November 2020 - Daz 3D New User Challenge - Materials and next level kitbashing

aprilshowers2065

Still tweaking my first image, but here's my second entry for the beginner's challenge. Suggestions?

Luftsturmregiment40

aprilshowers2065 said:

Still tweaking my first image, but here's my second entry for the beginner's challenge. Suggestions?

make the two look like angel and devil whispering in her ears 

Stargazey

Thanks for your comments Linwelly. I've tried chaging the colour of the statue, which I hope helps to seperate the three figures. I'm hoping to try doing another version of the "horror" figure (I'm not really happy with it,) with a slightly different outfit.

 

 

Luftsturmregiment40

Stargazey said:

Thanks for your comments Linwelly. I've tried chaging the colour of the statue, which I hope helps to seperate the three figures. I'm hoping to try doing another version of the "horror" figure (I'm not really happy with it,) with a slightly different outfit.

 

 

it looks like a Tarot Card

make it to one

put a frame around it 

make the texture look like very old paper

the colors washed out 

etc.

davidjones8418

_ AL1vE _ said:

no entry

everyone can use the key card absolutely free of charge anyway you see fit

only thing I ask you not to sell it directly individually but you can include it as part of a whole scene or a collection of items that you sell

say you have made a Sci-Fi warrior model who is holding the key card in or for a video game you can include the key card as part of the SF Warrior and sell it along with the model

good thing is you can modify it reshape it etc and you don't even have to pay me anything

no catch

just a genuine freebie for all of you

That is super cool of you. I really appreciate that AL1vE. Pretty fond of sci fi stuff myself and probably will find a use for this.

Only danger being it will show up the rest of the scene !

Still working on my entry for this month.

JoJoS

Not sure if this image counts for the intermediate challenge or not, so here it is either way ha. I wanted blood on the sword, so I used photoshop to so, I used the sword/shield from one bundle with a different outfit and messed with the hair a bit. Any comments/constructive critism welcome :-)

aprilshowers2065

Final version of Fire Cavern - thanks again to Linwelly and _ AL1vE _ for all the helpful suggestions!

Beginner's Challenge

Software: Daz3D, photoshop for colour balance and vignette effect

Luftsturmregiment40

aprilshowers2065 said:

Final version of Fire Cavern - thanks again to Linwelly and _ AL1vE _ for all the helpful suggestions!

Beginner's Challenge

Software: Daz3D, photoshop for colour balance and vignette effect

nice render

congratulations 

 

Stargazey

_ AL1vE _ said:

Stargazey said:

it looks like a Tarot Card

make it to one

put a frame around it 

make the texture look like very old paper

the colors washed out 

etc.

Thought I'd give it a go!

 

 

vamok

Stargazey said:

_ AL1vE _ said:

Stargazey said:

it looks like a Tarot Card

make it to one

put a frame around it 

make the texture look like very old paper

the colors washed out 

etc.

Thought I'd give it a go!

 

 

I was hoping you would follow up with this. Well executed!

Luftsturmregiment40

Stargazey said:

_ AL1vE _ said:

Stargazey said:

it looks like a Tarot Card

make it to one

put a frame around it 

make the texture look like very old paper

the colors washed out 

etc.

Thought I'd give it a go!

 

 

yep

fantastic

Shinji Ikari 9th

Linwelly said:

Shinji Ikari 9th said:

Version F here.

Moved the darkest character closer to the lights, changed the light settings, did a little texture work on the jacket of one of the other characters, and tried adding some bloom.

This develops very nicely, just a word about Bloom settings. I would advise to use a much higher value on the bloom filer threshold, standart is 2000. In a scene like this I would use a threashold of 9000. with the low values the effect is the grey out the image. As well try a bit higher bloom filter radius and on the other hand reduce the Bloom filter brightness scale (standart is 1, I would try something about 0.1 to 0.2)

have fun experimenting with that

Here's version G trying to make use of your suggestions.

Linwelly

@Shinji Ikari 9th  I feel like you should see this

https://twitter.com/richard680news/status/1329833856208343040

I'll be back tomorrow for comments on all images

Luftsturmregiment40

Linwelly said:

@Shinji Ikari 9th  I feel like you should see this

https://twitter.com/richard680news/status/1329833856208343040

I'll be back tomorrow for comments on all images

wow, how did you find that?

