Show Us Your Iray Renders. Part IV
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An Iray render with my new character Kathy for Genesis 3, that is waiting her turn to be released to the store.
Very nice V_W :)
Not exactly. Bump maps simply do an optical displacement of the normal directly out from the normal direction in an amount relative to the greyscale value in the bump map. Normal maps are a 3d adjustment of the normal; x/y/z with the values for each in the red/green/blue channel. A good normal map should give a better 3d representation then what could typically be achieved by a bump map but this of course depends on the quality of each. A poor normal map will result in poor results. Normal maps are meant to be as close to a displacement map as possible without having to add a lot of geometry that displacement maps typically need.
3Dlight throws a wrinkle in this in that Renderman allows for micro-displacement which treats a bump map more like a displacement map and mitigates some of the differences between a displacement map and bump map. Note, that is one of the features that was lost when going to IRay.
Ah, THAT explains a lot, Gedd! Thanks for the info.
Spruced up some characters I'd rendered before, put them together.
Both are Genesis 2 males. Ben has Benjamin skin, modified (converted Bump maps to Normal maps, added various Iray tweaks), George has a Skin Builder skin with some Skin Overlay elements. Real Hairy, Unshaven for Genesis, and Basic Hair, and various bottoms.
Simply converting a bump map to a normal map won't give any extra information to the normal map. To gain the advantages of a normal map over a bump map, the normal map has to be baked down from a higher resolution detail object. This is an advanced topic that is a bit involved and requires a higher detailed version of the object to bake the normal map from. In short, there is no advantage in converting a bump map to a normal map.
Thank you Kat. I am trying different lights. Here is another render.
Coming back to DS after about a year away. Loving the Iray renderer.
This is Bethany and corset dress. Ground and chair from Wedding Day set.
Lighting is default environment dome, no other lighting.
Well, all I can say is that with Iray the performance of Normal vs. Bump is very noticeably different.
Some variations of fantasy weapons.
Well while technically a normal map converted from a bump map would contain only the image in the bump map, it is also true that they are processed by algorithms in the render engine specifically for 'bump' or 'normal,' which means that there could be some differences in the end results. Without putting images through a series of tests I couldn't say what exactly is happening other then if it's working for you then great. ;)
Is the one on the right supposed to be ice?
Originally I was trying to make a silly jello weapon (Merciful Weapon in D&D parlance), but then it looked more like ice, so I went with that, but I couldn't get a good cold vapor effect I liked so ... ice? Glass? Whatever you like. ;)
(If I was willing to spend more effort or it was more important, I'd keep hammering (ha ha) away at trying to make a vapor effect)
I like it a lot. It gives it a thicker solid ice look. It would good for Ice Man. Would interested in sharing your settings?
http://www.sharecg.com/v/81300/related/21/DAZ-Studio/AllenArt-Iray-Gelatin-Gel-Shaders-for-Daz-Studio
Maybe something like this is what you were looking for?
Well, I could have tinkered to get more gel looking, but ended up liking what I had. Notably, the surface bump map from the base object created a nice icey surface.
PBR Metallic
Base color: Saturated blue (.085, .24, .66)
Glossy weight 1, color light blue (.59, .74, 1), roughness .2
Refraction index 1.1 (it should be higher, but... enh, I like to see what's inside more clearly)
Refraction weight .9
SSS Amount .001, SSS direction .5
You could probably do a reasonable 'frosted over surface' with top coat or maybe a roughness map and make base color white
My stab at trying to make something like Bethany 7 in G2F. It's... not right, particularly in the face, but otherwise a decent big beautiful woman.
Nothing super exciting, just polishing a character for my web comic.
The skin needed the bump muted a little. The hair has taken a huge amount of work to get it looking reasonably close to real hair.
He's a Genesis 1 figure. I had thought about migrating him to G2M, but could never get things to look quite right, and I like how he looks here, so whatever!
This started as another stab at Bethany 6, but it veered all over.
Weirdly, that's a mostly Ninive 6 head, to start with. Heh.
Yep, she does look like Katharine. Hope that was what you were going for, because if not, you did.
Lips and nose are different, but when I saw the character, before I read the name, I thought "That looks a bit like Katharine."
Here is another of mine...
The car is a mesh of mine exported from Cinema 4D and imported as an obj. I textured it and found an HDRI that produced some nice reflections, then built a background plate in photoshop to match the scene.
Nah. This is a photograph of a real car. Nice try, though.
Damn! what gave it away?
It was painting the car and set grey and pretending it was a clay render wasn't it?
I'd have gotten away with it too if it wasn't for you meddling kids...
Simon: flawless integration of elements. Bravo!
Yeah, that's an outstanding render.
So in my next render, I'm a bit... surprised. At 86% convergence and 3 hours. That's not surprising.
Almost 14000 iterations. Blink.
And then 86% to 100% in 10 minutes. Weird.
Mostly Ninive 6, with a few changes. Lots of texture adjustments to everything.
Hi all!
Do you know how I can get a shallow depth of field when using an HDRI as background? I can get some blur when adjusting the DOF of the camera, but not really that much. Basically, what I want is to make the background less focused so it`s not as obvious it`s a photo.
create a background image from the HDR, modify it in an image editor like PS, then apply to a plane...
thanks. I mean the environment dome, I can get it blurred at some point, but I can´t make the focus are mpre narrow and it's still not that out of focus.
I think Gedd is talking about using the HDR as the light source in the environment dome, but creating a plane with the HDR *image* stuck to it. Place that behind your model, and adjust the distance and DOF to get it defocused.
OR
Take a render with HDR draw on. That serves as your background. Now turn the drawing off (your HDR is still lighting the scene), and render again, this time with the default transparent background. Composit in Photoshop or any graphics program that supports layers and transparencies. In Photoshop you can apply whatever blur to the background as you like.