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Thank you so much, it was getting a tad frustrating there for a while lol all done now, and thank you again.
Revised Title: "Back to Back" (a.k.a. Still a really bad time to run out of bullets)
Programs: Daz Studio, Bryce 5.5 (background image), GIMP
Credits:
Genesis/ Michael 5 by DAZ Originals
Clothes: M5 Casual Male (pants and boots); M3 Winter Jacket by Kotaro; Sickle Fingerless Gloves by Sickleyield; Cowboy Hat by Wilmap's Digital Creations
Deep Delver Freebie Machete and Torch by Sickleyield
Millennium Dog by DAZ Originals
Bandanna for F4 by SOTO
AR-15 Tactical Rifle from Firearm Pack by ARTCollab and Sarsa
Carnotaurus by Herschel Hoffmeyer
Ruins by JeffersonAF
Monument #2 by Joe Kurz
Jungle Hideaway by ARTCollab (plants and grass)
Quetzalcoatl statue by DarkSpark2099 (downloaded from Thingiverse)
Jungle Background elements by Lyne's Creations
Attempted using the DOF setting for the camera - thanks again for the suggestion, Shinji Ikari 9th. Also added in the Millennium mongrel so M5 isn't facing the danger alone this time. Suggestions and critique greatly welcome. Thanks in advance.
I like this. You did a great job with the balance. Even if the fist more in focus I automatically look at her face (eyes).
The only thing, that is a little distraction, is her soft and warm mimic. I suspect, when someone hits you in the face, he will show less empathy. ;)
Hi everyone, Linwelly invited me to come over and check out this thread. I'm only sorry I came to it so late in the month. You've all been working so hard. I've been experimenting with light in a couple of images, but they WERE NOT created for this thread. But they are from this past week. IF you don't mind, I'd still love to get suggestions for their improvement anyway. I know sometimes I sort of go subtle, subtle, subtle, then WHOA, too much! Anyway, enough with the stalling. Linwelly and a few others have already given me some advice.
Thank you for the feedback and I know what you mean about the expression, except she isn't punching anyone, oriiganlly what I was going to do was put a hate tattoo across the tops of the fingers, but I felt that it really did put to much focus in one place so I removed it again, maybe in hindsight I should have left it there. Thanks again for the positive comment.
Wow, that are two beautiful entries. Far better than my tries.^^
welcome over here @Wanderer ! Those are some impressive improvements in both renders! I really love what you did with the godrys there and how that altar star looks like floating in the light, an effect the builders of that church surely would have aimed for :D.
Only small aspect to work on would be the pose of the dagger lady. its a difficult pose to get right. Right now her upper body seems to lean backwards and I think you could bend the upper arm closer to the body and reduce the lower arm bend in the same time.
Hi again, I've been tweaking my image from all the fantasic suggestions, everyone has made. I've learned so much about tweaking the shaders to help make the characters look less plastic, which is great. So thank you very much to everyone who has commented on this. This will have to be my final version for this month as I won't have time to do anything else before the end of the month. I'm much happier with the final version. It has lost a little of the charm of the original, but the characters look far more real, which was what I was trying for.
What? What’s this!
I miss a few days and woah! Dark horse entries!
Terrific work!
@ Chameo
Sneaky! Sneaky! Figured you’d have something else up your sleeve!
@ Dean and Wanderer
Welcome to the fun!
Great stuff!
Hope to see you two next month!
@ Everyone
Is it me, or did February rock?
I learned so much from the challenges everyone else placed on themselves. That’s what I like about this format.
Learned...
You can aim a spotlight just like a camera
Make your own barn doors for spots
Make your own gobos for spots
That pull-down isn’t just for gobos & things. Put the object’s file there, so you don’t nuke the details if make something glow
The list could go on!
Best wishes to everyone & here’s looking forward to March. I start work on the 5th, but I’ll still try to be a real poser...
Boo! OK, on that one better log off.
Thanks for reading!
