Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2024 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
When I picked up Stonemason's brand new set today, I also picked up an oldie......Streets of Asia 2.
Deleted the skydome, converted everything to Iray Uber, and then updated the leaves/pine needles/grass/cherry blossoms etc. with MEC4D's organic grass and leaves shaders from her Iray Vol 2 pack (still one of the most versatile purchases I've ever made here), keeping the original maps. Tweaked the translucency colors for the cherry blossoms from MEC4D's greens to pinks. Replaced the water with her volumetric water from the same pack and brought in a new normal map for the surface. Added some translucency to the paper lanterns.
Single HDRI, no postwork.
Holy cow, that's a lot of work! But one cannot deny it was worth the effort.
I'm a big fan of Vol 2, as well. More often than not, my renders use something from Vol 2 or Vol 3. And usually both.
This began as a fifteen minute stab at revamping the Shelter with iRay mats and ended up going on for much longer when, rather than modify an existing set to accommodate it, I became gripped by an irrational urge to see if I could create a park from maclean's Everyday Morphing Primitives. Which, apart from the trees, flowers and streetlamp, is what I did.
The roof of the shelter is all one material zone, and so I used the geometry editor to split it up, creating a material zone for the painted area beneath the tiles, and one for the tiles themselves, leaving just the struts etc that go above the tiles in the original zone. I then had to split the zone for the tiles so that they would all be running in the proper direction on all four sides of the building. This might sound more complicated than what it was - it didn't take long at all. After that, it was just a matter of putting some shaders on. The white paint and the tiles on the roof are from the Architectural iRay Shaders, and everything else on the building is Mec4D Vol 2. Job done.
Then I created the park, which took forever. Not because the Everyday Primitives are complicated or time-consuming to use (they're not, and I love them muchly), but because I just couldn't seem to stop messing about and adding and changing bits here and there. To make the park, first I increased the scale of the morphing terrain and used the geometry editor to cut a square hole it (in other words, I created another material zone and adjusted the cutout opacity to make it invisible). Then I dropped the four-sided tube into it so that the top of the tube was level with my slightly roughened terrain, and increased the width of the sides so that they would create wide paths around the hole (the shelter is sitting on one of these). I then dropped an ordinary plane into the bottom of the hole, shaded it all with Mec4D's Wet mud and stuck another plane just below the top, shaded with one of Mec4Ds water shaders. For reasons I can't remember, the plane was later replaced by a cube, shaded with the same.
The archway is a morphing primitive, as are the walls (box with rounded corners). The paths and the mud in the flowerbeds are boxes with rounded corners too, sunk into the ground and with the mud tilted slightly towards the grass (the grass was shaded with one from Nature Shaders). I used the boxes with rounded corners so that the edges would be less harsh and more natural looking, but squeezing them into the width of a path means a minute or two spent adjusting the scale of the texture as the squeezing will distort it. The trees are the two-dimensional ones from the old Ecomantics product, which I thought iRayed up surprisingly well. The flowers were quickly positioned with Ultra Scatter and came from an assortment of products, and the lily pads came from the Medieval Hall And Garden. I can't remember where I got the streetlamp from, but will look next time I fire up studio.
It was at this point that I started to drive myself a bit daft. I'd almost finished rendering the scene when I realised that the park didn't have a bin. Being really anti-litter, this bothered me and in the end it bothered me more than wasting time rendering and so I stopped it and broke out the morphing primitives again, creating a bin from from the cup shape and two triangle tubes made very thin, crossed at right-angles and with one edge of each sunk in the floor. I also shrank two morphing cylinders into rings and added them to the outside of the cup. This was shaded with one of the wood shaders from Architectural Shaders that looks like logs, and the inside with a Mech4D red metal. I hit 'render' again, and thought 'That archway would have a gate in it. Even if they didn't close the gate at night, they'd want the option. You may as well stop the machine now. You know you're going to.' Sigh. The gate was made from ordinary cubes, but it wasn't too long (thankfully) after hitting 'render' again that I found myself thinking 'That gate would have a handle. What are they expected to do - teleport through it?' Morphing primitives to the rescue again (extruded sphere), and I made myself walk away from the PC before I could think of anything else :)
Naturally, a night time render had to follow. And yes, I did shut the gate :)
...wow that's really nice.
@JamesJab, what shaders did you use on the lady's skin? It looks so real!
Beautiful work, @TabascoJack! Stonemason has some of the best sets!
That's looks fantastic, @Astracardia! Like a real place, I'd say!
