Rosie and The Winter Wolf
Dartanbeck
Posts: 21,623
Rosie 8 and The Winter Wolf
Guard Soldier - "Git up Jarhead, yer watch"
Napping Guard Soldier - "Ain't nuthin' ~ no body's gone be out 'n this kinda weather. Colder than a dead witch's patootie out there it is"
- A silhouette appears in the near distance through the fog of blizzard....
The June PC+ Sale Event really landed me a lot of new goodies - including a new set of goods to begin rebuilding a Genesis 8 Female version of my Rosie once again.
Amazing new environments to play with, tools, gadgets, scripts, shaders... I had a lot of fun!
Check out my article on my experience with this Massive Sale Event!
Below are the products used to create this render
Post edited by Dartanbeck on
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It all began with the introduction of Thorne and Handspan Studio's Lara for Genesis 8 Female character.
Little Lara is just perfect in So Many Ways! But I needed to tweak her a bit to make her into a Rosie character.
My first attempts were really cool, I thought, but when it came time to doing my animations, it started to become very apparent that I simply don't have enough Genesis 8 content yet.
Enter PC+ Semi-Annual Sale Event of June 2021!
As usual, the sale offers incredibly low prices on things that are worth more than what they sell for when they're Not on sale! Alaso as usual, I start grabbing up things from my loooong wish list, which is quite often a bunch of really cool environments and props - even simple ones that I really like, but I also long for some of those really cool larger kits too!
You'll see in my article that I really went nuts on grabbing up every Andrey Pestryakov scene kit I could! I'm really quite new to discovering these awesome sets and absolutely love how nicely they load and render without making my computer blow sparks - and the renders turn out great!
Staff Picks came along and, toward the end of the sale, I landed on this little cutie-pie: Akasha and Anain's Sol for Genesis 3 and 8 Female.
Hmmm... I though to myself, she looks a lot like the way Rosie looked in her kid pictures. I'm gonna mix her in with Lara and see what happens.
As if either of them aren't gorgeous enough to stand on their own, they simply are not Rosie - that is, until I put therm together!
I'm still not completely ready to make the switch to Genesis 8 yet, but that has nothing to do with character creation. Daz Studio just seems to like to crash a Lot more often - and at crucial, horribly time-consuming moments that leave me unproductive after hours of toiling - which I just cannot do right now... maybe later.
Still, I'm having fun assembling her and collecting new costumes for her. In the meantime, Rosie 5.2 is Rockin' it in the animation department!!!
Here a shot of the render before all of my blizzardy post work. In the actual sequence in the movie, it's so blustery we can't even make her out - it just has to be that way right here. For the gallery image above, I wanted to see here and her Dire Wolf.
I wanted to keep a version at this state to help show off how beautiful Magix101's Iray Worlds SkyDome is. He says in the promo that it's big enough to fit most scenes... yeah... it even fits the big scenes I just got from Andrey Pestryakov!
Alessandro did an amazingly incredible, superbulous job when he made this crazy-awesome Dire Wolf for Daz Dog 8!!! I mean, this is one complete, easy-to-use pack that comes with multiple coats, poses, a choice of dynamic fur and one incredible character shape/scale!!! I'll never forget how my stomach had that roller coaster feeling the first time I loaded him up.
When double-clicked, yeah. it's a wolf. Look in the parameters tab once, and crank that "Dire Wolf" slider up to 1!!! Oh Man!!! Huge and Beautiful!
Yeah, I am truly a die hard Carrara user - and love it! I'm in Daz Studio right now because, when I took the big step to evolve my main characters forward, I realized that I could be using Studio a Lot more to help with efficiency.
Daz Studio may be quite tiresome when it comes to animation (compared to Carrara, I mean - it actually works fine), but it has a wealth of very helpful tools to help us on our way no matter what software we end up using in the end - that is, for folks like me who want to perform our duties using wonderful Daz 3d (and/or similar) content rather than having to make it all ourselves.
This was all starting at a time when I couldn't really use either app much at all because my computer was down for the count.
That gave me time to read and think, draw and make notes. Carrara will run on the lowliest of computers, so I used IrfanView to batch-run all of my texture maps on this horribly under-powered laptop to one-quarter their original size - sometimes even smaller. It didn't matter, quality-wise. I just needed to have a way to test some simple experiments.
(Long story, so I'll stop there)
So by the time I got my new Ryzen machine built, Carrara was churning along faster than I've ever seen it. What a Dream!!!
After all of that thinking, deciding, testing, etc., I ended up going with Genesis 1 as my main base figure - for my main characters. Everyone else can be any (any) generation of Daz figure I want them to be.
