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Oh! Well, thanks so much! I wish more users would share in the Blender threads here, or that maybe more Daz-Blender users would post work in the gallery. I'd love to see a lot more of what's possible or what others have discovered/created. ^^
I haven't shared anything here in a while. I thought I'd show a work in progress. The basic colors are in place. I wish I knew enough of texturing to customize the assets. You'd think that after two or so years fooling around with Blender, I'm proficient with this. But texturing is something I'm still learning. So far it's lots of fun developing this scene.
All assets are Daz. I used Diffeo to bring them in.
Cheers!
You'd think that after two or so years fooling around with Blender, I'm proficient with this.
I think about this a lot. I feel like I should be farther along after thousands of hours working in 3d.
Nice work so far though!
Krys Kryngle,
Thanks for the encouragement! Here's what the scene is looking like from the ground up. I found a few Gumroad items that use geometry nodes to create the grassy field and the climbing vines. There's still work texturing decals to the motorbike and the mech.
inmymoonsuit,
I post often to my Instagram account with Daz assets rendered in Eevee. NPR and stylized renders are my thing. Here in the Daz forum I post in my own thread and occasionally in the 3D Comic Books Tips and Pictures. There's still a lot to learn.
Cheers!
I think this looks great, and I noticed in the post you made before that in the shaders tab you had the lightning boy shader. Have you gotten a character to look good with that? Not from behind (this one looks great from behind) but from the front. I've spent hours playing around with the lightning boy shader, watched their tutorials, and I can never get the Daz characters to look right, something always seems off. Just wondering if you have any tips. Great stuff though, keep posting stuff!
If you're interested in anime style there's the goo rendering engine, that's much more complete than the lightning boy shader. Personally I like more the "pixar" classic style and I'm not too much interested in NPR.
https://www.dillongoostudios.com/gooengine
Hi, benniewoodell.
Taking off from Padone's remark above, beyond the feature set of a particular NPR shader, I think "looking good" is very subjective.
The above renders are from from the same Blender file but at different camera angles. They don't have any post-editing I typically put in with Clip Studio Paint. As you probably know, lighting set up makes a big difference. For these renders the lighting isn't optimal as I set everything up for the first shot I rendered earlier, the one taken from the Sgt. Inez's back.
Below are recent ones with proper portraiture lighting put in place. They're all of the same Genesis 8.1 figure. They look different bacause adjusting the hue, saturation and value of the colors is something I also do using the Blender compositor.
What makes it look good? Beyond the Lighting Boy Shader configuration and compositor adjustments, there's lighting (as I pointed out) and posing too. For me it's all a packaged deal; it all comes together to convince the mind's eye that the character merits a pass.
Cheers!
Ah ha, looking at yours, I think I know what never looks right for me, the lips and eyes. For some reason, I can't get those two to look right. I gave up awhile ago, but seeing what you have here gives me hope to go back and give it another whirl when I have some time next week. Thanks for posting these front views, they look fantastic.
And thanks for the link on the Goo Engine, @Padone! I'll give that a look as well. Though I agree, I like doing the more Pixar type stuff, I'm animating a show for a TV station that's all these different stories and they asked me if I could sometimes mix things up and do different styles. They gave me full creative freedom to do whatever I wanted and I thought it might be fun (and save on rendering time) to do a story or two in an NPR way and seeing the posts above gave me hope that I could make that happen.
I'm terribly curious .. what TV show ? Are they publishing something on youtube ?
It's called RebbeTales on JLTV. I don't know when the first episode is airing again, I'm working on episode 2 right now. The station is available worldwide on many satellite and cable stations, but also available on their website for free. The first episode premiered last month. It's fun for me to watch because I can see the actual progression of my animation skills over the past year that I've been working on it and attending classes at Animation Mentor. This is the promo video I cut together for it if you want to see, obviously it's not playing tonight so pay no attention to the end title card. There's a mixture of Daz shots and Blender stuff, it just depended on various factors.
https://youtu.be/Vaoi78T-5Yk
And if you want to see a full segment, this is the one I just completed in September like four days before the episode aired. Cutting it right down to the wire lol. This one is really half and half between Daz and Blender, but all the animation was done in Blender and transfered to Daz with the Simple IK rig. There's things I wish I had more time on, but they wanted to premiere it on a specific date and I had to start cutting corners on some things, but overall I'm so happy with how it turned out.