Linwelly

_ AL1vE _ said:

Linwelly said:

@Shinji Ikari 9th  I feel like you should see this

https://twitter.com/richard680news/status/1329833856208343040

I'll be back tomorrow for comments on all images

wow, how did you find that?

not sure how that ended up in my timeline on twitter

Luftsturmregiment40

Linwelly said:

_ AL1vE _ said:

Linwelly said:

@Shinji Ikari 9th  I feel like you should see this

https://twitter.com/richard680news/status/1329833856208343040

I'll be back tomorrow for comments on all images

wow, how did you find that?

not sure how that ended up in my timeline on twitter

it's a photo from "The Goofighters Season 4 Episode 1 - no way back" 

Tirick

I took some suggestions to heart and found a horde of free textures that I carefully converted to Iray Shader presets and applied (after a lot of testing) to the surfaces. A few still have that original texture, but overall the surfaces were completely overhauled. I could not find a shot I liked that showed the engines, so instead I opted for a foreground ship (stock, save for Iray conversions) to break the scene up a bit. I also added some tiny figures for scale.

Thank you all for your suggestions, I appreciate the feedback!

Luftsturmregiment40

Tirick said:

I took some suggestions to heart and found a horde of free textures that I carefully converted to Iray Shader presets and applied (after a lot of testing) to the surfaces. A few still have that original texture, but overall the surfaces were completely overhauled. I could not find a shot I liked that showed the engines, so instead I opted for a foreground ship (stock, save for Iray conversions) to break the scene up a bit. I also added some tiny figures for scale.

Thank you all for your suggestions, I appreciate the feedback!

JACKPOT !!!

you cracked it

fantastic render

bastian2560

Hi every one. Well for some one that dose not have an artistic bone in there body (lol), I have learnt some new triks and think i'v got the look i was after. figers center corador slitly of center and angled a little, midground in focus background with a bit of niosegoing on. I tried to get that warp feeling happening when the improb drive first kicks in.

I geuss i could go with materials or kitbashing i dont know?

@Tirick WoW!

@Al1vE gotta love marvin.

@JoJos what costum is your figer wearing?

 

Oh Lucky Marvin.

Luftsturmregiment40

bastian2560 said:

Hi every one. Well for some one that dose not have an artistic bone in there body (lol), I have learnt some new triks and think i'v got the look i was after. figers center corador slitly of center and angled a little, midground in focus background with a bit of niosegoing on. I tried to get that warp feeling happening when the improb drive first kicks in.

I geuss i could go with materials or kitbashing i dont know?

@Tirick WoW!

@Al1vE gotta love marvin.

@JoJos what costum is your figer wearing?

 

Oh Lucky Marvin.

 

definitely a 42

and don't forget your towel 

katywhite

Linwelly said:

katywhite said:

Linwelly said:

katywhite said:

Title: Diamonds are forever

Caption: Even if you don't want to be

Software: Daz 3D

Challenge: Beginners

Feedback much appreciated! First time trying to use caustics but could use some suggestions to bring out the effect more.

caustics are a tricky thing to catch but you made a good start. One thing I would suggest is to give a bit more contrast to the surrounding colours, right now her podest, the surrounding rock and his clothing are all very much the same colour and structure. A darker underground would give the caustics to show more effect.

Also caustic are depending on the angle light comes in and leaves the opject in relation to the observers angle of watching. so experiment with some different camera angles as well

@_ AL1vE _
@Linwelly

Thank you both for your suggestions. I toyed around with it a bit more. I don't want to change the camera angle if possible because I like the focus on the diamond woman's expression and the secondary subtle focus on the man's expression. I changed the background colours to add more contrast. I also tried making it darker out (8pm instead of 6pm) and adding another lightsource - but it just got darker not sure what happened to my spotlight sources. Not sure what else to try with this.

 

Ups, hmmmm, let me ask, are you using the sun sky only in your environmental render settingss? If yes, that would explain the changes, because changing the time on that setting will move the sun as you major ilght source, depending on the rest of the setting (day in the year, longitude and latidude) even below the hoizon (8pm is already late in the day). that would remove a lot of light and as well alter the angle of the light hitting the diamond girl.

