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I have Hemlock Folly, so I checked. The odd checker-board effect is the texture. I suspect it's intended to give the smooth rocks a more rough appearance at a distance. Regardless, if you're feeling adventurous, you can use the Layered Image Editor to modify that texture, using another image from the set.
You may need to adjust the Opacity of the top layer in LIE more than once to get a look you like. And it may help to add a touch of gray to the Diffuse Color.
(Note: I loaded the Iray preset for the entire set. The pebbles are still using RDL settings, and I assume there are other objects that do as well. This is acceptable by Daz Standards, as long as the objects render correctly in Iray.)
@DAZ_ann0314 Sorry it took so long to get back to you, I've been busy digging through the forums, and running some test renders, and I managed to learn a few things. For starters, you mentioned the pixelation, turns out I missed the time limit setting for Daz Studio so it was stopping at the 2 hour default- I figured there was a setting I was missing- then I started playing with the settings under both progressive render and filtering, I would be interested in what settings would work best for those, funny you mentioned spotlights, I actually have 2 of them in there, one up high right(yellow) and one down low left(orange),I put them in when I first put the scene together, had to turn down the luminosity, they overpowered the fire. I think the biggest improvement to the render was just the time, letting it render longer definitely made for a much better result than I was getting before, Though I still did not get a complete render this time round either, let it go for just over 40 hours and only got to 11% and 1404 iterations(was getting impatient)-- just saw L'Adair's post about quality and realized that I had it turned on, this month's challenge has really been a learning experience for me.
So after going through all the advise, suggestions and comments from my previous renders I have come to this, I did make a minor adjustment to the shield arm to bring it forward a little more, I ended up taking the wings back to the original shader and got the glow I wanted back, and used some of the tips from other topics to make them look better. (funny what you find when your looking for something else) Left the ratio at 3:2. I don't know if I'll have time to make any more adjustments before the end of the month or not so this will probably be my final render for this challenge, though I will keep working on this piece because I want to see it as good as it can be, and advise, crits, and comments are always welcome.
@L'Adair Ooooh, thank you! I'll try that next time I use Hemlock Folly for a scene!
(Right about now I'm just so done with that picture, LOL! I don't care about trying to get it featured at this point.)
You got it
WOOT! I am glad the video was helpful 
(Sorry that I babble LOL I used to teach clases on Photoshop etc and I am comfortable doing that but for some reason doing it in a "recording" seems just so strange to me. I like classroom settings so much better but I'm trying to adapt - very ackwardly and slowly ROFL)
On the image, It looks great! The background has a much better fade in on the DOF so the eyes are drawn forward on it better now rather than getting pulled into the back vastness. On the rocks, as L'Adair said there are ways to help that along and break it up. The easiest way would be just to edit/correct it in a 2D App in Postwork (if you have something you can use for that) or possibly blurring the texture itself (only on the rocks) or adding some noise in (only on the rocks) just to break up the "patterning" Great Job!
Really nice work...the fill size has a lot of really nice details going and it is very clear. It can be tough to sort of find that good balance between render time and quality/clarity. I will say that sometimes adding in a touch more light helps (the darker the image the more iRay seems to chug longer. That said, if you are trying to strike a certain mood or trying to capture a scene at dusk or at night etc that really isnt an option unless you render it a touch brighter then adjust to darken it up in Postwork. I really love the image though..you did a great job!
You are having a lot of fun with this series! And they are all coming out great! :) The only thing Id say on that one is its maybe a touch over bright..of course on a bright sunny day things can get that way. You could try adding an ever so slight yellow cast to any in scene lights you've placed or tone down the Environment exposure just a touch (maybe by 1 or 2?) if you don't have extra lights but really this series has all come out really great
The changes really improved the overall composition a lot...I am really glad you got it to render clearer and without the pixeling it had before. Its looking really amazing (though I don't envy her..its got to be hot for her with all those flames!) Really wonderful changes!
@DAZ_ann0314: adding extra light also adds extra shadows... then people wonder "What's the other light source coming from?" then people wonder if this really happened or if the moon landing was really staged. LOL
I frequently used Ghost Lights to brighten an image, if necessary. They are my "go to" for ambient light in Iray-rendered scenes, indoors and out. And you can darken the scene in Tone Mapping, getting the time-to-render benefit of the brighter scene and still keep the scene as dark as you need.
Think I may be stretching the competition rules beyond breaking point, but technically, I think this may just fall inside.
This is a little action render of a lass driving past a photographer at the side of the road. She spots him & their eyes meet for a moment.
