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Thank you, Dustrider and EP, for explaining your most recent posts so clearly. If I get my first idea finished soon, I think I might use EP's skin shader tutorial on some custom human figures that I modeled last year.
I need some guidance. I found an image of the board from Clue on the internet. Am I allowed to use that as a shader? I mean both "allowed to" as in copyright/trademark police and "allowed to" as in for this month's challenge.
For this WIP, I did some adjustments to the candle shaders, such as small adjustments to the flame, and I completely revamped the metal holder using a variation of PhilW's suggestions in his most recent tutorial. Most important change per Phil was eliminating color from the diffuse and from the reflection channels.
The board is a vertex box that I used extract along to create the 2 seams to fold the board. I then did some beveling to reduce the sharpness of the edges. I created a separate shading domain and uvmap area for where I want the image of the board (paper glued to board, I believe).
If I can't use the Clue image, let me know and I will replace it with a facsimile that I come up with.
I added the dynamic hair and change the camera angle.
One distant light setup behind Aiko 6 head.
Two spot lights to illuminate only the hair and nothing else on the scene.
Another distant light to illuminate all of Aiko 6.
I don't see any problem in using the image for the challenge, I'm not sure with regard to the legal issues. It would depend on the source of the image, would be OK with the creator? I would think that as far as using an image of the actual board, as long as you aren't using it to make something to sell, it should be covered under "fan art", but I'm not a lawyer so I could be wrong.
Edit: I forgot to add that the render is looking really good, the lighting is great!
The lighting is much better Ringo. The lighting shaders on the outfit really make it stand out, a lot of the other renders I've seen of that outfit make it look a bit flat.
Nice skin Ringo!
diomede, your scene is coming along very nicely. I had my doubts about a vertex candle flame looking good, but you're doing it right!
Here's the latest. All image maps are gone. I use two black and white distribution maps to soften the transition between the lips and face, and the nipples and chest. Other than those two maps, this shader is 100% procedural!
I added eyebrows and improved the eyelashes. The eyebrows use a thin hair and the eyelashes use a medium hair.
Currently I'm testing the skin in some hi-res renders with different GI based lighting. I'll also want to test it with my own fake GI light rigs as well. I'll most likely use my challenge scene as the fake GI test bed.
I may fiddle around with minor elements, but this WIP will essentially be my entry. So, per the challenge, here are:
- screengrab of the object to be improved is the candlestick obj from the Poser 4 content CD
- a screengrab of the lighting that I arranged in the assembly room
- a WIP that could be the final entry
- Mrs. White in the Ballroom with the Candlestick
brief explanation of the 3 light sources
1) Primitive Sphere, scaled to envelope the flame, glow set to 2500 or so, alpha set to black
2) Vertex flame, glow channel close to normal, color set to a yellow/red/orange gradient, made semi-transparent in the shader channel with adjusted cellular function in alpha channel
3) Bulb light with brightness reduced to 13% positioned in front of the rendering camera
4) Ambient is set to zero
5) Gamma is set to 2.2
6) indirect light and light through transparency are active. No global illumination.
Credits - candlestick from Poser 4, image map of clue board from winning moves, lots of help from folks on the carrara forum and from PhilW's training tutorials
Objects created or substantially altered - Candle from Poser 4 reworked in vertex modeler, new uvmaps and shading domains, materials are original procedural shaders. Playing pieces are spline objects. Board is a vertex object. Dice are vertex objects, with numbers painted on using the 3D paint tool.
The transition around the lips looks great!
I really like this spin on the theme - great work!
More work here, I'm just going to show the results of my edits rather than before and afters, because I think you probably got the idea for the dramatic changes a bit of mat/shader tweaking gives. Changes here included (changed all texture maps from Fast Mip Map to Sampling):
The Gloves: reduced bump, increased specular and roughness (increased the specular on the metal parts the most)
Olympian Heroine Outfit: No major changes, increased specular for some of the metal parts
Sandals: for the leather parts I replaced the materials that the sandals and leg wraps came with using a leather material from the Octane LiveDB, I then reduced specular values, increase roughness, and decrease bumb values a little bit
Hair: reduced specular and slighly reduced gamma for the color texture map
V6 Skin: I used my shader set for the V5 Bree textures that come with the Octane for Carrara plugin, and modified specular and roughness to better match the lighting. This shader set uses the diffuse, bumb, specular, and SSS texture maps from the Bree texture set that comes with V5, setuo for use with the V5 uv's for V6.