So maybe return to the original time (or even got to an afternoon or morning time to test the effect). In addition to that try setting the SS multiplier to 0.2 or even highter which will give your sun more power.if this is too much light there are options in the tone mappings to adjust. (I come back to that later if needed)

BTW in this setting Sun sky only no other lights will be counted or rendere by the program. that would explain why your spotlight has no effect (emissive surfaces still do their job though)

When I said more contrast I really only meant to change the surfaces to a darker settings not reducing the amount of light. I should have put that in better words.

I hope this helps you on the way, If you didn't use sun sky only settings let me know what you used, so we find out what happened

I have it at dome and scene, and I turned off the map on the dome so I could access the time of day settings. I thought that should keep the lights too with having the dome on because it worked with some other scenes I did. I'm honestly confused why it isn't for this.

But I've taken another shot at it with your suggestions (ignore those white blotches I can clone stamp that out later if needed). First render I did was at 6pm; this new one is at noon with the SS set to 0.2.

 

Luftsturmregiment40

katywhite said:

Linwelly said:

katywhite said:

Linwelly said:

katywhite said:

Title: Diamonds are forever

Caption: Even if you don't want to be

Software: Daz 3D

Challenge: Beginners

Feedback much appreciated! First time trying to use caustics but could use some suggestions to bring out the effect more.

 

caustics are a tricky thing to catch but you made a good start. One thing I would suggest is to give a bit more contrast to the surrounding colours, right now her podest, the surrounding rock and his clothing are all very much the same colour and structure. A darker underground would give the caustics to show more effect.

Also caustic are depending on the angle light comes in and leaves the opject in relation to the observers angle of watching. so experiment with some different camera angles as well

@_ AL1vE _
@Linwelly

Thank you both for your suggestions. I toyed around with it a bit more. I don't want to change the camera angle if possible because I like the focus on the diamond woman's expression and the secondary subtle focus on the man's expression. I changed the background colours to add more contrast. I also tried making it darker out (8pm instead of 6pm) and adding another lightsource - but it just got darker not sure what happened to my spotlight sources. Not sure what else to try with this.
 

 

Ups, hmmmm, let me ask, are you using the sun sky only in your environmental render settingss? If yes, that would explain the changes, because changing the time on that setting will move the sun as you major ilght source, depending on the rest of the setting (day in the year, longitude and latidude) even below the hoizon (8pm is already late in the day). that would remove a lot of light and as well alter the angle of the light hitting the diamond girl.

So maybe return to the original time (or even got to an afternoon or morning time to test the effect). In addition to that try setting the SS multiplier to 0.2 or even highter which will give your sun more power.if this is too much light there are options in the tone mappings to adjust. (I come back to that later if needed)

BTW in this setting Sun sky only no other lights will be counted or rendere by the program. that would explain why your spotlight has no effect (emissive surfaces still do their job though)

When I said more contrast I really only meant to change the surfaces to a darker settings not reducing the amount of light. I should have put that in better words.

I hope this helps you on the way, If you didn't use sun sky only settings let me know what you used, so we find out what happened

I have it at dome and scene, and I turned off the map on the dome so I could access the time of day settings. I thought that should keep the lights too with having the dome on because it worked with some other scenes I did. I'm honestly confused why it isn't for this.

But I've taken another shot at it with your suggestions (ignore those white blotches I can clone stamp that out later if needed). First render I did was at 6pm; this new one is at noon with the SS set to 0.2.

 

 

one question please. you wish to use caustics. what do you want to convey?

isn't the drama of the scene more important than rendering a perfect caustic feature? you do realize that having accurate caustics in your case is extremely time consuming (do you?. unless you have a power horse of a beast with a 6000 Dollar nVidia card, you render still Newyearsday).

try to let go for a while and focus on something else.

how about you shatter the girl (use Blender for it or I do it for one time for you no questions asked) to show how fragile she is and no hand can hold her up no matter how good the intentions are - if something is broken for good there is no fix.

just loud thinking...

