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Thank you so much, I have had a blast making this series, I only started playing in DAZ a couple of weeks ago, so its been a very steep learning curve. nice to know its paying off.
It took a while but...
Beauty and the Beast
Kinda hard to tell who's the real demon here.
My entry is called "Elven Ears", because elven ears can hear quite far; even catching someone in the act of doing something they shouldn't!
Posing:
I tried for a natural pose of someone being sneaky, as well as someone listening in from a distance. The girl in the background is posed to be walking by, and the man popping out to "proposition" her is poised to be in her way; hopefully showing his unmoving stance.
Lighting:
I tried to not only capture the sunlight, but red light enhancing the warmth on the right side of the image, and blue light enhancing the shade from the left side of the image. I also have a backlight and a light from the earth to represent brown reflection up onto her face.
Composition:
I tried to include two angles as you hopefully can see in the "composition image". One from the backwall, and one from the side wall. I also used the golden ratio with her head/hair and the rule of thirds focusing on her eye/body. To direct further attention, I attempted to use the Pergola to create sightlines all pointing toward the main figure, be it from the floor, roof, or angled wall lines--all to make her the object of primary focus. I used a nature HDR environment map and set it to show so I could have some bit of nature showing through the roof.
Postwork:
All work is done in Daz3d. Final image touched up in GIMP: Mostly cosmetic changes - Curves change, contrasting skin to blend into image more, skin blemishes/baby hairs/veins, bumps for darker skin areas.
I tried my best to read and pay attention to your lessons and apply them to my vision. I hope you all enjoy it! Criticism welcome!
@rcbcgreenpanzer I know what you mean about the muse hitting at in oppertune times. More oftain then not it's been when I've got work the next morning.
That's amazing, how did you get the eyes and mouth to glow?
Second Entry:
The Final Rest of the Ancient Dwarves:
Daendarrow
These 2 images are what I made for this month's open render challenge. The first, "Biohaz A-Zone":
Basically a futuristic hazy atmosphere. This piece is focused more on the aesthetic of the environment. The environment originally came as 3Delight (or non-Iray) settings so I redid everything over to Iray...particularly the emissives as well as other surface settings to increase reflectivity. The atmospherics are from a rain package, Iray Storm... with the cutout opacity lowered substantially, and a few tweaks to the glossy and refraction settings. A lot of adjustments to tone mapping within Daz which allowed me to do almost no postwork on it. The suit came with normal and bump maps so I turned off limits on those parameters and increased the strength of both so the textures are more clearly visible and pronounced through the atmospheric haze. I uploaded my first copies to the main gallery a week ago too and made a few minor changes since.
The second image titled "What Are You...What Are We?" has a sci-fi element but is also more of a drama piece about an identity crisis, not understanding who or what they are as a non-human species. DOF was used so the environment is simply a background and not the focus. I replaced the textures of the outfits with different ones (combining multiple bodysuits and different textures for different material zones for the man). This one was basically concentrating on the lighting, skin settings (I did as much as possible to pronounce the detail of the skin surfaces), and facial expressions.
So many great entries I can't comment on all them. I will say to @daybird that I agree with Coryllon, your most recent image looks incredible. I don't know that I would change anything about it but if you were going to add anything your idea of ground fog does sound like a good one. It's great seeing all this fantastic work in the challenge.
The funny thing is, the fog should cover her feets, but how I said, I don't get it right and over the easter days there was no time, so I hope, I have the time for another try befor the month ends.
But when I look at all this cool entries, I should save my time for other things, because there are so great works here, that I have the feeling I'm far behind the others^^
The skin details on the male's face are incredible. Was all that done in Daz or other postwork used to create it? I have been looking at what others have done and working on making my skin surfaces look more realistic.
I agree the entries are amazing and creative, cheers to all the effort and work. I have some more work to do on mine and try to fix some of the lighting in the background character billboards. We will see it I can get it done by the deadline.
