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Here's my take on James Bond, as always, he's being watched!
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I had downloaded a scene set up by Scott Livingston for portraits, so I decided to see what my new MATs looked like in it. I love them! For me, right now, Khory, AoA and Scott RULE!
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Poor little Gia,
Doesn't get much love really. She didn't even get an HD add on! I decided to give her the Khory treatment, she liked it so much she spruced herself up to come back and thank me!
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Here's another 'rave from the grave', it's the M5 Dave! I am finding that the odd few textures that were designed with uber shaders and lights in mind don't play so well with AoA. Dave just about gets away with it. I think, until I get V7 and M7 comes out, that I will look at a few characters that were made for G2 by artists that I know have worked on the base figure textures. The obvious one there is Raiya and there are textures they've done that I've been long overlooking.
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Ok, I tried Dave out in Scott's studio, and he fared rather better than I was expecting. He's right up there with the G2's in terms of quality, I don't know who the artist was, but, they did a great job!
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Ohh, by the way, in all these newer renders, the eyes are all from Actual Eyes 4, my go to resource for eyes. I'm praying for Actual Eyes 5 now......
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Even in Scott's studio Gia doesn't look half bad.
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Here we have another base texture, and one I think is criminally underrated, David 5. His pro bundle makes up his entire catalogue! Whoever did this base texture could well have done the Dave texture too. I think this texture is a masterpiece, and I haven't found a shader it doesn't work really well with. I am so glad I have the David 5 UV so I can use this great texture.
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Here he is in Scott's studio, nice!
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I was pleasantly relieved to find that one of my all time favourite textures, Shaw by Phoenix1966, works really well with AoA and Khory's settings. He's got so much character.
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Great renders, Rogerbee.
Thanks!
Shaw has even more character when you dial in the Boris HD morphs.
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I've been reassessing the SA VAP Grim Armour for M3, and it is a load better than I previously thought. It was designed for DS and the materials are way more complex than they look. Each and every part of the armour has separate material zones and can be assigned its own lighting model within the DS Shader. Even the weathering is a separate material zone! It takes ages to go through it all, but it is so worth it once it's all done. Also, I did something special with M3, he's now high resolution and weight mapped. The armour autofits, but, it comes up as 'unsupported' and 'none' so it doesn't get mangled when fitted and it stays solid. Once the armour is on, and some bits have to be fitted with poses in the Poser style Pose library, you make M3 invisible and he doesn't impact render times. What you finally do is save the completed figure as a scene subset, then you can load him, fully kitted with the proper MAT into a new scene. Having just got Soldier 2025, I can play Killzone in DS!
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*Nudity * http://fav.me/d9128l0
Nice!
Actually, that Grim armour is a bit schizophrenic, built and textured well in DS, poses like Poser! I had to do a lot of tweaking and parenting to get everything where it was supposed to be and be sure that it stayed that way when posed. It's all done now though so it's ready for fun.
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If you really want to give him a gold tooth I am pretty sure I know a way to do it. I'll have to check in the morning (5:30 am for me right now) but unless I miss my guess it would be just a matter of selecing the tooth out via the gemoetry editor and creating a new surface. Then just apply a gold shader to it. If your using 3dl. I'd just use a mapped reflection so you wouldn't have to worry about getting a good reflection on the tooth. Not as realistic but easier.
Cool, I might just give that a go, or maybe I could get Dental Plan 2, it looks like you can do what you want to with individual teeth with that. I have the Genesis version but never did anything with it. Possibly because Genesis 2 came out before I got round to using it.
As you've dropped by, I really must thank you for that tutorial for the AoA shader, it completely changed the way I thought about it. I was treating it like the DS default shader and loading other stuff over it while waiting for the next big thing. How wrong was I, it's the best 3Delight shader there is for the modern skins. I'll be sure to keep using it on G3.
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I've been playing around with the Grim Armour for a bit this week. The DS Default shader wasn't really cutting it anymore and didn't look convincing enough in renders. I got the Subsurface Toolbox cheap yesterday and have been experimenting on the armour with the AoA shader and I think it looks a lot better. There's so many material zones though, I hope there's not a limit on what Group ID numbers you can assign. Here's a look at the helmet.
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Small update on this, to make sure everything was as good as it could be, I deleted all the files that I'd copied over from Poser and did a fresh install from a DVD I made with the original installers on it. This gave me back two nice .pdf readme's which I'd lost along the way, these were very informative. I made a copy of my original texure folder though, I'd created lots of original maps in that, so I put that back after the install.
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In the previous render, the helmet cam stood out too much, so I've spruced that up as well now. This is going to look so good!
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I am experimenting with different hairs rendered with shaders from
http://www.daz3d.com/uht-hair-shaders-for-iray
Below is an iray render of Gia with Ersa hair.
UHT Chestnut Brown TN preset.
Rendering Time: 21 minutes 21 seconds
It is very nice, but, I've still yet to be blown away by an Iray render. I want to see something like that one Hellboy did in 3Delight where you simply couldn't tell what it was done in. Now, I have seen stuff done with Lux that has really impressed me. I actually think it does more lifelike skin that Iray does. I'm not saying that Iray isn't good, because, for certain things, it is, but it seems to be better at doing objects than it is people. Maybe someone will do a skin shader for Iray that really will make stuff pop, but, I don't think we''ve seen it yet.
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I think, that it depends on how much time one would like to spend on tweaking the skin setup.
I have just made a quick adjustment on some of the eyes materials according to
Sickleyield video tutorial on YouTube.
I have left the skin of Gia mostly utouched (just applied iray Ubersurface shader).
Yeah, ok, I see what you're saying. No DS shader is that good straight from the box. Perhaps that Beautiful Skins bundle that Sickleyield has recently released will go some way towards that. I've been working a lot with the AoA Shader and Dimension Theory's presets and they really do take a lot of the guesswork out of it.
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Below is a test render of my fully finished and textured Grim, or Helghast as I like to refer to him. Each and every piece uses the AoA shader and has its own MAT. I think I got the specularity on the armour just right, I wanted it to look like proper armour, not quite flat finished, but sort of a WW2 German finish.
I'm happy with him for now
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Looks very good, Rogerbee.
Below is an iray render of non human characters.
Rendering Time: 3 minutes 5 seconds
They look great, here are a couple of renders of how the Helghast looks in a scene. I was surprised how well the AoA shader worked on solid objects, well, looks like they don't call him Age of Armour for nothing, LOL!
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PS (I had to create every single specular map myself!)
Looks great and those specular maps add that little extra, too.
Thanks,
I knocked the diffuse back to 50% and now I think they look just right.
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