What the hell is Gordig doing now?
Gordig
Posts: 10,107
I've been fiddling with DS for about a year now, but have only started to get really into it in the last couple months. I don't have an artistic background, and there isn't any overarching theme to my work so far; I'm not a writer, I'm not working on a movie or a webcomic or anything like that, and I don't even have a particular aesthetic yet. More than anything, I tend to craft scenes around whatever particular mechanic I'm trying to learn. As such, I welcome any kind of criticism at all, but especially as it pertains to the mechanic(s) featured in a given render. Without further ado, a couple renders I did just for fun, with no particular focus behind them:
How YOU Doin'?
My first real experiment with Multi-Man beyond just loading it into an empty scene and fiddling with a couple sliders. I don't currently have any female toons besides Aiko 4, so she's the one rebuffing Brock's advances.
Trollfight
Another Multi-Man render, this time with an HDRI background rather than just scenery. This character appeared in another render where he was cowering from a dragon, so apparently his lot in life is to be perpetually in over his head.
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Comments
Stood Up
Mechanics: lighting
One of the trickiest things for me so far has been lighting. Part of the problem is that I render in Iray don't have an Nvidia card, so actually seeing the results of any lighting change was a long and tedious process, and a lot of the lighting options and controls didn't respond quite the way I was expecting them to. The scene lighting here is all emissive from the scenery, and I don't think I altered any of those settings so much as hid certain items to get the look I was looking for. The only actual light I created with from Krystacia's phone.
Post scrubbed pending clarification from moderator.
Image removed due to nudity and sexually suggestive imagery
Dragon Lounge
Mechanics: Lighting, HDRI
This started as just having some fun posing the dragon, before turning into a lighting experiment. I started working on this before Stood Up, and that project gave me a better understanding of how Daz handles lights. The only light in the scene is in the lamp. This is also the first time I really worked with an HDRI, rather than dropping one into a scene as is.
Fading
Mechanics: Texture editing, lighting, shaders
Started out messing around with a free G3F skeleton from Renderosity underneath a stock G3F. To my surprise, the skeleton didn't follow the figure's movements after parenting, but fitting the skeleton to the figure worked. However, even with that, there were times where the skeleton poked through the skin. To achieve the desired effect on the arm, I had to create an opacity map, which took several iterations to get the way I wanted to look; there were some strange artifacts on the skin once I'd added the opacity map that I tried to troubleshoot, before ultimately realizing that those same artifacts didn't show up in renders, and thus didn't actually matter. I'm still not as quick at lighting as I'd like to be, so it took quite a few iterations just to get the backdrop properly lit, then achieving the "torchlight" effect on the sides, then cranking up the light on the backdrop to look like moonlight coming through the door. This was the first time I'd successfully used an "effect" shader, to get the fog effect below the platform.
Hey Gordig, pretty cool experiments! I too started about 1 year ago and keep learning new things all the time. Isn't it the best feeling to finally figure out something?
Your renders all seem a bit dark. Two things you can do if you want to change that:
- In render settings -> tone mapping, lower the value of "shutter speed". This will brighten your entire image.
- Use Ghost Lights. Make one or several primitives (for example a plane) and use the IRAY emissive shader on them. Then put the opacity really low, something like 0.0001. The effect is that the primitive itself will become invisible, but the light it emmits will still be visible. Place your ghost lights in your scene, for example along the walls or just below the ceiling. There's more thorough tutorials on this subject out there, this is just the basic principle.
Thanks for your comments. To a certain extent, in some of the renders, the darkness is a deliberate stylistic choice, but they could still be better. I re-rendered my last two scenes. For dragonlounge, all I did was lower the F-stop, and that turned out basically like I wanted it to.
Fading was a little trickier, as no amount of fiddling with the environment settings really got the desired effect; lowering the F-stop for shutter speed blew out the backdrop. In the end, I brightened the key light to better illuminate the scene without blowing out the entryway and backdrop, crushed the blacks to try to get darker shadows, and I'm closer to what I want. I noticed only after rendering completed that now the edge of the dust cube is showing.
