Post Your Renders - #4: A New Hope
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FYI: I made a new page in my manual for David Brinnen's Bryce Tutorial Links so they won't get lost in the shuffle :)
Thanks David...
You R O C K ! ! !
Um... personally... I'd get a great velvet in the bump channel of a shader... but I commend the experiment.
"I didn't SAY that... I was just agreeing with Garstor! Carrara!"
Hi Garstor,
Thought I would chip in as I have been quietly following some of the discussion. The first thing that struck me was the thickness setting for your hair - you have it on very large when I would go no higher than medium for velvet hairs. Also your length appears to be .03m which looks to me like metres - so 3cm, which is far too long. I would have thought around 1mm (or .001m). Keep the length in the shader as 100% and use the length parameter in the hair group to make the adjustment. See how that looks! I like how your scene is developing.
Just an additional thought - unless you are going to have a real close-up of the velvet, I would also look at a shader approach, with noise in the bump channel. Have a look at Sparrowhawke's Edge Falloff shader (in plugins/The Laboratory) as this can give that colour variation according to the viewing angle made to the camera which is typical of velvet. (or Fake Fresnel in DSG's Shader Ops).
Right unless, of course, it is the hair of the velvet that is the ultimate focus of the shot - like wee characters running through it.
Thanks guys! I appreciate the feedback and suggestions.
3 centimeters is certainly too long; no argument here. The UI doesn't give you any hints that it accepts less than 1 cm though...it "rounds" out to 0.0 m when you type in "0.001."
The velvet isn't meant to be the main focus -- the "crushed sapphires" V4 statue is -- so I'll keep the pure shader approach in the back of my head. The cool thing here is that I'm playing with new things and learning a bit more to boot. :)
Back to it!
Thanks. I hope these screen scrapes show enough info -- because as you can see in the third picture, it just got a whole lot worse... :lol:
As I'm not at home ATM I won't be able to do much until later, but for the moment:
The 0.03m for length seems very long, though it could be misleading if you've used other means to shorten the hairs (such as reducing length of guide hairs). I'd probably use 1/16" or similar.
Thickness of very large? Then scaled by 1.5? That won't look like velvet... Medium with a scale of 1.0 to 2.0.
4 segments should be fine and hair count will depend on the size and area of coverage.
The root and tip color look reasonable. The thickness is a matter of taste, but one benefit of the default 100%/10% setting is that the hairs have decent coverage of the object at the root while narrowing down enough to have the ragged edge suggesting fuzz. Really, you're after effect with this, not necessarily reality, so I wouldn't worry about what actual velvet fiber taper looks like. One way to think of it is that each strand represents a "clumped cluster" of fibers.
I'm guessing about the length from the spheres, but it looks like you have too much length variation. With a proper length set for the hair group you will generally want to leave the length itself at 100%. The length variation sets the maximum amount that a hair strand can have its length reduced. For velvet I'd leave it at zero or at least not more than 10%. Significant variation is going to make it look ragged.
There is something peculiar about your render. Hair strands consist of hexagonal cylinders -- in your case there would be four of them stacked, each with its own color. These hairs appear to be more flattened than cylindrical. Maybe its an artifact of the very large strands -- I don't think I've ever used that size (mostly Large and Medium).
Note: you can set the number of digits displayed (for most widgets) as a scene parameter. I forget the tab name, but it is in the assembly room, select scene and (I think) Interface tab.
I don't have either product (I have DCG's Enhance: C) but I don't understand fresnel effects anyway so I wouldn't know what to look for! ;-P
I don't have either product (I have DCG's Enhance: C) but I don't understand fresnel effects anyway so I wouldn't know what to look for! ;-P
DCG's Fresnel is in Shader Ops, and is very handy for edge or non-edge effects of rounded surfaces. For example, set the color to black, then in the alpha channel set it to Inverse (another DCG/Shader Ops) then Fake Fresnel. Change the fake fresnel slider to suit. Not home or I'd post an example...
Very nice, to be sure. But you should be able to get great results with a bare bones version of Carrara.
The suggested shaders (which mimic a Fresnel effect) allow differences between surfaces that are viewed face on to those that are viewed edge on. For red velvet, you need a pinkish tone for the face on, and a deep red for the edges. This should give a nice velvet effect. You can use gradients for more complex effects too. I once created a shader which applied to a sphere looked like an eye that always looks at you!
And anyone doubting that should look at Tim Payne's work. I am in awe. That said, using plugins can be very helpful in getting things done. This is just a test render that has a lot of other things going on, but it does demonstrate the kind of mixing you can get with fake fresnel.
Garstor, I'll try and play a little with the hair as well. The nice thing about Carrara is that many time there's more than one way to skin a polygon! If the hair is to much of a PITA there's also the shader route mentioned by others.
For the rope, I would rig it with bone 1 starting at one end and the other bones going to the other end. I would set the joints to ball joints and also use IK. I would line the rope up with the first bone positioned to where it would "connect" to one of your posts. You could even parent the rope to the post. The last bone at the end of the rope could be set to track a helper object which would be lined up with the other post you want the rope connected to. Simply move the helper object to the position where the rope is supposed to connect, and the rig should follow. If it bends a way that you don't want, such as up or to the side, select a bone from the middle of the rig and pull it downwards.
If you've DLed my hose from ShareCG it's set up in a similar manner to what I described above. When I'm done rendering my current project I'll play around and see if I can help.
EDIT: Using two red colours and the Spots pattern set to size 0. I turned on Reflection (very slightly) just to use the Fresnel slider...I still have no idea what it is doing (if anything).
I'll grab that and check it out because bones are my new nemisis at the moment. Here's the new model (not too different from before), bone-free currently, procedural shader:
That looks very nice Garstor!