@sisyphus1977xx
It was all done within Daz, the only postwork was minor stuff and was not done selectively to the figures but global levels/curve/gamma adjustments. The skin texture of the male model is really great to begin with, which obviously is always a good starting point...made by Phoenix1966 at Renderosity who makes really excellent quality realistic models/textures. I did still make a handful of adjustments to the skin surface settings: Slight adjustments to add a little redness to the base and translucency colors, sss tint a little more blue, top coat slightly more neutral. Wanting to accentuate the skin roughness I increased those settings and reduced gloss. Increased dual lobe specular reflectivity slightly. To make the pores/wrinkles stand out more I turned off parameter limits to the normal and bump maps and increased the strength of both of those (these settings can be touchy so have to be careful...I just experimented with dialing it up and down until I got what I wanted). I used a tool called 'expression smoother' but instead of smoothing, I again turned off the parameter limit and dialed it negative quite a bit so the expression "de-smoothes" the skin, creating more pronounced wrinkles and bunching of the skin.
To increase detail and see more fine lines/pores/facial hairs etc I experimented with and changed the pixel filter in the render settings...I actually used Mitchell filter instead of Gaussian and decreased the pixel filter blur (again this can be touchy and when you decrease it is easy to make it too sharp which doesn't look right). I made adjustments to the tone mapping which always totally depends on the elements of your scene (lighting/figure's skin/texture colors etc.) and effects the whole image-not just one figure, but for this particular setup I increased burn highlights and crush blacks along with iso and decreased gamma...this gave it a harsher more extreme look for this figure, making the darker colors closer to black and glossy or lighter areas more white.
Lighting was a manual setup along with an HDRI. I pretty much started with surround lighting with all the lights off and turned them on 1 at a time to see what was needed, played with the brightness/distance and slight tone adjustments until I ended with something close to a 3-point setup (with an additional soft rim light and weak front light). So starting I had Front, LF, RF, LSide Lower, LSide High, Rsid Lower, Rside High, LR Rim, RR Rim, Top-downward light, Center Angled Rear (which kind of accents ear translucency), and Back-Facing highlighting the background. If it were full figures or larger scene I may have used more lights but only the four lights plus HDRI map were used in the end. I also took off most of the ceiling so the HDRI light could reach the figures. Sorry for the long reply and if I may have left some stuff out.
Finally. This scene finally agreed to render. I felt like my first entry was too dull, and I wanted to do a scene where something more was going on. Feel free to tell me if it doesn't work at all, and I've broken 438 rules of composition, perspective and colour schemes. I'm too sleep-deprived today to be upset by it.
Nice one. Did you use the same character from your avitar for the teacher? If so, then nice touch putting yourself into the work.
Added a hostile stepping out from a side room being backlit from a blaze on the other side. Might go back and see if I can add some smoke wafting out of said room if I get a chance.
Thanks! Yes, that's the ever gorgeous Aylatani teaching. She doesn't represent me, however. Aylatani started her existance in my Sims 2 game, and she's in the Education career track. I've been wanting to do a classroom scene for ever, and I mostly just put her in the scene to add a bit of lolwut. It's canon that she's been a teacher at some point, after all.
Great insights, I really appreciate them. I have been working on changing the various surface settings (mostly base, top coat and volume groups) to see how they impact the skin details. I have kept within the parameter settings in my efforts so far, so I will take your advice around adjusting those beyond the limits. I did not think about the pixel setting. I was looking at modifying the base color and bump maps in a photo editing tool to see what I can do with them there. Can't thank you enough as I have been struggling to improve my overall skin surfaces.
Hiiiiiiiiii, I'm just going to cheat and ask here: What settings do I have to adjust to get rid of grainyness around lightsources, like candles?
In Iray or DS? When you say "around", are you using some kind of haze or atmosphere effect or do you mean on the adjacent illuminated surfaces?
Iray, I guess? I've pushed Crush Blacks and Burn Highlights as far as the slider will go, but there are still some grains on the glass. They're these candles in mason jars.
This is the picture in question, it's not an entry.