Lamps on the Columns: changed the Octane Materials opacity value to zero (4 different materials) as all items in the Gated Courtyard are a single model, so it was better to just make them invisible rather than delete them.
The scene is lighting is YosemiteHDR3 from Dimension Theory (Yosemite HDR Pack 1) with a single very low intensity mesh light used as a rim light.
Below are images for the general setup and a test render showing current scene progress. The black square above/behind V6 is the mesh for the Octane mesh light. I used a cube primative, converted it ti a vertex model, deleted to faces I didn't want to emit light, them made it a blackbody emitter.
Nice imagery, everyone. Dustrider, what hair did you use on your figure?
Dustrider, EvilProducer, and diomede64 thanks so much for your welcomes. Dustrider and EvilProducer thanks for suggestions for my file corruption problem. I was definitely saving from the popup rather than file menu. I'm now avoiding that like the plague and doing incremental saves with the local setting. So far, so good.
Evilproducer, neat tip with lowering the settings for the irradiance map. I'll definitely try that out. The indirect lighting renders come to a crawl when it hit hairs and eyes. I hope it helps with that.
I've been able to rebuild and have made progress. Here is my first WIP, showing my basic light setup.My goal is even lighting with soft, subtle shadows to bring out the dimensionality of the subject. This is basically the 3-point light system turned on its side to simulate light from big windows with a translucent shade. I'm going for window light to be true to the late 19th Century time period since electric studio lights were just being developed. This setup would be created with big soft light boxes in a modern, real world photo studio. The lights consist of 3 plane primitives with the shader glow channel set to a certain percent (image below). The normal sides of the primitives are facing toward the subject. The left side panel and ceiling panels are set to 200%, while the fill light panel on the right is set lower. I'll surely need to adjust the percentages when I place my actor in the scene. The glow %, angle, and size of the panels provide most of the lighting control. The lights only work if indirect light is on in the render settings. As PhilW demonstrates, this setup benefits from a gamma correction of 2.2. I'm using a mac, so 1.8 might be more appropriate for the monitor color space, but the 2.2 gamma correction looks better to me so far. Also, ambient is set at 0% in the scene settings. There are no other light sources.
I'm using props, floor, and surrounding walls from Age of Armour's fabulous Studio Paris set (http://www.daz3d.com/studio-paris) available in the DAZ store. In case you don't know, it includes Carrara materials and lighting. My backdrop is one of the canvases from the set. I made a custom diffuse, alpha, and bump map in photoshop using one of the backdrops from the On A Certain Night mutiplane cyclorama set (http://www.daz3d.com/on-a-certain-night) for the diffuse map and a hanging, wrinkled fabric texture from CGtextures.com for the bump and alpha maps. I want it to have a bit of obvious wrinkle and sagging like a real cloth backdrop would show. I researched 19th C photo backdrops on line, and found that they were mostly painted with chalks for a matte finish and in sepia tones.
Where it really helps is with the light calculations at the start of the render, which can take forever on my old, single processor system. Unfortunately, when the render tiles get to hair or anything complex like that, it will still crawl.
Hi diomede64 this is for you. This is Genesis morphed from within Carrara into Ribbits, Thin man, and Octogenesis (geografted tentacles morphed). The figure in front is Genesis 2 Female with the Fiends Forever morph. I'm sorry, I didn't know they didn't work in Carrara ;-).
I use Genesis, G2F, and G2M in Carrara 8.5 pro. Loading, posing, and morphing them in Carrara hasn't been an issue for me. However, I do load all my DAZ stuff with DIM, so I don't know if that makes a difference vs custom runtimes. I've also had no problem in Carrara with morphs transferred from Gen3 and Gen4 figures with GenX2 (actual transfer work done in DS, of course). In fact, I'm using the Francesca for V4 character by 3DCelebrity for my contest entry.
Autofit doesn't work as well in Carrara as it does in DAZ studio. I'll try autofit in Carrara first, but if it gives me trouble (such as lots of poke through, weird bridging between pant legs...) I'll go to DS and save the clothing as a figure/prop support asset then load in carrara. I sure wish Carrara had the collision settings like DS. Alas, the long dress mesh pulling issue is a problem in both DS and C8.5. One thing I do in Carrara if clothing is not autfoitting well, is to not load on the genesis(2) above actor in the instances tab, but drag the item to the outermost genesis(2) above it. Then select fit to Genesis(2) in the general tab. I don't know why, but often this cuts through the crap and gets the job done. There are some items that just won't work like some hairs, hats, jewelry, wings for example. These I drag to the scene, cancel the autofit prompt, and parent directly to the part I want it on.
