Post Your Renders - Happy New Year yall
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thank you Dondec, I usually take control over albedo in carrara by launching a photon map render and tweaking glossiness (or roughness) in the shder editor. I think this should be particularly taken into account for animations or camera tracking footage. In this scene I enhanced the skin glossiness while lowered down the floor one. In the case of Genny close-up I tweaked the shininess only a little bit to better underline the roughness of the skin. This particular hard set up has made the fortune of software house like allegorithmic and PBR materials imo
That's a really interesting technique magaremoto. Good clear description, thx. I'll try in on my next project.
I go for the best "by-eye" render I can get, using spot renders per item, then run it off and hack it in post using the multi-pass Carrara layers in Photoshop.
There's one other trick I use as the very last step. No mater good PS can improve a render I can always get 30% more using ACDSee, an old photo viewer app. They have something I've never seen in any other app, called Light EQ. Its like the old EQ boxes we had on our home stereo, one slider for each light tonal range. Improvements can be quite dramatic with almost no effort.
- Don
cool Dondec, looks like a variant of the graph histogram you can find in other apps; in another free app, xnview, for example you may equalize lighting by tweaking 2 addons: b/w level and shadow/light point
another shot of ten 24 guy to test soft lighting and shadows, with an eye to animation purpose,
I didn't foolow the link yet, but D|S has panels in the Render Settings panel for tweaking the render aspects. This is a different mindset than these ease of use in Carrara, and requires that we set lights, shaders and render settings together. "Dome and Scene" means that you'll be using the Dome (if used) for lighting as well as any lights in the scene, but we can also use Dome Only or Scene Only. Like magaremoto said, Allegorithmic is on top of how all of this works together and have extensive material available to learn how it all works. "SickleYield" has some great tutorials on how to Iray in more laymans terms - definitely check out her videos!
Very nice rendering, magaremoto!
dart and evil and magaremoto , thanks for sharing those hair renders , really interesting
here's a poster I did recently , took two hours from go to wo, I needed to put it on facebook before I went out to dinner,
so a rush job , managed to give M4 that loveley hunchback look ;) but I was looking for an old fashioned illustrated feel
this regional art gallery has been kind enough to hire me to paint in their grounds on the coming weekend - as an artist in residence, so it's big thing for me.
Beautiful image, Andrew! I think M4's back looks fine for the position he's in and the thoughts in his head. Love the Illustration look! Bravo! The paper effect looks nice too.
Congrats on the invite! Treat us to a "Behind-the-Scenes" afterwards?
+ 1
Thanks dart and bigh, ., ! I used a prepackaged pose for m4, they always use a position for the collar !
Need to figure out how to lock collar in place
wI'll post events as they happen .... With a slight time delay ;)
I like the composition Head wax very much, maybe the water looks too clear and glossy but I'm not an artist after all
another wip with the ten24 superguy, in the desert this time
no IL only sky light and fake GI, a 6 min render, normalized in post
Instead of locking the collar, you can always select on e of them and go Animation > Zero > Zero selected Pose.
I use those zeroing tools all the time. They're a lot more useful than I had originally thought, and I've liked them from the start ;)
I think you've certainly unlocked the power of rendering realistically. Now if we can only come up with a way to make that ten24 guy to stop looking so... constipated? LOL
He really looks realistic, though!
ah ah the actual model didn't take a breath for a lot of time, I almost see the first signs of a faint in his eyes
as for me I have a lot of time instead, to focus on carrara and many other softwares I love
the following test to simulate IL and tweak maps with no sss, a lot to do yet but it's funny and carrara is very responsive and fast
Hey DB did you see this clip by Wendy?
the carrara lady is really skilled in many fields of cg
Wendy never ceases to amaze me, and she's so adept at adding animation to inanimate objects! I've been a Wendy fan since I first joined! =)
@magaremoto yes indeed the water is too glossy ! good point thank you ;)
@Dartanbeck thanks for that advice - having a little trouble finding that in 8.1 though . :(
What softwares are you into these days?
