November 2020 - Daz 3D New User Challenge - Materials and next level kitbashing

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  • Luftsturmregiment40Luftsturmregiment40 Posts: 328
    edited November 2020

    no entry

    everyone can use the key card absolutely free of charge anyway you see fit

    only thing I ask you not to sell it directly individually but you can include it as part of a whole scene or a collection of items that you sell

    say you have made a Sci-Fi warrior model who is holding the key card in or for a video game you can include the key card as part of the SF Warrior and sell it along with the model

    good thing is you can modify it reshape it etc and you don't even have to pay me anything

    no catch

    just a genuine freebie for all of you

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    Post edited by Luftsturmregiment40 on
  • aprilshowers2065aprilshowers2065 Posts: 738
    edited November 2020

    Third version. Dropped the opacity on the flame and redid the geoshell for the lavaman. 

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    Post edited by aprilshowers2065 on
  • Beginner challenge, I guess- most of what I did was resurfacing and blending, rather than the LIE and geometry editing. I probably should do another entry to work with those tools in more depth. 

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  • katywhitekatywhite Posts: 443
    edited November 2020
    Linwelly said:
    katywhite said:

    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.

    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

    @_ AL1vE _
    @Linwelly

    Thank you both for your suggestions. I toyed around with it a bit more. I don't want to change the camera angle if possible because I like the focus on the diamond woman's expression and the secondary subtle focus on the man's expression. I changed the background colours to add more contrast. I also tried making it darker out (8pm instead of 6pm) and adding another lightsource - but it just got darker not sure what happened to my spotlight sources. Not sure what else to try with this.





     

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    Post edited by katywhite on
  • LinwellyLinwelly Posts: 5,956
    katywhite said:
    Linwelly said:
    katywhite said:

    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.

    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

    @_ AL1vE _
    @Linwelly

    Thank you both for your suggestions. I toyed around with it a bit more. I don't want to change the camera angle if possible because I like the focus on the diamond woman's expression and the secondary subtle focus on the man's expression. I changed the background colours to add more contrast. I also tried making it darker out (8pm instead of 6pm) and adding another lightsource - but it just got darker not sure what happened to my spotlight sources. Not sure what else to try with this.





     

    Ups, hmmmm, let me ask, are you using the sun sky only in your environmental render settingss? If yes, that would explain the changes, because changing the time on that setting will move the sun as you major ilght source, depending on the rest of the setting (day in the year, longitude and latidude) even below the hoizon (8pm is already late in the day). that would remove a lot of light and as well alter the angle of the light hitting the diamond girl.

    So maybe return to the original time (or even got to an afternoon or morning time to test the effect). In addition to that try setting the SS multiplier to 0.2 or even highter which will give your sun more power.if this is too much light there are options in the tone mappings to adjust. (I come back to that later if needed)

    BTW in this setting Sun sky only no other lights will be counted or rendere by the program. that would explain why your spotlight has no effect (emissive surfaces still do their job though)

    When I said more contrast I really only meant to change the surfaces to a darker settings not reducing the amount of light. I should have put that in better words.

    I hope this helps you on the way, If you didn't use sun sky only settings let me know what you used, so we find out what happened

  • Linwelly said:
    Stargazey said:

     

    This whole thing has such a different feel to the usual render, it's really interesting

    Not sure if you used that already, for the six armed statue you can hide the rest of the duplicate bodies by closing the exe of the respective bones in the scene tap, which might help with reducing render times. Though I understand that you rendered single items and composed afterwards? Mirroring the pose was a cleverer thing to get the statues like that.

    Getting those very different light effects was probably intentional. Wjat I'm not sure about is if you want this to look rather flat, like a painting or if you would like a feel of more depth in this.

    So right now I'm staying away from making direct suggestions because I'm not sure which way you want to go with this, so best is, if you have questions to come here and ask them

    Thanks for your comments. Must be honest, I didn't think about hiding the "unseen" extre bodies! The main reason for compositing the scene was that I have a rather old/slow system and it always struggles with more than a couple of figures.

