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Ah, okay, we will try that again. See what the morphs do.
LOL. IT's dirty, because its a post apocalyptic future blizzard?
Okay, here is one little prop I really like. It's a steamy breath prop. If you click on your character the breath prop automatically parents to the characters head in the direct center. This will look weird head on (like in this screenie) but there are morphs to rotate it around. I think it is best used from the profile view since its a plane.. As you can see I used it on Owen and this injured civilian, but just showed you the wierdness so you understand it is flat.
In this image, I rendered the character so the breath prop looked more natural. I also added 3 snow drifts, and used the morph so each one was different. For Owen and the injured civliian I put snow on the boots using overlays. Because I felt the snow texture looked a touch 'samey' I Recommend doing another render of the body part, and erasing some of the snow texture away with an frost brush eraser so it looks less samey.
You'd expect a snow mound that size in a blizzard. For snow like you've made, scaled down and aligned in multiple instances along sidewalks & roads would look good.
I probably need to embrace the idea that I need to have a stormy or darker HDRI if I am to achieve results as in the promos... Unfortunately, darkness and my computer are not on speaking terms.
So this may be all the aspects I can explore at this present moment.
Overall, I like this, product. The shaders and props are quite useful. Definitely a useful product to add to my runtime.
Okay, here is my final image with the snow. I think it turned out very well. Especially the addition of the rescue dog. And I finally got to use Ron's powder for the snow drifitng off the injured medic's back.
that looks really good
That's really beautifully done.
Thanks guys! I'm glad I was able to try a product and get results I like. I think that turned out really well!
There are a couple of tutorials out there for using Photoshop to turn Day into Night - might get round your computer problems. Now if I can only remember which computer I bookmarked them on :-)
Sickleyield has a day-for-night/night lighting tutorial: https://www.deviantart.com/sickleyield/journal/Tutorial-Lighting-and-Rendering-Night-Scenes-750184269
That looks interesting, thanks. I will read it, I tend to find dark scenes in Iray just slow my machine to a crawl. In some ways this seems easier in 3dl. It isn’t so much I can’t make a scene dark, it’s just that I don’t have enough machine or time for the results. Dark scenes are memory munching on my laptop.
I love a interestingly contrasted dark scene but like you my machine is just too slow to do much experimenting to get interesting results when I try them. There is a difference between a dark scene with low contrast that just looks muddy and one with contrast that looks dramatic.
That snow scene turned out great, and I really enjoyed seeing how you acheived it. I actually love 'bright' snow scenes where you get blue or purple shadows
I agree! The problem I had with repetitive snow textures, is you do need to depth of field the scene, so the repeat patterning is not visible. In this case, I also did an overlay in lavender which is my go-to color to darken tthe snow in the areas that lacked interest. I felt that in doing this, it draws the eye inward. Otherwise, it is one color of white, and you tend to get a bit snow blind when staring at same-white texture.
This is the abandoned infirmary set. I just loaded it before bed to see what we are talking about, since I was doing a batch of renders overnight. It is very dark in the abandoned infirmary. So I added Boyd-bot (Ready for combat), and the alien male that came with Nix whose texture is very dark. also added lights from Luminousity Black which I really like.
This set is very cool, just eerie inside. Even with the lightbulbs though, you'll have to add more light... Or it will be nearly black in there.
In general, Boyd doesn't pilot android bodies. They aren' efficient in combat, as other robotic shapes and he prefers flight. I also didn't want people to think Boyd was a cyborg or robot. He's a brain, so I limit the time he spends in humanoid bodies because I don't want the same story of a person falling for a humanoid robot which is a fairly common plot device. Boyd is in fact, body liberated, and so, not limited to one mechanical shape, and so I reflect that by having him assume various bods throughout his career.
Okay, everyone has this kind of set. Something you buy, thinking it looks cool, and then you have some problem with it, or don't get a render out of it you like, and you put it on the shelf. That set for me is Destroyed Hospital.
I was wowed by the promos, but I think at the time when I bought it, Iray was still pretty new to me and I had trouble with it.
By default it loads with a very dark screen, with some green (water)? on the floor plane.
To make life easier for me, I'm adding a dark sky backdrop, since only a bit of sky is visible outside the beatup wall.
Okay, not the best view for my default camera, but what can I do. To lighten the scene, I'm loading up luminousity black. I go under Mesh lights and use number 04 full moon preset. Things are looking better and I can actually see in there.
