Novica & Forum Members Tips & Product Reviews Pt 12
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Well I was trying to make a review of the Old West buildings & the G8M/G8F Toonify products but have run into a problem with knee bends on the G8M. The problem is not with any product bought out of the DAZ 3D Store though (I think, not 100% sure yet though). It is with a freebie designed for G3M that I transferred to G8M.
It'll be a few days before I straighten that out. I have some DIY I need to get done.
@nonesuch00 Thanks for the detailed reviews, several are very helpful/interesting
You're welcome. I'm trying to keep them concise but haven't been very successful.
And thinking of the scope of reviewing all f these Old West buildings that have interiors & exteriors is daunting.
Hebe HD (Gen8F) Dinosaur Queen Outfit (Gen8F) Blair Hair (Gen8M/F) Charlie Hair (Gen3/8F) Mesa Desert
From looking at the promos, they don't match my results with Hebe. Only one of the thumbnails show the bottom lip coloration as a very sharp cutoff, but then again, that's with one of the darker colors. Personally I don't like it but there are some people with a pronounced bottom lip line. However, women KNOW how to put on lipstick and you don't leave part of your bottom lip uncovered, particularly when using a dark shade. You can postwork it though, and otherwise Hebe is okay. Be sure and look at the gallery images too.
Well, here's a surprise for you. Charli Hair looks a different than in the promos. I got it on sale, and got a surprise- The promos make it look oily and very cartoony with the transparency, but it's really one to take a second look at. It still has a bit of a streaky look, but it's much better than the promos I think.
If you want Blair Hair to match the eyebrows, the second one I used the brown hair with these changes in Surfaces.
TIP: You can try this with other similar brown hair(s) too,to add anice deep auburn color-
Base 179 / 116 / 100
Top Coat 164 / 115 / 98
Take a look at that bottom lip.
Dinosaur Queen Outfit isn't shown in it's entirety, it's a trimmed down edition. I think I removed a skull from the arm, etc. I really like the choker of rope, looks real in the Mesa Desert lighting. Speaking of which, TIP increase your saturation in postwork to get more of the red look of the mesas. Very nice product and the ground looks realistic IMO. I put her toes in the sand, not sure I like it.
EDIT: The settings on the Mesa lighting will be the next post, in case you're interested. But I also increased contrast, midtones, and shadows in Corel Photo Paint.
The Dinosaur Queen Outfit comes with hand poses for the spears, making it a breeze to pose.
VERY large render, click to enlarge and click again.
What the heck is up with all these duplicate file warnings? Did we figure out in some thread what was causing it?
Dome Rotation 270
In Tone Mapping,
Exposure Value 13.19 (but always do your ISO first)
Film ISO 135
Don't touch shutter speed, when you do the ISO and Exposure Value it will do the right thing.
As always, this is with Mitchell Filter, Not Gaussian. Pixel Filter Radius is 1.30 (which deals with sharp/crisp.) I always do a mild Directional Sharpen in Corel Photo Paint on each render.
While in Filtering (under Render Settings) your Noise settings would be Degrain Filtering 4, Radius 3, Blur Difference .32
Nice renders, I may buy that Mesa product at some point based on them, although it's the sort of landscape that game land environment creation programs have been able to do for a long time.
I got this H&C dForce Floral Dress for Genesis 8 Female dress in the sale yesterday. I an very happy with it so far. It is dForce and has morphs to dial in thickness, so it isn't "paper thin". This texture is beautiful and it comes with several others I haven't tried yet. I used the FLO Makeup freebie from Christmas (from AprilYSH and still available on her website). As soon as I saw this dress texture, I thought of this makeup!
Looks very good! You should have done the promos!
The thickness morph is great.
You're welcome. I have some of his products and they are great, unfortunately I missed the all thing yesterday.
@barbult That all came together beautifully!
I wanted to link the dress in my gallery image, but I can't link anything with "&" in the product name. I guess that is why there are no gallery images linked to the product. Does anyone know how to add a gallery link for product names with special characters in the name?
Doesn't the link button do that, the little chain icon up there ^. Paste and highlight the dress name and then fill in the pop up box with the link. I haven't tried it but I'm sure that should work.
It works for products with "normal" product names, but it won't even let me type an ampersand in the name field.
Ahh! I misread, I thought you meant linking in here.
I just tried it. I copied and pasted the name into the content box and it accepted it and showed me the dress name highlighted below it as normal. I obviously didn't save it as it isn't in my picture so I don't know if it would add it or not
OMG! Sometimes the simplest things elude me! It works! Here is the gallery page to show the link. I'll link more products later. THANK YOU @Fishtales.
You're welcome
I did another image with the H&C dForce Floral Dress for Genesis 8 Female. The last one didn't show the skirt area. In this image, she is sitting, which is a much more difficult task for dForce. I think it worked very well. The little bit of white slip you can see under the dress is not poke through; it is the underskirt that comes with the dress product. This image uses the included morphs to make the sleeves wider than the last image I did and to make the skirt shorter. I shortened the sleeves with included morphs in both images. I used one of the other textures in this image.
Here is the gallery link with links to the items used in the image.