--Bruce
PS: @ Assums
Man, still think what happened to you really s**ks. Can’t say that enough. A little late now, but did it work when you tried giving spotlights more of a tinted ‘candle light’ color? Softer light to match their skintones yes, but don't know if you lost those terrific eye reflections. Just curious. : )
February is winding down. Remember, we have a short month. There have been good images and good lighting tips posted already, but it's not too late to get in your final versions.
Title: “Check Please!”
Software: Daz Studio, (minor tweaking in Photoshop CS3)
I’ve had a Daz3D account for 2 years, spent lots of money in the store (I’m actually afraid to tally up how much), lurked in the forums, and essentially just played around with the software without any serious render attempts. Here is my first forum post and shared image. I know it’s late in the month and there isn’t much time to accept constructive criticism for this contest, but I wanted to start contributing.
This image is an experiment in lighting for me. The interior portion of the scene was completely closed off except for the window opening, and is illuminated by lighting sources inside the room. The portion outside the window is lit by “sun-sky only”. The experiment for me was to see the results of a render that did two things.
Anyway, thanks for reading my forum debut. I hope to get off the side lines and be more involved in the future.
Welcome @Night678winG. What a great first post! The image is lovely, and you did a good job on balancing the lighting. The outside lighting is a little blown out, just as it should be on a sunny day. The posing is well done, too.
Hi @Night678winG
As barbult said, the outside light is a litte blown and for me the light in the room a little to bright, but I find the shader very interesting (Is this a standard shader from Daz?)
The scene looks like out of an Pixar animation film. You did a great Job with her pose and the interior.
But who I am, to give advices... I always get crazy with my light and the more I know about DAZ, the more I get problem with lights.
It's allways a pain, when you know, how it should look, but always fail to create the proper result. :/
I was actually praising the "blown out" outdoor lighting, because that is what would happen if you photographed an outside window when exposing for the indoor light. I think you are right about the indoor lighting being too bright, now that you mention it. Maybe a little lower indoor lighting would bring even more realism to the scene, if that is what the artist is after. It does have a bit of a Pixar vibe as you say, so realism may not be the artist's goal here at all.
Ohh, a praise, so I totally misunderstud you.
Lol ok, my fault. I see, my english is not half as good, as I hoped it would be.
But I miss a light bluish touch in the outside light, for me it's to white.
Picking up the nuances of another language is hard! The absence of bluish light is a good catch, too. Good comments, @daybird.
cleaver idea. I like it.
Thanks for the encouraging comment @barbult
. I appreciate it.
And thank you @daybird for taking the time to offer your impression of the image.
I really didn't have a goal to favor cartoon or realistic, though I do have a soft spot for cartoon style artwork so maybe there is a subconsious bend in that direction. Regarding the shaders used, I just applied the Iray Uber base to the default textures of the objects. The exterior and interior props were old models that were originally created for poser, maybe the more simplistic textures give it a cartoonish vibe?
As per the conversation above, I took some time to revisit the image and see if I could improve it. I lowered the intensity of the lighting on the interior of the room and changed the position of the sun outside to be late morning instead of early afternoon, hoping to get a little more blue visable in the sky. I don't think the sky responded the way I wanted it too, but I'm not very experienced with sun and sky settings. I was tempted to not render the dome and change the color of the sky manually in Photoshop, but I wanted to limit myself to lighting effects only in Daz Studio for this image. I also added some smoke to the end of the cigarette for effect.
Thank you both for taking the time to comment, if you get a chance, let me know if the updated image is going in the right direction or not?
I can't believe that Februray is as good as over. So much work left to do.
Here is the current WiP of my FunFairCart-Girl.
This weekend I solved some of the problems I had with the reflectivity, but not all.
The Background gives me some headache too, but I hope I can figure them out tomorrow.
The reflections on here are cool and I think, I should try something similar in the future by myself.
The most distracting thing in the moment, is the reflection on her shins. It makes them nearly invisible, but it still it looks great.
