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There are so many secrets to share, and I have viewport screenshots, I'm going to split this one into two posts for readability.
"Summer In Full Swing"
This is another entry in the SB3 render competition, so of course I used Skin Builder 3 to modify the skin. All pretty straight forward, no tricks like I did for Sagittarius.
Secret #1: The girl is wearing the shorts option for Jeanz for G3. I used the scale parameters, as well as Bend and Side-to-side, on the Thigh Bend bones of both legs and brought the hem down to lay on the skin, and to hang a bit below the legs underneath.
Secret #2: To get rid of that denture-perfect look to the teeth, I experimented with a variety of shaders from the Subsurface Workshop, and settle on the SSS only shader for WaxHard-Plain. I tweaked the results a bit to add a tiny bit of yellow.
Secret #3: Leaves from the Oak tree out of the shot were putting too much shade on the girl. I used one large Ghost Light to the right to get rid of most of the shadow, keeping her the focal point of the scene. So you can see the Ghost Light in the following image, I applied the "debug" material. (The white covering the ground beneath the girl is the bounding boxes of the instanced grass.)
Click here for full-size image
Secret #4: I applied the smoothing modifier to the tire and set collision to Jeanz, to get a slight indentation in the tire where the girl is sitting.
Secret #5: The tire swing comes with a chain. In real life, I've never seen a tire swing that wasn't attached to the tree with a rope, and the rope was looped through the hole in the tire. Well, there's no way I could wrap a rope around the tire, not with my extremely limited modeling skills, so I compromised. I hid the chain, added a torus for the loop of the rope, and used one of the ropes from the Tower in the Kids Play Area. The ropes are not separate, so I removed everything I didn't need using my friend, the Geometry Editor. I used Scale and y-scale until I liked the length and thickness of the rope.
Secret #6: The rope for the swing is actually not attached to anything. I parented the swing to the girl and repositioned her, (translate, rotate, etc.,) until I liked her in relation to the camera and the tree!
Click here for full-size image
Secret #7: The ground in the foreground is from Around the Campfire. I used the x-, y-, and z-scale parameters to reshape the object, squishing and pulling the hills into little more than mounds.
Click here for full-size image
And the rest of the secrets for "Summer In Full Swing"
Secret #8: The tree is a combination of two trees, the trunk and large branches are the Oak from The Sentinels of the Forest, with an Iray "bark" shader applied, and the leaves and small branches are an English Oak from Jackson's Field. Using the Geometry Editor, I hid the trunk of the English Oak and then deleted the hidden polys.
Click here for full-size image
Secret #9: I really liked the way the light interacted with the leaves of Stonemason's Japanese Maples, so I applied the green leaves from his set to the leaves of the English Oak, and then changed the images back to the original Oak leaves.
Secret #10: Between the ground with the tree and the two houses in the background, there are two plane primitives, (one original and one instanced,) angled up, with gaps between. And a very large gap between the furthest plane and the houses.
Click here for full-size image
Secret #11: I used the grass texture from First Bastion' Modern Bungalow on the plane primitives and the Around the Campfire ground object so they looked consistent with the bungalows' yards in the background.
Secret #12: The two bungalows in the background loaded complete, so I took out anything that wasn't in the shot. Then I added plane primitives in front of the sliding glass door of one bungalow and two of the windows of the other, and used PD Iray Shader Kit 2 to turn the planes into curtains/drapes.
Secret #13: I used the Geometry Editor to select polys within the viewport for the camera, created a new surface from the selection, and then used Ultrascatter for the grass in the foreground, constraining the scatter to my new surface of the Around the Campfire ground.
Click here for full-size image
(This was also evident in the image showing the placement of GhostLight, in the previous post.)
Interesting tid-bit: When you create one or more instances from an object, parenting another object to the original will add that object to the instance(s). However, parenting an instance of something else to the original does not add the instance of something else to the instance(s) of the original. I never really thought about it until this scene, where I used Ultrascatter to apply dandelions to the original plane and no dandelions showed up on the instanced plane. All the dandelions on the instanced, (closer,) plane were added manually.
"Modern Matriarch"
Modern Matriarch is a pretty straight forward image, intended to look like a professionally done portrait. I see her as in her mid-60s, but with the means to minimize the effects of aging. The apparent soft-focus camera also minimizes fine lines and such. Where you really see the age is in her hands.