@barbult, both your floral dress renders are excellent, really good to hear about this product
@barbult - both your dress images look lovely here! Love the bright colors and coordinating color-splashed makeup AND the more restrained color palette one as well! That dress looks very naturally draped and appealing in your second image (and a round-the-world-snap for you for that nice, subtle touch of matching that magazine cover's colors to her dress as foils against the neutrals in room & furniture!). I mostly buy male items and discovered IH Kang (aka H&C) back when he/they (?) were only at the other store, and have been a fan since. I number H&C/Kang one of the better digital tailors, mostly because there was early on a better sense of the lines, angles, drapes and construction of real-world clothes among their offerings. They often don't do much in the way of features, like coats opening, shirts open and closed, ties on/off, pants opened/closed etc, but I've been pretty happy with how the guy's clothes I've bought by them fit, look and move, even before dForce was a glimmer. :) Needless to say, I def bought more H&C during the same sale you mentioned :) LOL
~Gen
The Harpwood Trail - Mallard Pond, which requires The Harpwood Trail for Daz Studio
This is a very resource-intensive set. The water uses refraction; The leaves use translucency; And there are tens of thousands of instances. The set is from Howie Farkes and he uses Ultrascatter to place the instances.
I ran into one problem: the grass clumps are low resolution and those in the foreground did not look good. To solve the problem, I used the Geometry Editor and created a rectangle Selection Set of polys in the view of the camera. I then ran Ultrascatter and limited it to the Selection Set. I was worried it would change the look of the scene, but I didn't change any other settings in Ultrascatter, and I can't tell the difference. I didn't make changes to any of the other instances, but if it's too resource intensive for you, I believe you could cut down on the instances by half or more by creating a Selection Set on the ground, and then running Ultrascatter for each instances group, limiting the scatter to the Selection Set.
(I added a grass prop from Hemlock Folly to the foreground, applied SubD and upped the level to 2, to get the smooth, long, arching grass blades.)
I didn't make any changes to the materials. I tried several HDRIs until I found a lighting effect I liked. This is the most realistic outdoor environment I've rendered, and it was super easy to use. On the other hand, with my GTX 1080, I let this image render for 25 hours to get "only" 5000 samples, ( about a third of a typical render for me.)
The original render is 4381px x 2000px. You can visit the gallery page here and see the image at 2191px by 1000px, but if you're registered at PFDLives, you can see the original size image in The Big Picture Thread here.
@barbult That dress looks so real! The draping in the sitting pose is exquisite. LOVE the doggie!
@ladair So photorealistic- you did a marvelous job of blending. I can't tell the difference in what was original and what you tweaked!
@carolao Congrats on your win in the PC Monthly Render Contest- FIRST PLACE! Mars and Venus has wonderful posing and really conveys the emotions.
@L'Adair - just gorgeous, I can place myself there so easily, feel the warmth of the sun, hear the rustle of leaves and the birds chattering.... the light is wonderful, especially on the far side where the deer are, with the natural-looking dappled bright and shady areas. Really lovely work! I'll add an "oh yeah!" to your observation about the Harpwood Trail being resource-costly. I was able to barely use and render the Harpwood Trail on my older machine which was only a 4gb 745 GPU (and s o o v e r y s l o w l y at that, literally days!) but the Harpwood Trail FOREST DRIVE add-on I never was even able to render, until I moved up to a better machine with 32gb ram & a 8gb 1070 GPU. But when you want a really filled-in, heavily planted landscape, it can be just what the doctor ordered. One thing that would be really useful for us, is that when the makers of these really intensive landscapes set up the instances for the presets, if they would do them in pie or angle shaped sections, which could be turned off/on separately, so that once we have chosen a view, framed it in the camera, we could then turn off some of the expensive stuff that's in the scene and yet not directly in (or affecting) the view.
~Gen
Thanks Novica! I was really surprised, but also very happy :)
Carola O, that image was really well done! You earned the win. I could tell that a lot of work went into it.
Thanks for noticing the coordinating magazine colors.
Somethimes things just work out. I was looking through my content for a magazine, and when I saw that one, I knew it was the one!
I'm still playing with the new (to me) H&C (IH Kang) products I got in the sale a few days ago. I thought that pose with G8F arms raised and sharply bent would be a good challenge for a long sleeved garment. I got H&C Hoodie & Training Wear for Genesis 8 Female(s) that doesn't have dForce. I thought I'd try that. Well, it looked surprisingly good, but I thought the arm bend areas could use some improvement, so I added dForce with a dForce Modifier Weight Node to limit the dForce to the areas I wanted to use it on (the arm bend areas). Because I am using VYK Dorthie for Genesis 8 Female with a custom body morph, the breast area of the hoodie wasn't quite smooth. I fixed that with Fit Control for Genesis 8 Female(s). I added Base Shape Matching smoothing with 1 iteration. I added the lips decal from Make Me Teen for Genesis 8 Female(s). This is the result. I think it looks great. This is another product rating
from me.
Gallery link
All About the Lips
Folks, don't forget to add the HD product for free to your cart. It's only available for a limited time when you buy Sanjay. I almost forgot!
Heads up! A new DS Public Beta is out & I'm excited because it's been months since the last update. It is version 4.11.0.335 (was 4.11.0.236)
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/265581/daz-studio-pro-beta-version-4-11-0-335-updated#latest