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Playing around while trying to think of something....
lost it. >.< there was a lovely tutorial by Holly Wet Circuit, showing amazing skin shader with the scale procedural as noise.
I think I may call this one finished.
I'll post some more screen shots of the scene as well as what I rendered for layer passes and how I used them for postwork.
I think I shall call it, The View In The Room. ;-)
I didn't notice the window... the knife took my attention away from it
what knife - I don't see one
Yeah, this nice pair of ... loafs takes precedence ;-)
The bread does that effect.
Ugh, cucumber! (shudder)
What's wronng with cucumbers? Vicky has a long history of loving cucumbers! ;-P
This may take awhile as I can't see the new-fangled forum formatting options with my old browser on my old computer ;-)
Here's my scene set up. I used a lot of groups and nested groups for the various components. For the lights, I made a bank of horizontal lights and grouped them, then duplicated the group and re-positioned them, duplicated again, etc. etc. etc. I then grouped the groups. I made two large banks of spotlights this way. Tweaking the lights was very easy. I selected the groups of lights and used the Master Light control panel to adjust them all at once, although in the screen shot I've selected just one to highlight the settings.
I also modeled several different elements for the scene. None of the models were very complicated. I used the Spline Modeler to build the cutting board and the vertex modeler to build the knife and the coffee that fills the coffee pot.
The coffee pot was part of a kitchen appliance set from DAZ 3D, and I edited the model in the VM to create the coffee by selecting the polys that corresponded to the desired level of coffee in the pot. I then copied them and pasted (or duplicated-can't recall which) and then used the fill polygon command to create the top surface for the coffee. I then set up it all up as a new shading domain.
For the final image, I rendered multiple render passes and used Photoshop to composite them together.
I love the look of Carrara's dynamic hair, so rendering a Volume Primitive pass is essential, as many of the other render passes don't see the hair for whatever reasons.
I usually end up copying and pasting the mask part of the Volume Primitive pass and use the copy to add hair to the depth pass so that I can use that to generate a depth of field in Photoshop using the Lens Blur filter.
Competition!
I render the other passes so that if I want to enhance other scene elements I can. For instance, some passes work really well for creating a light bloom effect when slightly blurred. Using the layer's opacity control, you can define how strong the effect is.
Another advantage of the render passes is that you can create effects in PS or other image editors more quickly than Carrara can, and if you end up not liking the effect, you don't have to re-render the image. For instance, you can render a reflection pass and then blur that in PS instead of using blurry reflections in Carrara.
Another example would be Depth of Field. Carrara's default setting is a fast post-render effect, which uses an internally generated depth pass, which, as I mentioned in my last post, does not see dynamic hair. You could use the raytraced DOF option, but that takes much longer to render than it does for me, in PS to wand-select the mask part of the Volume Primitive pass and paste it into the depth pass and tweak the pasted mask to match the shade of gray on the object the hair is growing on.
For this image, I also copied and pasted the color part of the Volume Primitive Pass to create a new layer. I then set the layer blend mode to the same as the original (Linear Dodge). The original layer's fill was left the same. The pasted layer was blurred slightly and then the fill was lowered. The final result, was that the hair has a light bloom to it when combined with the other two layers.
I used the glow pass because I fake Subsurface Scattering (SSS) in the skin textures used on V4. A little explanation may be needed before I get into my post-work reason and work flow for the render pass.
I have the Reby Sky Elite figure from DAZ 3D, and it comes with Carrara optimized, very high res shaders, along with the standard Poser style material files. The problem is, SSS can take a long time to calculate and render, and it really only looks its best when used with Global Illumination, which adds to the light calculations.
Carrara does not use image maps in its SSS shader channel, but apparently, Poser does. I dug around in the Textures folder in my Poser runtime for image maps for the Reby Sky figure, and came across two maps for each shading domain that appeared to define the SSS. One was a gray scale map, and the other color. I multiplied those maps together in the Glow channel in Carrara, adjusted the brightness of the image maps and I was able to achieve a very nice SSS look without the light calculations.
