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Thanks, Kev....
I'm using Skies of Terra and Skies of Economy... playing around with them. The background is a scene projected onto a vertex object, so that sort of limits overall scene lighting a bit. It ends up behaving more like a stage in 2D. I use light bulbs for characters but exclude their furred clothing from those or else they glow too much. I try to keep shadows to a minimum. This very quickie low res render really picks them up, though and they come our harsh and rusty looking.
I have a lot to learn from lighting...and sadly am neglecting it at the moment as I am just trying to finish this series of book covers for print and ebook. Two more to go and DONE. Then I can go back to proper modelling and Phil's tuts. I want to be able to view things from many angles and not be restricted to staging and lighting dioramas from a certain 2D perspective to allow for front cover titling, blurbs on the back cover and ISBN barcodes all whilst trying to please the author. There are things in the scene I would not do if I had my way! Keeping green man away from any green foliage background is a challenge. For the previous cover I was able to keep his father inside a dark cave. The point of a cover is just to introduce characters... personally I think the couple are too busy fiddling with the bow/arrows and horse. I wanted them just standing in front of the horse as though just meeting which is a main point of this book in the series.
So much to learn... not enough hours in the day!
xx :) Silene
You can use a Background and a Backdrop together. It owuld work like this: You would have the skies of terra HDRI in the Background, and the image of the cliffs in the Backdrop. You may need to edit the photo in Backdrop to fit the aspect of the render. If it isn't the same aspect, you'll get stretching or squishing as Carrara forces it to the final renders' aspect. The Backdrop will hide the HDRI in the Background, but the HDRI will still provide reflections and light (provided Skylight is enabled in the render room).
I've been away far too long...
Wow! Look at THIS! Thanks evilproducer! This looks superb! Thanks!
You can use a Background and a Backdrop together. It owuld work like this: You would have the skies of terra HDRI in the Background, and the image of the cliffs in the Backdrop. You may need to edit the photo in Backdrop to fit the aspect of the render. If it isn't the same aspect, you'll get stretching or squishing as Carrara forces it to the final renders' aspect. The Backdrop will hide the HDRI in the Background, but the HDRI will still provide reflections and light (provided Skylight is enabled in the render room).
Hmmmmmm.... OK will try this over the weekend and see how far I get with it. Might be beyond my ability to catch on quickly enough, but will honestly give it a go and appreciate the suggestion as it sounds very appealing.
The colours are a bit glaring in this screenie as this was the CMYK psd which goes to pdf, but I saved it as RGB to post so the colours really popped... didn't think about that for posting.
x :) Silene
Evil, just found this. Outstanding! Thanks. I've been experimenting with Carrara's shaders lately and this skin texture will very useful. I can't wait for a chance to sit down and play with this.
We really need a 'Like' button here. :)
Hope you like it. It was really educational to put it together. I would link to the original tutorial I found, but it has bare buttocks and bare breasts in the example images, so DAZ doesn't want to offend the puritans.
To find it, Google this search term:
Playing around with procedural skin in Carrara
Thanks for that. It turns out I've had that tutorial for ages, it just got lost in all the other tutorials I've collected. Now, I need to sit down with your shaders and Shonner's tutorial and see if I can't get somewhere. :)
The one thing the tutorial didn't cover was the transition between certain shading domains. Namely the lips and nipple domains. My solution (and there may be better ones) was to use the 3D paint tool restricted to the Lips shading domain, the colors set to black and white, and used the airbrush to feather the edges of the domain.
This is where it gets unique. In the Texture room, I created a new master shader and set it as a terrain shader. The top level of the terrain shader I set as a multi-channel shader, and I copied and pasted the base skin shader into that. I then clicked the + button at the bottom and added a terrain layer (the only option) which created a distribution channel and a Multi-Channel shader below it. There was no option to load an image map in the Distribution channel, so I loaded the image map that I created using the 3D paint tool above into the color channel, then I copied and pasted the image map into the distribution channel. I then discarded the image map from the Color channel and built the lip shader procedurally.
I used the same method to soften the transition from the nipples to the torso.
P.S. per Ringo's suggestions in another thread (which I can't find at the moment) I used the anistropic lighting model for the lips.
Here's my attempt. I can't seem to see the eyebrows very well, even when I put more light on them to check. Had no trouble with the eyelash routine at all... just the brows.
Did I need to do something else first?
Also I cannot get rid of those nasty PS rusty shadows. If I use another programme to open it, eg Paint or Windows Explorer, they are not there. But they are there now to me. Rusty thighs. Why?
ETA: OK, it's only in PS and in Google Chrome. It's OK if I look at the forum in IE. Weird!
Anways, as to using this great shader, if I can do this anyone can. I would have put this up earlier but could not find any skimpy outfits for Vicky, had to dig deep into some earlier content. ;-P Silene
Hi Silene,
the eyebrows use thin hairs (I think), so you may need to increase the number of hairs. The shader is also relatively light, so darkening the tip color may help as well. if all else fails, try increasing the thickness of the hairs.
I was trying to avoid a unibrow look. ;-)
Edited to add, that that is a very nice picture!
Another go, different costume, background, brightened the dome and fixed pose a bit... and I worked with her brows. I tend to use medium hairs then the thickness controls and the subtract tool around the edges. There are lots of possibilities. I like this... please make some more!
:) xx Silene
ETA: Not crazy about the morphs on Ranger hair, looks a bit clumpy. I should have left it "un-windy".
I'm so glad you like it!
The eyes look great, but should you want to change the iris color, that one is a fairly simple color gradient. I found that in some scenes, the color I had used was washing out a bit.