I recently took a class from Norwich University of the Arts: "VFX for Guerrilla Filmmakers" shortly after acquiring BlackMagic Design's Fusion. For the class we all needed to (unless we didn't want to) download the free HitFilm 3 Express, which is really nice composite software. I'm not fully versed at VFX yet, but the class not only taught me a lot about the subject and how to perform many techniques, but it really opened my eyes to a whole new part of my workflow that was previously missing entirely.
More, as I was experimenting with techniques in Fusion and in HitFilm, I was seeing where I could do a lot of this stuff in Howler, whose developer comes from a VFX background.
So here's my final result:
I just threw this one together, inspired by how you've been capturing such photo-realistic results. I've been saying how I tend to go the opposite direction, reducing texture image sizes and mesh resolutions and setting the shaders up to perform at really low render settings, so here's an example of why.
To give the image more of the 'Graphic' look, I've been rendering an additional Ambient Occlusion pass to use as a compositing layer - a "Swap" buffer in Howler. The first attachment below is that from this scene. AO animations look really cool!!! :)
I can use this extra render pass for many different things, including using it in an Occlusion sandwich. Since it's fully animated and an exact match-up with the full render, I can actually use all sorts of different techniques for either blending portions together or even just using it as an assistant for selecting areas to edit in composite.
By the time I've reached the final image, I've made several more selections and used a good many filters - but it all happens so quickly after the render is complete.
HeadWax' poster image reminds me of one of the looks I'm most inclined to go for in my animated series - that look being represented in this final image.
Our heroes may be enjoying a nice dance in the garbage heap, but in less than a second there's going to be a pile of broken Ninjas laying groaning on the ground! This wonderful little set by ARTCollab is really nice. I'm going to be using these grass clumps in many more scenes because I really like how they render.
I have also been persuing some of these higher-end realistic render techniques. Not the same as you, party because I still haven't fully experimented with using volumetric clouds as lighting (though I have seen how well it works... I just haven't started a full exploration of it yet), but by following a lot of the advice of Jeremy Birn from his book, and then also by purchasing PhilW's Realistic Rendering course, which has some really neat tests and explorations to experiment with - he has a wonderfully open mind when it comes to teaching. But I've also read a lot of invaluable essays on the subject by Howie Farkes, Dimension Theory, Age of Armour, Tim Payne and others - as well as just being a part of this forum since 2010 or earlier....
I was originally planning (due only to how green I was when I started into this field) to use Carrara for everything. So I was working with rendering in layers (render over other renders) and using Carrara's lights and effects to help get the look I wanted.
The 'Fade-to-White' effect in this render was achieved directly in Carrara using spot lights with specific light cone effect settings.
Silly... perhaps. But I was well on my way to proving that it can be done - and still hold to the idea that it can... I've just changed my mind and don't want to do it that way anymore. Buying Howler and learning how to use it was the major turning point on that. The procedure I talk about in the above post is just a really fun way of doing things. I wouldn't have to go with a graphical look using these techniques. As a matter of fact, these techniques are more often used in TV and Cinema to make things look more real than the other way around.
Nowadays, as I'm preparing my animations for render, I think ahead about what I want to do in Howler after the render is done. So I can use that train of thought to reduce render times as well.
thanks DB good hints here to keep in mind
What I've been using mostly are apps with a focus on animation productions such as clarisse, houdini, arnold for 3d max, redshift and lately guerilla render and UE4. One day I'm going to go back to lightwave, blender and C4D, my first love. I'm not interested in pure render with artistic purpose unless it is adressed to publications of some kind. If you are accomplished with layers you'll love clarisse, there is a PLE version and is the most robust software I ever met; the render department is not top notch but it's worth a try
another shot to tweak sunlight and soft shadows
A lot going on here. Head Wax, love your poster... and love art that makes you double take. Very clever.
Dart... I always use AO in my images. Its a shame it requires a separate pass, but the good news is you can turn off all of the render options including Shadows, and even kill all your lighting too. AO doesn't need or use em. Makes it a really fast 2nd pass render. In PS you set it to Multiply against the base render to add what you need. Love your "final result" image btw.
magaremoto, I also have C4D v15 and still use it for modeling mostly. Horrible import/export compatibility but I found by Exporting from DS as FBX, I could read and tweak a model in Cinema, export the changed model as FBX, load that into Carrara, then export from there as Daz Collada to get it back into DS... a round about trick I haven't seen published anywhere.