Linwelly

katywhite said:

Linwelly said:

katywhite said:

Linwelly said:

katywhite said:

Title: Diamonds are forever

Caption: Even if you don't want to be

Software: Daz 3D

Challenge: Beginners

Feedback much appreciated! First time trying to use caustics but could use some suggestions to bring out the effect more.

 

caustics are a tricky thing to catch but you made a good start. One thing I would suggest is to give a bit more contrast to the surrounding colours, right now her podest, the surrounding rock and his clothing are all very much the same colour and structure. A darker underground would give the caustics to show more effect.

Also caustic are depending on the angle light comes in and leaves the opject in relation to the observers angle of watching. so experiment with some different camera angles as well

@_ AL1vE _
@Linwelly

Thank you both for your suggestions. I toyed around with it a bit more. I don't want to change the camera angle if possible because I like the focus on the diamond woman's expression and the secondary subtle focus on the man's expression. I changed the background colours to add more contrast. I also tried making it darker out (8pm instead of 6pm) and adding another lightsource - but it just got darker not sure what happened to my spotlight sources. Not sure what else to try with this.
 

 

Ups, hmmmm, let me ask, are you using the sun sky only in your environmental render settingss? If yes, that would explain the changes, because changing the time on that setting will move the sun as you major ilght source, depending on the rest of the setting (day in the year, longitude and latidude) even below the hoizon (8pm is already late in the day). that would remove a lot of light and as well alter the angle of the light hitting the diamond girl.

So maybe return to the original time (or even got to an afternoon or morning time to test the effect). In addition to that try setting the SS multiplier to 0.2 or even highter which will give your sun more power.if this is too much light there are options in the tone mappings to adjust. (I come back to that later if needed)

BTW in this setting Sun sky only no other lights will be counted or rendere by the program. that would explain why your spotlight has no effect (emissive surfaces still do their job though)

When I said more contrast I really only meant to change the surfaces to a darker settings not reducing the amount of light. I should have put that in better words.

I hope this helps you on the way, If you didn't use sun sky only settings let me know what you used, so we find out what happened

I have it at dome and scene, and I turned off the map on the dome so I could access the time of day settings. I thought that should keep the lights too with having the dome on because it worked with some other scenes I did. I'm honestly confused why it isn't for this.

But I've taken another shot at it with your suggestions (ignore those white blotches I can clone stamp that out later if needed). First render I did was at 6pm; this new one is at noon with the SS set to 0.2.

 

I learned soemthing new today, that you get access to the sun sky setting when you remove the the dome map. I usually switched to sun sky only settings for that, and never knew that woudl happen, so thanks for that :D

I will have to find out how far this differs from the sun sky only setting in the end, my current assumption is that despite what it says in the environment mode settings, this will deal with light like the sun sky setting so no spots bein in effect, but that's just a guess for now.

Now your render I like the colour contrasts and how she looks crytalline very much in this latest version, but I admit there is not much left of the caustics. As mentioned before caustic need a surface where they are seen on and rather close to the object that cause them. I believe that is why we see only on the mans arm a little bit of it. You could try to render with the sun set to 10 am or 3 pm to see if the different angle will help.

Maybe you do a small scale expeirment first where you transform something small to the diamond shader on a dark coloured plane and pose a set of cameras around it and then render at different sun settings. this costs you less render time and you can understand how the camera angle the angle of the light hitting the object and the relation towards the ground are related to each other.

Right now I am afraid that the camera angle you have now and you want to keep for the emotional drama will not work well with catching caustics.

Just an idea would be, to lay the statue on the ground still have the camera face down on her head the same way (parent camera to the figure before moving) and have him kneel in desparation at her side. that way you might catch the caustics and everything else.

looking forward to what you come up with

Linwelly

bastian2560 said:

Hi every one. Well for some one that dose not have an artistic bone in there body (lol), I have learnt some new triks and think i'v got the look i was after. figers center corador slitly of center and angled a little, midground in focus background with a bit of niosegoing on. I tried to get that warp feeling happening when the improb drive first kicks in.

I geuss i could go with materials or kitbashing i dont know?

@Tirick WoW!

@Al1vE gotta love marvin.

@JoJos what costum is your figer wearing?