Textures are definitely something I have to go to DS to get to work. I was really frustrated with Genesis at first, knowing that V4 and M4 textures should work within Carrara. Then someone mentioned here that the generic Genesis and basic female have V4 UVs while the basic male has the M4 one, so you just have to select the right on for the job. The skin textures are often black when they load. I think it is from incompatible SSS and DS surfaces maybe? I also have a lot of V4/M4 stuff I want to keep using, since Carrara doesn't do UV swapping, I've got to do it in DS and save as a character/material preset. After that, I like to optimize as Carrara materials.
Since I have a lot of Gen 3 and Gen 4 items, I have invested quite a bit in the shapes, clones, and rigging tools to make them usable with the Genesis figures. Though, for the most part, I do pretty well with Genesis figures in Carrara, there are clothing items, poses, geografts, etc. that just won't work in Carrara for whatever reason. It's frustrating, but fortunately the minority of instances.
in case anyone wonders, Ironman13's Squish soft body morphs work beautifully in C8.5. The sitting one is amazing! The morphs are very subtle, but make the figure look right in those places.
Your candlelit Clue game is looking good. Have you considered switching out the generic playing pieces for actual characters?
@SukyL - thanks for your explanation, and for your post of the characters. They look great, and are clear evidence that the newer Daz figures can work in C8.5. If you don't mind, I have added an edited version of your tips to a thread on best practices for integrating Genesis and Genesis 2 in Carrara.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/45361/
The potential use of Genesis and Genesis 2 characters in Carrara can really facilitate the use of items designed for M4/V4, etc. with all sorts of characters and monsters. I am only on the first few steps of this particular road, but I can already imagine some great possibilities. However, I have only just gotten the hang of using Carrara's vertex-modeling-in-the-posed-position function for V4/M4 and figures I make myself. I am hesitant to give that up, as it doesn't seem to work so far with Genesis or Genesis 2. I have been able to use the function with Genesis and Genesis2 on content I make myself if I use "attach skeleton" but that has its own limitations, and is best saved for a discussion on another day.
Thanks for your excellent suggestions. It would look cool to have avatars for the Clue suspects walking on the board. One real version of the game does have small figurines instead of molded pieces. But for this month's challenge we can submit two entries, and for my Clue entry, I am not allowing myself to use any figures that are rigged. No apparent reason, but I always add a personal requirement to my challenge entries. I haven't completely decided what my second entry will be, but chances are high that there will be a lot of rigged figures.
Your scene looks great so far.
As far as Genesis goes, I only use Genesis in my renders, I have a couple V4 things that have problems but all in all it works just fine, I don't use G2, why buy 2 of stuff when my 1 genesis can use both male and female items, plus with the plug ins, go back to m3/v3,
Here are my water drops, I 'm using three of the waterplanes, plus a surface replicator on the monster too,
A girl can dream. Time savings anywhere, anyhow is much welcomed. So, great tip! Your WIPs remind me that I've got to get to work on my figure's skin and clothing materials as well to meet the rest of the challenge requirements. My lighting setup was the fun part, now I've got to do some real work.
Dustrider Your Octane render side-by-side before and after examples look stunning. I have the Octane student license, but, sadly, have a Radeon chipset, so can't try it out. I'm trying to get a handle on Luxus/luxrender. Do you use luxus as well? If so, are any of the general material setup considerations you discuss for Octane applicable for luxrender?
Dustrider are you going to go out into the Commons and sell the Sept challenge like evilproducer did last month? It was great, kind of like walking down a carnival midway and hearing the barker. I got sucked in to checking out the WIP's, voting on last month's entries, and participating in this challenge just from that.
diomede64 I'm glad you liked the G1/G2 render. I thought they represented pretty extreme morphs, so might be a good example of what's possible if anyone had doubts. No problem and thanks for putting my comments in your G1/G2 best practices thread. I hope there is something I included that can be of use to others. I hadn't even tried vertex modeling around posed G1/G2 figures. I used to do that with V4/M4. Not being able to model that way with the new figures could definitely be a show stopper for some. All I've done with posed Genesis is push and pull at dress meshes to get rid of that dreaded autofit stretching artifact on the skirt. I'm starting to have some success with it, but there must be a better way.