    I was aiming for a rather painterly feel, a vague idea was that the figure in the pool was aware of the person looking at the picture and is looking out of the "frame" at them. The main figure (with the "Horror" head) is one that I've tried several versions of. He is loosly inspired by "The King in Yellow" and started off as a slim figure with a "pallid mask", but then I decided to add a touch of H P Lovecraft! I did try a version with depth of field, to make it a bit more realistic and to make the foreground stand out more, but I didn't like the background being out of focus. The lighting is a bit over the top and makes no logical sense but, after many years of lighting stage shows, I tend to like rather "theatrical" lighting. It's one reason I prefer 3Delight to IRay rendering:it seems easier to get the lighting effects that I want.

    By the way, sorry for not adding a full size image in the post (and if I haven't done the "quote" thing right in this post) but I'm not very good with posting in forums! smiley

  • no noseno nose Posts: 310

    Decided to replace one of the top pieces and I think it greatly enchances the outfit, I still want to get some kind of cape on the figure but that might take a while. Besides that I also changed the background (again) and I like it, besides messing with the lighting some more I'm not to sure where else to take this.

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  • vamokvamok Posts: 241
    edited November 2020

    Title: When Loggers Raid the Enchanted Forest

    Backstory: The Forgotten Realms aren't forgotten anymore...Drit (name changed to protect copyright infringement) the drow has had to endure the growing influence of human society. He was arrested for his vigilant acts. He had his unlicensed, exotic pet, Gwyn confiscated. He was cited for having unregistered magical swords. His home was condemned for not being built to code as were all of the dwarven mines in the area. Out of desperation, he took a job with the humans. Ironically, he is hauling the fallen trees of his adopted homeland to human-operated sawmills. At least he was able to get a human "magician" to mount some magical "glow tubes" on his truck to remind him of his home city...

    Linwelly said:

    Linwelly wrote:

    I really like the idea and I get that you want a lot of dark in there but if you render a drow in a black truck at night  problems are bound to happen. I take it you are rendereing in Iray? Iray loves light, the more light the faster your render will be. So my suggestion is to give this some more light, esp something that lights up your character a bit more and his beautiful no " f*s to give " attitude and pose, we really want to see that! Besides some light on your character, take the complete light settings to a good deal lighter and then use the tonemapping settings to make it darker again (crush blacks, vignetting) you can try as well to use a higher shutter speed value then to make it darker. This is a lot of experimenting

    The red emissive can go a good deal stronger as well, I guess that would halp as well between the light and the dirt on the truck

    Yes, I am rendering in Iray. Upon your advice, and some internet searching, here are the changes I made:

    • turned the spotlights into mesh lights, and eventually cranked up their size to soften shadows
    • Powered up the mesh lights to increase the overall lighting (At this point it looked like the surface of the sun)
    • Tweaked the HDRI settings
    • Made several adjustments in the tone mapping tab (never touched those before...) - crush blacks, vignetting, exposure value
    • Boosted the surface-emission lights, which was somewhat negated by the brighter scene

    I am not sure I am happy with the sky color in the new image and considered rendering it as a separate layer. Also, does the tree object nearest the truck need some lighting too? I don't have a pine tree so I am considering removing it altogether and seeing if I can spin the HDRI to improve the background...

    By the way, you were absolutely correct. Adding lighting cut 10 hours off of the rendering time. Yay. Thank you. You taught me a lot with your response!

    Below is the original for comparison:

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    Post edited by Chohole on
  • vamok said:

    Title: When Loggers Raid the Enchanted Forest

    By the way, you were absolutely correct. Adding lighting cut 10 hours off of the rendering time. Yay. Thank you. You taught me a lot with your response!

     

    10 hours render time? are you serious?

    what did you do to get 10 hours off your precious time? 

  • _ AL1vE _ said:
    vamok said:

    Title: When Loggers Raid the Enchanted Forest

    By the way, you were absolutely correct. Adding lighting cut 10 hours off of the rendering time. Yay. Thank you. You taught me a lot with your response!

     

    10 hours render time? are you serious?

    what did you do to get 10 hours off your precious time? 

    It's all about lighting with iray. Though I will say, it seems as though emissives don't help all that much in terms of cutting render times, whereas HDRI and other forms of lighting very much do, on my end at least.

  • Luftsturmregiment40Luftsturmregiment40 Posts: 328
    edited November 2020

    here my general purpose render settings to share with you

    I use higher samples when needed with glass or exotic stuff

    ps.: system is AMD RYZEN

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    Render Settings.zip
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    Post edited by Luftsturmregiment40 on
  • no noseno nose Posts: 310

    Wasn't to big on how the helmet's material was looking so I messed with it a tiny bit, also added a (temporary, hopefully I'll find a bigger one) cape to use.