Thanks! It's not too shabby from a distance...now to see if I can get it hanging naturally.
Very cool, both of you Garstor and Thoromyr.
Squire Gars, I'm really loving what thou hast done to yon room. The King will be pleased with your progress.
Brass with Red velvet was a great choice. He will be pleased!
Thormyr,
I'm really liking the look in your animals' eyes. The wolf wants to kill... you can just see it.
I'm playing around with some mmoir stuff as we speak. Did you use BMF a a starting point for that field? Looks similar. I keep prodding him to make more products. If anyone's interested in seeing a true Carrara genius in action, check out those CMP threads going on - he is leading us into becoming, well.. we're all going to get good! All because of his insistence to use Carrara to make Everything! Harder to pull of... but so worth it. Hmmm... looking for a render to post, while I'm here.
Been playing around with the hair idea. A shader would render faster with GI, but in case you wanted to try, I created the hair with an empty grow region, then added a hair group and selected just the rope section, making sure I didn't select any of the polys on the end caps. I set the hair length to .125 inches. I left the guide segments alone. I set the hair count at 200,000 hairs. I didn't really do anything for the shader except color. I copied the color from the rope and pasted that into the root and tip, then lightened the tip color just a bit.
The rig for the rope was as I described in my previous post. When I set the last bone to track the target helper it want to bow up, so I selected a middle bone and dragged down. The rest of the rope followed.
I should note that when I set IK and constraints for something simple like this, I select the first bone, go to the Animation Menu-->Select the IK option and when the editor/dialogue box opens up I set the constraints to custom, I allow Carrara to apply constraints to the children and adjust the constraint rings to where I want them, then click OK, and all the bones have the same constraints as the parent. Very simple. A more complicated rig would require more direct editing of each bone's constraints. I changed the constraint wheels from locked to limited. It seemed to give a good range of motion without distorting the mesh.
Thanks again everyone!
I was just looking at evil's ShareCG garden hose (and his screen shot above) and I think a big problem that I'm having is far too few polys. So I am going back to the drawing board mathematically emboldened!
The hose uses 57 bones...I was using 10...so between that and the polys, it is no wonder I couldn't pose the velvet rope properly.
I don't understand the whole IK constraints thing yet...I'm guessing that is another Pandora's Box begging to be opened...
It's just a way of telling each bone how far they can rotate , translate, etc., It's a big box, but once you open it, well... it gets bigger! No... just kidding.
I great way to think of it is to open a figure, say V4 or M4. Without removing the constraints, the arms can only go so high. This is sey up so that the animator or pose creator doesn't accidentally pull it into a horrid-looking, distorted mesh pose. With constraints on, you can grab a bone, say the right shoulder, and grab the center of the rotation globe manipulator and twist away. It won't end up on the other side of Mike's body, etc.,
The more you play with it - the easier it becomes to understand. Now... setting it all up, like the wonderful explanation by EP above... that's a whole other ball game. Lots of options.
Thanks EP for that tip. Or rather... those tips.
BTW, I was waiting for you to finish talking about your velvet hair. You switched over to the rig part and never told us how the hair thing went :(
I may have stepped off the edge of the pier this time...now I have nearly 10,500 polys for my velvet rope. I also managed to Regular Extrusion (with a bit a scaling down along the way) to get a hook tip.
Now to get the bones in there again...
I hadn't set up my scene to render and had to go and make supper. I just finished the lights and am about to start rendering.
DeviantArt is not letting me upload these on Android for some reason, so I will lump you guys with viewing my renders of my fave "tween"age rampage 70's Glam band lead singer.
Very good renders Girl! Hey... isn't it like... three days away from Wendy's Birthday? I know it's here somewhere. I'm gonna celebrate now. The whole month... cuz me and Rosie are Feb babies too! :-P
HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!
HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!
I agree, Garstor's work is coming along.
Thanks for the compliment. What I really want to do is an animation using those animals to really show off the transparency. However, too little time and too many things I want to do so it's been back-burnered. Yes, I do believe it was an mmoir that I based that on. And in my current project the ground texture is derived from another of his shaders. Good stuff!
yes, indeed supposed to be the late Brian Connelly.
I am actually rendering a video but refraining from naming the likeness involved, maybe going to try a few of my old idols.
would love to be able to animate that pageboy bob hair that took a bit of styling but shudder to think what "simulate" would do!
Valentine's day for me, hit 50 last year so now they are all coffin countdowns :long:
but
Hope you and Rosie have great birthdays and a happy Valentine's day!
I don't think it's so much the vertices that run the length of the model but the ones that circle it. I kind of cheated with my rope. I'm more comfortable in the spline modeler, so I made it in there and converted it to a vertex model so I would have more freedom to add shading domains. The original spline model had only fifteen points along the length and my current rig has thirteen bones. After I posed the rope I went into the vertex modeler and turned on smoothing. It's only one level but it seemed to help round it a bit where the joints in the bones are located.
Here's my render. It's a pretty basic hack job, so hopefully it shows off the fur and the rigging- At least well enough to get an idea of what can be done.
Looks great - and... this is using dynoHairs?
yes, indeed supposed to be the late Brian Connelly.
I am actually rendering a video but refraining from naming the likeness involved, maybe going to try a few of my old idols.
would love to be able to animate that pageboy bob hair that took a bit of styling but shudder to think what "simulate" would do!
Valentine's day for me, hit 50 last year so now they are all coffin countdowns :long:
but
Hope you and Rosie have great birthdays and a happy Valentine's day!Rosie hit 50 the year before last. I'm still a pup going on 47 this time!
Sweet is one of my favorite bands!
I could tell immediately - it's perfect.. especially the hair... but the face, the pose, the clothing and background... you fricken nailed it!