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I like the first one a bit better, the architecture (and the darker parts in it corresponding with the dark cloak) in the background give him more of being part of the scenery. additionally he is looking at the camera in the first. In the sceond he is looking at somethin different, but not enough to be sure about it, so it gives the viewer a vague feeling of his direction of sight. It could work if there was something on screen to be see by the viewer as well that he looks at. What i like in the second version in the fact that we can see his second hand. So mabe you could alter his right hand pose in the first scene so we could see somthing there as well.
Most of the renders here are doing a great job with dark/brooding...but that isn't all there is to it.
Here's the render I did for the August Freebie Challenge.
It's not a dark/brooding.
There is a Spot Render tool in Daz. It's the icon with the camera and arrow, titled "spot render" if you hover over it. (Of course, your layout might be different so you can also find it in Tools | Spot Render (Alt Shift C) ).
Ugh! Hate when that happens lol. I like the second one on this. I like the way his body and head are turned slightly compared to the first
This one is better still
This is my WIP. I thought I had better post what I have so far. I am still designing and building my scene layout. The render is just a test and everything will likely change pretty drastically as I move forward.
:-)
If you go for two zombies you should alter their poses from each other, in here the second one looks too much like an exact copy of the first one. I think the light on the zomby at the front colud even be a little stronger.
If you have somthing like griminizer I would think it nice if the trousers and the gear of the zombies aer a bit more muddied. You could try that as well with a LIE but doing so for all the gear takes patience.
The more distaint of the zombies is a node instance of the closer one, hence their similarity. I'm going over my textures for the next version, but as for LIE, I hate to type it, but I've never used it before.
here's the latest version
Yes I thought so, that its a node, you should still be able to alter the pose, at least when you made it by edit/duplicate node hirarchies, then it should be completely independent (I thing it was when you go through create new node instance that you can alter only the original and the node will follow). Well as for the LIE, there is a first time for everyone ;-). It stands for layered image editor and works by opening the image of the e.g. trouser in the editor by clicking on the icon in the diffuse channel, in the scroll down menue there is "Layered image editor" if you open that you can add an image previously created in GIMP or Photoshop to the surface and arrange to your needs. There are several tutorials out there in the net (this is from doc center http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/artzone/pub/software/lie/reference/lie_using) sometimes for older versions of DAZ but the system stays the same.
But be warned it is kind of slow.
Okay, so my Vampire In London has finished its latest render. Twenty-three hours this time at a higer quality setting at 5 and 10000 iterations. I'm still learning what all of those settings do so I'm still not sure if it produces a higher quality final image than the default settings or not. I pulled the camera out slighttly so his hand is visible, but basically kept the original camera angle. I fixed the fingers inside the cane issue. I kept the changes I made to the lights as I think it made a slight improvement. I'm still trying to figure out how to put a little more highlight on his hood without going into Gimp. I put a light directly behind his head and it does show a little highlighting, but not as much as I had intended. I may have to go into Gimp and try to fix that one thing now that I now how to do that.
Very nice! This works really well. As for the highlights on the hood, I'm not sure if this is possible in iray but in 3dlight I would increase the specular channel of the hood/cloak in the surfaces editor.
I haven't figured out how to get the look I'm want inside just Daz Studio with lights and/or playing with settings. When I looked at Iray, there doesn't seem to be a specular channel. I've been playing around with my render in Gimp, though, and I think it looks pretty good. I just played with the brightness/contrast a little and did some adjustments with the curves editor under color. Then, I made a layer that added a slight highlight to the hood. I think it looks pretty good, but I also think I've been playing with this render too much. I think I will take a break for a couple of days and wait for everyone's opinion on the latest render and the new adjustments picture. I have to say, though, that I like this particular effort in Gimp and I think my little bit of postwork made a subtle, but pleasing result. Tell me what you think. Too much? Stay with the last render and stay out of Gimp? Am I done? Should I do something more or less? I'm open to suggestions.
I like the second one better because of the seperation between him and the background. However in doing what you did you caused the fog to pixelate. I think you need to apply a blur if you can to get that wispyness back.
I took the last one and went in and added some slight blur to the background. I didn't like the way his face looked after applying the blur so I went back and redid the highlighting and curves adjustment. This time I was more selective in which parts got adjusted, apparently you can do that in Gimp. Does this look a little less pixelated?
Yes that makes the difference, very nice! And good catch Dollygirl I did't notice the pixelation at first
Ahh finally weekend, let's render :)
I have create a primitive and only put a red colore in diffuse and ambiente. In 3Delight i got a bright glowing beam, but with Iray it still look dark.
I don't think I added as much highlight to his hood in the last picture. Does anyone think it needs more highlight or should I leave it as is? I'm on the fence about it.
The only thing i would change, is his right hand. I would drag/ hail the viewer with her toward him. (Sorry for that cruel english ;) )
I believe you are at a place where there is no right or wrong anymore and I guess everybody might tell you different. You said you need a break looking at it, I know that feeling and it really helps to take that break. There is still a lot of month left, you could try your hand on a different render while this one sits tight for some days.
This is just a quick test. I did not allow it to render until it was finished so there is still quite a bit of noise but hopefully you get the idea.
First I applied the Iray Uber Base to a cylinder primitive and reduced the opacity from 1.0 to 0.5.
Then I applied the emmissive shader and change the Lumincance Units to cd/cm^2 ( see image 1 ). I do this so I do not need a rediculously high number in the luminance channel to get light or glow from an object.