    Also does anyone know how to fix the weird shading issue that seems to be occuring around the jacket?

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  • LinwellyLinwelly Posts: 5,956

    you all have been busy, I'll go backwards through the new posts so I always catch the latest you put here

  • LinwellyLinwelly Posts: 5,956
    edited November 2020
    no nose said:

    Wasn't to big on how the helmet's material was looking so I messed with it a tiny bit, also added a (temporary, hopefully I'll find a bigger one) cape to use.

    Also does anyone know how to fix the weird shading issue that seems to be occuring around the jacket?

     

    over all I think this develops nicely and I like that you experiment with different materials here.

    I'm not sure what exactly you see with the jacket shader since the image is rather small to notice such details but I guess you mean the lighter and darker areas in the lilac part. I can't say for sure what is happening, maybe there are some bends in the mesh or there are some remainders from the original texture you didn't catch. maybe you can make a screenshot with the viewport setting switched to wire texture shaded showing the detail

    compositionwise I woudl suggest twisting the backgeound a bit so that we see the red carped on the way up as a more separate thing. In the moment it's a bit wierd red striped thing standing out from her stomach.

    considering the capes, there are several superhero capes around, with a new texture they could serve you or you just drop a plane on her using d-force.

    Where you want to go with this, hard to say, maybe think about what caught her attention?

    Post edited by Linwelly on
  • LinwellyLinwelly Posts: 5,956
    _ AL1vE _ said:
    vamok said:

    Title: When Loggers Raid the Enchanted Forest

    By the way, you were absolutely correct. Adding lighting cut 10 hours off of the rendering time. Yay. Thank you. You taught me a lot with your response!

     

    10 hours render time? are you serious?

    what did you do to get 10 hours off your precious time? 

    It's all about lighting with iray. Though I will say, it seems as though emissives don't help all that much in terms of cutting render times, whereas HDRI and other forms of lighting very much do, on my end at least.

    I can confirm that observation

  • LinwellyLinwelly Posts: 5,956
    vamok said:

    Title: When Loggers Raid the Enchanted Forest

    Backstory: The Forgotten Realms aren't forgotten anymore...Drit (name changed to protect copyright infringement) the drow has had to endure the growing influence of human society. He was arrested for his vigilant acts. He had his unlicensed, exotic pet, Gwyn confiscated. He was cited for having unregistered magical swords. His home was condemned for not being built to code as were all of the dwarven mines in the area. Out of desperation, he took a job with the humans. Ironically, he is hauling the fallen trees of his adopted homeland to human-operated sawmills. At least he was able to get a human "magician" to mount some magical "glow tubes" on his truck to remind him of his home city...

    Linwelly said:

    Linwelly wrote:

    I really like the idea and I get that you want a lot of dark in there but if you render a drow in a black truck at night  problems are bound to happen. I take it you are rendereing in Iray? Iray loves light, the more light the faster your render will be. So my suggestion is to give this some more light, esp something that lights up your character a bit more and his beautiful no " f*s to give " attitude and pose, we really want to see that! Besides some light on your character, take the complete light settings to a good deal lighter and then use the tonemapping settings to make it darker again (crush blacks, vignetting) you can try as well to use a higher shutter speed value then to make it darker. This is a lot of experimenting

    The red emissive can go a good deal stronger as well, I guess that would halp as well between the light and the dirt on the truck

    Yes, I am rendering in Iray. Upon your advice, and some internet searching, here are the changes I made:

    • turned the spotlights into mesh lights, and eventually cranked up their size to soften shadows
    • Powered up the mesh lights to increase the overall lighting (At this point it looked like the surface of the sun)
    • Tweaked the HDRI settings
    • Made several adjustments in the tone mapping tab (never touched those before...) - crush blacks, vignetting, exposure value
    • Boosted the surface-emission lights, which was somewhat negated by the brighter scene

    I am not sure I am happy with the sky color in the new image and considered rendering it as a separate layer. Also, does the tree object nearest the truck need some lighting too? I don't have a pine tree so I am considering removing it altogether and seeing if I can spin the HDRI to improve the background...

    By the way, you were absolutely correct. Adding lighting cut 10 hours off of the rendering time. Yay. Thank you. You taught me a lot with your response!

