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Hello EP
That worked to get access !!!!!
I then tried to go back to the scene but it's still frozen refusing to allow me to access it.
Options:-
Use your shader tab option as a workaround
Or redo the scene.
I think that I will go for redoing the scene.
If I had more time I would have liked to upgrade the Nightstorm car into a proper concept car, and added water to the drain.
I was keeping the Yamaki as option 2.
My aim was to learn how to import scenery, people, clothes into Carrara, and then adjust shaders to get a good result, as well as get use to how the lighting worked. If I had time was going to explore doing some basic modelling as well to enhance the overall scene.
Got the importing worked out for the scenery, got the shaders better understood but still scratching my head a bit on the correct usage (I suspect that's going to be a learning experience for a little while). Still got clothes on people to do.
So quite a bit of progress but a few headaches as well, but life's like that.
Many thanks for the help, much appreciated, making far more progress in this challenge then I had in previous attempts to use Carrara !!!!!!
Also learning that there's heaps that can be done in Carrara as well.
Sorry for your troubles!
I can't wait to see the final render!
Clock is ticking down, but I'm thinking I can maybe still make it... :)
Here's a quick render of my scene setup, framed for the shot (always subject to change of course lol)
Nothing in the scene yet but the Vanguard gunboat, but I'm ok-ish with the lighting so far, though might still meddle about some more, and I've got the cast textured and ready, and since I've got some time free tonight maybe I can just squeak this out.
Hello EP
That worked to get access !!!!!
I then tried to go back to the scene but it's still frozen refusing to allow me to access it.
Options:-
Use your shader tab option as a workaround
Or redo the scene.
I think that I will go for redoing the scene.
If I had more time I would have liked to upgrade the Nightstorm car into a proper concept car, and added water to the drain.
I was keeping the Yamaki as option 2.
My aim was to learn how to import scenery, people, clothes into Carrara, and then adjust shaders to get a good result, as well as get use to how the lighting worked. If I had time was going to explore doing some basic modelling as well to enhance the overall scene.
Got the importing worked out for the scenery, got the shaders better understood but still scratching my head a bit on the correct usage (I suspect that's going to be a learning experience for a little while). Still got clothes on people to do.
So quite a bit of progress but a few headaches as well, but life's like that.
Many thanks for the help, much appreciated, making far more progress in this challenge then I had in previous attempts to use Carrara !!!!!!
Also learning that there's heaps that can be done in Carrara as well.
One suggestion that won't help you with your problem, but if you got it to work , do a quick save but change the file name so you don't overwrite your original file, then keep working with the new file, sometimes you have to go back to the first original file.
Hello Kashyyyk
I was originally going to save my work in graduated steps, more in case I made a bad mistake rather than a corrupt file. :P
Another one for the learning curve !!!!!!!!!!
Updated/redone Provence scenery about 99.8% complete, just got the streetlight glass to do, but am happy with the result.
When my skill-set improves will have to do another updated version.
Next up the car followed by Vicki6 and hopefully no moths in the wardrobe this time around.
Hello Jonstark
If the crew is ready textured I thought it would look nice with them doing the "group crew photo in front of their ship."
Don't know what you have in mind, but I hope you make it !!!!!
This is the assembly room setup for my second entry. Originally I was going to have the piano at the top of the tower, being played (see http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/45561/P255/#679025 ) but there's no way I was going to get that finished in time, so I switched to what is essentially the reverse angle of the first entry (I do like to get multiple pictures out of any setup!!)
You can see the detail of my window arches in the wireframe, even though they're only really visible in the first entry. Essentially, I cut rectangular holes in the walls for the windows, and the arches are inserts made from half a cylinder, given thickness and sized to fit the frame. There's a slight oversize on the outside faces, just so I don't get any odd alignment artefacts.
Hello Tim_A
Is the second entry titled ? :-
"Carry my chair down here NOW !!!!!!"
Love the first entry, bit less issues with vertigo when you look up.
Car Number 2 now in Scenery update No.2.
Will try a few more things with the Yamaki, then over to Vicki6.
LOL! It should be!
