In production HDRI Central Park NYC , some quick tests. 

 

So I have two renders I can't decide between now. The first is the first one I made and I'm done fiddling with it for now until I figure out what else I want to do to it. The other is one I made and showed to my DeviantArt first because I couldn't decide if I wanted to enter it or not. Finally decided I'll just post both and see which one looks best here. Did some custom texture work for a birthmark on the new one to make my friend's description of her character:

Care for a Drink?

 

Shadowed Killer

I like both works you present here and I like how different you approachd the topic with them.

Let me start with the dark one. Nice use of a spot in darkness theme and it suits the character. Still I think your character would win with a touch of backlight pushin his putlines a bit

With the other one you went a bit too monochrome with the tones and the light. You have a niceh use of DOF and thw overall lighting on the character seems nice, but I would like to see him set off the backwall a bit more ( darken the backwall / reduce the light hitting the backwall there are always several options)

Yeah that wall has been pissing me off this whole time. XP What would you suggest for a better way to make the central figure pop against it? Maybe change it to a dark mahogany wood or just darker stone or just fiddle with the lights some more?

Looking back at what I've written, I'm surprised you could even read that with all the typos...;)

First thing I would do is check the lights, I assume you use iray? What kind of illumiation do you have, is is possible to reduce the spread angle? Tilt the direction or move it a tad foreward? Can you just put up a plane out of sight blocking the light from hitting the back wall?

If all that is not working because of the sort of light setup you use, I would go to the backwall surface and turn the diffuse colour to a medium grey and see what it looks like. If you like the tone but not the appearance the next step would be a different shader like you suggested.

So I have two renders I can't decide between now. The first is the first one I made and I'm done fiddling with it for now until I figure out what else I want to do to it. The other is one I made and showed to my DeviantArt first because I couldn't decide if I wanted to enter it or not. Finally decided I'll just post both and see which one looks best here. Did some custom texture work for a birthmark on the new one to make my friend's description of her character:

Care for a Drink?

 

Shadowed Killer

I like both works you present here and I like how different you approachd the topic with them.

Let me start with the dark one. Nice use of a spot in darkness theme and it suits the character. Still I think your character would win with a touch of backlight pushin his putlines a bit

With the other one you went a bit too monochrome with the tones and the light. You have a niceh use of DOF and thw overall lighting on the character seems nice, but I would like to see him set off the backwall a bit more ( darken the backwall / reduce the light hitting the backwall there are always several options)

Yeah that wall has been pissing me off this whole time. XP What would you suggest for a better way to make the central figure pop against it? Maybe change it to a dark mahogany wood or just darker stone or just fiddle with the lights some more?

An interesting thing happened.  I noticed that Daz imports FBX files.  So in Cinema 4D, I exported my model in an FBX format and here's where its interesting...  Daz imported the model without textures but it imported each polygon individually.  It even imported the HyperNurbs nomenclature from the Cinema 4D object manager.  Expected Daz to explode or form a hole in the space time continuum.  But all seems well.  This at least provides me a workaround since I can redo the model to put the textures in exactly how I want.  (And I'm about 70 percent certain the only reason its not exporting my textures is because of the noob folder system I'm using where I pull all my textures from a central repository.)

The import process seems really detailed and from what i understand it can import animation and rigging from Daz to Cinema 4D so there's the distant possibility of doing my animated rendering in Cinema 4D's renderer.

The big question now is, why isn't everyone doing it? Why is anyone with any of the major 3d suites even messing with .obj files at all?  What little poop from heaven is about to descend upon me?   

@th3Digit be carefull not to get the PC wet when doing that!           

One of Phillip Drawbridge's Star Ship (Deep Space Heavy Cruiser) and mmoir's BMF Landscape Pack

Here is the same ship sunken to the ocean floor

and this is a whole city I made using the Distant City Background distance preset for the above mmoir BMF Landscape Pack. It loads back in the distance but when I looked at it up close, I decided to try it out as a central city environment... looks cool!

I started out making a concept ( well a first one) for a possible story I got in mind, just trying to get a hang of the character and the settings first ( and then I wonder if I got the long breath to go through with it.

So here is my first and central character and a rough idea of the environment. Not very finetuned render but it should be enough for this, Iray, no postwork. The character ia a mingel mangel from several g3f and some dialspinning plus  lunaskin that wnet through skinbuilder3

Yay an upcoming story from Linwelly!! Please please please =)

The render looks awesome, can't exactly make out what she's doing though? Climbing out or going in? Or *River Song voice* "spoilerzz"?

As I understand it Windows 10S is designed as a reply to Chromebooks, hoping to regain lost ground in education and perhaps in other markets where simple computers accessing a central server have made inroads.