Using the female adult skin from the G3 Growing Up Skins, I used Skin Builder 3 to create a pale skin with only a few age spots, but lots of moles, (because that's how my skin has aged, and I'm in her age-group,) applied a-touch-too-much blush, a-touch-too-dark red lips, and a reasonable "charcoal" shadow and liner to the eyes. The male Jonas Hair makes a great "old lady" style by dialing the morphs to make the curls as tight as possible.
But there are a few secrets, hidden in plain sight:
Secret #1: The shrug from the Evening Gown fits snug against her neck and shoulders because I selected each shoulder bone and scaled them down. (Scaling specific bones is a trick I use a lot with conforming clothing.)
Secret #2: I unlocked the side-to-side rotation, z-rotate, of the forearm, (something our arms can't do in real life,) and moved the forearm away from her body very slightly. The Manhattan Nights outfit collides with the figure, and the clothing was distorted and wrapping around the arm. By moving just the forearm to compensate, I left the shoulder and upper arm in place.
Secret #3: Last, but not least in terms of effort, is the hand-knotted chocolate pearl necklace and matching earrings. They are not props or conforming accessories, but carefully placed sphere primitives. The "knots" are all the same size and use a texture I created myself. The "Pearls" are graduated in size and have the chocolate shader from Shades of Pearl applied. It was a lot of work, but well worth the effort. The necklace lays on her collar as a real necklace would, without any distortion of the beads. (For the record, the beads only go as far as can be seen by the camera. Beyond that, nada...)
wow that is a lot of precisely placed spheres! But it turend out beautiful, so then I belive the effort was worth it!
LOVE the pearls, I would never have thought to do that. Really nice render!
Thank you, both. My emotions over conforming jewelry runs the gamut between merely disappointed to thoroughly disgusted. Not any creator's fault, just a limitation of the current tech. In this case, she really needed something around her neck, because in real life, that woman wouldn't be without jewelry and she wouldn't wear something so revealing of her aging neck without a bit of "camouflage" ... look at this, not that.
While it was a bit labor intensive, it wasn't difficult. I created the large sphere first, something like 12mm, (I don't remember the exact number.) I created the knot sphere next, something small like 2-3mm. Again, I don't remember the exact value used.) All the pearls and knots are duplicates of these original two spheres. There are five different sizes of pearls, with the largest in the center. and the smallest making up the bulk of the necklace.
I found that turning the spheres so the point where the long lines intersect could be my "hole" in the pearls made things much easier. No matter where the sphere went or how I rotated it, by keeping all spheres touching at this point it was relatively easy to mimic the look of a real bead necklace laying on her throat. Here are a couple of quick viewport captures to demonstrate:
I used the scene tab to hide her head and upper neck, making it very easy to move the view back and forth between the outside where the beads are to the inside where I could see when the bead intersected. I did this with each bead as I placed it. Also, I grouped the "pearl" and the "knot" for duplicating. With the graduated size beads, I had to ungroup to scale the pearl. But bulk of the necklace uses the small pearls and I didn't need to ungroup those, and it made making minor adjustments easy when the "knot" was already in place.
"Retribution"
Secret #1: The ground is, once again, the ground from Around the Campfire. It is quickly becoming one of my favorite grounds to kit-bash. In this image, I used D-Form to create several morphs vary the shape, (and to lower a hill that was in the way of the scene.) And I retextured the object with DA's excellent ground shader, part of DA Stonework & Masonry Shaders. I sure wish he'd come out with a pack that is all ground shaders.
Secret #2: It isn't a mistake I included Simple Living - Living Room in the list of products used. The lovely sky is from that set.
Secret #3: The man with the axe and shield is parented to the camera. I kept moving the camera, trying for a more powerful view of the centaur, but then the amount of man showing would change and lose the look I was going for. Finally, I adjusted the camera for him, parented him to the camera, and then adjusted the camera for her. Her hoof is actually intersecting the shield, just off camera!
Secret #4: It's not really obvious, but I made her very buff, using a combination of body morphs and Musculature HD Morphs. From the camera angle, her gloves cover a lot of her arms, but you can still make out her well-defined abs. I wanted her to look like a warrior, not some little filly that needed a stallion to protect her.
Secret #5: Related to #4, I did a lot of work with face morphs to create a more equine look. And then I made her head larger. It looks a bit odd from the side, but head on, it really draws the eye. Nope, no little filly. I think even the stallions are wary of this warrior gal.