You have 2 choices to change the colour of the emmission: 1. you can change the colour temperature or 2. you can change the Emmission Colour. I chose to do the 2nd option for this application. ( see image 2 )
This is the part that turned out to be a bit tricky. I tried upping the Luminance channel to get the glow on the laser but this just ended up throwing red light on the figure. Ideal if you want light from a candle flame, lamp, torch, etc but not what you are looking for I believe.
Next I tried the Glossy Layered Weight. I changed it from 0 to 1. This helped but wasn't quite enough. So then I changed the Transcluceny Weight from 0 to 1. These 2 combined seemed to create a nice glow to the primitive. ( see image 3 )
I did not change the colours in either of these channels. I left them at the default of white.
I also attached a quick render of what I ended up with. I hope this helps.
Ohh i have never used this settings, because i had no idea, for what they are.
Thanks a lot, now i break my render and try your advices.
This things you show me here seems to be very important. Many settings in Daz are mysterious for me. It would be nice, to start a new thread here in the forum to explain this things with a example like you do it here.
This was my first time using these settings as well.
I could have used this technique on a prior render a couple of months ago.
Here's my latest version, rendered last night. Decided to try replacing the node-zombie with a fallen guard. (Or could it be a zombie, playing possum?) Other then that, more texture work.
I like the story this version is telling me Shinji Ikari.
Not knowing how strong a system you have and what it can handle, the only thing I would like to see would be shadowy figures in the distance. As if the Guards could be overrun with zombies at any moment if they are not careful.
Either way this is really developing into a great story render.
After several testrender i found a setting that seems ok. In pic 1. the lumen was to high. In Pic 2. I set it to 0, to avoid the red shine on the surfaces of all things. Now at pic 3. the glow on the things reached a level, with which I can life.
Tomorrow i will test a few more settings, but i must give Kismet2012 a big hug for the help with the beam.
I added a car to the street, did a minor adjustment of the moon's scale, and turned on DOF. I tried several things to try and create a halo glow around the street lights but could not figure anything out that works. I tried a geometry shell with the atmosphere settings from SickleYield's journal post and a sphere primitive and nothing seemed to look right. Most of the time the Iray AtmoCam effect just smudged it out of completly. If I add emission to a primitive I can't figure out how to make it look right with having falloff. Setting emmission makes the light strength the same across the whole surface.
Hi RobotHeadArt,
for me, your last pic look great. There is a big improvement how it looks since your first try. The atmosphere is great and blue color create a wonderful Noir feeling.
Daz has graduated me from New User status and suggested that I mentor where I can - which I am happy to do. I'm not particulary confident in my abilities to mentor, so I will start by apologizing for any mentoring I do at you, in advance.
I had started on an image for this month's contest and I thought I'd share it. I like Sickelyield's tutorial, but what I really wanted to do was create a fog like substance. In this image, titled Emissaries, we have three actors coming through a dimensional portal. So, for the portal I wanted some sort of swirly vortex. Then I wanted a rolling fog along the ground that followed them out of the portal. You can see a dragon in the background, ostensibly the "sender" of the emissaries - so I needed to make sure we could see through to the other "dimension" as well. I decided I would make this a "learn about Iray shaders" exercise.
There was a lot of trial and error and error and error in getting what I have, and I'm not entirely satisfied with it, but I figured I'd share and perhaps short-cut a few errors for the next person down the line. I like the idea of trying to get the rendering engine to do the work since my Gimp skills are.... suspect and likewise any postwork I may attempt.
Portal: I used a cone primitive and created some swirling fog for the base of the code and just regular fog for the pointy bits (Gimp). I figured that this might give it some depth rather than just a plane against the doorway. I included jpg versions of the images I used for the base, and translucency maps. I ended up using the base image as the map for base, bump, and displacement. Using the displacement map and slider, I was able to get some nice angles to the swirly fog with helped to give it a little depth and shadowing.
Fog on the floor: I used the "clay cube" from one of Dreamlight's tutorials figuring I could morph it into a flowing shape to help with the fog-like illusion - a plane would have worked as well, but I wanted to make sure the fog wasn't a straight line across the image. For this one, I started playing with the Normal Map, which lets you create fake bumps and dents - much more significant than a bump map, I think. It acts a lot like the displacement, but I think I was able to get more out of it - experiments to follow. Like I said, this was a learning experience. Here I kept the base color white with no image and used the fog image (without swirls) as the translucency and bump maps (I still used a little bump to keep it from looking flat). Then I added the normal map to add this texture. (The normal map was just something I was messing around with and using the tile offsets, I was able to get an interesting part of it in frame.) With a little more effort, the normal map could produce some interesting effects.
There is a property: "cutout opacity", which I used a lot in conjunction with "translucency". From the doco:
This property uses a mainly black and white image map to cut or hide polys of the surface. This is not to be confused with the legacy habit of using an opacity map to make something translucent.
I can't tell you the best way to use these, and these two properties led to many hours of trial and error, but I hadn't noticed "cutout opacity" before and thought I'd point it out. For me, I liked that it could remove areas from the image which enhanced some fo the translucency effects. It's probably an image-by-image thing figuring out what works and what doesn't.
Well, this post hasn't been particularly educational, but maybe it'll get some interesting ideas started. (You can enter two images per contest!!) If nothing else, you can download the fog images and play around with them. I created them in Gimp, so they aren't owned by anyone.
(From a mentoring standpoint, when someone replies to this correcting everything I've said - imagine how much we will all learn then!!!)