Hipschter
Mechanics: emissive surfaces, shaders, lighting tricks
I've always loved M.C. Escher's work, so I thought it would be fun to reproduce this piece. The lighting all comes from an emissive plane that covers the entire ceiling. I only noticed while the render was almost done that there's a separate opacity setting in general parameters, whereas I'd been using cutout opacity to make the plane invisible. That might be why the ceiling looks a little like carpet. The way this environment is set up, I couldn't make the floor invisible without also hiding the wall behind the character; attempts to use DOF to blur the floor behind the reflecting orb were frustrated by the baffling fact that I could get the orb into focus, but not what it was reflecting. I ended up just creating a plane behind the orb and experimented with shaders to get more of a papery look.
I love your hipschter and the intellectual dragon.
Lineup
Mechanics: Shaders, surface reflectivity, geometry editing
This definitely isn't where I want it, but I've spent more than enough time fiddling with it for now. The hardest part by far was figuring out how to get the witness' reflection to show up in the glass without completely obscuring the suspects. I'm not sure I could get any closer without compositing, but if anyone has pointers, I'd love to hear them. I also created the dividing wall and window from scratch using primitives; there are definitely some things I don't fully get about that process, and would probably have been better served just opening up 3DS Max. In the end, the wall itself isn't even visible, so it was all for naught.
^ I think the wall should be in the frame. Without context the image is a little confusing.
What I do when I work with prominent reflections in windows (or on the surface of water): Make a second plane that hovers just a fraction above the window pane. Set Metallicity to 1, Glossy Reflectivity to 1, and Glossy Roughness to 0. Now you have a mirror. By setting the opacity of the mirror higher or lower you can controll the intensity of the reflection. This way you can make glass or water reflect more than they would in reality. You can even add an opacity map to the mirror to make it reflect more in some places than others (for example around her face).
Do you mean the dividing wall? I could give it a shot, but I had a real dickens of a time framing the shot as it is. I tried another render last night:
It's definitely more like I wanted in some ways, especially the increased clarity of the Reptilian's expression (increased eye size, opened eyelids wider, applied different eye texture) and hair. The lighting is uglier, which I wanted, but it still doesn't quite capture the feel of flourescent lighting to me. Also, I'm not sure why their shadows mostly disappeared, since I did my best to move the light source specifically so as to increase the harshness of the shadows. The witness' reflection is less pronounced, so I'll try your advice later. Thanks again for the feedback.
S.P.E.E.D.O. Power
Mechanics: fun
I've got a couple projects in the pipe, but in the meantime I knocked this out for a couple contests on the forums. Nothing terribly complicated about making this one, apart from picking out the right shader for Shredder's armor and fiddling with the HDRI to get acceptable scenery. Gigantic shoutout to @JoeQuick for all the TMNT-related items that made this possible.
Any Minute Now
Mechanics: dForce, cross-figuration, more emissive lighting and environment settings
I've only recently started to do more with dForce than load clothes on a figure, pose and run a simulation, and it's been giving me some trouble. For this scene, I used the same G3F skeleton from Fading with some G8M clothing, which brought its own complications because I don't have G8 clones for G3 yet. With another scene I'm working on, I can't figure out the combination of settings to make another object affect the simulation without disrupting it entirely. Here, I'm not having that problem, as the clothes are deforming correctly around the bench. The problem I'm having is that the shirt ends up falling through the skeleton's ribcage. I posed it a little to correct for that, but now it looks unnaturally puffed up.
Otherwise, I'm getting a little more savvy about lighting to get the look I want.
Where Are You?
Mechanics: lighting and render settings
You have some pretty amazing renders there @Gordig!
Keep up the learning, it is really paying off!
A Walk By the River
Mechanics: dForce, camera and environment settings
This is definitely the most stylized render I've done so far. I played around with virtually all of the render settings, settling on a fairly open F-stop, a light bloom filter, and a slight saturation boost. I played around with vignetting as well, but didn't like it for this particular scene. I also really struggled with dForce for this one, but I was finally able to get the skirt to fall at least mostly the way I wanted through more trickery than I thought I'd need. I wish the centaur's other hand were visible under Charlotte's skirt and legs, but I can live with these results.