The whole set reminds me at Metropolis, even if I don't know why?
I still find the sky a little to white, but the inside light looks now softer and gives the interior more deep, but such things are difficult to handle, because everyone off us has another taste.
The smoke is a nice little detail touch.
What happened to February?
Not an entry. I finally got around to revisiting my Theseus and the Minotaur project. Thanks for the suggestions. Reminder, I had originally had a lot of trouble just getting any light to work in the scene (especially the point light in the back for the rear wall), camera focus, and with the surface materials. Per your suggestions, I've been able to get some light in there, which is good because that is the point of this month. Unfortunately, now the arch and the column are almost glowing! Aaargh. I think the cause may be that the shaders I am using for those props have some reflection. At least, the base of the column is definitely reflecting the Minotaur and the blue environment outside sight of the scene. I also made a few other fixes, such as making sure the fingers were not in the ball of thread, the wall pipe no longer comes down directly behind the Minotaur's head. I even found the tiling sliders in the surfaces tab so hopefully the room walls look better.
Here is my original post, and the raw update render I just did. If you have suggestions, I'd love to hear them.
Original post
--------------------------------
and here is the update
Got hit by this idea tonight and had to render things to get it out of the head. Thought that I'd share the results with you all.
Thank you, Linwelly! (And thanks to others who helped) I wanted to be sure you saw what I did with your suggestions. The originals are in my gallery if anyone wants to see what I did before you chimed in.
That pose. hmm... yeah. One thing, the lighting reflecting off the dagger was difficult for me to achieve, in part because her upper body/right shoulder is blocking the lighting from glinting off the lower end of the blade for the camera at that angle. I'm actually not certain I can get it right. I'm worried I'll only make it worse.
To Daybird and Tynkere, thanks for the kind remarks. I am so very proud of how they turned out, and I'm thankful to Linwelly for the input given. I only wish I knew about this thread before I started these two works because they were totally about the challenge, although I didn't even know there was a challenge to do. So I don't think they qualify for the month contest, but I wish they did because the originals in my gallery show how much Linwelly (and a few others) helped me with suggestions. I grew a lot in technical how-to, but still struggling with the artistic side definitely. I'm sorry if I was wrong for posting them, but I wanted Linwelly to see them so badly after inviting me over to this thread.
On that note, I would like to enter a pic I did do for this thread, even though it's really too late for me to do much to make it better. I totally did it with things I learned doing the other two pics I posted above. If anyone has any last minute suggestions for me to try to improve before the end of the day, I'm all ears:
Title: Cross
Software Used: Daz Studio Only (Same as for the previous two images)
Technique Sources: Sickleyield's Tutorial on Quick Godrays for Iray, Connatic's Forum Thread on Stained Glass for Iray, Tips for Sunlight in This Thread Here.
Note: Sunlight was very tricky getting this to work. It gave me many problems that I'm still not fully understanding. If you want to try similar techniques, my best advice to you is if at first you don't succeed, try, try again, with many different camera angles and lighting choices. For some reason, for instance, godrays would work with camera set as sun-node from one direction/window, but not from the others. To get the effect I achieved, I had to use the time/location settings to put the sun where it needed to be. Camera set at as sun node did not work for that side of building, no matter how I tried. Also, colored godrays from stained glass are not as clearly visible from all angles. Experiment. A lot.
@Wanderer - great image and very informative description. Thanks for the information. I've done a similar image rendered in a different program. Good to see that it can be done in Studio as well. May take some time to experiment.
Shinji - RE: demon - I'm glad you shared and got it out of your head, but I don't want him in my room! RE: Golden Hour. Final postwork image has great impact. Great job setting up and combining the renders. Now I have to try to figure out emissive reflection planes. Always more to learn.