Love what you've done with the paint on the car - is that some kind of ChromaLusion effect?
Tim_A, both of these are awesome! Very cool that you've done both views.
dievans, great job on your entry. I'm glad you were able to enter and join in the fun!
It's always great to have fresh faces and perspectives in these challenges. It's also a great affirmation, that despite its quirks, Carrara can still attract skilled artists and provide them with the tools to make a great piece of art.
Steve, your entries are very cool. I agree with dievans, in that I love the two perspectives. Also, seeing how you started and watching the scene unfold via the WIPs was very educational. You also did a great job on the textures.
Hurry up Bunyip02! We're waiting to see your final submission! You've done a great job with your retexturing of the set.
I don't know quite how we'd do it, but a lot of these renders would look really awesome in stereoscopic 3D - especially given the title of this month's competition! :coolsmile:
Ran into troubles, because I completely forgot that while Carrara hair is perhaps the most realistic hair solution in all of digital rendering it has a fatal kryptonite in that it does not render right under volumetric lighting... And my starship hanger scene has a fair bit of volumetric lighting...
Quickly realized my mistake with the first test render, so had to try to find some prop hairs that were approximately the right styles and shapes to work for my characters instead. Alright so the figure is really tiny and racing into the ship, but if you look close you can see that the volumetric lighting from the spotlights just destroys the carrara hair in the first image, the second is how it looks with regular prop hair in it's place. So I had to give up my favored carrara hair and get straight to racing the clock, importing characters and refining poses.
Oh by the way here's a test render of the full crew scene in the spaceport, from when I was doing the character profiles. This isn't at any kind of resolution and not using GI or great settings, just to give an idea.
Going back to my scene, cause time is short, I started putting in characters and posing and changing lights and textures etc. Here's a screen grab of my lighting setup, though not everything is easily seen visible, because I actually went through the entire hangar (which is huge) and textured it so every light was glowing, and every single light had a primitive cube right at the same location set for medium intensity in the glow channel, alpha set to 0 so the cubes are invisible (this makes the cube invisible but in GI settings the light will still radiate from the glowing cube). Literally this results in something like 50 glow cubes, mostly on the ceiling lights shining down but also on any lights in the rest of the scene too, like the walkway to the side which has light strips running along the base and outside the entrance. Also the entrance to the hanger, those lights that run all the way around the opening leading out into space, those each have a glow cube (meshlight) to throw some light as well.
That might seem like it would throw a lot of light, but it really doesn't because the hanger is so big and I didn't set the glow at a super high intensity, so there is lots of hopefully natural looking light falloff but still makes the place nice and dark (or at least that's the aim).
There is one visible cube which is thinned out to be closer to a plane, over to the right side, and that's my main light source behind the camera, this one is big and broad, set to glow at 1000% intensity, and it's meant to throw some lights on the characters battling without putting too much brightness on the ship itself, I wanted the mood lighting to come from the engines and from light spilling out of the ship's door/ramp/entrance.
I put a glow cube inside the ship too, and it did well at illuminating the interior (the panels and screens inside the ship have also be textured to glow, but they aren't really throwing any light off), but the glow cube by itself wasn't spilling light down the entrance ramp the way I wanted it to, so I put one spotlight of low intensity deep inside the cabin pointing out towards the ramp, and then 2 more spotlights, also of low intensity, just over the entrance at the top of the ramp (corresponding to the 2 lights that were there in the textures) and set them all up with light cones to get a nice volumetric light spill. I had to really turn down the intensity of the light cones; a little goes a long way. Honestly I still think I may have overdone it.
There are also 2 bulb lights in midair just behind the engines. The engine texture is set to glow of course, but isn't really throwing any light off, and I wanted that nice feeling of red radiated light from the engines, hopefully selling the effect that the ship is primed and ready to fly, but bulb lights by default reach 400 freakin feet, which is forever and a day of too much distance and very little falloff, so I drastically reduced the range so the whole scene wouldn't end up an angry red. I also used the glow effect on each bulb light, and played for a while to find what I felt was an appropriate glow sphere radius.