The prop is the car, the pose was getting the driver to sit in the car. The expression, the driver clocking the photographer. Lighting etc involved getting enough light into the car to light her face to register. I also tried depth of field on the camera and an out of focus background image to enhance the DoF effect. The action is the car driving past, though motion blur effects defeated my imagination. Can't think how they can be done without decreasing the crispness of the face render. I am hopeless at post-work so want to get everything done in the rendering. I hate GIMP with a passion, and my copy of PaintShop Pro is version 5, so just a little bit elderly and is about as capable as I am (ie very simple and not terribly good by current standards).
I used to play with Poser 4 & then DS 0.9 to 1.3. I gave up in 2007 after realising my then PC couldn't cope with DS 1.3, and it was likely to get worse with further DS upgrades. In March, after 12 years, I got a more capable (though still second-hand) PC and have been playing with DS since. I simply can't believe how far rendering capability has come on since 2007. Think this is only my 4th or 5th serious attempt at a render since re-starting with DS in March, all the other renders I have tried have been 'Oh WOW!' type renderings to convince myself that the figures really do look that real.
Regards,
Richard.
@L'Adair: but do they create extra shadows?
My original thought for this challenge was a surfer with the shark, but my 3D modeling skills are lacking the capability to recreate the wave in the reference picture. I forgot to set my tone mapping and environment settings on the first one, this is go is getting closer for the windsurfer scene. I still don't know if I will replace the boat full shot with the windsurfer.
Nothing significant. Because there is almost no opacity to the mesh, the lights do not add specularity, and they don't create much if any shadow.
If they are close to an object, though, you will see more light on it, so Ghost Lights are best placed with some distance from surfaces to prevent "hot spots" when using as a fill light, (or ambient light.)
ETA: Here's an image that may help you see the differences.
Peeps, I have another question. If eyebrows (specifically the ones from the Growing Up skin set) that are supposed to be black show up as red on other skins, is there any way to fix that? I can't find any settings for the brows under "surfaces."
LOL Fair enough..less of an issue (extra lights) on indoor shots as often indoors there can naturally be multiple lighting sources but for outdoor scenes its more of an issue. In those cases you could do as L'Adair stated or you could up the exposure of the Iray Environment you are using. (Or just render it brighter in DS then dim it in Postwork)
I will remember that for the future. for this one I think it looks awesome and if the only benefit will be less time to render, then I think I'd rather do more showcasing of DAZ and less wow look at my postwork :)
@sisyphus1977xx You are really feeding the sharks this month!
I like your water/fluidos work. Have you seen "The Last Wave" in the store? https://www.daz3d.com/the-last-wave
@richardandtracy_e725004c1a That is a nice image and some great use of DOF! Looks like it would be tricky to light well/realistically. You have done a very nice job.
@marjoemartino Very nice work you have done!
@TigerAnne I like the changes you made. Great image!
What can I say, I just like sharks
from when I first encountered some reef and tiger sharks when diving. Plus, my thoughts for these scenes were to look at them from the shark's point of view. The sharks are just being sharks and doing what they normally do in their environment.
I have looked at the Last Wave product, but not sure it would work here judging from the promotion pictures. It appears to be sizable, but only a single style wave. While doing this challenge, I experimented with dForce and dFormer in creating the wave. I had moderate success in getting the overall shape by dropping a plane over a cylinder with dForce and applying multiple dFormers to the wave curl. However, the wave breaks across an angle at the top of the crest and the spray, foam and curl parts I was not able to recreate in DS (even using instances to generate different size foam, spray particles). So after alot of trial and error, I ended up putting that effort aside for this challenge. I think I will give it a go with Blender to see if I can come up with something better to use in the future.
Was trying to do a little mantanance on my system last night and accedently deleated some of my resorces. I think that I caught my mistake before too much damage was done and was able to recover some of the data, but I'm not sure of what else was removed. Let's just say that I'm kicking myself in the butt over it.
@DAZ_ann0314 - I totally agree about the skins. I was very focused on teh central character and became a little color blind to how the contrast made the other 2 girls look a little zombie-esque. I put a little work into restoring their color. They should look like they are exerting themselves (so a little drawn and pale) but (as Monty Python used to say) 'They're not dead yet!' (sic...yeah I paraphrased a Monty Python quote).