(1212) The Enchanted Well - YouTube
That is a tremendous work by a single person if you did it all by yourself. The quality of the body/face animation and camera directing and lights is good with no major mistakes of any kind. Storytelling also keeps the audience fine enough. The only drawback I can think of is, this piece of animation would really deserve some actor voices and environment sounds to bring it to life, after a while the narrator voice alone gets tedious. But it is clear this is a budget choice, not a production mistake by itself.
Very well done, thank you for sharing with us. It is exciting to see what can be done with blender and daz in a real production.
p.s. A minor note the narrator acting is good, but inhale exhale speech sounds are audible, that means the actor was too close to the microphone or the microphone didn't have a popping filter. This can probably be fixed in post.
That was awesome @benniewoodell
A combination of good animation and an interesting story.
benniewoodell,
Thanks for sharing your videos! As TheMysteryIsThePoint and Padone have pointed out, it's good animation with a great story at its heart. I encourage you to share it in the Art Studio forum as that's where folks showcase their handiwork.
[1] I just wanted to share some things about the Lightning Boy Shader. The above is a render I did a few months after I had discovered LBS, with my rudimentary Blender know-how. As you can see, I pulled in some inspirations from my favorite artists. LBS can accomplish both types of light-to-shade transitions, producing a Pixar-like (toon) effect or an anime aesthetic. In that image, I used both styles to distinguish between skin and hard surface. The LBS key light node, with its softness and range values are what you play with to achieve these. Below I put the sharp shade transitions to good use in a comic panel.
[2] As to the eyes, the G8.1 figure has several relevant materials. Believe it or not, making it all "look good" starts with the eyelashes. Early on I realized that its better to use the default Principled BSDF with all the textures derived from Daz -- thanks, Diffeo! Mixing Principled and LBS works because underneath the hood both shaders work with the same Blender nodes. You just have to account for the funky Red-Blue-Green lighting system LBS uses. Apart from the eyelashes, you'll want to enable the transparency of the cornea to reveal the iris and the pupil materials. The LBS document explains how to achieve opacity in general terms. (If you think about it, playing with the opacity and the specularity of the cornea allows for gloss and liveliness in the eyes ... something I haven't seriously tried.)
That's pretty much it. Now that I've picked up the Blender compositor, I'm branching out from LBS. Using cryptomattes, I'm trying to combine elements rendered with pure Eevee and/or Cycles. We can mix these as layers in post-edit, but sometimes its faster to get the "look" right straight from the render.
I'll be offline for a few weeks. Good luck.
Cheers!
Something I've been working on and off over the holidays. There's still post-editing work with Clip Studio Paint, but this is how the Eevee render stands.
Cheers!
This is one of mine scene set.
So I had a few hours today to mess around a bit. I found a kick movement on the Endless Reference Youtube Channel and animated it. I'm happy with it overall. If I had more time, I see some spots I could have polished up a bit, especially the second half of the shot I can see when I started getting strapped for time, but it was a fun speed exercise. And I tried to use Turbo Tools to render in Cycles. I think she rendered very nicely with Turbo Tools as a separate layer, but the background I'm not that impressed with how it turned out. It looks good for 28 seconds a frame, but it's still muddy in the trees. Anyhoo, this is done in Blender 3.5 with Diffeo and the MHX rig. The environment is something from Kitbash 3D and vegetation biosphere thing through Geoscatter. The character is Xiu Lin 9 with the Hanfu Dress from Crocodile Liu.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVaekPXYrQQ
@benniewoodell Overall the scene is very beautiful. As for the animation itself, in my opinion the center of mass should "shake" a little when she throw the kick due to the forces involved, otherwise she appears a little fake with no weight. Unless the reference is the same and you wanted to follow.
Thank you! Yeah, I was animating virtually on twos following the reference pretty much exactly as I saw it, but I totally see what you're talking about.
Very cool.
@benniewoodell: Amazing animations. Very good job.
My first Blender renders. Installed Diffeo and just doing my best to learn all the crazy Blender UI and feature stuff.
