November 2020 - Daz 3D New User Challenge - Materials and next level kitbashing
Linwelly
Posts: 5,956
New User's Challenge – November, 2020
Are you new to the 3D World? Are you at the beginning stages of learning 3D rendering? Have you been around for a little bit but feel you could benefit from some feedback or instruction? Have you been around a while and would like to help other members start their creative journey? Well then come and join the fun as we host our newest challenge.
New this year, we are breaking down each month into 2 different challenges. A Beginner Challenge and then also an Intermediate Challenge.
So which "Challenge" should you choose?
Follow the Beginner Challenge if you are:
- New to the New User Challenges
- New to Daz Studio
- Newer to 3D Rendering in General
Follow the Intermediate Challenge if you have:
- Participated in the New User Challenge for awhile
- Know the basics of Daz Studio and would like to learn more in depth topics
- Been using 3D Rendering Applications for awhile and feel comfortable with learning Intermediate Topics
*Please be sure to list in your post which Challenge level you are participating in*
Closing date for both is November 30, 2020
For a list of the current challenge rules, please see this thread: Challenge Rules
They apply for both versions of the challenge.
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Comments
From shiny polished gems to rough bark, from silk to leather
Beginner - "Materials"
This month's focus will be on Materials and Surfaces. One of the most important aspects of a great render is the effective use of materials. Effective surface settings can add realism, style, and visual interest to an image. This month we will be concentrating on how to create and manipulate the surfaces on the objects in your scene.
Also, keep in mind all the various items covered over the past several months. They will affect the way your materials look in your final rendered scene.
previous challenges on this topic:
November 2017
November 2018
November 2019
Helpful Links:
When following tutorials, be cognizant of the different applications (Bryce, Daz Studio, Poser, Carrara and Blender, etc.) and different render engines (3Delight, Iray, Reality, etc). Techniques for one may not apply directly to another. If you have some favorite Materials, Surfaces, and Shader tips, please share them in this thread.
Daz Studio Tutorials:
Daz 101: Surfaces by Daz 3D (video)
Iray Surfaces and What They Mean by Sickleyield
The Iray Uber Base Shader by Daz 3D (video)
Daz Studio 4.0 - Surfaces by Daz 3D (older video, 3Delight surfaces)
Bryce Tutorials:
Scroll down to the Materials section by Daz 3D
Other helpful places:
3Delight - Uberenvironment made easy!
this is more in depth and experimental for the 3delight renderer: 3Delight Laboratory Thread: tips, questions, experiments
Mix clothing and props, retexture, and make it look as one again
Intermediate Challenge - next level kitbashing
So you already know how to change shader presets, and give your character a sweat sheen but you want to combine different outfits and make them look as one? you want this tag on the shirt or a hole in that door? Then this challenge is for you
some parts of this challenge are easier when using an image manipulation program like Gimp or Photoshop to prepare the new texture
The tools you might want to use are geometry editor and Layered image editor (LIE). Understanding UV maps will help you with the more advanced use of materials and surfaces
geometry editor tutorial
Beginners guide to Daz Studio Layered Image Editor
DAZ : LIE Quick How To
DAZ Studio Tutorial - Layered Image Editor - Make your own Tattoos (nudity)
Creating a LIE overlay preset in DAZ Studio
Tutorial: Adding Surfaces and Striped Texture to a T-Shirt
Daz Studio UV Maps
Fixing UV maps in DAZ Studio (got to say it's not happening in DAZ Studio, its just used in DAZ Studio)
Painting on Uv Maps for Daz, Different ways to add texture/color to figures
Julia Palermo
her traits: guns, heavy guns
hey @-AL1vE- glad you're making the icebreaker for this month, I was afraid that nobody want to pick this topic up :D
nice starting point here and interesting play with the DOF, the gun tattoo is very suble at the moment so maybe you show some more hints about her passion for guns? Do you want the pants to be this glossy?
A little heads up to everyone, since the gallery currently is inactive we need you to attach you image to your post. As usual you can still load it in large to your post afterwards
no I don't want her pants that glossy but I don't know how to get this, I even don't know one can change that...
version 2
unique Mafia family photograph, Julia Palermo without latex pants
my goal with this picture is that the user is participating with the character rather than to expose her traits that she is a killer machine
her rather subtle looking tattoo of a machine gun and her scars are meant to let anybody know that she is not for show
she looks so charmingly nice she couldn't hurt a fly on the wall, does she... yes she does
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Title: Julia Palermo
Software: DAZ Studio 4.12.1
Renderengine: Nvidia Iray
Challenge: November 2020 - Daz 3D New User Challenge
Technique: pants - matte painting (render overlay and blend technique in Affinity Photo to reduce render times on my non-Nvidia-slow-as-hell-PC)
Post Work: collor grading
Given that most of what we see has been gone over with different material settings, but the toxic sludge below the bridge (Might see if I can make that look more like lava.) was brought in from another source I'm not sure which tier I'll be leaning towards this month.