RingoMonfort beautiful work!
kashyyyk I love that creature moving through the water. I can really feel the resistance of the water in his pose. I'm intrigued by your use of the water droplet planes and can't wait to see the final image.
Anyone, if you're in the States, a good Labor Day to you, comrades!
Some great WiPs starting to come in...
Interesting following the tips on Genesis1&2 in Carrara.. thanks sukyL..
I have found that there isn't much trouble with Genesis itself in Carrara, as sukyL mentioned the clothes converter can be a bit iffy at times. The HD morphs don't work but that's not a major issue for me..
The biggest problem I have is the hair.. takes forever and a day to load some of the Genesis hair and then when posing the figure the hair will disappear
The challenge is to do work arounds which is half the fun!.. and use Carrara's main plugin DS for some of it ;-)
My posted image is Genesis which was opened in Carrara, dressed in Carrara, morphed in Carrara, skinned in Carrara ( with the typical adjustments to rid black eyes and bump ect ) and posed in Carrara..
Why it's so easy I reckon it's as easy as pulling a rabbit out of your hat with a sword while holding a dirty sock lol
It just takes a little extra time and then some more if some things don't work to do alternatives. The main thing to do is to get a grasp on how it all works..
and that is where these challenges are great.... to get you to know your Carrara and know that there's more than one way to skin a rabbit :-)
Keep those WiPs coming in.. enjoying reading the processes you all have used
I've said enough... back to lurking :-0
I'm trying, but EP is a tough act to follow!! Real life will be a bit off the chart busy for the next month, but I'll give it my best shot. You can find the thread here: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/45562/
Feel free to chime in and add to the thread!
Here is my lighting set up. I'm using Dimension Theory Yosemite HDRI #3 for ligting. Plus my spot light at low settings with a gel to throw a subtle leaf shadows over my figures.
The hair is Riae hair http://www.daz3d.com/riae-hair
I'm going for a Well Dressed Victoria (that might turn Regal) with a Smile in a Chair.
She still has to be get some accessories.
This is V4. I did try to use Genesis, but to find a dress that the poor girl could be seated in, wasn't easy.
But the Pharaohs of the Sun for V4 ( http://www.daz3d.com/pharaohs-of-the-sun-for-v4 ) does have a sit in chair morph, so with a new texture and transparency-map I got something I could use.
The chair is something I made in Hexagon.
Nice Varsel.
Now, there may be people that thought I was joking when I said I was going to do an image of Vicki on a blimp with a Muppet. Well, judge for yourself. ;-)
I say we have next month's challenge topic.. :-)
To avoid copyrights infringement, I shall call him, Hermit the Amphibian. ;-)
The hair is Riae hair http://www.daz3d.com/riae-hair
Thank you. :)
Some more work, including adding a tongue, collar and shader work. Next up is rigging and weight painting.
I have Hermit the Amphibian rigged. However, as is painfully obvious, I will need to do some weight painting. This is not unexpected, but due to my inefficiency in the vertex modeler, things take twice as much time as they should. Weight painting tomorrow.
Hello kashyyyk
Looking good !!!!!!!
I have still got a long way to go in Carrara, but you gotta crawl before you walk, and then walk before you run.
Question on the water droplets, are you able to modify the size of the droplets as well as add some whole sections of water ?
It would not have to be a huge variety, but if there were a few changes just to fool the eyes it would look terrific.
Was hoping to do that for the DAZ3D August contest, but it had me scratching my head big-time !!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Thinking of a simple scene for this contest, just have to finish watching Phil's excellent tutorials first.
Regards, Bunyip (Amateur Pixel destroyer)
Hello kashyyyk
Looking good !!!!!!!
I have still got a long way to go in Carrara, but you gotta crawl before you walk, and then walk before you run.
Question on the water droplets, are you able to modify the size of the droplets as well as add some whole sections of water ?
It would not have to be a huge variety, but if there were a few changes just to fool the eyes it would look terrific.
Was hoping to do that for the DAZ3D August contest, but it had me scratching my head big-time !!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Thinking of a simple scene for this contest, just have to finish watching Phil's excellent tutorials first.
Regards, Bunyip (Amateur Pixel destroyer)
Hey Welcome!!
In the surface replicator settings I used the randon size settings in this case, I used 70% to give a wide range of sizes, and then the distance between them quite small .02.
I'm rendering it now, so I can't post a screen shot until it's finished