    Below is the original for comparison:

    New version has improv3ed by a lot! your question about the trees in the background, no I wouldn't say they need more light, since they are just around and not where our focus is supposed to be. You might even try to use Depth of field (DOF) to further increase the focu on the drow, though this is one of the rare cases where I don't think it's needed. 

    And yes I think testing different rotation positions might be giving you a better result in the end

  • LinwellyLinwelly Posts: 5,956

    Beginner challenge, I guess- most of what I did was resurfacing and blending, rather than the LIE and geometry editing. I probably should do another entry to work with those tools in more depth. 

    That's definitely an interesting choice of texture for the backwall there and the floor as well, looks like you added those from some completely different surface, very art nouveau :D

    esp for the floor you might want to try a fiddreent tiling and see if you like that result. Maybe you can experimant as well a bit with the magic effects like reduce the opacity and increase the luminance, mayben even remove the maps from the base colour.

    Did you put it through a filter in postwork or is the painterly effect the result from denoiser?

  • LinwellyLinwelly Posts: 5,956
    Stargazey said:
    Linwelly said:
    Stargazey said:

     

    This whole thing has such a different feel to the usual render, it's really interesting

    Not sure if you used that already, for the six armed statue you can hide the rest of the duplicate bodies by closing the exe of the respective bones in the scene tap, which might help with reducing render times. Though I understand that you rendered single items and composed afterwards? Mirroring the pose was a cleverer thing to get the statues like that.

    Getting those very different light effects was probably intentional. Wjat I'm not sure about is if you want this to look rather flat, like a painting or if you would like a feel of more depth in this.

    So right now I'm staying away from making direct suggestions because I'm not sure which way you want to go with this, so best is, if you have questions to come here and ask them

    Thanks for your comments. Must be honest, I didn't think about hiding the "unseen" extre bodies! The main reason for compositing the scene was that I have a rather old/slow system and it always struggles with more than a couple of figures.

    I was aiming for a rather painterly feel, a vague idea was that the figure in the pool was aware of the person looking at the picture and is looking out of the "frame" at them. The main figure (with the "Horror" head) is one that I've tried several versions of. He is loosly inspired by "The King in Yellow" and started off as a slim figure with a "pallid mask", but then I decided to add a touch of H P Lovecraft! I did try a version with depth of field, to make it a bit more realistic and to make the foreground stand out more, but I didn't like the background being out of focus. The lighting is a bit over the top and makes no logical sense but, after many years of lighting stage shows, I tend to like rather "theatrical" lighting. It's one reason I prefer 3Delight to IRay rendering:it seems easier to get the lighting effects that I want.

    By the way, sorry for not adding a full size image in the post (and if I haven't done the "quote" thing right in this post) but I'm not very good with posting in forums! smiley

    It's interesting to see how our background affects our visual customs. I get that stage effect from you image very well. Now that I understand you intentions I have the following suggestion: try to separate the colours between the figures in the centre of the image more. all three of them are an a range between green and yellow in different nuances, the green from the bathing girl is still the most different. I would esp. try some changes on the coat of your large cthulu sort of character.

    with using the layers and composing in post this might be exchanging onyl that one layer

  • LinwellyLinwelly Posts: 5,956

    Third version. Dropped the opacity on the flame and redid the geoshell for the lavaman. 

    This is giving me already much more of a glowing fiery scene, lots of improvement. I notice that your flames are very yellow, could it be that you tinted the missives colours here in yellow? If yous I would suggest to take that out and turn it back to white. Flame where it is really hot turns white. if there are fire texture maps used in base colour, try to use them in the missive channel instead.

    The other thing I would suggest is trying to either change the underground texture or play with the tiling to see if that results in something you like

  • LinwellyLinwelly Posts: 5,956
    Alias52 said:

    Take Cover

     

    Mainly played around with surfaces here so far. Used the geometry editor to make changes to the drain pipe.

    I think I didn't comment on this one yet. About the textures ther isn't much to add from my side, looking forward to see what else you might want to alter. What I would suggest is to change the light situation. I have the impression that you are using mainly the camera head lamp to lighten up your scene and takes away a lot of dramatic you could have with this.

    I would suggest to experiment with twe or three emissive planes one tinted in light blue, the other in a red tone (this time acutally tinted the light temperature can be rather hight like about 5000k). place them in different positions left and right ouside the camera view lighting up the scene, turn off the camera headlamp for this. the third plane could be filling in in white where you need it. try differemt püositions to see what effect it has on the scene. you can try other colours as well of course, there are just some suggestions.