@HighElf - Fun choices. We have similar problems but within opposite environments. I just described some reflection problems I was having above, but some (only some) are solved in my update below. I got improved results by setting my lighting in my render settings to scene only.That eliminated my undesired blue reflection on the base of my column. Unfortunately, that probably wouldn't work for you because you don't appear to be relying on scene lighting.
@Night678winG - welcome aboard! I really like the soft shadows under the table. That is what my scene needs because my shadows in the update below has shadows that are too harsh. I am jealous.
Sorry for not going back furher right now. I will try to be more consistant in following the thread during March.
Here is my next update. The only difference was changing lighting in the render settings. The key here is that I remembered to turn off the environment light. I relied entirely on scene lighting. Recall that I was frustrated with the appearance of the column and the arch above - seemed to glow and have strange reflections. The change in lighting has toned each down somewhat, which is an improvement in my mind. Also, the base of the column no longer reflects the Minotaur's legs. The figures now cast shadows on the floor and walls, which is an improvement, but the shadows seem too harsh so I'm not sure what to do about that, There does seem to be some lighting artifacts, especially on the column. Not sure what is causing that. Unrelated to lighting, Theseus needs to have more tension in his pose considering he is about to face off against a minotaur.
Here is the raw render update. Comments welcome. I am likely to be able to render it one more time and then do a little postwork.
NAE
Thanks for the nod, Diomede. Could the lighting artifact on the column be caused by light reflection off weapon? I like your subject matter and overall composition. If I might offer my own suggestions, perhaps the hero and his enemy, Theseus (jk), could both be modified a bit rather than just putting more tension into the one. What I mean is, what if the minotaur is closer to the start of reacting, say, still lifting the weapon, and Theseus is more in the moment of astonisment? As for the lighting overall, I'm not experienced enough to know how to fix your particular issue(s). I do wonder if it would be better if the lighting were more akin to torch/firelight, BUT in so doing, it might make everything too dark. I struggle with similar issues. As I said, I'm sorry for coming so late in the month and have felt uncomfortable about giving others advice when I just showed up the other day.
Okay, I hid for a couple days after posting my work because I was afraid of the reaction, so that was silly. Anyway, it's late, but I'm going to give some feedback on some of the pieces I see here. Again, I don't feel right coming in so late and saying anything, so this is taking a lot for me.
Night678winG -- Check Please is actually very good. I like the character, your posing, and the overall balance of lighting. I wish I knew enough to make suggestions, but overall I like it.
HighElf -- FunFairCart-Girl forces my eye to move as it seeks a spot to focus on. Between the colors, shapes, and focus of the piece, it is hard for me to digest. In one sense, I like it, but in another, I struggle with it. I have no valuable suggestions to make.
Chameo -- I found your work very, very imaginative. I like that you're telling a story. I would like to offer a suggestion, but I'm not sure how. Seems like light could be more directive in leading the eye to certain features. Doesn't necessarily need much, but I'd like a little more pop.
Shinji Ikari 9th -- I like the action and lighting overall of your shared scene. I think I'd like more of the red lighting highlighting the lower figure to be visible on the rest of the figure. Also, not sure on the eyes, but I think it's very interesting. Maybe the eyes just neeed a little extra something. Not sure what.
deancoombes1965_a2b7b663db I like the lady with the fist. I like the subject and composition. I like the colors. I wonder if it would benefit from DOF like on my terminator one. Personally, I struggle with DOF. The camera I used in that scene came with the HDR product and had it already applied to the camera. Otherwise, it would also be nice if the hands could be HD.
daybird I like the lady in the rain. I like the composition and colors. It would be nice if you could get the wet look on the woman more. On this thread, near the bottom, there's a tip about lightning that might be helpful. I haven't tried it, but thought you might like to see if it is worth doing.
Gallows I think you've got some great things going on in that image with the lady and the dragon, but I'm not crazy about the background effect. It looks low rez to me.
Now, as it's so late in the month, and there's a lot I haven't read, I'll stop. I hope someone finds something encouraging or useful in my comments. Thanks for putting up with me.