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..testing out some new to me stuff, the G3 skin I picked up as an AF gift, tks DAZ! Also trying to salvage the G1 Dark Raven(?) outfit, that originally ships with just diffuse textures with all those baked in shadows and highlights;)) At least it has good topology
a quick conversion of the Downtown Taxi, which I grabbed the other day... hm I'm sure there was a sign somewhere
...
...found it...
The ship is an old Poser model from Richard Merk (he did a few Star Trek styled, Pre-Federation ships back then) who posted the model back in 2010. I don't think I want to highlight the spinning thingies as I think they'd draw too much attention to them, but I *will* use the idea for when it comes time to fire energy weapons, having the weapon's ambience grow brighter and brighter until they release their energy beams. Thanks very much for the idea, I hadn't thought of that before but it will be a nice effect.
For the ship scaling, I know it it might look a little "off" but I was using the Star Trek Animated Series title card as a reference, though not following it too closely. While I have the slow, peaceful ship movement, my daughter (and editor) made it a very swift zoom and stopped it mid-screen with the episode title covering much of the ship. She did what I considered a more "modern" edit through the whole test episode, keeping it moving (since the main goal was to test the lip synch). Had I done the editing using my own ideas, it would have run an extra 20% longer and seemed much, much slower.
-- Walt Sterdan
As always, I love the way the metal come out for you. I really like the character, the skin looks excellent (I'm not sure I have that texture). I've been tinkering with my G1 collection the last couple of days and there's a really nice library there, but a lot of the characters I made back then don't open correctly and will need to be rebuilt if I want to use them (the biggest problem is that for many of the characters, the heads are squashed vertically; that, or their eyeballs are pushed back in the head).
-- Walt Sterdan
Love the reflection on the ground in the first pict, but this one is the kind of thing I really enjoy; the pavement looks real, the car is excellent (as always, i love the highlights and reflections) but this one has something you don't always get in even great renders, a story. I'm intrigued by why he's holding his undamaged sign while stopped in what looks like the middle of nowhere. My curiosity is piqued.
-- Walt Sterdan
Very much looking forward...
It was this one. Comes with some useful looking face paints. I customized it quite a bit because I didn't want that blue-ish elf color. I use mostly G3 textures and hairs on G1 these days;) Or Gen 4 textures, they often have a lot of "personality", albeit lacking in other departments;)
Hm. I had some moments of pure horror after upgrading to DS4.20, all my characters loaded deformed. There were a bunch of morphs (Genesis Evolution among others) that needed re-installing, IIRC. Also, the status of the auto-follow checkbox had changed on a number of morphs.
Oh good, and thanks
Well I guess our previous discussion played a small part here.
Darcy Investigates The Object.
Neat pict! The reflection on the objecxt came out very well, as did the rock textures; if I could offer one suggestion, I'd either rotate the character slightly or changer her stance a little. As it is now, it's hard to easily distinguish her right leg from her left and at first glance it looks (on my monitor at least) like her right leg is part of her left.
-- Walt Sterdan
I like the "chroma-color" look, very cool! And the "Object" metal is beautiful;) Wouldn't have minded seeing a bit more of Darcy and those SF gadgets, though:)
I've been trying to up my art game for the past year and I've managed to improve a lot. The thing I'm working on now is trying to improve the look of skin, but I seem to have hit a wall with the free 3DL shaders that come with D|S (aoa sss, ubersurface), can't get the realism, depth, or suppleness I want. Thoughts or suggestions?
Of the examples you posted, I find the AoA version more convincing. It has a more natural specular fall off and better diffuse roughness. However, I think both look pretty good in that lighting.
My first suggestion would be: Look into lighting next if you want to up realism! Experiment with area lights, for softer "light to shadow" grading! Y'know, spotlights can only take you so far, they can have soft shadows but the terminator line will always be harsh. Arealights would fix that at the expence of longer rendertimes. And then there's the global illumination/light bounce question, if you want to go further still...
So, IMO, it all adds up. It can be done for sure but in the end you might end up with much longer rendertimes than if you had used scripted pathtracing and better shaders from the start:)
Anyway, using arealights would make a difference, give it a go!
@Ethin, I tried to replicate your setup, using wowie's stuff. G1 with a G3F skin (set up/saved acc. to my personal preferences), G3F transmapped hair and a random bikini;) One front- and one rim-emitter, no environmental light, -reflections or -bounces. Two renders with your pixelsize settings, the first with "medium" quality settings, second with all bouncelight depth turned off, which should match your setup quite well.
I managed to pick a rather complex hair model, without the hair rendertimes are down to around 4 vs 3 min.
I haven't really tried, but I don't think I could render faster using AoA SSS, UberArea light planes and UE2 in bouncelight mode? Might be wrong, though;)
23 min
14 min
Should have set up the eyes differently for the second shot, but you get the drift..
Hm, just a good old RANT seems to be in place, and I can just drop it here, being well aware that it makes no difference at all;))) So here we go again:
Dear Publishing Artists and DAZ QA, please look up the subject of LINEAR WORKFLOW once and for all and start getting things RIGHT! You should know by now that, no matter if it's IRay or 3Delight, maps with color information, such as diffusemaps and normal maps should have a gamma vallue of 0 (2.20) and all graycolor maps, such as SPECULAR maps and BUMP/HEIGHTmaps and OPACITYmaps should be assigned a value of 1. It's no goddamn ROCKET SCIENCE!!
Hairs using opacity maps: Please stop making those (cutout) opacity maps with loads of gray shades in them! It's plain STUPID. They are MASKS! They should have pure black and pure white in them!! Simple as that!