  • LinwellyLinwelly Posts: 5,956

    Version F here.

    Moved the darkest character closer to the lights, changed the light settings, did a little texture work on the jacket of one of the other characters, and tried adding some bloom.

    This develops very nicely, just a word about Bloom settings. I would advise to use a much higher value on the bloom filer threshold, standart is 2000. In a scene like this I would use a threashold of 9000. with the low values the effect is the grey out the image. As well try a bit higher bloom filter radius and on the other hand reduce the Bloom filter brightness scale (standart is 1, I would try something about 0.1 to 0.2)

    have fun experimenting with that

  • skinklizzardskinklizzard Posts: 218
    edited November 2020

    The cobbled together jetpack probably still needs a fair amount of adjusting

    but here is an entry so far for the intermediate challenge

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    Post edited by skinklizzard on
  • Luftsturmregiment40Luftsturmregiment40 Posts: 328
    edited November 2020

    The cobbled together jetpack probably still needs a fair amount of adjusting

    but here is an entry so far for the intermediate challenge

    the rocketgirl needs more focus - try lighting her up a bit

    Post edited by Luftsturmregiment40 on
  • bastian2560bastian2560 Posts: 83
    edited November 2020

    Hi all. This started of as a background for another scene and i tosed in a couple of figers. (I hate this one).

     

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    Post edited by bastian2560 on
  • second go intermediaet. i have a couple bobo's will fix if i have time.

     

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  • second go intermediaet. i have a couple bobo's will fix if i have time.

     

    Marvin paranoid android in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; it was a good laugh

  • vamokvamok Posts: 241

    Here is my final render for what I am now calling - When Loggers Raid the Enchanted Forest

    I rotated the HDRI and then made some tweaks to the lighting, tone mapping, and emissive surfaces to compensate for the change in light resulting from the HDRI rotation.

    I have enjoyed reading the posts and seeing other people develop their works as well. This has been really fun!

    When lumber comes to the enchanted forest final.png
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  • aprilshowers2065aprilshowers2065 Posts: 738
    edited November 2020
    Linwelly said:

    Third version. Dropped the opacity on the flame and redid the geoshell for the lavaman. 

    This is giving me already much more of a glowing fiery scene, lots of improvement. I notice that your flames are very yellow, could it be that you tinted the missives colours here in yellow? If yous I would suggest to take that out and turn it back to white. Flame where it is really hot turns white. if there are fire texture maps used in base colour, try to use them in the missive channel instead.

    The other thing I would suggest is trying to either change the underground texture or play with the tiling to see if that results in something you like

    Thanks for all your advice! Wasn't a yellow tint but it seems I may have dropped the temperature too low; bumping it back up helped, although now it looks a little brighter than I expected - going to play around with that a bit more. Also increased the displacement of the cavern texture and DOF to the camera.

    Fire Cavern 10.png
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    Post edited by aprilshowers2065 on
  • Linwelly said:

    Third version. Dropped the opacity on the flame and redid the geoshell for the lavaman. 

    This is giving me already much more of a glowing fiery scene, lots of improvement. I notice that your flames are very yellow, could it be that you tinted the missives colours here in yellow? If yous I would suggest to take that out and turn it back to white. Flame where it is really hot turns white. if there are fire texture maps used in base colour, try to use them in the missive channel instead.

    The other thing I would suggest is trying to either change the underground texture or play with the tiling to see if that results in something you like

    Thanks for all your advice! Wasn't a yellow tint but it seems I may have dropped the temperature too low; bumping it back up helped, although now it looks a little brighter than I expected - going to play around with that a bit more. Also increased the displacement of the cavern texture and DOF to the camera.

    great job looks convincing

    now you could play with color grading and add a vignette effect

  • Luftsturmregiment40Luftsturmregiment40 Posts: 328
    edited November 2020

    second and final entry for this month contest

    inspired by the TV Series The Expanse

    ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

    Title: the interface

    Software: DAZ Studio 4.12.1

    Renderengine: Nvidia Iray

    Challenge: November 2020 - Daz 3D New User Challenge

    Technique: compositing

    Post Work: collor grading 

     

    the interface.jpg
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    Post edited by Chohole on
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