Not a secret: I used Depth of Field for this render, something I've struggled with in the past. Also, using the female centaur was so much easier than trying to make the male work as a female, as I did with Sagittarius.
I really liked the Summer In Full Swing image and all of the screenshots. It gave me a lot of ideas. Thanks.
edit: fixed the title of the image as I left out the word summer
Thank you, Cathy.
And I look forward to seeing those ideas come to fruition. Now if I can just catch up on your thread so I'll see them when you post... Just a little over 1000 posts to read. Piece of cake!
LOL! Yep, shouldn't take long at all. ;) Luckily, I slowed down the last couple of months because I took time out to do NaNoWriMo back in April or it could have been much more. I spent the last couple of months working on writing projects so the thread hasn't been quite as active. I just posted another Gimp tutorial and plan on posting a few more but writing has been taking priority the last few months. I have posted a few renders that I've managed to do the past couple of months when I took a break from the writing though.
That's good, though, that you've been working on your writing projects. I haven't done any significant writing since I got hooked on DAZ. I thought that would change, once I got a second computer just for the graphics, with a fast cpu and a GTX 1080. But I just do more 3D art... but I suppose it didn't help anything that I've had too accidents since I got the new computer, broke my wrist with the second one and was in no shape to spend much time at the computer for graphics or writing. Since the brace came off, (about the time Centaur 7 G3M was released,) I've been rendering with a vengence, I missed it so much. Poor Zev0! I entered 11 times!
"Magic Moment"
Magic Moment started out as a scene to showcase one of Khory's products for Novica's Tips & Product Reviews.
I don't have a lot Khory's products, but I wanted Iray Sprites for quite a while before I bought it, and then had never done a finished render with them. I immediately thought of a dark forest setting with an observer to the "wisps" swirling around. In the end, that observer was another product I didn't have a real use for but really wanted and bought anyway, when it had a deep discount, SY's Unicorn.
Secret #1: This is the second version of the scene, as I wasn't happy with the results of the first version:
Secret #2: The unicorn is a character for the DAZ Horse 2, and the pose I used was for Horse 2. It really distorted the mane SY provided and the mane wouldn't hang down from the neck, but wanted to move forward. So I removed the mane altogether, planning to add one in Photoshop.
Secret #3: The mouth looked like a black hole, so I added a small amount of emission to the teeth and inner mouth. I spot rendered it brighter than I needed, then layered it in Photoshop and adjusted it there, until it was bright enough to make out, but not so bright as to look unrealistic. I had the same issue with the eye, so I added emission to that as well.
Secret #4: The only lighting I used was the DS default HDRI. The Willow Creek set has a 360-degree outer panorama ring of deep forest. This blocked a lot of the light, perfect for the atmosphere I wanted, but the white unicorn rendered gray instead of white.
Secret #5: I used CWRW's Mane N Tail pack from Hivewire3D for the mane, goat's beard, and lion-tail tuft in Photoshop. CWRW's product consists of various layers of mane and tail sections in both light and dark versions. I was unable to get the white mane sections to match the darkish gray of the unicorn, so I replaced the gray beard and tail tuft, too. The leg fur didn't match, then, and I didn't like anything I created for them in photoshop. In Daz Studio, I made the leg fur an emissive white, spot rendered the legs, and added the new leg fur to the unicorn as another layer in Photoshop.
By this time, I had close to a dozen layers in Photoshop. The results weren't too bad, and I shared the image in Novica's thread here, (also linked from the small image above.) But I wasn't really happy with it.
Secret #6: After a day or two, I went back to DS and added the same emission values to the coat, head, ears, tail, tuft, and so on. I left off the beard, as I really liked the one I'd created in Photoshop. Knowing emissive surfaces take longer to render, I set this to render overnight and increased the number of sample before it would stop automatically. With more than twice the samples, the Sprites looked smoother, too. I put this new render as the base in the Photoshop file and removed any layers of corrective spot renders, leaving only the layers with the mane, beard and tail tuft. I made the backgound a bit darker to make the lights show up more. Now this version of Magic Moment, I really like.
FWIW: I originally had an elven-type character sitting on the stump, but neglected to save as I was working and lost her to a crash when attempting to apply OOT's IrayPair Hair shader base to hair I had not first converted using the Iray Uber Base. (Don't believe the word that's going around that you do not need to convert first. While it may be true of some shaders, there are many that do not, and it's not worth losing your work over.)
