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That's a great piece of information. Filing away for future use...
I got distracted with lots of stuff and never even got started really on my first one. Looks like I'll be sitting this month out completely.
Well, it works for karate, kobedo (weapons), and batto (sword). I assume the same is true for other styles of fighting as well.
Here's a few changes from version d. Have to come up with a title.
Good to see you back Sonja. Hope you get back to rendering soon.
Final (???) adjustments completed.
Thanks for all your suggestions!
Thanks! I've been doing some easy stuff mostly drag and drop on some new stuff. But the second render I had in the works involves god rays etc which I've never tried before and I've not used the godrays props I am planning on using before. And its my daughters birthday tomorrow so lots of family stuff after work.
This has come a long way since I first saw it!
I like the use of the light coming through the arch to light the scene.
Here is my second one. Its not quite where I want it to be but this is going to have to be the final for my second entry. I will probably do the post work I had in mind for this once the contest is over. Its a little dark but any lighter and it just doesn't convey the mood nearly as well. Again, doesn't matter I'm out of time so this will have to do. Feel free to give some more suggestions though since I will be working on this one some more once the contest is over.
Actually yes the contest is over soon, so everyone remember to post in the entries!
I would like to see a bit more light on the acting people here as well, some general environment light (whatever that is in iray) and the flames and ember look a bit off to me. Everything else is looking good!
Thanks Linwelly! Ya I was hoping that the god rays would light up his face more but its the first time I have used that set so I am sure if I fiddle with it a bit more I will figure it out. And I wanted to add some blood and grime to them both to show that she died in battle. I will be working on this one some more once the contest is over. This is one of those renders that I have actually had in my head for over 6 months but didn't feel I had the knowledge to pull it off then. Its close this time around though...
Friendly reminder. Today is the last day to post your entry.
By my reckoning, there are only a couple of hours left to post your entries for the contest.
So don't delay and post away.
I just haven't had much time to work on this this month. Added the toon effect. Boat ended up quite flat because the surfaces are too smooth to get much differentiation in the colors. I've been playing around with toonycam pro to use with the visual style shaders, but I haven't been very thrilled with my results - especially on my people. I'll have to keep playing with it some more next time.
I don't know if the time for entries officially closes at midnight, or when the moderators say that the contest is closed. So for the record, I submitted my image at 12:17 and then updated it at 12:49 Sept 1.
So, for the sake of wanting to rant somewhere where others will understand, this image was kicked my trash this month. I had decided that I was going to submit early so I started on my idea right away. Almost immediately, after I started building the scene, I realized that it was too much for my poor little 512 MB Graphics Cards. I spent a lot of time adding to the scene with the visibility of the rest of the scene turned off, and would then export the characters as scene subsets and pose them individually before importing them back into the scene. Unfortunately, you can only do so much on a scene without tweaking it as a whole. As soon as I turned everything one (esspecially those soldiers wearing the Galactic Armour), everything just turned to a crawl. I wanted to do more with the scene based on the feedback I got earlier, but changing anything was so slow that I decided not to change anything compositionally.
I had tried adding a few more things, like freckles on the girl, but it wasn't looking right and I was running out of time, so a couple of nights ago I decided to render and submit. Unfortunately... something... wasn't working right. The tank in the far far back (it's not even clear what it is, I am thinking) was rendering solid black. I'm not sure what the issue was but after trying a few things, I found that it rendered just fine if I removed a few other things out of the scene. I figured... maybe my machine couldn't handle everything, so I decided that I was going to have to render the scene in chunks.
Last night, I went through a fairly painstaking process of breaking the scene into far-back, back, mid, and foreground, and rendering them all individually. It wasn't too painful, except that my machine is churning so slow that it took 2-3 seconds for any mouse clicks to register (ok... actually it was really painful). It took all night. As an added bonus, I rendered each layer with les color levels, which I had hoped would add more atmosphere.
So this evening, after getting the kids to bed, I sit down to start compiling all the layers. After loading the second layer, I realize with horror that I had saved all the renders as JPEGs instead of PNGs! I wasted a bunch of time trying to work around it, but it was looking like crap. I had to re-render all the layers again. Fortunately... I had saved each of the different layers as individual scenes, "just in case". Unfortunately, I didn't save them all right before or right after I had rendered, so each layer still had a little bit of redo to get ready to render again.
I think I must have been in a panic, because for some reason I had the distinct impression that I couldn't render with the Toony Cam and have a transparent background. So I turned off all the outlines in Toony Cam Pro, and rendered with a transparent background. In retrospect... this makes no sense... but it sure seemed like the thing to do at the time. So I rendered everything individually, with the plan of rendering the outlines seperataly and overlaying them on the image. The outlines took the longest, mostly because right where the robot's foot looks like it's on the window sill, with a fire escape directly to the right, are all of the teeth of the Genesis 3 character that I have with opacity set to 0 so that the robot can be holding an eye. Even though they're not visible, Toony Cam spends a REALLY long time on that section calculating all the normals and where it would draw lines if I had them turned on. So, yes, it's calculating for something it's not going to draw.
At 10:50, I started rendering the outlines and started playin solitare. It wasn't until just after 11:30 that I saw that in the file I was rendering on, I had not turned off the outlines for the hidden Genesis 3 male that I was using for the eye. The render had taken 40 minutes already, and was only starting to render the outlines for those darn invisible teeth!
Now in an even greater panic, I immediately stopped the render, and went through the slow grind of digging down to my Genesis 3 character and turning off all the outlines except for the eye and starting another render. Then I opened up GIMP and compiled all the other layers in aticipation of the outlines. Then I started hunting down background processes on my computer, killing them, hoping it might free up enough CPU to speed up my render in time. But it was no use. At exactly midnight, all the outlines were rendered except for a small rectangular chunk just to the right of the robot's foot where all the lines for the fire escape are. It would have been very obvious if it was missing, and at this poing, I figured if the deadline is midnight, then I was already late anyway.
I think I finally posted my image at 12:07. I sighed in releaf and sat back in my chair to admire it. That's when I realized that in an attempt to remove the white pixels that cling to the event horizon of opacity and transparency in Daz PNGs, I had removed too much from the edges of the character in the front. In just a few places around the character, not completely around, but just in a few places, there was a small, pixel wide gap between the outline of the character, and the coloring of the character, and the background would shine through that gap. I tried to ignore it, tried to go to bed, but I just couldn't. I had gone to far. So I calmly redid the layer mask for the foreground layer, and resubmitted the image at 12:49. At that point, I figured if the image was going to be disqualified for submitting it after midnight, then it was already invalid when I submitted it at 12:07.
Anyway, the image is not perfect... but I am DONE with it! Thanks for letting me rant!
(takes a quick look at his image and sees something new that he's not entirely happy about...)
No! Walk away... walk away!
Well, I never did end up getting my render together this month. I do want to wish all of you the best of luck with the contest. I saw some really great renders in the wip thread! Good luck, everyone!
Well...bummer! Sorry you had such a difficult time. For what it's worth, I think your images are turning out great, and I wish my toons were turning out even half as good as yours. This month I totally gave up on the Toony Cam because I couldn't get it to look right and ran out of time. Keep up the good work!
New User Contest is closed!
Good luck everybody!
What in is is in
, seems you had enough of panic moments to last for a while.