That's why you are here for, right? So selcet the pants and go to the surfaces tab. I don't know if those pants have more than one surface area if yes, find the one that defines the pants part (not rims or somethign like that. In that fiels scroll down to "glossy layered weight" and move the slider to a lower setting, below that is a field called glossy reflectivety, slide that to a low level as well, you can try to push the glossy roughness up.
check as well if those onat have a top coat, those are often set to a high glossyness, find refelctivity in that one or turn doen the tiop coat weight to zero.
I noticed the new render, so maybe you found all that already, which is good, or you just geve the pants a new shader preset which is a good way to handle that as well.
@Shinji Ikari 9th You've been her with us for so long you can go for the big one this time :D
I challenge you to make a hole into the bridge to make the passage even more dangerous. If you have question how to start that, I'm here to help. You did a nice job making a look old and rusty already. For the green glowy stuff I suggest you try something with more extreme bump/displacement (displacement is not as effective in Iray though) or create a normal map to add to that which rises the dark or the lighter parts, so its bulging up.
@Linwelly, Challenge accepted. I'm about to render version B in which I make use of geometry editing, primatives and a part from another set wedged in to fill the gap.
Version B here. Like I said in my last post, I use geometry editing to remove part of the walkway and the pipes on the underside of the walkway (didn't even know that they were there.), replaced the center pipe with a primitave, (the pipes were only partialy modeled due to overlaping with the underside of the walkway which is why I removed them.) and used a section of walkway from a different set to wedge in the gap. Retexturing was done mostly with Nvidia's vMaterials which I'm still learning my way around.
NOT A CONTEST ENTRY. Just a few ideas to maybe get more folks involved in this month’s challenge. I think I’m too busy with other projects at the moment to actually do diligence in these challenges, but love to check them out and browse through when I can. Was really looking forward to this kitbash theme more than anything when I saw it. I just expected more people to be jumping in, since to me kitbashing is the essence of fun in creating things with Daz. I’m more heavily focused on modeling now, but never get tired of a good kitbash session when I find free time.
So here’s some examples of bashing together various characters/morphs, outfit parts, sections of environments, props etc. For kitbashing outfits or environments, it’s usually best to hide certain parts of the assembly via Surfaces tab, material zones and the opacity dial (dial to zero to hide that material zone that you selected). Experiment wildly, try off the wall mixes and mashups until something fits.
Hope this gets some ideas flowing for someone maybe. Would love to see this challenge really get busy rolling and pick up steam.
WIP for the beginner's challenge; not really satisfied with the dragons, but not quite sure what to change. Suggestions would be very much appreciated.
Title: Diamonds are forever
Caption: Even if you don't want to be
Software: Daz 3D
Challenge: Beginners
Feedback much appreciated! First time trying to use caustics but could use some suggestions to bring out the effect more.
Very good! I like this. If you have some water splashes or something of that sort you could add that to your green lava stuff right where that new bridge part is, licking through the holes or somethign like that? I'm just sprouting ideas here
the vMaterials you use were provided as freebie by NVIDA, wasn't it? Maybe you want to add the link to that for others to find if you got it at hand.
just thinking what it could be...
every fire outdoors you get smoke, glowing dust particles, normal dust and the scenery is generally not dark but ... "ON FIRE" your scene is like the fire's out for good and what we see is the last bit of Fireman before he goes cold
on the safe side you could use dust overlays because I don't know if Daz Studio can use particle FX or use Particle Illusion which has gone free now (Google for particle illusion free)
Thanks a lot for chiming in, those are lovely examples! Maybe you will find some time, there still is a lot of Novemebr left
here is one example for retexturing I made, these kits were retextured using Gimp from this sports dress: https://www.daz3d.com/x-fashion-uniform-03-for-genesis-8-females
in your picture the caustic FX is terribly difficult to achieve - the reason for this is generally you want a glassrefractive object as close to a surface as possible with the greatest surface exposure to a lightsource
your glasswoman (or girl?) is in a upright standing position giving the groundfloor very little to none refractive surface on the ground
Ttry a small experiment: use a hand reading glass outdoors with sunshine or indoors with a bright lightsource, position the glass on the table and slowly pull it up to the light - you see the closer you get the glass to the lightsource the less visible is the refractive caustic effect on the floor or paper and the same with your glasswoman (underwatercaustics is a different effect alltogether but maybe try something like that and put her under water because her pose is almost like she's drowning)
Alright very nice we got fore and ice (oh no she's a diamond in the other one) making this give a strong feel of heat and danger is the challenge here.