Hi,
Thank you for sharing your "secrets" @L'Adair! I really like what you did with your unicorn render.
Trish
Oh, L'Adair, sorry to hear about the wrist. Glad it's better. As for writing, I had really let it slip away when I discovered DS. I'm happy that I can actually do some really decent renders with it but I really needed to focus on my writing so I could actually get something close to being publishable. I still feel like I'm light years away but getting closer. During NaNo Camp, I was all about the writing and didn't render much. Now, I've discovered that I need to find a happy balance which is so super hard to find. Too many times, it seems like an either/or choice. I'm getting there, though.
I have that unicorn but have not tried it in Iray yet. I like what you've done with it. It looks really good. I think I might have to dust it off and see what I can do with it. I will definitely come back to reread your secrets when I'm ready to play with SY's unicorn.
Thank you.
It loads with the body shape I used in the image. I didn't realize until later there is another body shape morph, for a smaller, more delicate unicorn. I would have used it instead, had I noticed it sooner, as I was really trying to showcase the sprites. But I had already put so much time into the mane, I didn't want to start over. Lazy of me, I know...
I thought those chunky oak leaves at the top of the page looked familiar!
Hi, TA!
Thank you for dropping by. And thank you for putting out an Oak tree with leaves that look like what I expect to see on an Oak tree. I don't suppose you expected to see the tree kit-bashed when you made it, though around here, nothing should surprise you. One of these days, I'll have to use the whole set. It really is gorgeous.
ETA: @TangoAlpha (so you'll get notified I responded...
)
"I Love My Job"
Here's an oldie but a goodie, from back in January 2016. You may recall the free products being distributed to promote the Encrypted Daz Connect products. Dragon Queen for G3F was one of the first three freebies. Those of us grabbing them very early in the a.m. were able to download via DIM! (Whoops!) With the first "It's Raining Men" render competition barely behind us, along with "comments" about all the "skimp-wear" for the ladies, I just had to put this outfit on Michael 7!
And I admit to being a bit rushed. I assumed I wasn't the only one with the idea, (I wasn't,) but I wanted to be the first to post. Not an easy task when all my Iray renders were still CPU Only.
Secret #1: Not so secret, as I mention it on the gallery page, but the background was rendered separately, and in 3Delight! @FirstBastion's High Cliff Crossing is a hugh set. Notice all those dragons? They are full size. I tried converting the set, but I just didn't like the results, so I went back to 3Delight.
Secret #2: Again, notice all those dragons? Not dragons, but Wyverns. At the time of the render, I didn't own Daz Dragon 3 and the millenium dragon was not being very cooperative. (Posing without pose presets was a nightmare.) So I used the Wyvern 2.0 instead. The Wyvern is actually the reason I got started with DAZ… a story for another day.
Secret #3: The stairs and door are a tower from the Fantasy Castle 2011 - Castle Surround. The textures for the older castle sets don't hold up well for closeups in Iray, so I used the marble shader included with Daz Studio for the stonework and a leather shader for the door. All of this was done before I learned how to use the Geometry Editor Tool.
Secret #4: The pièce de résistance of the scene is, of course, Michael wearing the skimp-wear armor for G3 females. First, it is a violation of DAZ's TOS for any pubic hair to show in a render. To make sure this image didn't get pulled down, I opened the torso texture in Photoshop and removed any semblance of hair using the clone tool. With his new "digital waxing," I then auto-fit the various pieces of the armor onto Michael.
The problem with that is any parts that would be rigid on G3F, "conformed" to fit the pose on G3M. The pauldrons, (shoulder pieces,) didn't bother me, but the knee cops of the greaves, (leg pieces,) were obviously distorted. I ended up using three instances of the greaves, one on Michael and the other two posed to put the single knee cop I left visible over his knees.
For the record, that is not the way to do it, but it was the best I could do at the time. Today, I would make an object of one knee cop by hiding everything else and exporting it, then importing my new object. Much, much easier to position. And I'd do the same with the dragons on the pauldrons, too. What a difference "a few" months' experience can make!
"Rune vs Rune"
It's been a while since I posted in here. That's due in large part to the tutorial I wrote on using the Map Transfer utility to convert DAZ "7" figures' materials to fit the Base Female, and become usable by Genesis 8 Female. (I spent a good bit of time figuring out the Map Transfer so I could use Rune 7's materials on G8F to do this render. I decided to pass on what I learned.)