I think billboards are one of those things that you resist with Iray out of this pbr mantra of 'simulate everything!!'
But billboards often look good and render way faster.
With how nice depth of field works in Iray, I would be very hesitent to add cardboard cutouts into my scene. :P
Her skin is just FWSA Camile HD for Bethany 7. Here she is up close, same lighting, pose and scene.
@Astracadia That turned out really great! Yours is a good example that you can do a lot on your own with a few basic shapes. Thanks for your story too, I know I've restarted renders multiple times to "add just one more thing".
Gorgeous! And I too, frequently go, oh wait... I need to add (fill with whatever) at least twice sometimes more often, halfway through a render. If I would just stop before hitting render, walk away for 5 or 10 minutes and look at it again, I would probably save myself the time and trouble lol.
@astracadia, the scene is amazing and looks as good in the dark as in the light. Wow. Your work paid off!
@JamesJAB, that closeup really shows off how nicely her skin turned out.
Here's a little something I did pitting the real Rune 7 against G8F with Rune's shape and materials, (converted to Base Female UV's using the Map Transfer utility... tutorial is in the works, which is why I've been mostly absent lately...) Anyway... I used the very old Multiplane Cyclorama with the Serengeti addon.
Rune vs Rune
I was having trouble with the distant tree growing out of the head of the Rune on the right, so I flipped the image, sort of. I scaled the prop -100% and set X-rotate to 180. It not only fixed the one problem, but now the shadow of the branches on the large tree are going the same direction as the shadows my twin Runes are making on the ground. lol I also created bump and normal maps in photoshop, with the upper area flat, and made the whole thing emissive to get that bright blue sky. The downside to this set, besides the ground looking really bad in the foreground, is you can make out the jpeg artifacts in the sky around the trees. But I can see how this could be useful for some scenes.
Decided to try a scene where the character is getting dressed.
The set is Space Station Living Quarters. The only materials that I messed with where the emissive surfaces, I changed them to Iray Emissive.
@JamesJAB, I'm really surprised by the detail of the default skin, then! I thought for sure you'd messed with it to make it look so good! Also, the set looks very good! Though based on the description of the product, the materials are already adjusted for Iray.
@L'Adair, interested in that tutorial for sure! I haven't even touched G8, tbh. But I'll do so at some point! The cyclorama could be used as a quick background, say behind buildings or other stuff to keep from grabbing too much attention to its flaws. Because the sky looks very pretty, save for the left side, where it hits the background tree and you can see some seams.
Not sure which set you are talking about. :P
The Space Station Living Quarters set just comes with 3Delight materials.
None of the GIS sets come with or have been updated to include Iray materials.
The link you posted Space Station Living Quarters. says in the description: "All Material and shader are adjusted for Iray render." The promo has also been render using Iray (see the logo on the corner):
Oh, I did not notice that. If you look in the "What's Included and Features" at the end it just says "Daz Studio 3Delight Material Presets (.DUF)"
I as not expecting it to be Iray when I grabbed it in the flash sale a couple of days ago. I just went into the materials and set anything that said emmissive to the Iray preset without really checking the settings first.
Wait.. that kinda sucks for 3Delight people, it does not come with seperate material file for each (3Delight and Iray) so the author just got rid of the 3delight mats in an update?
Not sure, as I don't owe this product. My guess is he/she designed it with Iray in mind. Then created 3delight materials to support that render, maybe? So I'd think that perhaps when you load it, it loads with the iray materials. If you want to convert it, then you apply the 3delight duf file? I only read the description because i found it odd that it says it had emissive maps (sicne 3delight doesn't use it). Plus, I remember this set came out during the MarchMaddness sale I joined Daz (last year, I think) and by then almost all products were Iray (which is why I jumped straight to learning iray and didn't even touch 3delight).
I do not use 3Delight so it's a non-issue for me. Maybe the 3Delight bit at the end of the list was not suposed to be there?
I did a quick and fun image of the old Dragon 3 with the new materials that come with the Crystal Dragon. (I do not like the crystals!) Anyway, I used another cyclorama material for a background. This time, I used the Geometry Editor to create a new material for the ground showing in the front and applied one DA's excellent shaders.. No image, just a link, in case anyone wants to check it out: Did Someone Say 'Ice Cream'?
I have that space set.
It has a full 3DL set of surfaces, and then an 'optimized for Iray'... which is still 3DL except for emissive surfaces. The big difference is that the 3DL panels use ambient, the Iray panels use emissive.
