Michael and Friends Appreciation Association [Lots of images, please.]
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The shirt is http://www.daz3d.com/troubadour-for-genesis-2-male-s with http://www.daz3d.com/the-shader-plan-iray-satined-textiles (tweaked a bit mainly lowering the shine)
The daz store has a lot of nice tunics actually, but they all seem to be paired with loose soft looking pants, which are not nearly as historically accurate (or fun) as some nice hose. ()and not that this shirt is super historically accurate either it was just the shortest medieval-esque thing I had. I wanted to show off that peek of codpiece ;)
Fun render J Cade! I like that a lot. =-)
Nice image J Cade! I actually saw it in the gallery before I saw it here! Really well done.
Where DID you get those shoes? They border on ridiculous but very very fashionable.
Hi Serene Night,
You have raised a very interesting point here.
Recently I decided to look through my runtime texture files and was shocked to find 11 of my male characters all had the same merchant resource textures albeit that they were shaded a slightly different skin tone colour. I had purchased them as new characters but in reality it was only the face and body morphs that made them 'new'. (I am sure there were many more but I gave up looking).
Looking back at some of my old M4 textures I found them to be more detailed, (because I have noticed some of the 'new' recoloured textures are washed out of detail and the skin then looks like sprayed on tan) and the older textures were quite photographic showing different human male models had been used in their creation.
Looking through the few G3 male characters I have also show the same texture sets being used with a different skin shading. So basically I feel I am now buying the same texture sets over and over again. This is why I now consider purchasing head and body morph products, to make different characters, a far better cost effective option.
We certainly need more variation of real human texture resources for the new G3 male characters or, as you correctly say, they will all look the same.
I noticed a similar thing back then in the M4 days - I found I had at least three characters that used the same MR, but at least they had all sorts of various tattoos, facial hair and war paint (those were the main reasons I bought them for, so no complaints really). It's kinda trade-off... "smaller" vendors will use MR, but they will often be very creative with extras. "Big name" vendors will create skins from photo shoots they organise themselves, but those skins tend to come with very few options.
They're from http://www.daz3d.com/medieval-fantasy-accessories-for-genesis-2-female-s fitted to G3M and with a really basic custom morph. They're comparatively subtle by medieval standards too.
I feel like textures based on photos are not so good for pbr. I have seen many realistic 3D portraits done and the textures they use are painted in X program of choice. THis means there are no baked in specular highlights or sss.
But don't you usually paint using photo-based tiles anyway? Procedural texture generation keeps getting better, but creating a convincing procedural material is much harder than just using photographic textures.
And a perfect texture-oriented photo shoot will take care to minimise specular highlights, using specialised light setup and polariser filters for example. Think this: http://gl.ict.usc.edu/Research/DigitalEmily/
Okay, that was too good to be true in this market I guess, but I can think of a number of "quick and dirty home remedies" to help with that (like using anti-shine makeup, which is a transparent powder).
Besides, if all else fails, you can run your "specular-contaminated" albedo maps through a tool like Bitmap2Material which has a specular-cancelling algorithm. It's obviously not perfect, but can be helpful.
Haven't had much time to play recently, but I wanted to try out Dark Whisper and as it happened I hadn't tried out Long Shag either.
3dDreamer: That's REALLY nice.
I agree! Really nice image!
Shamelessly ripping off one of the early Hobbit film posters, to show off the Erebor Key I made. Also a modern version of Thorin.
Now I'm imagining a modern remake of LOTR...
OT I guess but if you search around on Archive of Our Own you'll find plenty of modern-day LOTR fan fiction. However, most of it has Thorin dating Bilbo, so if you're not into Hobbit-Dwarf romance (often of the explicit kind) you'll probably want to steer clear.
(No, I haven't read any. Just seen it around. I get my kicks from Gimli/Legolas and Glorifindel/Erestor. Though there was that one time with a transformed-into-an-elf Smaug and a Hobbit whose initials are BB. ;-)
Well, it looks like a very nice key and very nice manly render to boot!
Very nice. I like the realism of the hair on the arms and the rolled up sleeves.
Thanks Will and Knittingmommy
I'm currently trying to work out the lighting in your Harmonica player, Knittingmommy, it is so effective - all part of the learning process. :-)
3Ddreamer, great expression on your guy in the Dark Whispers outfit, nice work. (And who is that character BTW?)