Not a masterpiece by any stretch, this render was solely to show off how well the shape morph of Rune 7 worked with G8F. There are some differences between the two in the final pose, but even those differences don't really give away which is which. And I won't either. Not yet, anyway.
As simple as this image is, there are several "secrets" involved. But before I get to the secrets, I have a couple of links for you...
First, the morphs tutorial: Morphs from G3 to G8. And second, my tutorial: From Map Transfer to Material Presets.
Secret #1: There are several free scripts floating around to fix the arms and legs of G8F after applying a pose made for G3F. Let me tell you, they might give you something, sort of, close, but if you want it "exactly" the same, you're going to do a lot of tweaking. I put both figures in world center, (0, 0, 0,) applied my pose to both figures, applied the script to G8F, (well, first one, undo, then another, undo, back to the first...) and then I tweaked. And when I was finished, and they looked really, really close...? I noticed the staff they held went right through the left breast, like a shish-kabob. So it was back to tweaking as I changed the pose to bring the arms forward and avoided skewering the right breast!
Due to changes in G8F, I'm pretty sure it's impossible to make the poses exact. But once I pulled the two figures apart, I'd have to say, this is close enough.
Secret #2: The technology for the cyclorama I used as both ground and background is really, really old. The cyclorama comes with the Safari Starter Bundle, which was packaged free with DS back in March 2010. I spent quite a bit of time with the Serengeti materials in Photoshop, creating both a bump map and a normal map, that affected the ground but left the sky and trees alone. Good enough for my purposes, I wouldn't recommend these older props unless the ground won't be seen. The sky for Serengeti is compressed too much for Iray, and you can see the artifacts around the tree trunks, if you look closely at the larger image in the gallery. But the sky looks really good, (if you ignore the artifacts,) and the reason for that is I also plugged the texture into the Emissive Color parameter and adjusted the other parameters the way we do for things like computer and tv screens!
Secret #3: There was one other thing I did with the cyclorama. I flipped the image horizontally. Not in the parameters, which would have had me using L.I.E. for texture, bump and normal maps, but by using scale and rotate: I applied Scale at -100%, then rotated it 180º by the X axis. This was necessary because otherwise it looked like a tree was growing out of the head of the figure on our right.
Secret #4: Last, but not least. I used the Battle Queen outfit on both figures, using auto-fit for G8F. That loin cloth was a mess! So I surfed on over to Deviant Art and Sickleyield's Convert Clothing G3 to G8, G8 to G3 tutorial and converted the loin cloth to G8F. Works like a charm.
Oops... Reserved for my next image...? Yeah, that's it... lol
Glad you're healing- a broken wrist would be such a pain so far as getting on the computer or doing almost anything! I really like the DOF in Retribution, and of course the pearls. Nicely done!
"Happy Girl"
Here's another image using materials that were converted from one generation to another using the Map Transfer utility, in this case, from Kids 4 to Genesis 2 Female.
As I mention in the tutorial thread, I created an Iray material preset by copying material zones from the base Genesis 8 Female and pasting them in the corresponding zones on the Genesis 2 Female, in the Surfaces->Editor tab.I didn't want the images, so I saved the preset without them, leaving just the values for the parameters used by G8F. It wasn't perfect. There was one image that had to be removed. It made a great starting point.
Secret #1: The new preset left the fingernails too shiny and a very light shade of blue. The toenails were also shiny, but at least they weren't blue. I tweaked for the fingernails, and found the light blue color in the Translucency settings was the source of the blue, (exactly as I expected.) I changed the light blue to an equally light shade of yellow, which left the characteristic pink of the nails where they attach to the fingers, and made the tips look off-white with a slightly yellowed appearance. Unfortunately, the same settings looked odd on the toenails, so I tweaked some more.
Secret #2: I gave the sandals the yellow soles so they would show up on the black flooring material. It's just a yellow layer in the L.I.E. set to Additive at 60%, (I think.) Now they look more like something a child would wear.
Secret #3: The trees in the background are from Ecomantics - Efficient Ecosystems, and are transparent between the trunks as well as above the leaves. In Photoshop, I selected a rectangle area below the leaves and added a green layer sampled from the trees. I created another layer with a darker shade of green. This layer I made semi-transparent using the Dissolve blend mode. In Photoshop, the Dissolve mode removes pixels rather than making them transparent. So one I liked the effect, I used a slight bit of Gaussian Blur to make the pixels less sharp. That became the "grass" between the trees.