With localised noise like that (not that it seemed particularly bad to me) you may find the only workable option is to select the Spot Render Tool, in Tool Settings choose the New Window option, and drag a rectangle over one of the lights; save the result as PNG or Tiff, repeat for the enxt light, and when done stack all the light renders on top of the main render. The problem is that Iray keeps going until the set percentage of pixels are converged (have reached what seems to eb their final value) - you can increase the percentage that must be cnverged, or the narrowness of the definition of converged (that's the Render Quality slider) but when most of the image is converged and a few stubborn areas aren't trying to get a set-up that will work without wasting a lot of processing is tricky - doing a spot render makes the problem area a much larger proportion of the render, and so you don't get the same issues.
If you are using the Public Beta and have an nVidia GPU that can cope with the scene you could also try the new AI denoiser.
Crush Blacks and Burn Highlights are for tone mapping, they don't affect noise.
Oooof, okay then. Thanks for answering. It seems like I got rid of most of the remaining grain by setting the Render Quality higher, and removing the overlay on the mason jars.
Edit: I'm withdrawing my first entry (the two people on the couch) and meekly inquire about permission to submit a new one. The rules say two images per person is allowed, but I'm not sure if that means two images periode, or two final entries.
looks good. add some Depth of Field to your camera to start blurring out the background to add even more realism. Hope this helps.
Thank You Coryllon. The Behemoth came with a preset for the glowing eyes and mouth. I applied to the G8F figure too. I did render this in 3 passes at different blooms to get the glow the way I wanted it though so there was compositing in PS.
I love the lighting in your dwarves scene and it was a great angle on the scene too.
@Testingtesterson35 - Awesome. I've been thinking about picking up expression smoother so now I guess I have to. Great detail work.
My understanding is the two image rule is a "guideline," and if you would like to upload a third image, that will be fine. You don't even have to withdraw the first one.
@LAdair Okay! Thanks! Let's see if I can get the third one to a state I'm satisfied with, before the deadline, though. Several times now, I've thought I had the solution to the problem, and then I didn't. How do you get candles (or the light source that's supposed to be the candles) to cast light on the surface they're on? I've tried using regular and linear point lights, but only some of the candles give off a faint bit of light on the ground. I've upped every dial I could think of, so it's time to try something else, methinks?
And by the way, I'm still withdrawing the first image, because I'm not satisfied with the lighting in that one, either. Of course I had to be out of the game during the month where light was the lesson.
I'm getting more and more picky about my own stuff, too. (But at least I'm learning. I think.)
I made the feets more transparent, but I think that's not real a improvement. It looks a little out of place.
Okay, so this is my last entry, although probably not the final version. I would really like to get a bit more shine on the grass, and have the large jar on the upper left give off more light on the leaves behind it.
Version C of my first idea, adding in a stream of tracers coming at the shooter near us, and adjusting said shooter's left arm and hand some. I rendered this in Daz3d earlier this week but didn't get around to uploading it untill now.
I have added DOF to the wide shot. Some problems with it due to the blocking in the scene and angle of the two main groups. This required some adjustment to the DOF to get all the main figures in focus.
Both shots are now my final versions for this challenge. I have been having problems with DS 4.11.0.335 Pro using my GPU for rendering. Looked at another thread on the forum and saw that there were others having a similar problem. I am now going back and seeing which Nvidia driver I need to revert back to so my GPU rendering will work. It took quite a bit longer to render these images with just the CPU. Oh well.
Looks like I just got in under the wire. I keep losing internet connection due to storm damage.
First a bit of fun with the April fools day freebie.
My second submission is more artistic.
I have been doing a lot of work with skin and wanted to create a glamour shot to see it at its best. I morphed this from G8F, and built the skin with skin builder. I also have done a fair bit of work with bump and displacement maps. It is still a work in progress but I am pretty happy with how things have gone so far.
I didn't know how I wanted to light this piece and went to sleep thinking about it, then woke up a while later and had my answer, hence the title "Dreamlight".