let's go step by step. I think the fx plane you used for the flame comeing from his hand or trailing him isn't emissive right now (assuming you're using iray here, if you are using 3delight it needs to go into the ambient channel and dialed way up, but come back tio me if that's the case and I explain more)
So add the map that atm in your base colour /diffuse channel and put it into the emissive channel, change the light temperature to something between 2800 and 3500 and the luminance to kcd/m2 1500 (play around with that and the opacity, try if you want to remove the map from base colour /diffuse altogether, this is what I usually do when I want a flame.
This will add light in your scene which will help detecting the dragons (let's talk about them with the next round if they are still too hidden)
About the laca man, I would suggest playing around with the emissive as well (light temperature, and how strong the emission is) you could try to use bloom in the render settings, though this is chunking up render times a good deal.
Piking up the idea from _ AL1vE P you could try to add a geometry shell with a good distance around the lava man and add a sparky fx shader to it (this can be made youself using gimp/photoshop whatever you got on your hands.
I don't have any information about this particle illusion thing besides it being an additional program and being hefty on the system. You can find more info here: https://sites.google.com/view/dartanbeckcom/the-software/particle-illusion
caustics are a tricky thing to catch but you made a good start. One thing I would suggest is to give a bit more contrast to the surrounding colours, right now her podest, the surrounding rock and his clothing are all very much the same colour and structure. A darker underground would give the caustics to show more effect.
Also caustic are depending on the angle light comes in and leaves the opject in relation to the observers angle of watching. so experiment with some different camera angles as well
@Linwelly Thanks for your feedback, I'm glad you like it so far. In regards to splashes and the like, I'll have to see what I have.
Version C here was in the process of rendering when you posted about version B so I hope it's to your liking as well. I changed the grating to something thinner using vMaterials and then messing with the settings of the result. I also added some characters in the room behind the windows in the background were we can just see them.
As for the vMaterials this link should take people to Nvidia's page about them which has a form to fillout to be able to download the catalog. (Warning the file is more then a Gig. in size if I remember right.) You'll also want to go here, and here to download the shader presets the MCDLabs over at ShareCG.com had created to make them easier to work with (at least in the way of applying them. Any tweeking of settings I'm still learning as I mess around with things. The new grating had to have the scale setting changed to get it to look like it should work, I ended up setting on a setting of around 0.01 to 0.02 somewere in that area.)
what would prevent me from even thinking going over that bridge is if the green goo is messing all over so you have to go in swirls around the superglue
I found some splash props and added some that I retextured to look like the sludge (it helped that the serfaces were named the same, I was able to copy and paste the settings with no problems.)
Anyway Version D is rendering as I type this, and should be ready to post by the time I'm home from work.
Here's version D which I had rendering while I was at work. I added a splash prop along with an instance to get some of the sludge coming up on the bridge through then grate.
mission impossible - nobody will pass the green goo
it looks like green lava
pretty cool render
very good! now we need someone reacting to it maybe? and I would suggest trying to render with bloom activated
@Shinji Ikari 9th
That is looking really freakin cool now! Amazing job on the scene so far, love the composition and materials/fx, the surfaces are all looking great.
I do agree with Linwelly about adding possibly a character(s), and think some bloom if applied well will really enhance the image. This is definitely going to be a visual stunner and developing nicely as it "comes to life".
@Linwelly Thanks so much for the kind words... I wasn't sure afterwards if I should've posted those images if not entering the contest, almost just deleted them, but guess i'll leave it alone.
Thank you also for the encouragement to join in, I really appreciate your suggestion. And I certainly don't think I'm "too good" to enter, I am not by a longshot. I just along with work have multiple projects in development including another contest that requires modeling a character/outfit and textures.
But I feel motivated by what you're saying now.... and would love to participate.
If I can then, I will submit this new revised version of the previous one I posted as my entry to the "INTERMEDIATE CHALLENGE":
another example for next level kitbashing is this trophy I made for a virtual game
it consists of a genesis 8 female with clothes hair and the shortened baseball bat all made into one object by exporting together and then coloured in gold. everything below that little statue in made from various primitives in different shaderpresets and for the inscription I made a normal map from a text using this online tool: http://cpetry.github.io/NormalMap-Online/
like the normal map generator, thanks
would be great to have it offline...