This is how I'm seeing Win10S as well.  I'm a network admin for company with offices in multiple countries, as well as multiple call centers.  We are constantly fighting against users installing unapproved crapware on our systems (there's a balance between how tightly you lock a machine down yet not have to spend all of your time at said machine unlocking things that are necccessary but were blocked by the security rules, our company policy is to err on being more permissive so we don't have to spend as much of our time holding the users hand).  It would definitely be nice to have an OS we can roll out and not have to worry about.  Unfortunately, it won't really work for us right now, we do have programs that we have to use that are not, and probably will never be, part of the UWP.  Although, come to think of it, we could use this right now at the conventions we put on for our associates where we have to supply computers for them to use to access our website and it's apps.  This would definitely simplify setup for those.

As I understand it Windows 10S is designed as a reply to Chromebooks, hoping to regain lost ground in education and perhaps in other markets where simple computers accessing a central server have made inroads.

I forgot Linwelly, do you run a hi-speed NVIDIA GPU or do you follow in the steps of those courageous people like Chanteur and use the CPU for Iray?

Since last christmas I am the happy owner of a NVIDIA GTX 1060. So not the biggest and fastest around but it is very comfortable. I couldn't bring myself to use Iray much when I was still on CPU only, as I'm not the most patient person around...

I'll need to remember that. Somehow you don't strike me as "not the most patient person", quite the other way. =)

Great renders, as usual =)

One nitpick: there are splashes underneath the bench as well. But I guess it's a limitation of that rain product?

Lol, yes that eloped my attention, with some adjusting and postioning I could have avoided that but well there is is now :)

I started out making a concept ( well a first one) for a possible story I got in mind, just trying to get a hang of the character and the settings first ( and then I wonder if I got the long breath to go through with it.

So here is my first and central character and a rough idea of the environment. Not very finetuned render but it should be enough for this, Iray, no postwork. The character ia a mingel mangel from several g3f and some dialspinning plus  lunaskin that wnet through skinbuilder3

Hi All,

I've almost finished a city park set that I'll submit to DAZ for sale. Willow Park itself is a roughly 60x30m trapezoid, with willow trees, grassy areas, sidewalks, benches, street lamps, trash cans, and a central statue. It's bordered by three streets and a river -- with one street extending over the river via a stone bridge -- and surrounded by seven building facades. Each building facade has both default low-res texture maps and optional high-res maps for shots where that building is in-frame, in-focus, and close enough to see texture details.

The total ground plane is about 120x80m. I tried to place the buildings and trees to block distant sightlines, but many camera angles still show an edge of the ground plane, and the sky goes all the way down to the horizon. So I'd like to find (or create) a skydome with buildings in the middle-distance (beyond the ground plane) out to the horizon, so it looks as if the park is in a larger city. If DAZ has such a product, I can use that for my promo renders and cite it in the promo text. If DAZ doesn't, I'll need to make my own.

Any ideas?

Thanks for your help,

CrissieB

When I lived in Florida, I lived on the central east coast in Melbourne.  I often made motorcycle trips to Orlando in the center of Florida about 65 miles away.  The road between Melbourne and Orlando (US-192) goes  east-west through river plains, swamps and cattle ranges all dead flat and unpeopled for about 50 of those miles.  On the nights coming back from Orlando and still about 30 miles away from Melbourne I could see the glow of the coastal cities from Cocoa Beach 20 miles north of Melbourne to Palm Bay 20 miles south of Melbourne.  The sky directly overhead was pretty dark and starry but the eastern horizon was obscured by the glow of the unbroken line of coastal cities.  And of course behind me the lights of the Orlando metropolitan area obscured the western horizon. 

Unfortunately, in Florida it's often so humid and dewey at night that the stars are sometimes dimmed out by the moisture in the air.  Although sometimes overhead out in the swamps, or standing on the beach looking east out over the Atlantic ocean on dry nights they are amazing.

I was waiting for a gift card offer and the other day one came along, so to trigger it I got Wild Arums - A wild flower bundle for Daz Studio. I combined it with grass and weeds from G3D-DA Grass and Plant Pack and a tree trunk from Dark Trees Pack 1.  The central white and red flowers are from wild arums while the surrounding foliage and the fallen tree are from the grass and plant pack. Here are two  IRay renders, the first without DOF and the second with DOF. The sets combine together nicely and give a nice lush setting.

...I've had requests for my Leela character but I have similar feelings about releasing her or even the settings I use, considering I have been developing and refining her over several years from Gen 4 (when there were no teen characters) to the current G2 version.

She is also the central character for a story I am working on.

I take it thats your Avatar? Thought she was from that Disney movie a few years back, but quite cute. : )

 

...actually my Icon is Merida from the film Brave.

This is Leela (G3 version)

This looks great!

Will there be a companion product for Michael 8?

Thank you. Yes, there will be one for Genesis 8 Males then too.