Secret #4: I'm a photographer. Though I don't get out as much as I used to, I still stop along the road when the scene is too interesting to pass up. That's how I ended up with a couple dozen images of just clouds in a bright blue sky. It's one of those photos, placed in the very back, that became the background for the image.
Secret #5: This scene is lit entirely by one of Mec4D's HDRIs available on her website, Mec4d.com. The shine in the girl's eyes is a reflection of the sun in the HDRI.
"The Girl 7/8 Photo Shoot"
There's one more in the series, a nude variation of the Girl sitting on the sofa, (with a slightly different pose.) I uploaded it to my DA account, with the Mature Content set to true. It's my first nude render, so of course it's a toon-ish gal. If you want, you can view it here: The Girl 7/8 Photo Shoot 05
This started out as a single image: The Girl (morph on G8F) on the sofa with the capri jeans and red shirt from the Mega Wardrobe. Most of the images I do start out with the character. I add clothing and hair and that sometimes dictates what I do next, sometimes not. In this case, it was after that, when I found a base pose I liked with her in these clothes and hair. Once I had the pose, I needed something for her to sit on, and the sofa from Shinjuku Living won the honors because of the cushions. Then I modified the pose to work with the sofa.
Next I needed an environment. After several sets that "didn't work," I settled on the first Portrait Studio from IDG. That led to adding a photographer and a camera, that were a waste without the long shot. So I knew at that point, there would be a long shot, so now the look of the environment became important, not just the backdrop. As I progressed, a story formed in my mind, which led to adding the almost formal portrait with a different backdrop, as well as the cheesecake and nude versions.
Secret #1: I used auto-fit for the G2F version of Meru Hair. and Destiny Gardens' Toon Hair Shaders for the color, along with changing opacity setting to 2.5 to make the strands look more toon-like. The scalp looked too white, though. In the end, the scalp is actually from another SWAM product, Loyce Hair.
Secret #2: The sofa from Shinjuku Living doesn't have legs. The base sits directly on the floor. So while the cushions suited my purpose, the base did not. I found a table, from The Living Room Collection with legs I liked, and scaled the x and y axes to fit just inside the base. Using the Geometry Editor, I first hid, then deleted the polys for all but the part of the leg I wanted for the sofa. I then used a wood shader from Khory's Neutral Shaders to make the base and legs match. (I later added the table behind the sofa, and applied the same wood shader.) The sofa fabric is also from Khory's shaders, but tweaked to make the yellow more closely match the color of the Meru Hair.
In the above image, you can see where the table was. In the Geometry Editor, I selected the polygons I didn't want, assigned them to a Selection Set, then hid them by clicking on the eye icon for the set. Because the set is "selected," the hidden polygons show up as transparent red. After the screenshot was taken, still in the Geometry Editor, I deleted the hidden polys. And then I parented the new legs to the sofa.
Secret #3: The floor of the studio uses tiles from JGreenlees' Homestyle Iray Shaders, but none of the color variations were neutral enough, so I used the bump image in the Base Color parameter.
Secret #4: There is no camera tripod in either Portrait Studio product, nor does the Professional DSLR Camera come with one. A tripod would be more likely in a studio environment, for portrait photography... But what I did have were several poses of a photographer with the camera. For Genesis 2. I used Zev0's G2 to G3 Pose Converter and applied the converted pose to my G3 male. It was close, but not quite there, especially with the arms. So I loaded G2M, applied the original pose, and used him as the basis for tweaking the pose on G3M. In the end, I just moved the left arm so the hand didn't show. I was spending too much time fiddling with a detail that wasn't going to be in the shot! So the pose, from the front, not so good. (And of course, once I was done, I found the perfect tripod on sale at Hivewire3D... only $4.95. Got the tripod, but didn't want to start over with the photog! Next time...)
