Novica & Forum Members Tips & Product Reviews Pt 12
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Hope your mom had a happy birthday. Hope she has a great year
@Novica I got the Painter bundle (Humble bundle) some time ago thanks to you so here I am sharing my first image using Corel Painter and Topaz Impression.
Gallery link
I did a render with Alidreaux and wanted to putz with testing out some of Corel Photo Paint's tools that I've never tried. I did screenshots but the masking was done quickly and so part of her face wasn't included, so didn't keep the renders. This will show you what certain tools do though. The HDRI is Abandoned Mine, and I have to confess I'm not very saavy when using those things. I want to know what the difference is between one marked Scene and another marked Render?
First, the original. Then each one of these ADDS TO the previous one, until you get to Dodge/Burn. That starts back with the original. The first ones are all impacting only the masked gal.
I wanted to compare other tools with the approach of just using Dodge/Burn and then a slight tweak. Dodge/Burn doesn't require masking (you can, but if you have a steady hand you don't need to.)
Original All of these are large, if you want to click to enlarge then X out.
Tone Curve
Histogram Equilization
Gamma
Contrast Enhancement
Dodge Burn (Starting back with original. Those above were all ADDED to each other.)
Dodge Burn/Tone Curve
Tip: After doing the Tone Curve, I added shadows to the fingers on the rail, and darkened slightly the front of the shirt where a shadow would be from the railing. So add shadows from the HDRI images which aren't really there in 3D. If your hand is "on" something, add a shadow. If something is blocking light from "being there" do a shadow on the person.
So I'm a real dummy when it comes to these HDRI thingies. Like I said, I'm not understanding what Scene and Render are in the Abandoned Mine. And how do you darken the scene items, like all that washed out building in the background? There's nothing to select for Surface. You have a ground plane in Scene, but nothing about the HDRI image which is the background. Is there any way to tweak the intensity of the images for those? I really hate the washed out buildings in that scene. If you darken the Tone Mapping settings, everything goes darker.
Stay tuned for a headshot of Alidreaux. Weird dark shadows above the lip and below the eyebrow. Will try her with different lighting.
SO, curious. What products have you turned in for "not working" that never got fixed? As buyers, we should know. Vendors who work their hineys off to do a good job should reap the rewards, and the sloppy products shouldn't be in our runtimes. I remember one main character release that had green fingernails, and I can't recall who it was, but last I heard, he never got fixed. I think it was a brawny guy, maybe Ivan?
It was Lucian 7
It's been a while since I've done a product review but thought I'd get back into it with some recent purchases. This one is about the recently released UltraTrees - Realistic Tree System (elm, eucalyptus, and spruce trees) and UltraTrees - Arboretum Volume 1 (oak trees).
I find many trees for 3D lack realism because they use a simplified limb and leaf structure to keep polygon count down. You end up with short trees with stubby limbs. The UltraTrees to my eye look much better and use a large number of instances to create the effect without burdening your computer with a large mesh.
The product is driven by a script that you can find in either Smart Content (under Props / UltraTrees - Realistic Tree System / Utilities and is the only script with an image in the icon) or in the Content Library (under Environments / Landscapes / UltraTrees). Run the script and you first choose a type of tree (each specie has a number of different sizes shown via icons), then a trunk texture, and finally a leaf style and season color (various tree types can have different species available so there are for example burr, sessile, pin, and willow oaks). You then click on the create tree button and soon your tree appears. It normally shows only the trunk, limb and branch structure which is enough to compose your view but you do need to be careful as leaves may cover something you want shown. There are also advanced options but I didn't give them a try. Iray and 3DL materials are available and you can choose which to use in the script. Once a tree is created, if you select it in the scene pane the script will recognize it and you can make modifications.
In the following renders I included a Now-Crowd billboard to give a sense of scale. These are all 1200x1200 Iray renders. Times are for my GPU which is an Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti, so for many it will take longer than what I indicate. Be sure to set Iray Optimization to Memory to avoid dropping to CPU which will happen to me even though I have 11 gigs of Vram.
American Elm: render time 2 min 57 sec
Burr Oak: render time 2 min 44 sec
Sessile Oak: render time 5 min 5 sec
Spruce: render time 1 min 0 sec
Overall I really like this product - easy to use, quick to create trees, renders quickly, good variety with large trees available. I wish the tree roots had more structure - these trees suffer from what I see in so many 3D trees, roundish trunks flatly intersecting the ground. I also found some of the trunks appear to be too thin. If you created multiple trees, be careful if you hide any of the trees in the scene pane as the trunks will disappear but the leaves will still be visible in the render (they are generally hidden in the viewport) and you'll find floating leaves in the render as I did several times.