The space background is just a backdrop of a nifty looking pic of a real galaxy that I found, slotted into the backdrop channel, so that when looking outside the opening of the hanger there would be something to suggest that we are in space. It doesn't give any light to the scene however.
And that's it for the lighting setup.
Anyways... I think this is going to have to serve for my submission, as the clock is down to the wire. I'm not entirely 100% happy with it, I'm missing using all the lovely realistic carrara hair, and the texturing work on the skin that was so painstakingly refined over lots of test renders is mostly wasted in a low light scene like this where the characters aren't even all that close to the camera (I do a lot of portrait rendering, so I'm used to characters being right there near the camera with lots of light, so this was a bit different).
There's no SSS in the skin of the characters either, mostly because I was running out of time and needed to get something done and didn't want to wait on the calculations for so many characters in the same scene with lots of different light sources, but also because I'm not sure there would have been much SSS effect in what is a pretty low light situation. I would have liked to have use a lot of motion blur to denote the action of the scene and the movement of it, and would have added in some 'blaster' bolts of energy here and there to try to sell the energy of the moment, but again, my earlier setbacks and procrastination led me to not really have the time to really refine this.
Anyway, it's a bit messy, maybe visually too busy by half, but I was in the mood for a nice battle/escape scene, and I think most fight scenes are a little messy, just goes with the territory. Hopefully there's enough little details here and there to sell it and be visually interesting, despite being a bit messy and chaotic.
Btw, just a side note, but I was struck how capable Carrara is at handling large and fairly complex scenes. I've got 10 fully outfitted M4s, 1 V4, weapons, many many different articles of clothing, tons and tons of morphs for each one, as well as a fairly complex and large hanger and an even more complex spaceship, and Carrara handled it all without blinking. Way to go Carrara :)
Great work Jon. By the way, you can fake SSS with the glow channel. I only have one Elite texture set, which is Reby Sky, but I found what looked like a color map and a black and white map that seem to be made to drive an SSS type effect in Poser or D/S. I multiplied those maps in the glow channel and turned the intensity of the maps down to 50% and had the pictured result.
Skin is the procedural skin, so there's some weird effect going on between the lip and face shading domain, as I had used a black and white image map to soften the transition, but with the glow, it almost seems to multiply the effect between the zones and increase the brightness. I think with regular image maps in the color channel, you wouldn't have the issue.
Good tip Evil. You just reminded me that I haven't yet had a chance to play around with the procedural skin you developed yet. In the abstract I actually think procedural would be superior to image mapped, although one limitation is that I can't think of a way to have a female character with makeup (eyeliner and the like) with procedural skin. Maybe in layers? Or perhaps there's a way to use carrara's 3d paint capabilities... musing on it...
I should finally have a little free time in the coming week, and one of the things I've been looking forward to is playing around with the procedural skin template :)
Got a few minutes of breathing room to comment, so finally going to start doing some catch up on this thread :)
Tim_A, I love the perspective of both your shots, I think it's an incredibly dynamic and creative way to frame the render. When you posted the first render of the camera looking down the tower/shaft I was immediately struck by the fact it actually made my slight fear of heights tingle (not a bad thing at all). I thought for sure you were going to do a render of a character plummeting downwards, eyes fixed up towards the camera, hair billowing in the breeze, eyes wide and mouth open. Lol, I guess that might have been a bit too morbid/dark, but it sure would be viscerally effective. I wonder if I'm just twisted that that's the first image that popped into my mind, I never considered it would be a much happier scene of someone calling down to another character on the ground level. Just goes to show... Anyway, great, great concept, and I wanted to complement you on it.
If you look at the shader, particularly the nipple and lip domain shaders, you will notice that I did a bit of a cheat and used a terrain shader. I have the top part of it, the global shader the same settings as the base skin layer. I then used a black and whit image map that I had painted earlier using the 3D paint tool to feather the edges around the edge of the shading domain, as a distribution map, with a multi-channel shader below it to color and texture the lips and nipples.