- Don
Hi Dondec !
I have c4dR14 and the Riptide Pro plugin to make the exchanges as .mdd or .obj sequences between c4d and Carrara.
I never had success with .fbx import into Carrara (any softwares) and I'm very interrested to know how you are doing to export .fbx from c4d.
Thanks.
hello Dondec, nice to see that c4d can be part of a daz pipeline; actually since I'm not an animator what intrigues me in the last releases is the embree connection and the powerful team render, I'd like to test both
about AO there is a strange behaviour in carrara, maybe a bug, that lets cache the occlusion after a complete render; if you uncheck the AO in the render tab right after, the shadows come out softer but realistic enough
Magaremoto:... RE: AO... wha.... really? Just for the next non-AO render or what? Just wondering if I can exploit this somehow. Could be useful.
Dudu: I downloaded a free 3d prop from TF3D as obj, loaded it in C4D and remodeled and defored parts, then exported it out as FBX 7.1, T and Mats, As Text File... which unforthnately DS couldn't read... BUT Carrara could !! In Carrara, loaded the import then immediately exported it choosing the option Daz Collada. Note that I was not using animations or morphs, so both those options were disabled in the export window. I used T Maps and Full Path in the Carrara export window. DS could read the file with the textures, no problem, which allowed ta dah... My first IRay renders...
http://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/123171/ "Everybody is interpreting their environment differently"
http://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/123176 "What the little boy sees..."
http://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/123181 (What he drew... as in the previous render)
http://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/123186/ (finished "pencil sketch" ;) )
My appologies to Carrara purists not interested in DS renders... but technically I did use Carrara in the work flow :)
- Don
here what it happens if you check AO
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/uploads/FileUpload/6c/5a467fa2b4a9a7f78d755b75087369.jpg
then uncheck and launch the render
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/uploads/FileUpload/c3/e7036120107e06d59571579ab144d4.jpg
same scene but different occlusion radius; AO checked
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/uploads/FileUpload/50/b1ef3bf35372675bf37d2c8690580d.jpg
and unchecked
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/uploads/FileUpload/c2/2ec39ac844a113553047abdefd22eb.jpg
carrara uses the shadow cached and the result is more realistic and the render is faster; dunno if this has been highlighted elsewhere
another test on skin, render speed: about 14 min on my i7
Been playing around with Substance Painter - that's a fun piece of software. Takes an fbx rather than an obj (had to get QA to send the export dll, cos it's missing from the mac 8.5.1!). Then it's a bit like 3D Paint on steroids, & finally it cranks out a bunch of maps.
Had to rethink the way I do some of my UVs to suit this workflow.
Am I right in thinking that the specular goes into Carrara's Highlight channel, and Glossiness goes into Shininess? It seems to work that way, anyhow. (although the door wood still looks a bit plasticky). Also been playing with the lighting to get a reasonable candlelight. Added a simple vertex shape with glow on it for the flame.
Aargh! Darned thing created a new post instead of editing the other one! Just attached the Substance window, to see what the lantern and its UV looks like in that program. There's two version of the lamp, just with different fixtures. I made a composite version, with everything on the same UV. In Carrara, I split it into two models, both using the same shader.
Highlight is the brightness of the specular effect, and Shininess is how diffuse (or not) the effect is. I usually never bother putting a map in the Shininess channel. I put a numeric slider in the Shininess. I usually have a low value (more diffuse) and let the map in the Highlight channel drive the effect- darker areas have less highlight, brighter areas, more. It all depends on the look I want. The bump map will also have an effect on the Highlight/Shininess.
I really like the look of the leather in this sorceress image, using the method mentioned above, except I added a multiplier to the Highight channel and added the specular map in one slot and a brownish color chip in the other.
The second image uses the same method, but no multiplier, just the image map in the Highlight channel- maybe the bump map as opposed to a true specular map. It also uses a displacement for the leather lacing and eyelets. Proof that you can get subtle displacement in Carrara if you work at it.
The sorceress image is a procedural skin shader. The eyelashes and eyebrows are dynamic hair.