Novica, Serene Night, & Invited Guest Contributors Tips & Product Reviews Pt 3
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Nice one. He looks good and has character, and I bet you like the facial stubble. =-) Nice tip about the spotlights under the chin. =-)
I DO like that stubble- you know me so well. I hate sticky porcupine looking hair. (Reminds me of when my son was 5 years old and saw a photo of a porcupine. He said, "I bet those porcs hurt!") This hair looks SO real. Chest hair looks good too.
I'm doing Stefan on M4. It was weird. When I upped the distant light, I got white shiny commas all over the place. NO deep shadow maps. These weren't like those thingies. So shutting down the studio and trying it again.
Sorry hit the wrong button. Will fix and repost.
Okay, will replace this when I figure out what's wrong. But what IS wrong???? This is all just raytrace shadows, excellent settings, just distant light and spotlights again. What the heck? Poor Stefan!
Gone for an hour or two.
So I have a question about group poly editor.
I don't use this this often, but I have a pair of pants that is clipping with boots I am kitbashing together. my usual trick of hiding the surface didn't work, since it is just under the knee and hides too much of the pant leg, so I used group poly editior and selected it and hid it... Works great, but it doesn't save the preference, so every time I load the file it loads with pants visible again..
What is the best way to permanently hide it? Will locking it while hidden do the trick?
I am just curious.
GRAS.
I've never seen that before. Bizarre. Could it be a shiny light? Does it move if you rerender it or is it always in the same place?
Invited Guest Contributor
Using Morph Sliders as a "Sculpting" Tool
I'm afraid that this by nature will be a bit vague, but the process itself is personal and a bit "fiddly" so I'll have to describe it in general terms. I want to encourage others to try to create characters that are all their own. Doing so is personally rewarding for me.
1. After I decide what I want to create, I gather reference photos. This can be generic (like with Rani), or more specific, like today's example. In this case I was trying for a portrait (see B&W attachment).
2. I place my references on a plane and move and size the plane until it is approximately the correct size and aspect ratio and set it next to my model in DS; here I started out with Michael 6.
3. Here's where the process gets a bit fiddly. :) I worked with the Genesis 2 Male Head Morphs
A. First I work with the face shape. These are things like "Square Face", "Round Face". Find the one that is closest to to the reference. The thing we're aiming for is to go from coarse to refined in our details. A bit like the sculptor who was asked how he made such a accurate marble statue of an elephant. he replied, "I just chiseled away everything that didn't look like an elephant." :)
B. Then I work the Brow, the Eyes, the Nose, the Mouth.
C. The final tweaking of all the available Head Morphs until you are satisfied.
In the case of "Dragon" it took me about an hour to get the morph sliders where I wanted them. This can be a slow process to learn, but you should get faster with practice. It took longer to render than to "sculpt".
The Full Body render is in the Gallery here along with the list (and links) of products used:
http://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/17774
John
I've never seen that before. Bizarre. Could it be a shiny light? Does it move if you rerender it or is it always in the same place?
Birds overhead? (sorry, I can't help it)
I've seen an errant pixel or two before but nothing like that. I would save and reboot.
What was weird- the first render at the smaller size was just fine (it was 600 x something) but this shows up at the 1000 x whatever size. Same skin settings. This was out of the box and the vendors don't normally set you up for failure, lol. I'll go turn it down and see if that's it though- thanks for the suggestion.
Just wait. You know what they say about payback!
That's interesting- it saved it when I saved my scene. Remember the fishing pole made out of the coiled rope? When you save your scene, it should be saved- are you naming the group? If you are just using the tool and selecting the polys in the mesh, then saving as a group, the group shows up in Surfaces and that should save when you save the scene. (I'm trying to remember, been a month since I used it.)
What can I say. It DOES look like....well, you know. Crap. In more ways than one. I'm trying to test settings now.
Not sure if it's a valid 'tip' or 'hint', but with the snowball saving allied to a flash sale of Dreamlight's store, I just got Lightdome Pro-R for just a bit over $5 ;)
Stefan For M4 And Genesis
http://www.daz3d.com/stefan-for-m4-and-genesis
Used the exact same expression as Ulrich.
Glossiness is all the way up (which means a low glossy, for newbies. It's the opposite of what you think would be logical. When you lower glossy, it gets more glossy, your other settings impact it too. The specular was at 100% too. The ambient was zero.
