Hidden Treasures- Fun with Older Sets

Linwelly

I walking through a lot of older scifi sets in the moment and turn them over to iray versions, in this one I used the good old Level 19 by stonemason

nonesuch00

kyoto kid said:

L'Adair said:

giselle3000 said:

I'll keep playing with Njob to see if I can re-create the normal map I've made with photoshop. I'm thinking the difference is that with PS I'm creating the normal map out of the original bump map rather than the diffuse. But when I tried that with Njob it didn't work (since that one asks for the diffuse map). Will check it out after work and post my results.

I wondered about this when I read it. Now that my computer isn't busy rendering, I thought I'd check something... And I was able to create a normal map from the bump map by using the 4th Filter option, Heightmap > Normalmap. That eliminates one step, if there is a bump map. Now I must try a comparison between creating the normal map starting with the diffuse, and creating it from the bump map. I'm going to use a different older DM set, though. Just for a little variety...

I haven't seen kyoto kid in here since Monday. I wonder how Njob is working out for him/her...? Hopefully kk is rendering like crazy and about to come in here with some comparison renders...

...actually been looking for a new place to live is taking most of my energy right now.  Particularly difficult as my only income is Social Security. Average market rents here even for a "shoebox" studio flat are about 130% of my monthly benefit and low income housing is about as rare a find as a snowball in the Sahara.

If they have a dependable public transportation line, taken I think it's not always pleasant to drive yourself with arthritis, try looking in rural areas as far out as the public transportation goes. Of course I know in the US good public transporation is very much the exception and only a few privileged folk in the biggest urban areas have it, but still check anyway.

L'Adair

Linwelly said:

I walking through a lot of older scifi sets in the moment and turn them over to iray versions, in this one I used the good old Level 19 by stonemason

Very nice. The DOF really draws the eye to your character.

Not that I know one way or the other about this set, but DOF can also hide a number of flaws in older sets. (I'm thinking specifically of a castle courtyard I was tinkering with. I know I posted the render, but apparently I attached it, rather than putting in a private gallery and I can't find it now.)

kyoto kid

nonesuch00 said:

kyoto kid said:

L'Adair said:

giselle3000 said:

I'll keep playing with Njob to see if I can re-create the normal map I've made with photoshop. I'm thinking the difference is that with PS I'm creating the normal map out of the original bump map rather than the diffuse. But when I tried that with Njob it didn't work (since that one asks for the diffuse map). Will check it out after work and post my results.

I wondered about this when I read it. Now that my computer isn't busy rendering, I thought I'd check something... And I was able to create a normal map from the bump map by using the 4th Filter option, Heightmap > Normalmap. That eliminates one step, if there is a bump map. Now I must try a comparison between creating the normal map starting with the diffuse, and creating it from the bump map. I'm going to use a different older DM set, though. Just for a little variety...

I haven't seen kyoto kid in here since Monday. I wonder how Njob is working out for him/her...? Hopefully kk is rendering like crazy and about to come in here with some comparison renders...

...actually been looking for a new place to live is taking most of my energy right now.  Particularly difficult as my only income is Social Security. Average market rents here even for a "shoebox" studio flat are about 130% of my monthly benefit and low income housing is about as rare a find as a snowball in the Sahara.

If they have a dependable public transportation line, taken I think it's not always pleasant to drive yourself with arthritis, try looking in rural areas as far out as the public transportation goes. Of course I know in the US good public transporation is very much the exception and only a few privileged folk in the biggest urban areas have it, but still check anyway.

...totally transit dependent as I cannot afford to be "owned" by a car on my income. 

However I finally cleared a wait list and am in the process of moving into a new place Only 475$ a month for a lovely large studio apt. in a city where the average market rate rent is around 1,200$ - 1,300$ for the same type of unit.  The other nice part is it's on two of the tram limes amid very near two others.  The area it is i h also has a very high "walkability" rating. meaning lots of places within walking distance. in a very "pedestrian friendly"  area.

...ugh stupid forum spell check not working again even though it is activated.. Has to go into Word to check for typos.  How many years have we been dealing with this rubbish?

L'Adair

Here is a closeup of the Gazebo and occupants from Fern Meadow, with a few changes, including a new camera angle. Close up, all the elements of the gazebo hold up except the roof. This close it looks flat in the full-size image. I may yet try running the roof textures through Njob to create a height map, as well as a normal map.

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bohemian3

Echoes Old and New

One of the very first sets I purchased back in  2012, Oremus, with Michael 8 which I purchased yesterday with iRadiance Variety Pack.  Techniques I use to convert an old set to new in < 5 minutes:

•  Apply iRay uber base.  
• Change base color to off-white so its not pure white.
• Play with Mettalicity setting for metal items, such as iron.
• Add a quick top coat to surfaces where it makes sense like marble.
• Add slight bump with diffuse map if no bump is supplied.
• Add translucency to surfaces where it makes sense like leaves.
  