This room we are in is basically a flooded reception room. The building is an interior only, and there are two 'enclave' areas which have side areas, where there are additional chairs. Although the room appears to be flooded, the gurney is sitting on top of the water, although the reception and the door seem to be mired in water. I am confused.
The vine plants show a high degree of realism on the walls, which is in contrast with these leafy trees which I don't like as shown on the left.
This view shows the side view of a reception area/additional space. I like the rebar sticking out of the walls, although there is one of those weird trees.
Okay, so lets bring on the blizzard shaders.
Here is the main reception room. I'm sorry, but my iray preview window gets a bit bogged down, so its not as crisp as I like. I think the gurneys are a touch too big and tall. I used Overlay shaders for everything but the floor. There I used a complete shader. I figure you wouldn't see green water underneath if it is frozen. You can however see footprints thanks to the shader I chose having premade footprints added into it.
Here is that side room all iced up. Those little trees look great covered in snow.
Iray Blizzard does not contain an ice preset. But if you own Snow and Ice, you can recolor the floor ice instead. Unfortunately, this is quite reflective and too intense for my iray preview.
That looks really cool. Can you push the gurney down so that it's properly under the water? Seems a bit odd that the default load of the set has it sitting on top of the water surface.
Yes, will do that. The gurney is also kinda big. Its not just perspective. It looks better when its smaller and submerged.
Apologies for interrupting. You mentioned a while back that you wanted some more shaping morphs, and these are on sale today only (allegedly): https://www.daz3d.com/ej-body-shape-and-detail-morphs-for-genesis-8-male-s
On topic-ish: The overlay shaders you mentioned, are those part of Iray Blizzard? (I have it, but I've got umpteen different things going on, none of which involve needing to put snow anywhere, so I haven't had a chance to look at it.)
I don't suppose we could convince you to assemble these tutorials in dA journal pages so that they're all in one place where we could locate them?
Yes. If you go to the root props directory and open the kindred arts folder you will find the blizzard set. Inside they have sorted the shaders into two kinds, overlay which adds snow over your existing texture and complete shaders (I forget the specific name since i am not in front of my computer at present) which are of the classic variety and cover the whole surface.
i can create a journal entry at some point. I’m not sure these are tutorials precisely but explanatory missions. I figure since I’m doing it I might as well let everyone see it.
thanks for the morphs. I will pick those up.
Okay, so this may be interesting for those interested in PS and using Postwork. You should know by now, that I love doing postwork, and due to hardware limitations, it is a mainstay for the way I look and want my art to appear.
This is my basic render. It is a flawed render- I should have depth of fielded it and added more stuff... So lets see what I can do to make it look more visually interesting.
Owen is fighting two alien women in the snow in our abandoned hospital. He has managed to knock over one combatant, but her companion is prepared to strike.
1. First fix any obvious flaws. In this case, I repaired owen's scalp, which sometimes pops through his hair. I also take the opportunity to brighten the image a bit.
2. Secon the image even though I followed the rule of thirds has a lot of single color in it. I want to draw the eye to what matters, and diminish what doesn't matter in my shot.
The thing that is interesting in the image is Owen and the women. So what I want to do is add some color to break the white monotony and diminish the disinteresting qualities.
3. Make a new layer. Using purple/lavendar color the areas which you want shadier and to have more color. (See screenshot) I use a big brush, and if you accidentally paint something you can erase it.
4. Change the purple layer blending mode to darken, and drop opacity down to where it can barely be seen. In this case, 15 percent.
5. This was not enough for me, so I do this again. This time, with a bluer Periwinkle color. I make the layer style darken and drop it down to 5 percent.
6. We have now added some color to the snow, while encouraging the eye to follow the action.
7. Using this same method, I wish to add shadow to my render, and interest to things in the background. So I do this again, this time using black to add some shadows where there are none. I now drop the black layer to 29 percent. Blending mode darken.
8. The door now is shadowed, and the area around the reception desk, but not enough! I do it again.
9. So I do another black layer. And add more details. I set this layer to 10 percent and choose darken.
10. This looks better to me so I'm going to stop messing with shadow layers. I like the ominous feel of the picture and the shadow in the archway near the hospital door.
11. For parts I want to emphasize, such as eyes, armor, and shiny pieces I create a new layer. Using white I color those areas. Mode should then be switched to Overlay, and you can drop the opacity down until it looks natural. In this case 52 pecent opacity.
12. As a general rule of thumb, white will lighten, black will darken in overlay mode. You can now see that Owen's armor is brighter where I want it, and that the girls have streaks in their hair.