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All I have to say is "Wow!" It is really gorgeous. :D Nice job!
did that for some reason maybe just put it here i guess!!?
@daybird
I think it would help if you cropped in and removed the light sources at the top right. Have a look at the suggested crop attached. Notice how the dark areas don't seem quite as dark anymore? It also removes that large and empty black space at top left and takes the figure away from a completely central position. A nice triangle of light leading the eye to and from her face and hands is formed by the figure's bright face and the guns blazing. With the bright street lamp above and the huge area of light from the window included, the eye is taken away from the action and wanders out of the image. Some brighter ambient light streaming down from this same area above but out of the image's frame might also help seperate your main figure from the background and improve the depth of the image. The foreground is looking good with the out-of-focus guard caught in mid-pose falling down, but the middle and background look flat. Perhaps you could even try rotating the image slightly to pull your main figure over to the left more? I like that your figure is looking up and out of the image, suggesting that there is a lot more going on that we can't see, creating tension and inviting us to imagine. Keep going with this!
Ouch, that must hurt a lot! The metal wire-frame underneath the desk is running straight through her legs..
I can see where you're going with this and it's promissing! You should have a look at the first post and the Golden Rulles (of Thirds, Golden Ratio, etc.) on how to make your composition more interesting or intriguing.
And then play with the lighting. As the girl's at the back of the room, there's likely only lights in the ceiling in front of her which could make for interesting shadows on the back wall. Maybe a sun light from a window, too. That would really make this picture come to life!
Right now it appears you have two main lights – all at eye-level or lower as it seems – casting some faint shadows:
There's a lot of room in this pic to play with that and create some ceiling lights casting some more real life looking shadows on the wall!
Hope this helps!
@daybird
@IceDragonArt
@sidhe_touch
Thank you for your encouragements!
Hi
After looking at all the comments here and other posts I went away and rethought my entry for the comp. Here is my latest effort. Please be kind I have only been using Daz for little over a week. I'm completely new to this.
I call the render "Amazment". I used Daz3d and GIMP for post work.
Forgive me if someone else already asked, but why the mic stand? Its not, IMO, adding to the composition in its current position. Take that away, I like the composition a lot, though I would give some (more?) z-axis tilt to the camera.
So you've gone the oposite way, which is a valid proposition if you want both figures to get attention. The way it works now, the rear figure gets my attention first, and then I'm draw to the front. It's a really nice flow, actually.
For the eyes: One spotlight, turned to either a circle or square (brightness is going to entirely depend on the other lights in your scene, but its going to be a lot less bright than the rest since it only exists to do this one thing), boost the spread angle to at least 90 degrees. Plop it right in front of her face and see if you get something. If you don't, your materials need work. If you do, manipulate that one light to get what you want.
I am glad you see and like the flow of the image. I want the viewer's eye to travel lefft to right, and then (ideally) down the foreground figure's arm. For what it's worth, the foreground figure's face is alinged with the face of the foreground figure in the photo. . . . Now to get that spotlight working . . .
Still can't let this alternate view go...any help or advice (or even therapy) welcomed. One thing I'm struggling with is that I'm zoomed in so far every control is super sensitive and even minor changes are getting hard to tweak. Is there a way to reset the scale of the Daz interface without impacting everything in the scene? It feels like I'm trying to do molecular level work with pliers...
I'm assuming that this is the WIP thread for this month's contest. This is what I'm working on.
That's interesting, but awful busy. With the paralell lines leading me off into the distance, all I can see are those giant clouds. Literally everything points me in that direction. You've got to break up those lines somehow, and I wouldn't place your two figures on or so close to the two-thirds lines. There's nothing to focus on here. You need to find something to draw the focus where you want it... the shooter or the shootee? One of them has to be the dominant figure.
Not to say that there's not some nice stuff here, its dynamic, its pretty (in a way) and the materials pop. But as a composition... its tough.
I'm really liking this a lot!
Try switching to perspective view and using that to move around the scene and not your camera. I don't know if that will help or not but I have a bad habit of moving my main camera after I have the perfect position. And I don't know if the perspective view will help with how sensitive everything has become. You may try going into smooth textured mode as well, that may help a bit, although it looks a bit odd if you aren't used to it.
Try rotatating the camera for a different view. I really like where this is going, a more dramatic camera angle may make this more dynamic. You might also want to make the guy who got shot look more... shot, like the bullet hit him hard enough to knock him off his feet. I'm struggling to explain what I mean, his arms thrown back more or his back arched more...
She is a G3F character. I modified the pose of her arm from the collar to the forearm, does it look better now? I don't see much difference...
Nope, I don't think anyone mentioned it. I don't really have an answer. I just thought I liked it there. I have been debating getting rid of it, though, when I redo the render. I've gotten some good suggestons and I'm definitely going to be working on it some more. Thanks. Always a pleasure to get your input. Thanks for the comment on the composition. I struggle with composition a LOT. I'm never quite sure that I've 'got' it.
That's actually an interesting perspective with the addition boat in the foreground. It totally changes the perspective. Not a good thing or a bad thing, just different. Personally, I like the other image better, but there are things that I like about this image, too. It kind of reminds me of take on Gulliver's Travels. I don't know why that popped into my head but there it is. There is nothing that says you can't work on two images even if they are similar or were morphed from the same basic image. Artists change perspective all of the time. My advice is to work on both and see which one ends up being your favorite. There is still about two weeks left to work on images. If you can't let it go, there is a reason why you need to work on this version. If you want therapy, work on the image. That's the best kind of therapy there is for an artist. :)
It does look a bit better. Its subtle but it looks more like an elbow now. Weird that it would do that on G3
Thank-you, both for the encouragement and the suggestion...I'll try it tonight and see if I can speed up progress.
