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Salt Lake City, UT 84101
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© 2024 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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Thank you so much, I was hoping you'd see this. Here's the same scene with some DOF. I don't know if it's just because I'm using dForce hair, but backlighting doesn't seem to be doing much.
I think that's too subtle and right now those intense neons are drawing attention away from your subject. So perhaps try with a very shallow DOF, wherein the background is just blurred out entirely. Here's a good tutorial on that:
As to your backlight, perhaps try increasing it? I think the hair looks about right since your current backlight is quite subtle.
this is wut u meant rite?
Something that's working against me in this particular exercise is that I'm also playing around with camera dimensions for the first time, which is making it a little harder for me to place the DOF, but it's all good training. I'm working on another iteration.
Excellent, that already helps tremendously. Next up you could also try adding some mist to diffuse the background light of those neons. You could even try using the matte fog option (Render Settings > Environment > Matte Fog) since that was is much lighter than using a volumetric cube.
I like the latest DOF version! I don't know if all versions of Daz have it, but some have white-lined plane guides for the DOF that can really help control what you want blurred out. You just select the camera and look at it from perspective view to see them. You can drag them to where you want to be. I'd investigate the Daz version issue but I'm rendering out a moshi.
I know Dreamlight gets flamed for his tutorials, and some of them are of questionable quality, but I feel like my lighting got 100% better after getting the magic 8 point light set tutorial. I only got the first one, but it explains how to sharpen or soften shadows, how to avoid light damage, the functions of fill, rim, backlight etc, and how to place them for good effect.
As for the hair, I got backlight hair shaders and they are great for that backlight look. I don't think they are really necessary, but they just seem to catch the light so easily, and I love the colors.
Anyway, looking good! It's always fun to see what you are working on.
Man, I posted that render as a joke, because I thought the DOF was WAY too intense. Glad you all like it, though. I may slap a non-dForce hair on him to see if that's why the backlighting isn't doing what it's supposed to. And yes, the planes are how I'm positioning the DOF, but changing the focal length and/or width also changes how the focal distance and f-stop work.
LOL.
Anyway, I checked out Daz and it looks like it's the little white ball you move, not the planes. Works in both 4.12 and 4.15.
Actually blurring out a weapon or having the weapon sharp and the figure blurr are quite common. Depending on what you are choosing to focus on will help build the mood and tell the story. Handy examples below :)
I gave it more reasonable DOF, and also turned on Spectral Rendering (natural, cie1964) for this one.
By the way, any comments about Welcome Home? That was also part of the whole lighting journey I'm currently on.
I like the lighting of the character in Welcome Home, but the environment is pretty dark. But maybe that is what you were going for? It's pretty moody. Whenever I want to brighten an environment, I hide the ceiling and nonvisible walls and try an hdri at a low level (maybe even at less than 1 brightness/intensity). You could use spotlights with really big geometry too, but you have to be careful how you aim them or you're just going to get an obvious spotlight effect. Dreamlight suggests actually aiming a spotlight at something off-camera to have the light bounce back into the scene, but I've never tried it. Unless there are mirrors in the scene, hiding walls is super easy. You could also try turning down crush blacks and messing with exposure.
omg! I can't believe I forgot about ghost lights! If you make a sphere primitive and set it to emissive and really low cutout opacity, (I think .001 or .0001), then you can put them in front of the camera and they should be invisible and give nice, soft light.
Oh, I know about ghost lights, and I use them fairly often. My problem is not generally that I don't know how to do these things: it's that I learn how to do them, then ignore that and do things my own way, because I am way too Scottish for my own good. So I know that all kinds of things are possible, and even that I probably should be doing those things, but I don't, which means that I don't really learn when I should be doing them, or why.
Anyway, I put together another scene. Just a basic portrait this time. I don't know why my brain translates practicing lighting into "women running their hands through their hair". I've also used this arm-across-the-body pose a few times before, and I'm not really sure why. What does it communicate to you? I'm also learning that I'm really into high-key lighting.
New entry in the movie scenes:
Private Commodus
I don't think I got the angle of the sun quite right, but it was a little hard to check since, like the Blade Runner image before it, after a certain point Iray Preview stops working, and just goes into an endless loop of "preparing scene". I still may fiddle with it a bit more, because I want to get the harsher shadows on his left cheek like in the reference.
I also did some postwork on Welcome Home to draw out the environment a little bit more. The idea behind the render was the the woman was waiting to greet her lover, so the light was coming from the next room over. There's also a fireplace just out of frame, so I experimented with a reddish fill light that doesn't really show up in the original render, but is more apparent in the postworked version.
Also, because I am a lunatic, I started an underwater scene, which has always been a nightmare for me to light effectively. My best-looking underwater render so far was Part of Your World, and that just completely ignores the underwater look. Maybe I'll torture myself by re-rendering with caustics and whatnot.
Private Commodus looks so good! And I like what you've done with Welcome home.
Thank you!
For Private Commodus you might try
One consideration is to leave some parts not lit by the shadows deep and juicy dark shadows like the photo.
Sometimes the environment lights can kill the strong shadows
Aside from the lights it is a pretty darkly lit scene.
Amok in Kent
Not part of the lighting challenge, but definitely a challenge to light.
Rudest Awakening
Turtlewash
Foxtease
Prank Fairies
Has this ever happened to you?
Fair odds that this one gets deleted.
Hooves 'n Horns
I started this one quite a while ago, and I'm not sure why I never finished it. Maybe just didn't have the power to render it. I think it started with wanting to make Teen Princess Leila look scary. And then she became a centaur, because that is what a Gordig do.
Thanks, I'm pretty pleased with how that turned out. I should really re-render Foxtease with better lighting....which I probably could have done better if I hadn't been working on Prank Fairies concurrently.
Melter of Honor
It took me FOREVER to set this scene up...
...but it's finally done. There's a less modest version on DA, but of course, some concessions must be made to post on Daz. Can you identify them all?
Merry Kronia
I don't speak Greek, so blame Google if the translation is wrong. I intentionally didn't work too hard on the lighting because I wanted it to look like an actual family photo...and because my computer would have exploded from trying to Iray preview it.
M.O.D.O.M. (Mental Organism Designed Only for Microwaving)
I'd say... Hermes, Demeter? (I thought she's more about food than flowers), Dionysus, Poseidon, Ares, Hera, Zeus, Hephaestus, Athena, Aphrodite, Artemis, and... Hades? Arrived at that last one by process of elimination but don't really see how that's supposed to be him, so I'm probably off.
Very good, except the last one is Apollo, Artemis' twin brother, and considered the ideal of male beauty...which, to the ancient Greeks, meant he looked like a teenager. I could have done more to give him character, maybe given him a lyre or something. The bow and falcon are both symbols of Apollo, but I thought they made more sense on Artemis, the goddess of the hunt. Demeter is the goddess of the harvest, which I decided to interpret more broadly as "nature". She is, after all, the reason we have different seasons - or, rather, Hades taking Persephone is the reason, but Demeter is the one who makes the seasons change.