple to change as possible. I hid the parts I didn't want in my render, and used the Silver Foil shader from Mec4d's shaders on the metal parts I kept. Here is screenshot showing what zones were hidden, followed by a close up of the the part of the lamp I used.
(The images above are linked to their larger counterparts, which will open in a new window.)
Hopefully, you'll find some of this information useful.
Really love, love, the lamp one. Just beautiful!
Thank you, @IceDragonArt.
But just for my clarification, which "lamp" one? (All three images, the two published and the WIP above, are lamps!)
As mentioned a few posts back, my liquid cooling system was on it's last legs. The pump seemed to be fine, but the fans were dying. It cost me an additional $27 when I ordered my computer, so I'm thinking that's not bad for two years work, a bit over $1 a month. Anyway, I bought a new Corsair H100i v2. I went looking on Amazon, and found it on sale for under $90, while the next best Corsair was actually more expensive. After applying rewards points, I spent a bit over $41, so that's even better.
However, I haven't done a lot of computer hardware work for years, and so much has changed since I was a technician. I was feeling a bit overwhelmed, faced with the need to actually touch my CPU. In reality, it went off without a hitch this morning, and now "the beast" is as quiet as when it was brand new. The new cooling system is a significant upgrade from the last one, too.
Now if I could only find a brand new GTX 1080 for $41…! (At this point, I think I'd be happy to find one for only $410. Blasted cryptominers.)
Anyway, I have some WIP images from the image I'm working on now. I'll post those in a minute.
I am finding the PC+ for a Day to be the most tempting aspect of the anniversary sale. Things I would never consider buying before are ending up in my runtime, as I don't mind paying such a small amount for things outside of my usual interests. (Skinchangers is one recent example.)
I'm currently working on an image that uses two: the dForce Meillyn Outfit and Eirian. The overskirt on the outfit has been giving me fits.
I've got the character in the process of stepping up on a railing and I want the longer overskirt to flow and flap as if there is a bit of wind. The overskirt wanted to drape straight down, regardless of any thing I tried, including a Wind Node from underneath. Obviously, I was doing something wrong. The fan was below the "floor" of world center, and that seemed to be impeding the flow. Anyway, after nearly two days, I finally decided to get creative with the Weight map.
But before I go any further, here is the character and outfit with the finished simulation. The lower half of the pose is set. That's what I'll be using. I still need to pose the upper half, and give her a suitable expression.
And it looks like I'll need to get creative to prevent the armor from intersecting the skirts on the upper thighs. But I am satisfied with the way the ends of the overskirt are moving in the air.
Here's a viewport save showing both the "posing" using the bones for the left, right and center sections of the overskirt and the final influence weight map. Doesn't look like much variation in the weight map, but it made a world of difference.
Both skirt and overskirt have two material zones, a small band around the top with Dynamic Strength set to 0, and the rest of the skirt/overskirt with Dynamic Strength set to 1. All the other Simulation Settings for the material zones are default and the artist did not use Weight Maps. I copied the materials from the overskirt to the rigid zone, and used the influence weight map to control the drape. I left the first couple rows at the top with 0 influence.
I tried several different things including higher influence at the top and lesser influence as the bottom with odd results. Finally, I filled the entired skirt, (minus the strip on top,) with 99 or 98 % influence and painted lower influence values around the edge where the mesh "dipped" already. then smoothed the weights 100% at 100. I was getting closer. I attenuated the entire skirt by 99%. And finally I selected one row of polys along the bottom of each section and attenuated at 99%. As you can see with these values, the influence weights are very close to 100%, and even closer to each other.
Here's the overskirt after the simulation, using the Wind Node with a strength of 2. As always, I used the animated timeline. I set the range to 91 frames with the pose complete at 30 frames. The Wind Node remained stationary throughout, facing the front of the skirt. However, it was set to a strength of 0 with another key frame at frame 0. At Frame 35, the Wind Node was set to 2 and then tapered off to 1 by the last frame. After the simulation was complete, I scrolled back until I found something I liked, at Frame 55.