I kept lowering the specular, it was doing okay. Increased the ambient to 45.7. Specular ended up being 62.8%. Is that low? I normally don't have to fiddle with that. Should I leave ambient alone? Anyway, here's how it looks.
Wow, I wonder why they would do a 70% on top of snowball.
Wow, I wonder why they would do a 70% on top of snowball.
Dunno, but I am not complaining! :)
For those textures, are they Poser specific? I've had things like that happen if there's no DS specific settings for a texture.
There are many that don't have collected lots -or -any- snowballs.
I don't even have tier 1 XD
I can understand that (not being tier 1) because there were certainly a lot of things geared toward Genesis 2, for example. The older versions kinda got left in the dust.
BTW, in Dreamlight, be sure and check out some of the light sets and see what all they include. That Dream House Great Room has a panoramic to go outside the windows. Could be used for any set that has windows. The Guildhall one, has a fountain light so even though I don't have Guildhall, I have the fountain so it can be useful.
I think that looks like fun! I'm surprised it didn't take you that long. I'm sure it comes with practice. It looks good- like a caricature.
@Novica: Like your bird image. LOL. HEH!
@tJohn, what a challenge you had there morphing M6's head. You are quite close with that. Nice work. I also like your Mohawk couple!
Hmm. I'm kind of tempted by the DZifre sale. Never picked up the cybermech 4.1 and like that police skin, but I've been rather 'spendy lately. So not sure if I truly need it. =-)
That's interesting- it saved it when I saved my scene. Remember the fishing pole made out of the coiled rope? When you save your scene, it should be saved- are you naming the group? If you are just using the tool and selecting the polys in the mesh, then saving as a group, the group shows up in Surfaces and that should save when you save the scene. (I'm trying to remember, been a month since I used it.)Dear ladies, in PGE hide is for the active render only. It does not save as Hidden in Scene or Scene Subset saves. To fix that you make a New Surface from the Selected Polies and then set that new surface to 0% opacity in Surfaces. The New surface will save, even if saved as a Assest file.
@Jade: That works gras.=_) I am so glad Novica showed how to do this earlier... It is very useful for as you put it... Thinking outside the box with clothing. =-)
Shaw For M4
http://www.daz3d.com/shaw-for-m4
Continuing on, this is Shaw. I toned down the distant light from the front, and hit him with more of the lights from the side/underneath. It makes the nose down the middle a bit more interesting. Same expression as Ulrich and Stefan.
What I had was the default :) I didn't set it up that way.
That's what I thought I said. But probably not :) Mine always saved. (thank goodness.)
Did you get it to work SereneNight?
@Novica
Thanks for taking the time to render some of the Phoenix1966's characters. All of the ones you've got are on my wishlist. I'm very curious about Stolz, he looks rather distinctive.
@tjohn
I like spinning dials as well. : ) Your character has turned out looking pretty good. It has very defined features, maybe a bit more exaggerated than on the reference, but I guess you were not striving to achieve a perfect likeness but rather used the photo as a starting point and an inspiration, which is a very good technique for achieving realism. I really like the results of your "dial work". : ) Your characters do look unique which is really nice to see.
Oh, you're welcome. I needed to explore them :)
The hardest one to avoid the white "poo" with major, major specular overhaul- would be this one. I upped the ambient (black) which may be helping, but this darned specular had to go down to 14.6%. He still had white on his chest.
I have NO clue what I am doing, used the mc6 texture, there are so many and I don't know if I have a lot of repeats or not but it seems that way. DIM installed it so what can I say? Things don't appear to change when I click the duplicate files. (If they are duplicates.) But here you go-
Thomas For M4
Again, same facial pose so you can compare all of these equally. All are "out of the box" without any morph tweaking.
EDIT: This dude took me FOREVER to get straight. The hardest one of all of them so far. I would NOT recommend starting with this one unless you drop the specular to 14.6% and work your way up. Ambient was black and 46%.
I'm doing Stolz now, and shooting up from the underneath with a spotlight to check for that material zone for you. Back in a few. Will post it here though, so you'll have to check this post.
EDIT: At first glance, even without rendering, I'd say yes, it's there. Rendering now.
EDIT: Let me just post this disclaimer- I haven't a clue what I'm doing with all these files that appear to be duplicates, some don't appear to do anything- so this could be my mistake. However, I've tested all the materials to get the head/body to match, and this has a bright spotlight on it and nothing is making that shadow, so I THINK the same area exists on this model too.