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I love your Jaderail tribute. PERFECT. He would really chuckle about that (and asked if you put a spotlight on it, lol)
Thanks Cathie, I hope he would smile at the idea. And yes, lol, I'd bet he would get right in to talking about the lights.
Another picture I made for the contest on Dreamslayerartworks.com.
Kind of arrived at this image gradually, I thought of the framing first, and searched for a pose that would give me a good crouched down starting point and tweaked it... at the same time, I wanted to do some creature creator things and try a red skin. Then decided to actually have a person beneath, and slowly figured out the setting, which really started to make the picture different from my original idea. At that point it was a little strange, but I thought it could maybe go further and, well, I ended up here...
Just Need Your Eyeball
A new one. I've been trying things out with different sorts of light leaks and flares, trying to play with them. Be interested to know if anybody thinks they are a good direction or if they become distracting and take away from the image.
"Defying Gravity"
Great looking piece there. I love the prosthetic leg. I do notice something though. Is it me or are a couple of the pistons in the thigh missing piston rods?
You are absolutely right about that, not sure how I missed it. I spent a good bit of time applying different shaders to the leg parts, so I should have noticed. Could be I accidentally made something transparent, though I don't think so, or possibly more likely it could be an artifact of the fact that Cyborg M4 has been through autofit twice (once to G2M to use the M4 clone and then from G2M to G2F) and the pistons got distorted out of position.
An early test for something, using Stonemason's new Dirt Shader... which is right up there among the coolest shader products I've ever used.
Looking good. I have those shaders but haven't played with them yet.
Thanks Kismet2012, they definitely look great - though the specular controls behave a little differently than I expect, they seem to operate within a narrower range, though I may simply have not sorted out the proper variables yet. At the moment, even when dropping specular color to black and glossiness to zero, there still seems to be a pretty strong specular effect, just broadly spread out.
Here's the finished render that I was making the gargoyle for. (The material switched to the the "bronze patina" option, but is still using the dirt shaders)
Used Genesis creature creator for the statues and G2F creature creator for the girl. Also used Viking Male Hair, Divinity Skies Ascension, Epic Wings, Fantasy Ornaments, Degeneration, 5 Toadstool Lane, Dubious Pub, AoA advanced lights and cameras.
I think I like how it turned out.
"Away From the Monsters"
I like the horns and the skin texture. Thanks for posting the render.
Thanks starionwolf. It was actually my first time using the horns, and I was surprised how nice they are. For the skin texture, I used one that came with creature creator, but moved the bump maps to displacement and switched the overall shader to AoA subsurface.
I love the Away From the Monsters render and congrats for winning the monthly contest part one.
The Stonemason shader and Creature Creator shaders look great of course. The lighting is awesome too. What did you use (if you don't mind sharing your secret)?
Hey Luci - thanks muchly. :)
I think maybe the biggest lighting "secrets" if we want to call them that are the UberArea Light that is floating up just off her face that is giving her the nice moonlight glow and probably the wide-angle AoA advanced spotlights that are shining in the village to make little window/torch glow effects (I'm also using the AoA Easy Volume camera for the atmospherics in the village).
Overall there's about 7 lights that are active in the scene. 4 are Advanced Spotlights in the village, spaced about with falloff turned on and tagged as Foglights. Screenshot of their settings below. There's also 1 Advanced Ambient Light there in the village, also tagged as a foglight, and set to a very weak intensity of 6% - I wanted it to trigger a subtle sphere of light around the village to make a kind of overall village glow.
The village lights were actually too strong in the raw render, so I dimmed them further in post. Most of my post work focused on the village and the sky; the foreground needed very little in this case (EDIT - not entirely true, see below). Even with the EasyVolume creating fog, I interposed a layer of bluish cloudy haze between the foreground and the background in post. I'll post my raw spot render of the village that I used as that background layer.
The other two lights do not affect the EasyVolume Camera. They are an UE2 light that is blue and somewhat dim, and the AreaLight Disc I mentioned that's pointing at the girl. The screenshot shows a wider view of the scene so you can see where it is, and I'll post its settings. The settings for UE2 are from a Lantios Core Lighting set, with the other aspects of that preset (Distant Sun and Spec) turned off, and I don't know if I can post those settings. Hope that helps!
Ok - I reconsidered my statement that the foreground didn't need much post. It didn't need much, but it made a significant difference. Mainly, I brightened the overall image exposure to where I wanted, and then did a little bit of extra dodging on her legs and face. Possibly did some shadow things to the gargoyles.
Here is the side by side, raw spot render, and after post. I re-rendered the girl a bunch of times trying to get the skin right, so by the end, I was just doing spot renders over her body again and again with different adjustments to her skin and clothes and dropping those on top of the original render. You can see, at some point I did a smaller spot render of her arm to get rid of some of the armband because it was distracting me. I also did a spot render of her horn without any hair around it, layered that over the main one, and masked out areas to get hair strands going around the horn.
I'm rambling on a bit in hopes that some of this is useful or maybe interesting. :)
Thanks so much, Storypilot. Very useful and interesting! I do a lot of layering in postwork too, so hearing about all the "skin grafts" really helps.
Lighting always fascinates me and I am so happy to learn about several unique (to me anyway) things that you did. One is using Advanced Ambient Light at 6%. I didn't think that would do anything at that low level. Using EasyVolume with the Advanced Spotlights- I haven't used EasyVolume and I love volumetric lights. I tried unsucessfully using the Advanced Spotlights for pointlights once (I think he said to set them at 360 degrees) and gave up doing much more experimenting after that.