  Amazing what $2 can buy ya!  Thanks Llynara for starting this thread - great idea.

JamesJAB

Here's my first G8M render (OK, it's my second because this the same as my first but with a DOF adjustment)
G8M + G8F + the old Hot Tub set (with the water plane replaced with a cube using a water shader)
​

kyoto kid

...reworking the girls at the bus stop scene now that I know a heck of a lot more about Iray than when I first created it.  The only parts I'm changing are the two girls, using G3F, Slosh's  UHT2 shaders, and SBP3.

RGcincy

So many good examples of older sets used in Iray. Thanks to all who have posted!

Here's an old set SKU 3361: BRC Beautiful Darkness - Eternity. Background and dome lighting provided by the new Iray HDRI Storms Lightning and Desert. I didn't make any changes to the building textures - just let DS automatically add the Iray uber base. I positioned a spotlight in front of the building to take away the shadows. Click image for fullsize version.

L'Adair

On A Sunny Afternoon

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The set used is Blooming Alley, which came out several months before the first official release of DS with the Iray render engine. While it's not really old, it does not have Iray materials.

Blooming Alley loads with 3 sections: the back-end with the cul-de-sac, (Alley-Round,) a straight section of road, (Alley-Way,) and an entrance, (Alley-Enter.) For the image above, I used just Alley-Way and Alley-Round, and I applied the Iray Uber Shader to everything. This is a large set, and as with so many large area sets, the relatively small textures look pretty bad closeup. The grass wasn't a problem, but the cobblestones were blurry with very visible jpeg artifacts. Fortunately, all of the ground objects have separate materials zones from the road, and I was able to apply one of DA's ground shaders. I did have to turn each of the images 90 degrees in LIE, however, but the resulting roadway looks very much like the original, only "cleaner" and sharp.

I added Translucency to leaves and flowers of the assorted plants and trees, and I applied a glass shader to the glass of the street lamps.

On the right of the image, you can see between the trees to the object along side the set. That is also true throughout the set. I used Ultrascatter to create a screen of trees along the back, and the main prop from The Unused Railway Bridge to add the street next to park. An instance of the "bridge" sits perpendicular to the original, in the back and behind the Ultrascattered trees, to fill in any open areas between the trees.

This is a beautiful set that converts to Iray well via the Iray Uber Base. For Iray, however, this set would really benefit using instances. For example, the road section consists of 8 objects: AlleyWay-Benches, AlleyWay-Ground, AlleyWay-Lanterns, AlleyWay-Trees-Ash, AlleyWay-Urns, AlleyWay-Bushes-Hibiscus, AlleyWay-Bushes-Oleander, and AlleyWay-Vases. Each of these "objects" consists of multiple items: 6 Ash trees, 6 Hibiscus bushes, 9 lanterns, 6 benches, (2 of one style, 4 of another,) and so on. The other two sections are similar. If these objects were groups with one object and several instances, the set would use a lot less memory and render faster. I plan on doing this for myself, later, when I have more time.

As it was, this image ended up rendering CPU only as was too large to fit on my GTX 1080. (I do believe it would have fit on a GTX 1080ti.)

JamesJAB

Dystopia City Blocks 001-010 (Poser)
Dystopia City Blocks 011-020 (Poser)

Here are a couple of renders that I did playing with volumetric lighting.  Swapped out the glass and lighting materials for Iray shaders.  The surrounding environment is from Oberon Station.
One day and one night render

Sven Dullah

L'Adair said:

On A Sunny Afternoon

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That is a lovely render, the posing is spot on!

L'Adair

Sven Dullah said:

L'Adair said:

On A Sunny Afternoon

---

That is a lovely render, the posing is spot on!

Thank you.

(I can only take credit from the neck up on both characters, though. The City Bike comes with poses for G3M, G3F, G8M and G8F.)

dHandle

JamesJAB said:

Dystopia City Blocks 001-010 (Poser)
Dystopia City Blocks 011-020 (Poser)

Here are a couple of renders that I did playing with volumetric lighting.  Swapped out the glass and lighting materials for Iray shaders.  The surrounding environment is from Oberon Station.
One day and one night render

Whoa!  These are great!  Especially the night scene.  The volumetric lighting adds a very realistic fogginess.  Well done!

I was wondering how much it would slow things down to be looking at the distant city from the edge of a forest or woods...maybe through teh eyes of some animal.  Or alien.

Terra Dome 3 for Iray would make a good foreground/background too, I bet. 

Thanks for the inspiration!

: )

L'Adair

Here's an "artistic render" I did after doing a lot of work on the Deco Club Exterior. Did you know this set was done be Stonemason? At least, I think it was. One of the textures states, "Modelled and textured by Stefan Morrell. I think the sidewalk in front of the club is the only surface of the club I didn't replace with a shader or my own maps. No. Wait. The "Opening Night Tonight" signage is original, though I made it emissive.