The World Between
Mechanics: geometry editing, UV mapping and surfacing, d-forming, environment and render settings
This is still a work in progress for Llola Lane's render challenge. I mocked up something for the middle panel, but it looks terrible because that's not my forte, so I just left it as is for now. I took one of the shelf units from Rosemill Moor, flipped it around and deleted polygons until I had a frame to put around the backdrops. The backdrops themselves are actually super janky because I'm not very familiar with Hexagon and haven't installed 3DS Max on my current hard drive yet. This scene would have been a lot easier to execute if I had the Void; I tried to get a similar effect by deleting the appropriate portion of the wall behind the panels, but had trouble figuring out the polygons, so I was limited to creative posing. The hardest part was to position the female character such that her skirt didn't vanish behind the background, so I ended up using a d-former for the first time. To achieve the look I wanted for the render, I lowered the gamma and saturation, and I also added a dust effect, but I feel like that just looks like noise.
She Knows
Mechanics: portrait lighting
I haven't really messed with proper portraiture before, since it doesn't particularly interest me. A simple three-point light was both a good exercise for me, and a welcome break from all the other wackiness I'm trying to do now, and I'm reasonably happy with how it turned out. The backlight could probably be shifted a bit stage right, and maybe turned down a hair.
Love "Worlds Between", very cool idea and strong execution! I wonder if it's possible to avoid the shadows that the characters are throwing onto their worlds, but that's a minor quibble.
Not feeling the portrait. The harsh highlights on her hair and shoulders seem like something a portrait photographer would seek to avoid, and I don't understand the pose of her lower body at all.
I've gone back and forth about whether I'd even want to do that. It makes a certain kind of sense that their now-3-dimensional bodies would cast shadows onto the painted environments that they're leaving.
Haha, I just noticed what the problem is. I couldn't possibly have planned it, but the way the dress is draping over her left knee lines up perfectly with her right leg, so it looks like her right leg is actually coming out of her left hip. I changed the shape of her dress to clarify her legs, and did another render after futzing with the lighting and render settings a bit. I'm still iterating on it, but the highlights aren't as harsh, and at least now she doesn't look non-Euclidean.
Thanks as always for your feedback.
Looks better already! Is she leaning against a wall? Then I think the wall (and floor) should be visible. Also, is that light from the back realistic if she's against a wall?
That's the problem I'm having. Yes, she's leaning against a nonexistent wall, and the backlight is behind where the wall would be.
The thing this reminded me of, on first glance, is one of the early automoton clocks where the man & woman appear on the hour to act out a little scene. It looked like this one's theme was marital dis-harmony with the two figures appearing to throw punches at each other. Then I looked more closely, and wondered what on earth was going on. I'm no further enlightened after a bit more study. Must be allegorical, but the story eludes me.
New versions of She Knows, with and without a real backdrop. I ended up rendering the second version in perspective view instead of the camera I set up, and I'm not sure which framing I prefer.
Interesting take. The idea behind the scene is just that characters painted into panels of a triptych representing Victorian England and China have fallen in love and are trying to reach other.
The last one looks so much more plausible than the ones before!
The second one is much more interesting to look at. The wall & floor shadows give a scale and depth that's not easily appreciated in the earlier one.
Regards,
Richard.
Overcast
Mechanics: Render and environment settings
Pretty simple scene here. I started with a boy lying on the grass to see where my muse took me, and here is the result. The dragon's shadow didn't react quite how I was expecting while I was setting the scene up, either in terms of its size or its intensity, when I moved the dragon itself higher or lower on the Y axis. I might want to reframe the shot a little bit, and maybe repose the boy so he's reacting a little more.
Serenade
Mechanics: Render settings, dForce
Pretty light on mechanics for this one as well. I was mostly playing around with some free morphs and textures on the female when it turned into this scene. She's wearing a @wilmap outfit, which turned out to take dForce really well. Like so many of my scenes, the hardest part is just figuring out the lighting, since I have an AMD GPU but render in Iray, so it takes a lot of waiting to try out different lighting conditions and render settings.
The Chase
Mechanics: dForce, HDRI lighting
This is my first experiment with using only the lighting from an HDRI, which has its ups and downs. I definitely need better horse textures, or at least to figure out which surface settings would make the forelegs less shiny and fake looking. It would be worth experimenting with putting some plants or other objects on the ground to help anchor the figures to the setting. I used a wind node to simulate the dress flapping in the wind, and a combination of poses and morphs (depending on what was available in each item) to get the various characters' hair moving, and it was tricky getting them all to look like they were all reacting to the same forces.
Very cool, the scene looks dynamic! How did you do the motion blur?