To me the strangest thing about the render is that I didn't see the village at all. I was just kind of subliminally aware of it. It has an enormous impact on the mood, as tiny and distant as it is. It is really cool that such a subtly brilliant render won over the second and third place winners, which were also excellent.
I'm kind of tired of doing things the same way render after render and it's time for me to try some new stuff. Your renders and explanations in this thread are so helpful!
Thanks again!
Very welcome! Glad to share, and thank you for the kind words. :)
I will add that I believe the only reason the Ambient Light does anything noticeable at that low level is because I'm using it in combination with the volumetrics over such a broad area so far away. There's a lot of "air" through which the small effect it has is able to accumulate. I started out with it at higher intensities, and was ending up with a giant yellow ball around the whole village because it would blow out the volumetrics there - so it was a discovery by trial and error for me, I'd never tried anything quite like that before.
Good luck with your experiments - I've been experimenting more lately, or trying to, and I feel like I'm making progress on the technical side with lighting and also with the way two figures (sometimes more) relate to one another in the scene, which is something I've been deliberately focusing on... even here where one of the two is a statue.
That makes sense. Just like using a fog camera. Is a fog camera affect a type of volumetric? I never thought of it that way because it doesn't slow renders down or affect lights in the same way.
About using figures together - that is the most important part to me. Your posing of the girl-creature with the gargoyle statues is very cool also. I don't know if it was intended but they seemed alive in a way and that she belonged with them.
Probably, I'd call fog cameras a kind of simple volumetric, they cheat with a simpler calculation - like you said, they don't compute the effects of light, they just add the fog color progressively with distance to get an basic effect, so that's why they don't add time. But they are trying to act like a volumetric with very even lighting.
I'm glad that came across with the gargoyles, I was hoping for something like that. :)
Was challenged to do the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge today. I donated to the ALS Association and opted to split my donation, giving a portion also to the CDC Foundation to contribute more broadly to public health programs. I encourage anybody to donate to a program of their choosing. Here are links to where I contributed:
http://www.alsa.org
http://www.cdcfoundation.org/givenow
I didn't do a video, I made this instead. Incidentally, it's my first DAZ self-portrait where I'm not a robot. :)
My newest picture, which I've been working on a little bit at a time for most of the month. I almost gave up on it several times, and it crashed my computer a lot along the way, one time even completely resetting my version of Studio somehow, so that it didn't remember any of my preferences, lost my mapped directories, my scripts menu...
One of the last things I did was make the waterfall, which I had imagined at the start, and that was what kept me going, because I wanted to see it with the waterfall. Although that wasn't the very last thing; the last two things I did was put in the ship in this distance at the far end of the man's gaze, and at the suggestion of my wife, who does a lot of acting and who is always most concerned with character's intentions and the moment they are in, I added the scroll to his hand, which kind of tied the whole picture up in a way and gave me the idea for the title, which may or may not be a good title, but I went with it.
There are, I think, 13 separate renders inside this picture, not including the tests and things that got changed or cut. Artistically, it may not be as strong as my gargoyle picture, I don't know, but I wanted to try an ambitious scene to push me and I learned a ton in the process of making it. Thanks for looking, and please view big.
I tried to put the biggest version in the gallery here, but it seems to still have shrunk it somewhat, so I now have the full size version (4000x1500) at deviantart.
"A Message" aka "Jacktown"
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Thanks Tarina so much for the generous comment! Glad you like it.
I like that scene. On a distant level, it reminds me of the city at the end of the 3dmark 06 "Canyon Flight" test.
I know intimately about that running out of ram bit, it has plagued me the past month, especially when I add things like a flock of dragons in the distance. The 128GB ram kits simply will not be available for PCs soon enough, and this sorry computer maxes out at 32GB (4 x 8GB, max x max), lol.
Gorgeous image Storypilot.
Thank you for the nice comments, Kismet2012 and zarcondeegrissom. Our computers are never powerful enough for what our imaginations want them to do, right? :)
Here's is a new render, featuring Stella HD, which I picked up during one of the recent Raiya promotions, and one of the less prominent scars from smay's very cool new face scars product. Also EmmaAndJordi's scarf braid hair and Lady Edwina Jewelry (earrings); the PC Cordvidae dress; Fisty's Jeweled Finery for the ring and bracelet; and the necklace from Spriteling.
very well done. I like so much there, If only I had endless funds. She kind of reminds me of that woman from the ERA music videos. As I ponder my first cup of coffee reflected off her glass sphere (orb), lol.
At least I got some of my desktop space back, why do they keep making features explicitly designed to get in the way of productivity, lol.
Hehe, thank you zarcondeegrissom.
Thought I would share this, even though it's not especially DAZ-related. It's a hopefully amusing web video I made with some friends; I directed and edited it. It does have a tiny bit of DAZ animation, both at the very start, and a short ways in, with the computer flyby.
We plan to do several of these, parody movie trailers of traditionally "guy movies" but with all-female casts. This is the first one, Fight Club. Let me know what you think.
http://youtu.be/PWKWwPDbtpM
That was very well done! The writing was witty, especially for a parody. Cohesive beginning, middle, end to the story arc. Good production value and editting. Looking forward to seeing what your creative team comes up with next.