Secret #5: I created my own backdrop, with the windows and curtains. The view out the window is one of my own photos, (Hendrick's Park, Eugene OR.) I used the picture window wall from Backdrops Made Easy Windows and Doors, default position, applied a wood windowsill with white walls, switched from Perspective View to Front View, (which centered the wall perfectly in the Viewport, and rendered. I saved the render as a png, leaving the background around the wall and inside the window transparent. Next, I added curtains to the wall, from the Divine Dining Room. To get a semi-transparent effect, I put the bump map in the Cutout Opacity setting. Following the instructions in Mec4d's video on Shadow Catchers, I turned the wall into a shadow catcher and rendered just the curtains, rod, and corresponding shadows. This render I also saved as a png, preserving the transparency. In Photoshop. I layered the curtains, wall, and my photograph. I used Photoshop to add a pattern to the wall, and adjust the color to come up with very pale yellow walls. (You can do this in DS, applying a shader to the walls. I needed to change the base image, though. It was too dark for what I wanted to do.) I made the final image 2000px square, the same as the images included with the studio. Finally, when applied to the Backdrop object, I used the vertical offset to move the bottom of the curtains to the bottom of the paperroll. (And I saved the photoshop file, so I can make changes and create more backdrops.) Here's the Shadow Catchers video. You can leave the sound off if you like, it's just background music.
Secret #6: Girl is in world center. Or her behind is. I moved everything else down. I used Scene Only mode in Render Settings->Environment, so it may not apply, but I have noticed lighting works better when the subject is in world center. Especially the shadows. One slight problem, though. I didn't realize until after I'd done final renders and was working on the long shot... the floor of the studio has two layers, a top and a bottom. When I positioned the studio to the bottom of the sofa legs, I was making adjustments from underneath, moving the studio down until the legs had only the smallest bit showing through. Of course, that meant the bottom of the legs were cut off by the depth of floor! C'est la vie. (This became apparent when I realizied the photographer was floating and and was positioning him to the floor. His shoes were through the floor, but I couldn't see them from the bottom view!)
Secret #7: Girl seems to sink into the sofa, even squishing the cushions a bit. Those are morphs I created using D-Forms. It's actually so subtle it's hard to tell. The lack of morphs would be more obvious. I used 6 D-Forms and spawned 3 morphs. It's because of these morphs, I didn't mess much with the lower half of the pose. Here's a comparison of the sofa cushions with and without the morphs.
"Got Milk"
This is a very straight-forward render. One cat, one glass of milk, one spotlight, rendered in Scene Only mode, without a background.
This is the Hivewire3D Housecat. I modified the Grooming pose that came with cat, and I applied the LAMH short hair preset provided by Saiyaness. The glass is from Everyday Drinks, using shaders from Mec4D's Vol. 2 PBS shaders for both the glass and the milk.
To get the full fur, I followed Saiyaness' suggestion to set the hair count to 1,200,000. I converted the fur to an object using the player and rendered without converting it to iray first.
I layered the render over the background layer in Photoshop, and after trying to create a DOF feel with a blurred background, I went back to the pure black for a more dramatic presentation.
If you have the HW3D Housecat or HW3D Kitten and are interested, Saiyaness also provided an LAMH long hair preset. Both presets are free.
ETA: There are now three presets from Saiyaness, the short hair I used above, a second short hair that's smoother, and a long hair. All three are available in one set now, still free, from Hivewire3D.com. Just do a search for "LAMH" and you'll have no trouble at all finding it.
Thank you again for this awesome thread and all of your efforts to help others learn from your process. I've learned a lot and utilized some of your "secrets" already. A lot of it still goes over my head but I am making headway and understanding more and more of what I read.
I love these kinds of posts. Thanks so much for sharing!
You're welcome, @Worlds_Edge and @dreamfarmer. Thank you both for taking a moment to comment. It means a lot to me knowing you are reading and finding something of value in the posts.
And Worlds_Edge, please feel free to ask questions about any "secret" you need more info about. I'll be happy to go into more detail on the how, if you need me to.
In fact, I'm still learning as I go, too. The Map Transfer tutorial I did a while back was the result of being too stubborn to give up and finally figuring out how the d@mn thing works. I couldn't find a decent step-by-step post out there, so I created one of own... Which I fully expect to refer to from time to time! A bit of external memory, so to speak.
So if anyone reads a "secret" and knows of a better way to do what I did, don't be shy. Tell us how you would do it. Please!
I know the dent in the cushions is subtle but it really makes a big difference. Looks great!
Thank you, Sonja.
"The Standoff"
After Sweet Pea died last May, the squirrel continued to come out looking for him. That went on for a couple of weeks, then the squirrel stopped trying. We still see him from time to time, but he doesn't hang out on the top of the fence anymore.