Works quite well on genesis and g2f gens. you'll need to set up new shading domains tor the various parts, and then apply the appropriate shader
adit to add: Also need to create some distro maps toachieve a nicer blend as was don with the nips
OK, playing hooky from the Monthly Challenge I finally got a chance to play with evil's precedural skin. Very nice. :)
I darkened the color a bit to get a slight ethnic look. I also ticked up the bump on all textures a bit and fiddled a little with the lips and nipples (although you can't see them in the final render). I will say that my model was a bit cold and it showed. You've done a great job with this shader, evil. :)
I wanted to add some makeup and different eyebrows. This gave me a chance to play with Inagoni's Baker plugin. Baker can take procedurals and turn them into 2D texture maps. It worked great. I added eyebrows and some eye makeup to the map and created a new shader for the face (not the lips, they were fine as is). I copied the bump and highlights from the procedural shader and you can't tell the difference. Baker is a great addition to the Carrara kit if you need 2D maps from you procedurals.
I also used GI Brightness from DCG's Shaders Plus plugin. I've had the plugin for a while, but never used GI Brightness until I saw how well it worked in Antara's image from the October Carrara Challenge thread. Got me wanting to try it, so I did. I used GI Brightness on a cube as the main light in the scene. It worked very well.
The first render is the direct from Carrara version. The second is the postworked version.
Wow! That's a really great job! I've thought about Baker before. I may have to go and get it!
I've never really got into postwork, but it's certainly added a lot of pop and zing. I'd love a rundown of what you did.
I rendered this one with an alpha, so I could add the background later. Also, with a single figure image, it's much easier to do certain things when you don't have a background to worry about. I used to render out layer passes in Carrara, but I've found I can get the results I want without them, which makes the whole process much quicker.
I take my Carrara render into Paintshop Pro (of course it works the same in Photoshop or Gimp) and duplicate the image and add a blank layer on top. Usually, the first layer is set to Overlay. This is where I enhance certain shadows and highlights. It all depends on the look I'm after. I usually use this step to also enhance the eyes, nose and mouth. I also a separate layer set to Overlay to work on the hair. I deepen the shadows and lighten the highlights. How much again depends on the look I'm after. I then add another layer set to Normal and paint in whatever flesh accents I need, like rosy cheeks or darker lips or different color eyes or whatever. If the hair needs some help, I'll add a layer for that as well.
There are other things that you can do in Paintshop(Photoshop, Gimp) but the above is my usual routine. After, Paintshop, I will flatten the layers and send the image over to a nifty program from Onone software called Perfect Effects (I have it as part of a package called Perfect Suite).
In Perfect Effects, I usually begin with correcting tone and contrast. Next, comes color, then glow, then...there are so many choices I can't even tell you. I never save my work projects in Onone, I only save the final results. I like to start with a clean slate for each image. While I think I'm slowly developing a style, no two images are exactly alike.
Sometimes, I'll bring the image back to Paintshop and sometimes I'll run it through Perfect Effects again. The hardest thing for me is knowing when to stop. :)
While this all sounds like a lot of work, it's really not. The above process can take as little as fifteen minutes to as much as an hour or so. It all depends what needs fixing and the look your going for (did I say that already).
This isn't the only way to go about postwork. I've gone through several different stages in my postwork as I learn new tricks and acquire knew software. I like what I do now, but it all could change over the course of the next year. Who knows?
I hope that was what you were looking for. I'd have to go back and do the image again to get a step by step. Of course, I will if I have to. :)
Thanks, man, but it's all based on your shader, so great job to you. :)
Baker was a pleasant surprise. It works very simply. I was expecting complicated, but I ended up with simple. I like simple. :)
Once again, while I should be doing something else, my muse forces me to come back to this shader. :)
I've been working off and on with a new series of Odd Girls. The current series is really all about experimenting with Carrara's shader room. Evilproducer's new shader has sent me back to the Odd Girls and Carrara's shaders.
I took the character I made for the previous render and changed all the shaders to texture maps with Inagoni's Baker. I did that so I could dive into Carrara's shader tree without getting lost in the original shader. I used a multichannel mixer so I could leave the newly generated texture maps alone and work on my part separately. I used one of the shaders in DCG's Enhance:C as a mixer as well as a generator for displacement.
Yes, the result is odd, but that's the point. :) This is the first of my new Odd Girls to be shown in public. I liked how it turned out using evil's skin shader so much that I just had to share. Once again, thanks, evil. Great shader with lots of possibilities.
Cool effect where the rim light hits the skin.
I wonder what that texture would like if the dark areas had a glow or maybe a metallic look?
Thanks BBD. I've got an old copy of Photoshop Elements ("It does everything real Photoshop does, except that thing which you need...") which has to do. But I've never really used it for much beyond adding text overlays.
It's obvious when I look at your before/after, what an impact adding the postwork has, but I don't think I'm at the stage of being able to look at a picture and saying "this needs x y and z doing in post.'
Hmmmm. I'll have to see about that.
Small steps at first. The first thing I did with postwork was color correction. It just grew from there. :)
I tried a more metallic look, but there's nothing in the scene to reflect so it didn't come out very well. I did apply a fade fresnel effect from DCG's Shader Ops to the Glow channel to give the darker areas a brighter look. I also moved the left rim light to help accent some of the shine on the blue shader areas. I also changed the hair color a bit since the old color didn't really go with the new skin color.
I really need to stop playing with your toys. It's too easy to get lost in Carrara's shader room.