Thank-you...we'll keep working on it as therapy then. It seems like I'm following the image as it evolves, instead of driving the ship (he said, mixing his metaphors horribly). I have forked the images - in trying to get the composition right on this one, I had to cheat and diverge from the original 'outside' view. And change the lighting. And adjust the background. And... My original "cunning plan" was to have two cameras, and get two images for the work of one...
Thank-you for sharing that, Shinji. I was away for a few days, and just catching up on past comments, and saw this. You just made my night.
Hi Sirius. I really like this concept and where you're taking it. Given your handle, I surely hope the telescope is pointed at certain bright stars in Canis Major ;-)
The only suggestion I'd make would be to tone down the brightness of the objective lens. Either by changing the light that's shining on it, or by modifying it's Shader to make it less shiny reflective if you can. Keep going - I look forward to seeing this unfold...
Another face-palm moment...was this perspective view there all along??? Extremely useful tool and much smoother. I still have to hand tweak my camera setting (I know...Captain Obvious), but otherwise zooming around to change things is much faster and easier.
I really like how this is evolving - and as others have mentioned, the guard on the floor really adds to the story. My $0.02 would be on the muzzle flashes. The star pattern is formed by the flash suppressor on a rifle, and also they imply both pistols are fired at precisely the same time. Since the guard is on the floor and she's looking elsewhere, unless she's spraying and praying (and if I remember Underworld, the cartridges were quite special) she probably fired at the guard first then the next one. Maybe reduce the muzzle flash on the pistol facing the downed guard and give a sense of sequence to the shots fired. Hope that's helpful (I don't know art...but I survived Infantry School).
Therapy Time continues...
I added a lantern to be a 'light source' on the ship and in doing so, introduced a different hue to the middle-ground. A complete accident, but I'm going to claim I did it to add a pallete/hue difference between the middle and back grounds. Yeah...that's the ticket... It also passes my test of being a noticeable change in a thumbnail view. Also, to explain my intent here, in case it's not obvious (and to solict help in making it obvious, or at least noticable) this is zoomed into the deck of the ship in a bottle in the front corner of the original work. I'm still trying to get the reflections off the inside of the bottle to work to make it clearly the case.
As always, any and all feedback and comments are welcome.
I probably enjoy fiddling too much but I'd like to get some tips to try and improve the detail on my figure's mouth. The little specular highlights on the lips are kind of noisy and distracting. I figure they should be a bit smoother and I was wondering if there was a way in the render settings, perhaps in the filter settings, to do this, rather than fixing it in Photoshop? The lower edge of the bottom lip should be in shadow too but it has rendered a bright line underneath. The image was rendered with the Iray engine. Anyone?
I have been working on this for several days, and have started over so many times.... And this is what I ended up with.
It took a while for me to get the lighting and her clothing the way I wanted for quite a while. For her clothing, I wanted a wet and torn kind of look. I used this product for the shirt > Boyfriend T-Shirt Wet and Dry for Genesis 3 Female(s) and I used cut out in order to make the shirt appear torn. then I made the jeans look as muddy as I could. I don't exactly remember what I did to do that, I was in the "zone" at the time, lol.
I also couldn't decide whether to make the background with rain or not.
When I finally decided to let it render I decided to stop it halfway so I could make sure that I was doing it right.
So what do you think so far, should I let it continue rendering?
I have been working on this for several days, and have started over so many times.... And this is what I ended up with.
It took a while for me to get the lighting and her clothing the way I wanted for quite a while. For her clothing, I wanted a wet and torn kind of look. I used this product for the shirt > Boyfriend T-Shirt Wet and Dry for Genesis 3 Female(s) and I used cut out in order to make the shirt appear torn. then I made the jeans look as muddy as I could. I don't exactly remember what I did to do that, I was in the "zone" at the time, lol.
I also couldn't decide whether to make the background with rain or not.
When I finally decided to let it render I decided to stop it halfway so I could make sure that I was doing it right.
So what do you think so far, should I let it continue rendering?
I have been working on this for several days, and have started over so many times.... And this is what I ended up with.
It took a while for me to get the lighting and her clothing the way I wanted for quite a while. For her clothing, I wanted a wet and torn kind of look. I used this product for the shirt > Boyfriend T-Shirt Wet and Dry for Genesis 3 Female(s) and I used cut out in order to make the shirt appear torn. then I made the jeans look as muddy as I could. I don't exactly remember what I did to do that, I was in the "zone" at the time, lol.
I also couldn't decide whether to make the background with rain or not.
When I finally decided to let it render I decided to stop it halfway so I could make sure that I was doing it right.
So what do you think so far, should I let it continue rendering?
My guess is that you might be able to fix that by playing with some surface settings on the figure itself but I'm not positive. Which figure and makeup did you use? Was it with Iray materials or did you use a 3DL to Iray conversion? Also, what lighting setup are you using? Those kind of things can help us give you better answers.
It looks like a good start. Composition isn't my strong suit so I'll let others comment on that but, at first glance, it looks a good use of the rule of thirds. I like your surfaces but you may have the shirt a little too transparent. I'm not sure. I like the rain.
If you could edit your posts to fix the width of your image so that it is 800 px, that would much be appreciated as it is the preferred maximum width in these forums. You can find instructions on how to do this here and here.