Secret #1: AM's squirrel kept crashing Daz Studio, even when all I had in the scene was the squirrel. It was crashing when I was trying to pose him, while the LAMH presets were applied. My solution was to work with the hairless "actor," creating the pose on the fence and adjusting the shape. Then I saved Presets for both the Pose and the Shape. When it came time to render, I deleted the "standin" and added the "hairy" actor. I then applied the pose, (which included the translations to send him to the fence,) applied the shape, and then opened LAMH and exported Fiber Hair. Once the fiber hair was created I deleted the long tufts for the ears, as our gray squirrels do not have those.
Secret #2: The fiber hair created by LAMH uses a lot of memory. I was not able to have both the cat and squirrel with fiber hair at the same time. I rendered a base image without the squirrel, deleted the LAMH preset and fiber hair from the cat. Then I added and prepared the squirrel as mentioned in Secret #1, and did a spot render of the squirrel and the area around him.
Secret #3: I added an instance of the maple tree to the background, the poseable peonies behind the fence and the mushrooms in the grass after I'd rendered the base image. Rather than go the time and trouble of redoing the LAMH hair on the cat, I rendered that section without the cat. Then I hid everything but the cat, set the HDRI to 0.00 and Draw Dome to Off. The resulting render was a silhouette of the cat, which I used in Photoshop to create a rough outline of the cat in the layer mask. I did run into one issue with eyebrow hairs, so I did a small spot render which I added as a layer, and masked out where the hairy cat was. (Yes, it would have been better had I redone the render, but I didn't want to wait another 10 hours for a new base image!)
Secret #4: The mushrooms looked too dark, matching the color of the fence, and looked more like dog "piles" than mushrooms. After scaling them down to 7-10% or so, I changed the Base Color image to that of the underside.
Secret #5: I used a single stem of the Poseable Poenies to get the flower growing through the fence, moving the brances and leaves so they didn't poke through the fence boards. Then I added a "bush," which is a collection of stems, and applied the same flower color to all. I added a second "bush" farther from the fence, and applied the pale yellow flower.
Secret #6: The fence I used, from The Fence Collection, has been updated to include Iray materials. And the wood looks fake as close to the camera as I had it. I used a wood shader from, of all things, the Props package for the IDG Portrait Studio 2. Using a shader, however, removes the nail heads on the fence boards. Daz was kind enough to include a Metalicity mask for the nails, though. I created a Geometry Shell, turned off the two Lattice material zones, applied one of Mec4d's metal shaders to the shell and put that metalicity mask into Cutout Opacity. Also, the fence was too high for my needs, so I moved it lower using Y-Translate and hid the rest with the plane used for the ground.
Secret #8: I used Mec4D's HDRI-Gardens #3 for both lighting and background. (You can find it on her website, mec4d.com.) This and several of her HDRIs load as a scene, including Tone Mapping and a default camera. I loaded the HDRI and then saved a Render preset, selecting only the Tone Mapping and Environment. (I actually did that will any of her HDRIs I have that load as scenes.) The only change I made to the Render Settings after loading was to set Draw Ground to off in the Environment. And to rotate the dome until the background didn't show any road or people.
As expensive as Commercial Use HDRIs can be, I highly recommend her HDRIs, either the HDRI products she's released here at Daz recently, or the single HDRIs she sells for $6 each on her own site.
Secret #9: I used the Hivewire3D House Cat along with the short LAMH preset from Saiyaness. Right now there are only two texture sets for the cat, the three gray Tabby options that came with the cat and the four options with the orange cat addon. I wanted to do something a bit different, so I selected the material zones for the furry areas and opened the image in L.I.E. I added a new layer, changed it from black, (0, 0, 0,) to white, (255, 255, 255,) and moved it below the original image. I then set the opacity for the original image to 80% making all the gray areas a lighter shade of gray and accepted my changes. (This approach would not have worked well if the face was part of the image.) Because the LAMH preset uses the colors of the Base Color image, the generated fur was also a lighter gray. There was one issue with the preset. Saiyaness told us she had uploaded the wrong short preset, that it hadn't been smoothed. But it looks really good kind of scruffy. More like my cats look most of the time. However, there was this oddness to the back, sort of four parallel lines down the back, which I corrected in Photoshop. I used the content-aware healing brush, maybe 10 pixels or so, and clicked on areas of the line, only changing one spot at a time. It turned out pretty good.
As always, please feel free to ask questions if you need more details on anything I did here.