Love your statues render. So delicate and classy. Wonder what it would look like as a frosted glass (like a Lalique statuette) perhaps with the new ghost shader.
Thank you, @Worlds_Edge. Jepe made a wonderful product, and I had a lot of fun with those. (It was actually hard to set it aside and get back to work that was in the queue before I bought the statuettes product!)
That's probably easier than you think; The product comes with six glass shaders. I just shut down the render machine, but I'll open a scene tomorrow, and see what happens.
@Worlds_Edge. I'm rendering a statuette now that sort of has the look of Lalique.
I had issues using the glass shaders that came with the product. The head rendered much brighter than the rest of the statuette. So I moved on the Ghost shader.
The Ghost shader works up to a point. To get the look of solid crystal, you need ot increase the Refraction Index, Somewhere in the 2-3 range, according to your personal preference. You may also need to adjust the Backscattering Roughness to get different objects to look about the same opacity. In the image that is currently rendering, I had to increase the Refraction Index to 3 so the leg was opaque enough to appear in front of the fabric drape.
The color of your lighting affects the color of the statuette.
And the biggie: The Ghost shader sets Cutout Opacity to 0.00 for bits of the anatomy that are under the surface, such as the teeth and tongue. And all but the eye socket of the eyes! Consequently, close up renders of the face are going to look really weird. You could, theoretically, model replacement "eyes" to fill that space, but they would need to go no further than the eyelids, which means a custom job for each figure as you use it. Of course, expressions with the eyes closed will not be a problem. Just be sure to hide the eyesocket zone if you close the eyes.
I'll post the finished render as soon as it's done.
Okay, here ya' go:
Frosted Crystal Statuette
I think it would look better with white lighting in a room environment scene. But I do think it's quite do-able as a background prop.
Lol this is true. I clearly missed part of the sentence that I was thinking. The one in the room with the two figures and the heart shape.
The most recent image I created for Llola Lane's challenge is The Warrior's Talisman. The idea was to "capture" a fae inside the arrowhead of a pendant from the dForce Necklace MR set. In fact, the image was supposed to be about her, not the warrior. Unfortunately, to make sense of her trapped inside the glass arrowhead, a captor was needed. Due to limitations of my abilities, as well as having only a couple of days to pull it off, the image became more about the warrior and less about the fae.
But… The fae was created first. Here is a render of just the faerie, posed, and the skirts already dForced.
This render was taken by hiding everything else in the finished scene, so she is very small and a lot of her details aren't apparent. Also, the background was transparent, so I cropped it to just the fae and added a background color in Photoshop.
For comparson, below is the same camera position and angle of the pendant as it hangs on the warrior's chest. The faerie is the same pixel size in both images, but the image below wasn't cropped. (The warrior's skin looks awful this close up, so please ignore him.)
To create this illusion, I worked on the faerie at full size, though the body morph I used, Izabella 7, made her quite dainty to begin with. I loaded the pendant and scaled it up to fit the figure. (I started at 5000% and adjusted it from there.) I then posed the figure to fit inside the arrowhead. It wasn't a perfect fit, so I used a dForm to enlarge the back of the arrowhead, moving the figure back a bit, tweaking the upper half of the pose, and so on. By the time I finished, all of the faerie, wings, hair and wardrobe, were inside the glass and parented to the pendant..
Once I had the pendant complete, I sized the pendant back down 100 percent. Then the real fun began. I was trying to use the chain that came with the dForce Necklace set, but it wouldn't cooperate on a male. After far too many hours of pure stubbornness, I finally gave up on the idea of dForce and decided to use the necklace from the outfit I already had on my warrior, the Vinnuth Kriegor Armor set.
I zoomed in as close as I could for the final image, even cropping off the top of the warrior's head. But the faerie I worked so hard on still isn't easy to see, something I found disappointing.
I decided to enter this in the PC Render Contest, too. (The qualifying product is the warrior, Eibhear for Vlad8.)