Thank You! (Ugh)
...so after modifying the hair transmap I managed to shave 10 minutes off the rendertime..and it looks far better..FYI, April
Added a tad environmental reflections from a hidden env. sphere and a hidden ground plane to catch some of that bouncelight. Changed the lighting temp and some stuff. 27 min render. (Transmap still needs tweeking)
Ok that'll do for now...(29 min)
I'm the last person to advice you as I focus mainly on Toon/Comic NPR rendering, but I think they both look pretty good with the AoASSS one looking a little better. The lighting will change, though, based on what scens you build with the character, so the way the skin renders like this, in isolation, probably won't work the same "in action". If you're really not sure if you're happy with either, I'd try them both in different scenes and look at the results then to decide. You may decide that one might look better in some scenes and the other better in others.
-- Walt Sterdan
Gorgeous; the hair really does look great.
-- Walt Sterdan
Ok, I tried your suggestion @Sven Dullah. Two uber area lights, uber enviro2 and the AoA shader. Yes, It looks better than what I could get with the daz default lights, but I had some issues.
I ended up using AoA because I was getting a weird interaction between uberSurface and the uber area lights, everything rendered fine until I added some kind of ambient lighting and then I would no longer get specular from the area lights on surfaces using uberSurface, and that's a big problem because I use uberSurface for lots of stuff.
Thanks @wsterdan.
I suppose realism isn't really what I'm after though. If I wanted realism I'd be using Genesis and Iray instead of Aiko3 and 3DL.
Although I have to admit, I only stuck with 3DL this long because until recently my computer couldn't handle Iray. So now I'm conflicted, do I stick with 3DL or do I learn Iray.
Hmm, that indeeed seems to be the case, tks for bringing it to my attention! This, I wonder, is another one of the OmUber product line bugging out on us? I use DS 4.20 and don't recall seeing this behaviour in previous builds...and interesting that the AoA SSS works!
Anyway, after some dabbling around, I may have found a workaroundhack to using UberSurface with the arealights, it involves using the AoA ambient light in specular only mode;) Will post some renders later on...
PS I think that looks better also, but here's a thought; I find your renders a tad underexposed in general. It might be my screen or a matter of personal preference, but I think every light setup has a sweet spot where you get the maximum detail without blowing out the diffuse or highlights. You could try upping your direct lightsource-intensity levels some..?
...ok, this is Gabi V5 textures on Genesis with 50% A3 body and 50% G3F clone, minus 50% A3 head, dialed in, Amber Hair for V4, both using OmUberSurface.
Two UberArea ligth planes, a skydome, UE2 in ambient mode with the skydome texture loaded, an AoA advanced ambient light in specular mode with light strength at 100%, light color pure black, as to avoid any additional highlights from the ambient light, and "normal" occlusion settings with occlusion strength 75%. The light strength slider now apparently serves as a specular strength master controller
I tried setting the AoA light to diffuse only, and yeah, that kills the arealight highlights, weird.
Another workaround, that does not seem as attractive, would be to parent spot- or pointlights to the arealight planes and use specular only with soft raytraced shadows.
Two renders, in the second one I set all skin diffuse gamma to 1.7 to desaturate and lighten it up a bit, which is closer to what I prefer;) Both rendered in about 1m 45s in progressive mode.
I've not used these shaders much lately, so if someone has better ways of doing it, or something to add, please share! And my thoughts are of course that in non progressive mode these kind of renders are many times faster with scripted pathtracing. (With this pixelsize I'd take a guess at 4-5 min with medium settings, compared to the standard renderer with OmUber shaders at around 35 min if hair occlusion is enabled)
Decided to test her with an environment (another one I didn't know I had) and change the UE2 to bouncelight mode. Moved the front emitter further away to act as moonlight or whatever. This progressive 8x8 pixelsample render took just under 20 min, and is a bit noisy (progressive will always be nosier), could be reflection samples or SS shading rate on the skin, or the UE2 shading rate settings, or the arealight samples...
Hmm, lots to take in. Thanks for the feed back!
To think I got this far without touching a lot of the advanced stuff in D|S.
Ok, a couple of linear point light corresponding to the main light fixtures on the ceiling, UE2, and a distant light and an area light for the external lighting (not that you can tell for all the clutter).
Hey that looks nice! Love how the outside and window are slightly over-exposed! A tip, in case you didn't know: You can have soft shadows with DS pointlights, shadow softness is a hidden property;)
(Did you notice? I kept it short
)
Don't know how to embed videos, but here's a camera "walkthrough" in a large maze I'm working on. Rendered using just UE2 ambient with a skydome...maze in base resolution (dz default), 900 frames in 30 min;)
And a few awe testrenders in SubD, yeah it's quite large, and tileable
, built in DS from a primitive plane.
Looks pretty dang done to me! For me, seeing the environment and where all the shadows of the objects in the room fall helps me see the light on the subject and how the character's own shadows (as from her hair) makes is seem more "real" to me, more than if the character was by herself with the same lighting. I guess, for me, fitting into an environment that seems real makes her seem real to me as well. I think that interaction makes the skin seem more real, rather than viewing the skin in isolation.
-- Walt Sterdan
Fun stuff! rendering 30 frames a minute is very decent, what size was the full frame? I enjoyed the walkthrough but wonder if the sand might have been a better choice for it than the plants as they look a little "flat" aat some angles, more than I think the sand might.
I also enjoyed seeing the Sluggian animated again, a great character. I used him a fair bit way, way back, but I might need to revive him.
Thanks for sharing,
Walt Sterdan