Muscles don't grow extra mass when flexing, furthermore the anatomy is not real accurate, as biceps/muscles don't grow in mass like that, while the deltoids remain unchanged...This would work well for the toon characters though, but not for realistic characters like V8/Genesis 4, you would need to learn anatomy in order to improve your product. Great effort though, but it's too unrealistic for such a realistic character and needs much more work.

I would head on over to ZBrush central for some incredibly useful tips as they're masters of this craft and will really help your work immensely! 

Thanks for your comment. This is not only a "flexing" add on but a "muscle mass" add on too. Mainly a muscularity add on. 

Well, to explain the unrealism in the promos showing all muscles flexed/grown. For the promos the dials are completely dialed in at 100 per cent, this is the reason why the mass is that big. And the promos show all dials dialed in together to display them better. I would have needed 50 promos or so to display each muscle in different stages of flexing and mass :) 
I know that it is impossible in real life to flex all those muscles at the same time and with that intensity (therefore the bodybuilders for instance have different poses for each muscle or muscle group), but it was the only way to display them without having 50 promos. 
Since you can dial in all individually you can achieve the results you want I think. For the deltoids for instance there are 3 dials (lateral, posterior and anterior) so you can adjust it exacly as you need it, for instance for your example, you dial in the biceps a little but leave the deltoids unchnaged. The promos are just to display which muscles are affected, so all have been dialed in. 
The first image shows only biceps dialed in some, flexor a little and triceps a little. The second shows deltoid flexing for all regions of it. (well the front area it is not visible here in that render) Maybe this is something more you expected? 

Muscles don't grow extra mass when flexing, furthermore the anatomy is not real accurate, as biceps/muscles don't grow in mass like that, while the deltoids remain unchanged...This would work well for the toon characters though, but not for realistic characters like V8/Genesis 4, you would need to learn anatomy in order to improve your product. Great effort though, but it's too unrealistic for such a realistic character and needs much more work.

I would head on over to ZBrush central for some incredibly useful tips as they're masters of this craft and will really help your work immensely! 

...I've had requests for my Leela character but I have similar feelings about releasing her or even the settings I use, considering I have been developing and refining her over several years from Gen 4 (when there were no teen characters) to the current G2 version.

She is also the central character for a story I am working on.

I take it thats your Avatar? Thought she was from that Disney movie a few years back, but quite cute. : )

HI Mitovo :)

If you just want to move two objects together so that they are in contact,. you can switch on (collision detection) and move one object until it touches the other and stops.

Each model's Hot point, is the central rotation and movement axis point,. rather than a physical part of the model.

There are many ways to arrange objects in carrara,. such as replicators,. or distribution maps,. or groups,. or Poses, which save the position of an object,.

You can select an object,. (hold shift) and select another object,. then go to EDIT / Align ,. then select the options for how you want to align those two objects.

use Collision detection,to move two objects together until they're touching.  ..then remember to turn collision detection off again,. it can slow things down.

 

I agree and collision detection has worked for me in the past.

...OK so i know sports isn't a fave topic here (I really miss Ed), however, I am suprised, pleased, and somewhat amused that my Milwaukee Brewers have been on top of the National League Central division for over a month. Particularly so, as before the season, the sports pundits projected they'd be the division's "cellar dwellers" for most of the season. They won again today extending their lead on the 2nd place World Series champion Chicago Cubs who lost to Miami.

I like sports but I tend to follow a very few teams. Baseball lost me as a fan when when the players' greed intercoursed the fans over, although I did enjoy watching the Cubs win a pennant in my lifetime.  My brother is a fan of the round football, so I catch a lot of those games, usually while rendering. 

...yeah I agree, free agency and big money ruined all pro sports. It's no more the "love of the game" as it is the "love of the big fat contract". 

I loved baseball when I was growing up in the 50s & 60s.  I remember sitting in the bleachers at old County Stadium with one of the great legends of the game, Hank Aaron standing there in the outfield right in front of us. Was a member of the local parks department "Knothole Club" where 25¢ (later 50¢) got you the bus trip and a game ticket in the right field bleachers (Aaron's usual position).

Played in high school but didn't stick with it in college as I went into music and was afraid to injure my hands.  In some ways I feel it was a mistake as I probably could have at least made the minors had I stuck with it.  Tall with a good "wingspan" (not unlike Randy Johsnon), I was a pretty decent pitcher though more of a "junkball" than fastball specialist (my "mentor" was the Milwaukee Braves' Warren Spahn).  Also, not too bad at the plate either.   Back then unless you were "shelled" in the first couple innings, pitchers would "go the distance"  more often (pitching a complete game) unlike today when starters are routinely pulled by the 6th or 7th inning (hence why I probably have left shoulder issues).

That music career? It pretty much went nowhere.

3delight doesn't have a central "draw dome" setting, which is partly why I was querying it. Which dome are you using, and wat settings are you making?