 

Oh Lucky Marvin.

where you sort yourself in,you got to decide, I certainly like your idea and I wonder if the lift doors will tell you how happy they are that you are using them ;)

overall a bit more light would be nice I think, so we can see the reflection of the corridor in the glossy head (it would be really funny if the reflected part of the corridor would go slurp with the drive, depending on the model you got there you could try something with d-formers on it, but safe it to a separate file :D)

thank you for the fish!

Linwelly

Tirick said:

I took some suggestions to heart and found a horde of free textures that I carefully converted to Iray Shader presets and applied (after a lot of testing) to the surfaces. A few still have that original texture, but overall the surfaces were completely overhauled. I could not find a shot I liked that showed the engines, so instead I opted for a foreground ship (stock, save for Iray conversions) to break the scene up a bit. I also added some tiny figures for scale.

Thank you all for your suggestions, I appreciate the feedback!

Love this very much, the stark contrast of light and darkness gives a very good space feeling, the light on the planet/ moon and the ship is a perfect match, adding the figures was a good idea ,,, now how about adding a lost toolbag floating towards the cam and the figures pointing vividly towards it? hehe I'm getting carried away here

The only thing that comes to my mind is to experiment with depth of field but not too much of it, and I'm not even sure if it would really add to the picture

Linwelly

Shinji Ikari 9th said:

Linwelly said:

Shinji Ikari 9th said:

Version F here.

Moved the darkest character closer to the lights, changed the light settings, did a little texture work on the jacket of one of the other characters, and tried adding some bloom.

This develops very nicely, just a word about Bloom settings. I would advise to use a much higher value on the bloom filer threshold, standart is 2000. In a scene like this I would use a threashold of 9000. with the low values the effect is the grey out the image. As well try a bit higher bloom filter radius and on the other hand reduce the Bloom filter brightness scale (standart is 1, I would try something about 0.1 to 0.2)

have fun experimenting with that

Here's version G trying to make use of your suggestions.

This is looking very good, now I never though I would write these words to you, but here they are: maybe reduce the light intensity a bit again? especially thosthe on the walkway, they take away effect from the glowy stuff

Linwelly

Stargazey said:

_ AL1vE _ said:

Stargazey said:

it looks like a Tarot Card

make it to one

put a frame around it 

make the texture look like very old paper

the colors washed out 

etc.

Thought I'd give it a go!

 

 

Oh, wow, this really works! the change of the colours were already a good choice but make it gritty and giving it this frame really completes it.

If you stick with this I would like to ask for you to post the original version and the tarot card version together since that was done in postwork (just adding the layers together is not postwork in that sense)

JoJoS

@bastian2560

My figure is wearing the legend armour by Aeon Soul

Linwelly

aprilshowers2065 said:

Still tweaking my first image, but here's my second entry for the beginner's challenge. Suggestions?

very nice choice and start! I really like the silver gliterring skin on the left side lady and the snske sking golden red on the right, very good! the snak skin has a bit trouble with the seams there on the arm.

Now what I suggest is a bit tricky: you could try to export the snakeskin lady in this pose but withouth hair, dress and wings as an obj without! keeping the surfaces intact. Reimport and cover it againwith your snakeskin, then parent it to the original figure which still has hair dress and wings, so the obj import takes exat the same space the lady has now, then hide the original figure but keep the obj and assets visible.

I hope that this explains it sufficiently?

generally I would think a bit more light might help this scene

Linwelly

skinklizzard said:

The cobbled together jetpack probably still needs a fair amount of adjusting

but here is an entry so far for the intermediate challenge

Nice start with this and I think the jetpack deserves to be seen a bit more :D

Your a bit at a tricky place with your light settings here, you've got really bright parts on the lady and as well very dark parts, same goes for you background, together they play a bit hide and seek.

So finding the right abount of lght and dark so the figure comes our a bit better is the challnege here.

Maybe you want to start with giving the lade a bit more interesting pose, center part is the jetpack, so you wnat to show a lto of that to the viewer, on the other hand a face is always catching attention, so I suggest giving her a pose with the back motsly towards us but looking over her shoulder, maybe she's being chased? add enough light so we can see what's goin on.

with the lights on the backpack maybe you can as well play around with bloom settings?