Street Smartz - Hey this is my first real attempt at a final first render.

dee_dub

Street Smartz - Rendered with the default settings in Daz Studio 4.5 with a little Curves adjustment in Photoshop.

Hey I've been floating around here since 2004 but never really did anything till this past month. I'm finally finding the courage to tackle 3D and hopefully find the patience to persevere.

Anyways I just watched the first few videos in the "Light Masters" from Dreamlight about Distance Lights and wanted to start something right away. The next video is on Point Lights so I'll take what I've learned from that and try another render and so on.

I did notice in this render that the shirt seems to be kind of glossy but now just remember watching something about how you can apply lighting settings to materials. Is that correct? I'll have to look into that :)

thanks for looking and your time, D.

C & C welcome :D

Herald of Fire

The glossiness in his shirt can be remedied by looking at the specular and reflection settings. Specular is basically a 'faked' reflection, which shows the highlights in the material. If you bring the specular strength down a touch, it will help to remedy the over shiny t-shirt. Failing that, you can look at the actual reflection settings. If these are enabled you can simply disable them without any ill effects, as the specular's faked highlights will compensate enough. Once you're more confident with editiing materials though, you can find a good balance between the two.

Aside from that, it's looking very good indeed. I like the pose, and the character placement. Steering away from the default lighting would be a good idea though. The headlamp does fine renders at a quick glance, but on closer inspection, you really notice the lack of fine details and depth which a proper lighting rig can fix. A little post work would make this art look pretty sweet though.

dee_dub

HeraldOfFire thanks for your tips and your kind words.

Hey can I ask you a quick question? I want to buy more content but I'm a bit confused about product compatibility. I have noticed that with the new Genesis figures a lot of older product can adapt to it. Example fitting older M4 and V4 clothing. I'm confused about older morphs. I like a few of the older M4 and V4 character morphs and wondering if I can apply them to the Genesis characters? I have the new M5 and V5 characters. Do I need to also buy the older M4 and V4 models to make this work or can I fit these M5 and V4 morphs to to the M5 and V5 models like I can with clothing?

I have also noticed 4.2++ morphs as well. Confusing stuff.

Herald of Fire

In theory, Genesis can use most of Gen 4's outfits using the autofit tool which converts them at import into a usable type. In practice, you'll need to make a few changes to get certain outfits to work. Footwear and any skirts are two sticking areas where the autofit fails to compensate.

Morphs are a different story though, and don't work immediately out of the box at all. You can transfer Gen4 morphs to Genesis with a plugin called Generation X (GenX for short) but this doesn't work completely well, as Genesis is actually a lower poly character than Generation 4, so it loses details in places. Most notably in the face. The two images I have below are a side-by-side comparison of a character altered using the Generation X plugin. Left is the original Kaelyn for K4 and right is the Genesis modified version.

The Genesis character can use textures from older generations perfectly fine, and even allows you to change the UV settings for the model so it can use Kids 4, Victoria 4 and Michael 4 skins, or even a mix of those on different parts of the body! It's very versatile. You can also create a new UV set and load it in which I did recently so that I could use a few older Sadie textures for the new Genesis Sadie.

Jaderail

Also remember this, all your older content will still work fine in DS4.5 I use all my V4 M4 stuff in it and just mix them into my renders with Genesis characters and figures. That gives me a very WIDE range of figures and Characters now.

dee_dub

Thanks everybody for your advice :D

daveleitz

Very nice! I like the perspective view looking up and the lights from the sky and building in the background. Certainly gives the viewer several things to look at in the scene. One thing I would recommend is trying to make the character stand out a bit more prominently in the scene somehow.