I am not thrilled that 'optimized for Iray' includes mostly 3DL materials, but apparently that's totally fine by Daz.
It's a nice looking set, so I'm fine with needing to tweak the materials since I got it on the flash sale a few days ago. (since you meantioned it, I guess I'll look at the non-light emitting surfaces and play with them)
I took a look at Old Village Wishing Well to see what it would look like in Iray. The good thing about this set, is that it has bump maps already, so I didn't change any of that.
1ST Render:
2ND Render:
3RD Render:
@giselle3000, I used the Treescape Backgrounds behind the Victorian House, and also with another render, (Respite) and I have to agree with you wholeheartedly. Not only is the masking sub-par, but with threes sizes for each backdrop, you'd expect three sizes of images. But that's not the case. And it was a bee-atch trying to make the trees usable with the night sky in Respite. I also noticed the props are all the same ratio, but the images are not. To get the trees to look right, (#5,) I had to double the height! I've been waffling about returning it.
And more on topic, I really like what you've done with the Wishing Well. I picked it up recently, but haven't used it yet. It looks really good.
I gave the Treescapes product a miss because of how they looked in the promos, my reasoning being that if I couldn't do better myself then I could at least do as badly! There are other backdrop products in the series too which could be really good for all I know, but the tree one managed to put me off all of them. I used the trees from Ecomantics in the park renders earlier in the thread and it was a big surprise to me how good they looked with just the iRay uber shader thrown over them, despite their age. I bet we'd be amazed at what can be done with some of the stuff that's long since been pensioned off into the darker recesses of our runtimes, and with very little effort sometimes too. I love this thread - big thanks to Llynara for starting it :)
The wishing well is looking great. I actually preferred the ivy on the well before the colours were restored, but leaving it that way is just one of the many options we've got and there would be no point to software that offered them if we were all after the same thing. I love your 'messed up' ground too - maybe I'm not the best of critics :)
@L'Adair, I'm with you on that. I knew the mask was horrible for the prop, but I Figure I could grab the hi-quality one and make a mask myself... until I realized that the "three sizes" meant the thing was simply scaled up but the quality of the image was the same. I don't think it's worth it to try and make it usable. Unfortunately, I also made the mistake of picking up MountainScapes Backdrops without even testing the treescape first. Let's just say I'm not impressed with this one either. I may end up returning both products as well, since I probably won't use them at all.
@Astracadia, I know! Ecomantics looks beautiful whenever I use it! I feel like there's nothing better to use to fill in a backdrop than that one! And about the ground on the wishing well renders. I actually loaded the water plane that came with MountainScapes Backdrop while checking if that one worked better as a backdrop (it did not). I suspect I may have deleted the mountain but not the water plane, giving the ground those weird white patches. As to the vegetation, it's important to note that the second render has the original vegetation. For the third render, I replaced the leaves entirely with Nature Shaders. I like the leaves before too, but I didn't like the branche's colors. Perhaps I should've only messed with the branch and kept the leaves. Then again, the third render feel more... like a fairy tale place, sort of. So it might depend on what you want to do with it :D.
Daz bought Mountainscapes and it's now a PC+ product. I was thinking about contacting CS and getting a refund for the difference. But I haven't tried to use it yet. Looks like I should. I may need to just return them both. Too bad, as the concept is a good one. But I could do a much better job with my own photography, a few primitives and the Geometry Editor!
I opened a ticket to return both of them. We'll see what the veredict is.
Found this old set: Country Dining Room in my content - must have bought it during one of my temporary PC+ membership phases. Anyhow, it converts nicely to IRay although I swapped a few shaders to personalise it a little.
And here's the companion set: the Country Kitchen, again with a few shaders replaced.
Something Old, Something New... Pure Romanze is so old, the included poses are for V3 and M3! Modeled by Marforno, the Gazebo and Arbor, (not used in this scene,) have stood the test of time. Even the Willow tree looks pretty good. I used a wood shader on the Gazebo floor, and I created a separate material zone for the support running around the bottom of the floor using the Geometry Editor so I could make the grain of the wood horizontal. Other than that, the Gazebo is just Iray Uber Base converted. Fern Lake, on the other hand, is only a year and a half old, and comes with Iray materials, (as well as 3Delight materials.) I did convert the water to a grassy meadow, but the rocks, trees, ferns and surround are all Stonemason.
The original image is 2560 x 1440, and can be viewed from the gallery page here.
Fern Meadow