I used to just build my Genesis and Genesis 2 (and earlier generations as well) characters directly within Carrara. During my thinking stage, I realized that there's no real way to export a rigged figure from Carrara - not efficiently anyway. So it just made sense to build the characters in Studio and store them in the same library I use to load them into Carrara. Well now everything's really starting to rock!
The downside was that I was really quite illiterate with Daz Studio except for things like using the Content Creation Tools, like Morph Loader Pro, Transfer Utility, the Hexagon Bridge, aniMate 2 (but still only a little, on this one)... I was only using it as a toolkit. And that's fine! But I've now discovered that, getting better at Daz Studio makes my work in Carrara better, easier, faster and more efficient.
All of that said, and the reason I said it - When I started my website I was till in the computer-less stage, working from my laptop. This pile of junk I'm typing on now.
Beginning the way I did, it really started off as a "Carrara" website. I'm glad that I knew I'd be also bringing in topics about Daz Studio and other software, so I built avenues for that into the initial outline, because as I finalize this, first of my animated movies, I'll be expanding into demonstrating how I am currently using both Daz Studio and Carrara with each other as if it was one big studio, with cool side tools like Hexagon and the rest of the cool software it takes to make animated motion pictures.
Do I still favor Carrara over Daz Studio? Well... I'm not sure I ever really did. Yes, I find Carrara to be my favorite software ever - true. But I was there when Daz 3d first started working on D|S and, even though I didn't really come to grips much with those earlier versions, I was really proud of Daz 3d for taking that massive step - and then for pushing, pulling and taking it to become such an advanced tool that it is today! I mean, if you want to make content, Daz Studio is the first tool you need to have!
After spending so much time actually learning and using Daz Studio I am quite convinced that I no longer really have a favorite. I do think it's a Massive misgiving to the CG world to not develop Carrara. As aged as it is technologically, its still doing what it does best better than anything I can think of. It might be possible to find similar lovin' from an app that costs a mortgage, but I'd be willing to bet that Carrara still handles a DS library and Poser runtime better and faster.
But I am now at a point where I love getting to work either whichever of the two works best for the next thing I have to work on - so I'm constantly going back and forth between them - and I love it!
Here are some fun things to consider if you're getting into making CG movies:
Daz Studio's Content Creation Tools
Whether you use it for your main characters or not, Genesis 1 Totally ROCKS!!!
Using Content (or even just browsing the store) to inspire a Story
That massive PC+ Semi-Annual Sale Event really did something to my library.
It wasn't until an earlier PC+ sale this year (this year? This Year! :|) that I discovered how amazing Andrey Pestryakov's landscape and scenery kit are - largely in part for my lack of ever using Daz Studio to render with.
During this recent PC+ Event, Andrey put up a Lot of really nice (they're all really nice, from what I've seen) products in several of the highly marked-down sales categories.
I have a nice listing of all of them Right Here, and I've been trying all of them out - they're incredibly efficient and very nice to render!
I also grabbed up SickleYield's (I love buying SickleYield stuff - she's so gerenous and cool!!! Thanks SY!!!) Sky System Iray, which is a really handy bit of eye candy for the environment! I'll be tring this out in Carrara as well, along with ImagineX's cool Backdrop Series. I love getting these ultra creative and efficient time savers!
Poor Rosie! Dartanbeck, think Fast and Strike Swiftly!
Above - Andrey's Medieval Lands environment (Awesome! Huge! Easy on the System too!!!) along with cliff rocks from Stones HR2; SickleYields Sky System and JoeQuick's super-awesome Drago for Genesis 8 Male(s) dragon!
Below - Andrey's highly detailed, realistic cliff rock pack called Stones and Structures - a title that really doesn't do this wondeful product justice... but it's just a name. It's all in the package that counts! This one also uses SickleYields Sky System Iray product.
Several people have commented to me that they feel that Rosie would be cold in such a situation.
Allow me to assure you - she's not!
In production, she's currently marching through the northern tundra on an important mission, and it's going very well! :)
Daz 3d and the wonderful PAs have gifted me with even more content sales that lend perfectly to this side-quest right at the time when I could use the content the most... right here, right now. How do they know to do that?
So I've scribed a short article in my Content-Driven Story section regarding Rosie and the Winter Wolf.
It feels like a fun little article to me - let me know what you think?
Disclaimer: This aricle is found within my Content-Driven Story section, which is within the Carrara CG Workshop section - even though I've now established a whole new workflow that includes using Daz Studio quite a lot. Just FYI
A little still frame I made using some of the elements I've rendered for the side quest mentioned above