I did the renders above with no other environmental components so as to focus on the trees themselves. This next render combines a sessile oak with the Pond Field scene from Modular Field Environment, and older product I got during November sales. They go together quite nicely even though the render times are dramatically longer given all the transparency used in the grass. Render time as 49 min.
I hope sales for UltraTrees are good and more expansion packs come out, but even with just the base product and the oaks, you have lots of variety to work with.
Buggy Products
Z Household Chores- Creates corrective morph in all my pose files
Orc Brute for Genesis 8 Male-tooth Morph in my pose files
Toon Generations Essentials-Adds file to all G8M characters
Technophilia Data Implants (3 years)--Been so long can't remember
Malik HD for Silas 8-Bad texture on legs
Drone Eye Warden- the 'fire' texture is not there, missing or never created
Yvanovic Bun Hair-Still doesn't parent hangs in the air above the head
Ignore the hairline, I'm not worried with that, I just want to see about the upper lip area and the eyebrow.
First is with the same HDRI map as before. These are taking a long time to render, so only showing 35% as it just gets more pronounced the longer it goes, and you get the gist.
Next is Click 'N Render number 15, the upper lip looks better, there's still a scar orremnant or something of an eyebrow on our left side, under the brow. I only loaded default materials, never tweaked the brows.
Then Click 'N Render 23.
Looking at the product page, the top row of thumbnails, last one- you really have to click then click again to zoom, but yes, that line by the eyebrows is there. So I assume she is supposed to have a scar. (I think that's what it is)
Oh my that is impressive. I had Modular Field Environment in my wish list, glad I noted it. It's impressive! Thanks for showing those.
Kagiso. I was one of the people who put in a ticket about it. There was another issue, but that got fixed.
Him, too? Sheesh!
Thanks for listing those, hopefully people note them when considering what to buy.
Green eyeballs, too? I'd return that. Don't waste more time on it.
@Novica ... beyond the things you're mentioning in those headshots of Alidreaux you're showing, they also seem to all have the same odd tones in the shadow areas of her skin, like grey/brown or black or some other dark tone is on the maps in those places or... could it be some off color in the sss settings doing that effect? It seems offputting and odd to me, unless she's supposed to be the undead or something. :) This definitely makes it look like she has a bit of mustache staarting above her lip, since the shaded area around her lip edge is darkened by the weirdly dark undertones.
~Gen
Karen 7 is another character with fingernail materials problems. The SSS Reflectance Tint is blue, instead of the yellow color on the skin. It makes the fingernails look white. Change it to match the skin SSS Reflectance Tint, and they look very natural. I reported this in 2016. Nothing was done except to report it to the "bug tracker", where bugs go to live forever unaddressed.
She's suppose to be an elf of many skins. She comes with different skin and eyeball colors including green (see last promo image). She also appears to have some body and face markings that can be used.
I already put in a ticket, but wanted to show you before they officially cancelled the purchase. At the moment, I still own her and wanted to share what I'm seeing. I am definitely not keeping her. The Click 'N Render used on other characters turn out quite nicely. I will say, some of this is user preferences, she may look quite good with other lighting, but I'm having too many "don't like that" things with her (thumbnails, lips not changing, special facial markings not working, that scar by the brow, etc.)
I would open the Grey Dev G8F female, save a complete grey material set for it, then apply that material preset to the problem Elf character. If that doesn't solve the problem return it and then finally apply a normal G8F or G3F material texture set to her. I've learned some (many) material presets are additive and don't remove images or settings of many already applied materials on a model.
She's a nice looking character though.
LIE presets are like that, by design. "Normal" presets should replace all the material settings. (Which is to say, they might not. Depends on whether or not the artist saved the preset with all the parameters selected.)
I had a look at that HDRI, I don't have the set, and it looks way overexposed to me. It would be handy if the PA's selling these HDRI would include the camera settings too, that way you would be able to match it, or close to it, in Studio.
I started going through some of mine to try and give you an idea on using them but there is so many variables I use to make them work I got sidetracked into this :)
This is Dresden Station a 16K HDRI
Click on image for full size.
I added the Thumper Train from DAZ. This is as loaded and the Ground in the Environment is set to Auto. Not quite working is it?
Click on image for full size.
I set the Ground to Manual and dropped the train until I thought it was level with the platform.
Click on image for full size.