I'm posting the clay renders and straight Iray Uber Base conversion on the Show Off 3DL Stuff Rendered In Iray thread.

Early Night

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I used dForce on the dress. The roadway is the Asphalt shader from Mec4D's vol 2 PBs shaders. I added the stripe and grunge in Photoshop. I also added a bit of grunge to the whitewalls and the tread surface of the tires. No artistic postwork on the rest of the image. (Though I did clean up some fireflies on the building surface.) I used the Geometry Editor tool to hide "surfaces" not in the image. At 2000px x 2600px, and with all the emissive surfaces and low light conditions, this still rendered about 3500 samples/hour. ( I left it to render overnight.)

algovincian

L'Adair said:

Here's an "artistic render" I did after doing a lot of work on the Deco Club Exterior. Did you know this set was done be Stonemason? At least, I think it was. One of the textures states, "Modelled and textured by Stefan Morrell. I think the sidewalk in front of the club is the only surface of the club I didn't replace with a shader or my own maps. No. Wait. The "Opening Night Tonight" signage is original, though I made it emissive.

I'm posting the clay renders and straight Iray Uber Base conversion on the Show Off 3DL Stuff Rendered In Iray thread.

Early Night

---

I used dForce on the dress. The roadway is the Asphalt shader from Mec4D's vol 2 PBs shaders. I added the stripe and grunge in Photoshop. I also added a bit of grunge to the whitewalls and the tread surface of the tires. No artistic postwork on the rest of the image. (Though I did clean up some fireflies on the building surface.) I used the Geometry Editor tool to hide "surfaces" not in the image. At 2000px x 2600px, and with all the emissive surfaces and low light conditions, this still rendered about 3500 samples/hour. ( I left it to render overnight.)

Night lighting can be so tricky - this looks great, L'Adair! Found this thread while checking out Dreamfarmer's Show off 3DL stuff rendered in IRay thread. Interesting to see the render you posted there compared to the one here.

- Greg

Llynara

So much awesomeness here! I'll try to get the index updated soon. Sorry I fell behind!

L'Adair

algovincian said:

L'Adair said:

Here's an "artistic render" I did after doing a lot of work on the Deco Club Exterior. Did you know this set was done be Stonemason? At least, I think it was. One of the textures states, "Modelled and textured by Stefan Morrell. I think the sidewalk in front of the club is the only surface of the club I didn't replace with a shader or my own maps. No. Wait. The "Opening Night Tonight" signage is original, though I made it emissive.

I'm posting the clay renders and straight Iray Uber Base conversion on the Show Off 3DL Stuff Rendered In Iray thread.

Early Night

---

I used dForce on the dress. The roadway is the Asphalt shader from Mec4D's vol 2 PBs shaders. I added the stripe and grunge in Photoshop. I also added a bit of grunge to the whitewalls and the tread surface of the tires. No artistic postwork on the rest of the image. (Though I did clean up some fireflies on the building surface.) I used the Geometry Editor tool to hide "surfaces" not in the image. At 2000px x 2600px, and with all the emissive surfaces and low light conditions, this still rendered about 3500 samples/hour. ( I left it to render overnight.)

Night lighting can be so tricky - this looks great, L'Adair! Found this thread while checking out Dreamfarmer's Show off 3DL stuff rendered in IRay thread. Interesting to see the render you posted there compared to the one here.

- Greg

Thank you, @algovincian.

I added a very dark blue color to the background using the Environment tab, (and added a few "stars" in Photoshop.) The lighting is the default HDRI, default settings except Draw Dome is off and Environment Map is set to 0.80. Plus the emissive lights, and a couple of ghost lights. There is even a second set of headlights off camera to add a bit of light on G3F, as she was too dark under that canopy.

L'Adair

Another example of a Cyclorama addon that works well. The is Heart of the Jungle, which comes with textures for the Multiplane Cyclorama, Millennium Environment and both Woodland Play Sets. (This image is also an entry in the PC+ and render your cart competition.)

In The Heat Of The Day

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As with previous cyclorama backgrounds, I plugged the image into the Emissive Color properties, set the color to White and the Emissive Temperature to 0, and then set Luminance to 20 and Luminance Units to kcd/m^2. (The amount of Luminance that works best may vary depending on the scene.) The ground of this texture is much better than some of the others, though I did add some sparse grass, (Grassy Grounds Megapack,) a few mushrooms, (Traveler's Naturals - Mushroom Singles Vol 1,) and more than a few dandelions, (Predatron Dandelions, apparently no longer available. I hope Predatron is improving them and brings them back.) I also added a number of RDNA Jungle Plants to camouflage the transition between the upright jungle image and the horizontal ground plane.

marble

I was reminded of this thread while reading another on old sets and IRay so here's another oldie that looks pretty good with a few IRay tweaks.