@dtrscbrutal - I used anagenesssis 2 to add some texturing noise to the skin (you can do it manually too but I'm lazy). I took down some of the specular lobe weight and glossiness and kinda tweaked bump maps a bit. I don't really have a work flow for this yet because I'm just really starting to experiment on pushing skin too. I got great results from my Darius post so I need to keep working and I promise to try to do some work flow when I have a little more confidence that I have even the slightest clue what I'm doing :O
Next iteration...tonal skin changes to give a little more life to the zombie soccer team. A little less exposure to go for less uniform contrast and focus the eye more on the center image.
*SIGH* and I uploaded the wrong version first (before I photoshop out the stubborn sleeve) so full size image is the one on the right below.
@sisyphus1977xx That makes sense, I have found water to be very tricky to work with in all kind of ways.
@Shinji_Ikari_9th Ouch, that's got to sting! I hope you get it sorted.
@ariochsnowpaw Your image is looking better and better! Thanks for the info. Lots of skin work happening as of late.
well since this is action and props with the enfacis on using the props figured i'd submit a series of pics IE "animation cells" for 1/2 sec of a n 8 ball game.
all rendered in Iray on Daz 4.10
2019-05-Prone-Unsupported-Mk0
This was painful. Initially I was planning to do the action of loading a new clip, but then I realized that that would not have many hard constraints to work from, compared to prone shooting needing both arms to both hold the rifle and plant an elbow on the ground while the rifle lines up the sights between the shooter's eye and the target. So then I figured I'd do a quick shooting pose, then find some minimal motions to go from that to loading a new clip. Then getting the shooting pose actually working took most of the month (off and on, this ain't my day job!). In the end, I expanded the limits on one or two joints, and I'm still not sure that I had too, or that the end result is quite inside human range. Of course, the resulting image omits most of it because we're producing images, not multiview engineering diagrams.
In contrast to the posing, the environment was thrown together over a couple of hours (and a couple more for an unsuccessful attempt to move the target further and use something else to repel the tree billboards from the shooting lane).
Plans for the next version:
- Scatter some brass. I have a group of instances ready, but they're still in the default formation.
- Deform the ground and blanket a bit for the shooter's weight.
- Adjust the lighting. I'm not sure how yet; it might be as simple as rotating the skysphere, or completely redoing the lighting.
- Muzzle smoke? If I do anything here, I intend to be subtle. These are smokeless, after all, not black powder.
Comments, complaints, criticism, critiques?
@richardandtracy_e725004c1a: Correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like you're using Iray with DoF. The upside is that any background you place far enough back is going to get blurred by the render settings. Unfortunately, Iray doesn't do motion blur, so that blurring isn't going to suggest any particular motion. For your scene, I'd put up some sort of background billboard and blur it horizontally before rendering. I'm right there with you on trying to do everything in-engine (I've been meaning for a while to experiment with rendering an animation and averaging the frames), but if the engine doesn't do it, that means figuring out how to work around that. Whether or not you decide to revisit it, your image is rather striking; you definitely have a better eye for constructing a scene than I do.
You know, I hadn't thought that the background would be out of focus anyway. I think I need to bash my forehead on a desk. I like the idea of a billboard with motion blur. Not that the car (a 435cc Citroen 2CV) could go very fast at the best of times... Unfortunately I won't be able to make the change within the month. I'm out tomorrow evening and have no time on Friday. C'est la vie.
Regards,
Richard.
@dragoneyes002 Very cool stuff! How long did that take? I have only done the most basic animation, playing in daz.
@rcbcgreenpanzer You have done a very nice job with your pose work. Looks very natural for the subject. I can only pick at nits with the pose, you might want to get her eye a bit closer to the rear sight aperture if wanting strict/correct form. A little head tilt forward might be all that's needed.
I think all of your next version plans are spot on.
To me the high lights look pretty good, but the rest of the lighting is a bit dim, almost like the camera had on sunglasses. Perhaps a camera setting/dome intensity adjustment?
Really good start, great job!
Not that long individually kept it to about 3 hrs per frame the animation on DAZ leaves to be desired though in-betweens should have different wave paterns to allow for sharp or smooth transitions to the next key the difference between walking motions and doing hand gestures the walking will try and use the connected joints to smooth out the transition from a to b where as a sharp change will only move the joint that created the key so a hand grasp looks different from bending the second knuckles with the rest straight but that aside another thing would be adding path constraints that alone would massively upgrade DAZ as an animation platform
Here is version 2 of my submission. Referencing back to earlier in the thread, I saw right off that I had a misaligned plane when I came back to this. So I had to do more rendering than I expected. As an experiment I tried the main scene render at x3 size. (9k x 7k) for about 4 hours (about 2500 iterations) then reduced. I can't see a massive difference between this and the 11 hour render for V1. I will likely try this again.