I use the glow pass in PS in conjunction with other render passes, such as Specular and Diffuse to create a light bloom on the figure or brighten areas that may be a bit dark. For the light bloom effect, I've added a 2 pixel radius Gaussian Blur to each layer, and lowered the layer's fill. Examples below:
I rendered the Reflection pass and the Refraction pass so that I could blur them in PS a bit and not have to worry about rendering blurry reflections in Carrara. I also blurred these layers with the Gaussian Blur filter in PS. The effect was a bit strong, so I lowered the fill on the layers.
Due to all the relections, transparencies with refraction and Fresnel effects, etc. it was becoming apparent that the scene would take a long time to render. So, I rendered the scene with an alpha channel and then I created another scene with a sky and tree, rendered that, and composited it with the interior scene. Since I added a DOF to the interior scene, I played around a bit with that for the exterior scene and decided in the end, that a simple Gaussian blur looked better to me.
So, for comparison, here's the raw render, with no postwork, and the postworked version side by side.
I also added a noise filter to the final image and the Blur filter.
I should note that the pose is original, and not canned or a modified canned pose.
I used two target helpers for the feet to track, so that I could manipulate the figure without feet movement. I also added one for the right hand to track to keep it and the knife in place. I had to change the constraints on the right hand to ball joint, as trying to get the wrist in the correct position wasn't working using the default constraints, and turning them off entirely caused the shoulders to collapse. Any unwanted deformations in the wrist's mesh, were hidden by the body.Don't know if one of these at the cafe is what you are looking for.
http://carraracafe.com/tag/fake-sss/
thanks. all i'd found was a reference to it in this - http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/782364/#Comment_782364
but it's not the thread i remember, someone did a test render, girl sitting on the road holding her shoes?
the tutorial had something to do with specular hi lites
this is it http://carraracafe.com/tutorials/create-specular-skin-effects-in-carrara/ :D
doh. scaling a terrain and then saving it, is saving a scaled terrain. haven't verified.
to save a scaled terrain as a base object, i need to scale it in the assembly room, yes?
but double-clicking a terrain opens the terrain editor. i need to convert it to vertex obj.
Had a few minutes to doodle and I came across something in my content library. This set is from the Old West series. http://www.daz3d.com/old-west-sheriffs-office This G2M has quite a nice view of the gallows. Clothes were converted for a set made for David 3 (steampunk Cowboy http://www.daz3d.com/steampunk-cowboy-for-david ).
I did the same thing this morning Diomede, went looking through my runtimes and found some items I haven't used in a long while which I thought fitted this challenge..
Had all morning to put it together, it's lunch time here now so time for coffee & bread ;-)
I'll post my WiPs after I've eaten..
looks like the poor old cowboy didn't get a last meal ... :-)
Synopsis
Man has ventured to Mars and started a small settlement.. It has been over twenty years since contact with the Curiosity Rover was lost. NASA hadn't received any signals from Curiosity since the year 2019.
The small contingent of astronaut adventurers ( 2 women and 1 man ) had been settled for 8 months on the planet Mars and all was going well till one by one they started to disappear.. Segway hadn't been seen for a week and now Justine has vanished.. The last one left is Katalina and she is frantically trying to find her comrades to no avail..
It was when she looked out the window from the control panel that she saw it..... after 23 years Curiosity was at the doorway... Has Curiosity come to kill the Kat?
< click on the thumbnails for bigga! >
Basic scene setup
I used two cameras to set the scene up.. one camera inside for the main and one camera setup on Curiosity for the look inside which is on the TV monitor.
I made the TV monitor and used Carrara's textures to texture it apart fromm the screen which I rendered from camera two and added postwork and created a shading domain for it.
I used Genesis and a jumpsuit from Mr Sparky which I retextured to try and modernise it a bit.. Curiosity is from Renderosity and the building is made up from parts by Mr Sparky..
very nice Stezza .
thanks for the tutorial evil. You should package that as a pdf - seriously.
Thanks HeadWax..
Here is the final render no postwork.
Title - Curiosity Killed the Kat
thanks!
Very neat concept Stezza! The picture in picture concept is really cool!
Diomede, that also looks like a winner! I can't wait to see how it comes together when lit.
Misty, glad I could help!