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Comments
LOOOOL LOVE the expression on that guy in the front and the thing chasing him (dog? Monster dog? LOL) DOF etc looks really great and everything seems to work really well together. I admit it gave me a good giggle.
Well it was all worth it. Really nice job!
I don't really have anything to add other than I appreciate all the details you added. The interaction between her foot and the ball is especially nicely done. The slight give there is a nice detail.
Lots of details going on in this image. I feel like the posing maybe be a touch strange on the front character/robot? though it may be the white of the fracturing/blast is hiding some of the connecting parts of the posing that is making it look a little confusing or it could be just the way the burst is affecting her (in which case it is as intended) I would maybe cut back some of the white blast part a little (if you are able to) to show a bit more of the face and/or body of that figure but over all really nice work!
I think it works well as you have it. Thank you for describing your thought process (that is always handy) Honestly I think the lighting is about how it needs to be for the reasons you said and you don't want the image to end up too too dark either. The change in lighting adds some contrast to the image and depth so I think the daylight is actually working to your advantage and I understand what you are saying about the posing and the shadows. Nice work on this
The other way to sharpen an image would be to render it larger than intended (I mentioned this to someone else as well) and then scale it back down to the intended size. Since the render is larger, Iray has more room to render cleaning in smaller detail areas and so the render tends to be sharper once scaled down to the smaller size. I put a tutorial on this here: The Advantages to Scaling Up
OK so final on this one. I added a bloom to the sabers, I moved her knee out. But having the benefit of 3d on my end, the foot is in the correct position; creating a diamond shape for maximum stability.
@DAZ_ann0314 Yes, robot. It won't be a major undertaking to move/remove a couple of the transparencies in the bloom layer and re-render. I will give it a go and see how it comes out.
I really appreciate your input!
@Coryllon Your bloom work looks great! Good pose too. A very cinematic action scene.
@Coryllon, As DAZ_ann0314 mentioned, you can choose a higher resolution and scale it back down later.
My general rule of thumb is to render images large, because the more pixels in the image, the better the detail. (I come from a photography background, and have worked on websites for clients, and there was nothing more frustrating than having a client provide a 640x480 image and expect me to postwork it and make it look good!)
Anyway, there are a number of dimension presets in Render Settings->General to choose from. You can even create your own presets. (I have several!) Using the Active Viewport for rendering is good for test renders, though.
Yes, it helps a lot. The image editor can only work with the information it has. The larger the image, the easier it is to remove/rework/correct a few pixels here and there with good results. My latest gallery entry was rendered twice the size I uploaded. I made all my corrections in the original size and then let photoshop do the heavy lifting with resizing.
Here's a small area where I made four corrections, (did I mention I'm a perfectionist?) To make it a bit easier to see what I did, this image shows the section first with a dark overlay, leaving the areas I corrected light, then the same section without the overlay, and finally the corrected section. I know this is really minor stuff, but it makes the point about how difficult it would have been to fix this stuff with a smaller image. (This section is the same size as it was rendered.)
In the same image, the shadows on the deer are very abrupt, something you wouldn't see in nature, so I softened that transition. Again, this is something that would have been much more difficult to do with a smaller image. Here's a before and after. This image links to the full-size if you're interested. (Opens in a new window.)
The trade off is, that image took 25 hours to render with a GTX 1080, between the size of the image and all the instances used by the PA for that set.
I hope I haven't "overshared," that you find this interesting and helpful.
given that information... I fixed an issue with the bloom bleed through on one of the yellow "laser swords." next week I'll run the other render at a higher resolution
@DAZ_ann0314 I posted another version of the fishing trip picture, and that one does have a bit of DoF. When I tried pulling the camera further back, it got behind a bridge or wall, so all you could see was a close-up of the brick. That structure can probably be deleted or hidden, though. I could do a third version.
PS: Glad you like my entries.
@dtrscbrutal - Good eye. When I read your comment I looked at the scene and realized just a slight rotation on the camera would give me more energy in the scene.
@DAZ_ann0314 - Thank you so much. Getting the compression into the soccer ball took a tremendous amount of patience...not as much as texturing it did but lots of crashes. I love dForce but it's persnickety.
Next iteration. Rotated for a little more dynamic posing. Tried to soften the shadows a little. Adjusted hair to lose that stiff look. Did some detail work on the skin with NGS2.
I put together a little (all be it rambley) tutorial for you to see if it may help with the bridge/wall issue: Working with Depth of Field in DAZ Studio
We haven't really covered Depth of Field in this session of the Challenges yet, but I thought it may help.
@ariochsnowpaw Super job! It is amazing what a few subtle changes can have. I like everything you have done. The center characters skin looks great! ( I sense a penalty kick in her near future.
)
I have been very focused on skin work myself as of late, so would you mind sharing more about the NGS2/skin work you did?
Very nice work!
Kewl! Thank you!
I did the DoF lesson last year, but I was such a fresh nooob I didn't even know what f-stop was. x)
@ariochsnowpaw great work with using Dformer on the ball. I have not had much success using it out on small areas, but it works great on large planes like oceans. I am really impressed with everyone's efforts so far.