 

marble

Forum not playing nice ... duplicate post.

 

FenixPhoenix

marble said:

I was reminded of this thread while reading another on old sets and IRay so here's another oldie that looks pretty good with a few IRay tweaks.

Those stairs seem to have a texture to them that's lost. Perhaps adding a normal or bump mark could help bring them up?

nonesuch00

Here is an old set, 'The Back Gate'. It must of been a freebie at one time because it's not the sort of partial set I would buy. That's not to say the model is bad quality it is excellent quality so I went to look at this PA's other products and I actually have quite a few of them given as freebies which I recognized as having used those freebies also in renders. So hats off to all the PAs that specilize in making all those great high-quality PC+ freebies.

It did come in handy when I decided to do a render based of the book Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett.

What's really nice is the gates open & close. It looks simple but the scene was deceptively difficult to put together and look like a Discworld illustration which I think it manages. I may of used more products to create this render than any other render I've done so far.

marble

Gigi_FenixPhoenix said:

marble said:

I was reminded of this thread while reading another on old sets and IRay so here's another oldie that looks pretty good with a few IRay tweaks.

Those stairs seem to have a texture to them that's lost. Perhaps adding a normal or bump mark could help bring them up?

It was the angle of the spotlight that made the texture look washed out. It is a bit of an enclosed space so I need to play with the angles some more but the Subway/Street set is really good and converts to IRay very nicely.

nonesuch00

Hmmm, I've been wanting that subway set for a while now but you didn't link to it.

marble said:

Gigi_FenixPhoenix said:

marble said:

I was reminded of this thread while reading another on old sets and IRay so here's another oldie that looks pretty good with a few IRay tweaks.

Those stairs seem to have a texture to them that's lost. Perhaps adding a normal or bump mark could help bring them up?

It was the angle of the spotlight that made the texture look washed out. It is a bit of an enclosed space so I need to play with the angles some more but the Subway/Street set is really good and converts to IRay very nicely.

 

SixDs

The subway set is this:

https://www.daz3d.com/the-central-district-subway

nonesuch00

SixDs said:

The subway set is this:

https://www.daz3d.com/the-central-district-subway

thanks

FenixPhoenix

nonesuch00 said:

Here is an old set, 'The Back Gate'. It must of been a freebie at one time because it's not the sort of partial set I would buy. That's not to say the model is bad quality it is excellent quality so I went to look at this PA's other products and I actually have quite a few of them given as freebies which I recognized as having used those freebies also in renders. So hats off to all the PAs that specilize in making all those great high-quality PC+ freebies.

It did come in handy when I decided to do a render based of the book Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett.

What's really nice is the gates open & close. It looks simple but the scene was deceptively difficult to put together and look like a Discworld illustration which I think it manages. I may of used more products to create this render than any other render I've done so far.

This looks really cool! Which dragon model is that?

nonesuch00

Gigi_FenixPhoenix said:

nonesuch00 said:

Here is an old set, 'The Back Gate'. It must of been a freebie at one time because it's not the sort of partial set I would buy. That's not to say the model is bad quality it is excellent quality so I went to look at this PA's other products and I actually have quite a few of them given as freebies which I recognized as having used those freebies also in renders. So hats off to all the PAs that specilize in making all those great high-quality PC+ freebies.

It did come in handy when I decided to do a render based of the book Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett.

What's really nice is the gates open & close. It looks simple but the scene was deceptively difficult to put together and look like a Discworld illustration which I think it manages. I may of used more products to create this render than any other render I've done so far.

This looks really cool! Which dragon model is that?

 

Sorry the link I made to my DAZ gallery page isn't working so I'll put it here:

https://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/586256

The dragon is an old one modernized for iRay with these things:

https://www.daz3d.com/millennium-dragon-2-0

https://www.daz3d.com/bone-and-fantasy-scale-iray-shaders

https://www.daz3d.com/strange-and-unusual-iray-shaders

and for the mouth & tongue area I upped the emmisive to like 20,000 kcd/m^2 with a temperature of 2000 Kelvin. That way it looked more like a fire-breathing dragon although I could probably tone the emissives done to 5000 kcd/m^2 or less.

FenixPhoenix

nonesuch00 said:

Gigi_FenixPhoenix said:

nonesuch00 said:

and for the mouth & tongue area I upped the emmisive to like 20,000 kcd/m^2 with a temperature of 2000 Kelvin. That way it looked more like a fire-breathing dragon although I could probably tone the emissives done to 5000 kcd/m^2 or less.

Ah, that's very clever! I never though to add an emissive to the mouth and tongue to give it the effect of breathing fire! I'll have to remember that when I render a dragon (which I love to do)! Thanks for sharing the tip!