-Gen
Thanks Genaris - the character is Ragnar, and the expression came partly with the pose and part a Lower face from an expression pack - if I hadn't found what I was looking for I'd probably have dial spun the mouth.
All you had to do was ask! I'm heading out, but I can give you a break down when I get back later this evening if you are interested! Although, I'm afraid I didn't come up with my own lighting completely. I swiped lights from two different sets to get the look I wanted. I'm currently trying to figure out from there how to do it from scratch. Which is my usual MO these days. Do the lights how I like from light sets and then figure out how they did that!
Yes, I'm curious about the hair on the head, the strands are perfect and the fact that the hair is not this thick looking mass on his head. Love all the light showing through like a man in his 30's or 40's that's thinning just slightly. Specks of gray in the front. Just brilliant!
I'm asking, I'm asking
But trying to work it out is a good learning experience - I have the beginnings so it would be interesting to see if I am on the right track. And I agree with RAM - I am not getting that effect on the hair - I'm using Ades Hair, were you using Alex Hair?
Wow, thank you Knittingmommy, Barbult and RAMWolff. His head hair is Colin Hair with Mec4D's Unshaven 2 hair shader, and his arm and hand hair is Real Hairy, also with the Unshaven 2 shader.
This is my totally ridiculous image of my character Boyd on a lily pad. I've been wanting to use it for something for years.
Made me smile...
@3Ddreamer Okay. So, I dragged up the save file for my harmonica player. Every time I make a major lighting or scene change I save as a new scene file using incremental numbers so I had to find the latest file. Yes, it was Alex Hair and I used the IDG Iray Hair Essentials although I'm not exactly sure which one, but one of the brunette shades. I love that hair shader. That and the UHT Hair Shaders for Iray by SloshWerks are my automatic choice when it comes to doing hair in Iray. I don't even use any of the ones that come with a hair anymore.
I've included two screen shots, a front view with the lights and a back view with the lights. In the back view, I hid the backdrop so you could see the placement of the lights from behind.
I used two rim lights from Render Studio Iray as well as their Infinity Cave which is the curved backdrop with Cover07.jpg as the texture on the IC. Those are the two smaller lights, one in front and one behind. The main lighting came from Ultra Genesis Studio Vol. 1 which is by RDNA. I used the UG Standing Rig 002 which gave me two lights, the two lights with the reflectors. I chose that rig because it gave me the lighting closest to the look I was trying to achieve based on the icon which you can see in the screen shot where my Content Library is at, middle one in the third row. I basically left them alone once I had my figure in a good position for the lighting I wanted. I added the two rim lights from Render studio so that I had one in front aimed at the hands and one behind aimed sort of at his elbow so it would add some highlights to the hands and just a little bit to the hair. The main light above him is aimed at the back of his head and angled down somewhat as I didn't want it shining full on at his head. I have found that when doing the lighting, it really helps to have the viewport in nVidia mode so you can make adjustments on the fly.
Both of the Rim Lights are at the default that they loaded in at 6500 K;1000 L;150 W. The light shining at his back is set at 5000 K; 4000 L; 500 Im/W. The main light above his head is set at 5000 K; 7000 L; 500 Im/W. I've tried just putting the standard lights that come default with DS up in those spots and I have to tell you that those reflectors and stuff really make a difference because it is just not the same thing. Hopefully, between the screen shots and the detail I just gave will give you some ideas. I don't know if you have either of those light sets, but I really like them and I think they were worth the investment. I'd still like to figure out lighting so that I could some day do my own lighting from scratch, but I'm not there yet. Although, I do seem to get a little better with every render so I must be learning something.
If you have any questions, just ask. I'm always willing to share anything I've learned or show how I did something. I hope this helped you out!
I have that hair, but I'm not sure if I've used it yet. It looks different on your figure than the promos. Did you change any surface settings? was that a hair preset straight from the hair product?
Gotta love Real Hairy and Mec4D's Unshaven! Awesome products.
Nope, I just ctrl+clicked the hair to keep the image textures. I used Jet Black on the main hair sections and Dark Gray on the "fine hair" sections. Honestly, I'm surprised you guys like the way it looks so much, I thought it looked kinda weird and too thin, but I guess I was wrong.
Here it is from the side, just a quicky render so you can see the ponytail part.
Hivewire Dusk, CRWR's Jackson head and body morph and Rodrigo mats.