I see no reason that you couldn't use the same technique to paint a distribution map for eye shadow. You could also try layers lists or other operators in conjunction with image maps to distribute or add the effect.
Hello EP
Had a bit of a slow-down due to health not being good - still not 100% but I'm trying to get a final render done.
Lighting I used the Carrara Skies & Lightdomes product, specifically the R16.
Adjusted a few of the factors including the Latitude/Longitude and reset the time in years/months as well as 1pm, going more of a direct down lighting. Would like to get to the stage where I can do a complete light set-up but I'm still on my Noobies knowledge base, but I'm starting to get the hang of how Carrara works, got much to still learn.
The first renders show the shadows a bit off, but when I put Ray-tracing on it looked a lot more like what I was after.
I ended up using the import out of DAZ3D as an object for Vicki6 and her clothing, I also used the Gia skin on V6 to give her a slightly darker skin look.
Tim_A
"Love what you’ve done with the paint on the car - is that some kind of ChromaLusion effect?"
The textures on the body of the car are for the Yamaki GTX-R, I was going for a chrome look to the paint by maxing out the reflection, highlights and then adjusted the shininess to where it looked the part. I then adjusted the shaders going through the metallic paints by various vendors to get a combination that worked with the overall reflection look. The result I achieved is NOT because I am any good at lighting, it was as a result of trying different things out and then exploring the concept when it looked the part. I would still like to do some more exploration of what I have done. If everyone is interested I can then post a thread to hopefully get some good ideas and thoughts going, especially from any others who have already gone down this path.
When I get my current render complete if it looks like I have not missed anything I will be posting it as my entry.
In the meantime here's the last of my WIP renders.
Was a bit bright form when I bought in the Yamaki & Vicki6 as they also bought in a Light each time, have turned them off for the final render.
I don't know if it is to late, but the woman's hair looks a bit plastic. If you have the time, you can go into the hair shader and perhaps copy and past the image map from the bump channel into the Highlight channel, then adjust the Shininess to around 3 or 4% to start with.
If you wish to get really fancy, stick a multiplier in the Translucency channel and copy and past the image map from the color channel into one slot of the multiplier and the the image map from the bump channel into the other slot. You may need to lower the brightness slider in the bump map (below the thumbnail) if the effect is to strong.
Hello EP
Final render shows the effect on the hair not as bad as the last WIP, it's still not great, but I am going to PDF this entire Challenge and redo my scene later with all of the advice everyone has given, will allow for a more relaxed learning.
Many thanks once again to try and get my renders looking better each time, GREATLY APPRECIATED !!!!!!
There's still half a dozen things I would like to do with this scene, but I'm very happy with the results obtained, can only get better especially with the support/feedback from the crew here.
Regards, Bunyip
Entry loaded in, again could have easily spent another week, but it's a huge improvement on what I was doing in Carrara before.
Currently doing a 3000 pixel wide render - looks like it's about an 8 or 9 hour render time !!!!!!!!
Such coolness everyone! I've worked all day on mine, I'm at incremental save #33, and I'm about to hit the final render button. EEK!
Good luck suky! Can't wait to see it!
Bunyip02, that render looks great! I'm so glad that you and the others, such as suky, dievans, etc. have chosen to participate and share your talent with us. This is the reason we have the challenges- to promote and educate others about what Carrara can do. We want to demystify the software so there is less of an "eek" factor.
One last tip for you and your big render, so it doesn't take so long to render would be the Irradiance Map trick. It helps speed up the light calculations at the start of the render. There's a description here:
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/43528/P105/#668290
Oh my! Just posted my entry with less than 15 minutes to spare. I had to go out of town for a family reunion today and just got back a couple of hours ago. I still had to put together all the required WIP, content, and add a comment. Whew!
Glad you got it in. Your entry looks fantastic.
This is going to be a tough one to decide, that's for sure.
Thanks so much, evilproducer. No doubt voting is going to be difficult, especially when you follow how much effort everyone puts into their work before the final render.
I like especially like your Vicky and Hermit image. I confess I like to open it up to it's full size just because the great expanse is kind of thrilling.
Good luck to you and everyone else!!!