I added four Matte Planes. One for the Platform, two for the bench and one for the Pole with the sign.
Click on image for full size.
I added some interest using two Billboards.
Click on image for full size.
If you look at the top right of your Viewport you will see a small box split diagonally from top right to bottom left with a + and - sign on each side and a dot at the top right corner. If you go to the Raw Settings Tab and under Advanced there are three settings, Exposure, White Balance, and Both. For this I had mine set to both but I chop and change between the single ones mostly. Click on this and the cursor becomes the box, move it over a part of the render in the Viewport that you want white or bright, light grey works or I sometimes just put a white box in and use that, making sure the little black dot is where you want it and click. What this does is set the White Balance and or the Exposure. If it doesn't work as expected, it makes the image too bright/dark or gives it the wrong colour cast, then go to Tone Mapping and set the changed entries to default, don't use the default button at the top as that resets all the Environment settings. I used the side of the train for this one just between the first door and the grill for the engine. You can see the difference between the previous images and this one.
Click on image for full size.
Something to be aware of too, don't move the camera. Lock all the parameters and only use the zoom to move in and out of the image. Moving the camera in any other way means you will ahve to redo all the items with geometry that you added to the HDRI.
I hope this helps in some small way.
So there's no way to darken the HDRI images in Photoshop or something?
I'm not sure how well that would work as there is no way of knowing how the original HDRI was produced. It depends on how much information is in the 32 bit image. I usually lower the Map intensity and or the Environment Intensity and then add fill lights for any figures trying to match the light from the HDRI without changing the Tone Mapping which would just bring back the bad HDRI background.
@Fishtales GREAT JOB!
i'd guess that you might be able to do something about the overexposure in Levels. that's great for dealing with photograph exposure issues.
the adjustment won't add textures where the highlights are really blown out. but you might find that some details are there when you slide the white point down and tinker with the grey/midpoint placement. you can certainly stop those white fields from being so blindingly bright.
You'd need to composite after rendering HDRI & adjusting the contrast & brightness.
@barbult
Thank you :)
Right, round two.
This is TROPICAL BEACH which is a 3K HDRI.
Click on image for full size.
You can see that the sand, sky and sea are all blown out. I dropped a billboard which looks pretty well lit. Now you could adjust the Tone Mapping to make it darker and bring back the sand texture but that makes the billboard dark. I know they are in shade but they look better with some light. What I did was lower the Environment Light to 0.5 and the Environment Map to 1.5 which brought out the sand texture. I added a 1 Meter plane and set it to Emissive, Colour=White;Temperature=4500;Luminance=35.00;Units=cd/cm2. I pulled it up and to the right of the couple and angled it to face down to try to imitate the sun which is coming from that direction going by the shadow of the tree. I then adjusted the size of the plane to soften the light, it went about 200+% for this image.
Click on image for full size.
The city of Pensacola has been under cyber attack since Saturday morning- all City Hall phones and internet are down, and other city buildings. The online pay system may be hacked as well, giving the hackers everyone's financial institutions information. They are digging into that and won't confirm it yet, trying to see if it has happened. All emergency services were taken offline as a precaution and are using alternate means of communication. They are trying to see if this is related to the attack on Pensacola NAS.
I am not in Pensacola, I'm in Pace/Milton across the bridge. I always just say Pensacola so folks know the vicinity (only about ten to fifteen minutes out. Like a suburb but it's a separate town with all the big stores (except the mall ones like JC Pennys, Best Buy.) We got our own Michaels last year- yeah! About time!
@Fishtales The emissive plane sounds like a good idea. I had been tweaking the Tone Mapping settings, and like you said, it makes everything else too dark. One other idea I had with a composite was to render the scene and mask the shadows, cut them out, and apply them (like your two figures walking on the beach) then I could take the people out of the next render which would be the darkened sand. Render the people separately, because I'd already have their shadows. So composite would be the sand (darkened) , the people, their shadows. (and any other shadows needed, such as for trees.)
So... I've made a character with FaceGen Pro. The shaders it creates are AoA shader based by default. I used Anagenesis 2 to convert to iray, but I found the skin far too red after this. I used Altern8 by Divamakeup on the iray skin mat - and that reduced the red and gave a tone much closer to what I wanted - but now there are visible, glowing seams on one side of the head.
I've read the forums and it sounds like this could be realted to SSS settings - but nothing I do makes them disappear. The seam was not visible before I applied Altern8 to the figure.
Any suggestions?
Looks more like there is a difference in Displacement and or Bump settings between the head and the face.