So here is my third go at this. Worked on the splashes more as well as the shark skin details. @DAZ_ann0314 thanks for pointing out the neck position on the one guy, I think the pose is better, may still tweak it some. I have increased the saturation in both shots as well as a warmer white balance. I have used the "Sunny 16" setting for overall exposure (ISO 100, Shutter Speed 100, F/stop 16) for both renders.
To best understand the general idea, I would look up some stuff on Photography. You could try watching the below video (It does a nice job of sort of showing what everything does in pictures which I think makes it easier to see what is really going on). Everything isn't exactly the same in DS (though I think there is a product in the store to get it pretty close) but it does do a good job of explaining how everything works together and while the numbers arent always applicable the principles are: Aperture, Shutter Speed, ISO, & Light Explained-Understanding Exposure & Camera Settings
Its looking really great and yeah the neck looks much more natural
Great job! 
I think this is really looking great! Only comment I could really make is the other two girls look sort of washed out comparitively to the main girl. Now I will say that could be an intentional choice (I admit it makes them look a bit more sinister - a bit "Village of the D......ed" looking (name of a film if you've seen it you'll know what movie I mean LOL) If that was what you're aiming for (making it obviously which team you're sort of cheering for) then disregard. If not, I would see if you can play with their settings some more and give them a touch more pinky undertones. Its coming along really great though! And I really love all the attention to detail.
. That said, I've been using DS and Poser now for 15? years and you all have come so far so quickly. 
PS to everyone, I want you to know how very impressed I am. You all are doing excellent! I know I am giving a lot of critiques, but I wanted to say how very well all of you are doing. You will find in general that when you walk away from an image and come back to it (or when you have another set of eyes look at it), there will ALWAYS be something "more" you can or could do. Things that can change the entire mood and feel of the images and small detailing especially gets easier to sort of see when you step away for a bit and then look again. So I'm not trying to discourage anyone (and I hope I'm not) I'm just trying to have you step away and come back again so you can take more looks at the details. Often when you do your first pass, you're focused on putting together what you are picturing. Second look, you start noticing small things that maybe you lost sight of getting to that initial vision. By the 3rd or 4th look it's really all about the small details or little things that could be tweaked etc. Eventually that gets more and more like second nature and it takes less and less looks to get it all together but it can be very easy to focus so much on one thing and loose sight of some others. It happens to me to this day
@sisyphus1977xx You have made some nice improvements. I really like the newer lighting and the water is looking very good.
@DAZ_ann0314 Thanks for that! I myself am grateful for all the input I can get on my art. The New User Challenge has been a great learning experience for me.
I have found coming back to an image I have created with a fresh eye almost always reveals something I can improve, or a detail I have missed. I think looking at the same scene for a long time trains the eye/mind to see what is expected, and not necessarily what the image really is.
@DAZ_ann0314 @dtrscbrutal Okay, I have made another version. I used the tricks from the video to pull the camera back, while actually not moving it physically. Now you can see a little more of the pond or stream in the foreground. I added some "scene filler" on the left side, because that area is within the very clear range. (Humongo thermos, because you can never bring too much coffee! Aylatani doesn't like travelling lightly, not even for a day-trip.) The dog also got repositioned, to fill up the right side of the screen. Personally, I like this arrangement better than the previous version, but I'm not an artist, so meh. PS: I have no idea how to fix the odd checker-board effect on the rocks. Maybe they're just textured that way? They've looked the same in every render I've done of this scene.
Ultra HD, because why not?
ok I think I have this as good as it will get. sized it up to double. 15,000 iterations and 65 hours to render...
I can still remember rendering a single image for over a week, trying to get to 95% convergence, (before I learned to turn off Quality.) With The Beast and the GTX 1080, it's rare for me to render more than 24 hours, but I will if I need to. Regardless, your image is looking really sharp now. Good job! (And big Kudos for so much patience!)
Found out something important. If I know i'm not going to reach convergence before the time limit, I can pause the render and restart teh clock :) I had to to that 5 times. LOL I al also change the iterations to up them if I'm not going to reach convergence and restart.
BTW what is Render Quality SUPPOSED to do besides take longer?
Another scene, that needs some more work (what else is new
), but it may work out as an alternate to the full shot of my other scene.
Based only on observations of my renders, my non-technical conclusions are: With Rendering Quality Enable set to On, Iray decides which areas of the render to give priority, and when the code determines those areas meet coded criteria, the render is complete. Your control of the Iray code is limited to the Rendering Quality and Rendering Converged Ratio parameters. A higher Rendering Quality will take longer to reach the specified Rendering Converged Ratio. This also means that Iray needs to do calculations along the way to test the convergence.
In my experience, setting Architectural Sampler to on, in the Render Settings->Optimization, forces Iray to give all the areas of the image equal priority.
However… it has been years since I rendered anything besides a test render with Quality enabled. And I have no idea how the Architectural Sampler effects the render with Quality off.
With Rendering Quality Enable set to Off, the code no longer tests for convergence. The render will only stop when Max Samples or Max Time are reached, whichever comes first. And you can effectively disable Max Time by setting it to zero. Then you decide how many samples you want your image to use.