Ninefold's Palatable Renders

Ninefold

Hi, I'm Ninefold! I'm mostly a 2D artist, but I've been using Poser and later DAZ Studio to create figure reference for myself on and off for a long time. I've fallen prey to several sales recently, and started getting interested in techniques more oriented to finished renders than the "Bald Nude on Featureless Box with Dramatic Lighting IV" sort of thing I'd been rendering to paint from. Also, it turns out I'm extremely vulnerable to forum render challenges. It's starting to stack up, so I guess it's time for me to start a gallery and a thread.

Ninefold

The Last Light, also posted over in the gallery with more or less the same comment I'm posting here.

I rendered this for a DAZ+ monthly challenge that was about revisiting and updating old artwork. I don't actually have a lot of finished 3D art under my belt, but the challenge got me thinking about my very early 3D exploration in Bryce and Poser. I committed many of those "perfectly mirrored sphere floating between an infinite water plane and a procedural sky" Bryce renders that you see if you Google something like "bryce 90s", and I don't actually still have any of those, but I decided to revisit some of those ideas here -- reflection, procedurality, infinite desolate planes, etc. Originally this character was going to be holding a reflective sphere, but I ended up wanting to play with the way the horizon will sometimes match up with its reflection on a flat mirror instead.

I was very pleased with her pose and then wound up obscuring a lot of the things I liked about it with the way I lit this scene, so I might come back and revisit that.

csaa

Ninefold,

Great to see you break ground with your new thread. I think I first saw this at the Gallery. Are all elements straight out from the render, or did you add them in post-edit? It's a wonderful image to share here in the Forum.

Hope to see more.

Cheers!

Ninefold

Thanks, csaa! The only thing I straight-up created in post is the ground fog. I couldn't get that looking good in my test renders and decided life is too short. The fog is just a light blue gradient layer, set to screen and masked with the depth pass. I did have to combine two renders to get this result, though. The image reflected in the mirror is just a plane with a photograph on it, and when that plane is the right dimensions to provide the reflection that I wanted on the mirror, the reflection of the mirror in the water shows the top of the plane and the environment beyond that. I also ended up not liking what depth of field did to the background. So, one render with DOF and the version of the sunset that looks good in the water, one render with no DOF and the version of the sunset that looks good in the mirror, combined in Photoshop. This is totally different from the sort of Photoshop chicanery that I expected to have to do to make this image look the way I envisioned, which was fun.

csaa

Ninefold,

You mentioned combining two render layers. Working with multiple renders is a technique I've only used in the last six months or so. I find it very powerful when combined with post-edit layers, applying different effects. It's most useful in approximating real world shadows. Say we're working with a single light that's hard; the contrast between light and shade on 3D assets is quiet hard. But by orbiting that single light, then rendering, we moved the shadows a bit. Once we layer this and play with the opacity, the overall shadow takes a softer look, with a gradient tone from dark to grey. This is really how shadows work in the real world; there's a bit of light bleeding into it, blunting hard transitons.

I like the backlighting. I'm guessing there's also side highlights. Did you also have a frontal light? That seems to be the only way you have that subsurface illumination on the skin.

Cheers!

Hylas

Woah, nice render! And welcome to the Art Studio subforum!

Also, since you're "vulnerable to challenges", let me dangle this months Freebie Contest in front of you like crack... erjack popcorn!

Ninefold

csaa said:

Ninefold,

You mentioned combining two render layers. Working with multiple renders is a technique I've only used in the last six months or so. I find it very powerful when combined with post-edit layers, applying different effects. It's most useful in approximating real world shadows. Say we're working with a single light that's hard; the contrast between light and shade on 3D assets is quiet hard. But by orbiting that single light, then rendering, we moved the shadows a bit. Once we layer this and play with the opacity, the overall shadow takes a softer look, with a gradient tone from dark to grey. This is really how shadows work in the real world; there's a bit of light bleeding into it, blunting hard transitons.

I like the backlighting. I'm guessing there's also side highlights. Did you also have a frontal light? That seems to be the only way you have that subsurface illumination on the skin.

Cheers!

Oh boy, I mix slightly different renders of the same subject all the time. Not for soft shadows -- I usually prefer to do that in the scene, using lights that have an area, though I do vividly remember the "fake it with like 300 point lights" era. But I love the artistic control that rendering light passes and mixing them in post gives you, and I'll often render an object with two different shaders and mix them in post if it seems faster or more straightforward than making the shaders play nicely in the scene. I recently did that on some hair with one shader that looked good in frontal lighting and another that looked good backlit.

There's a little bit of illumination from the sunset plane, yep. The other light source is a huge, very emissive ring that's quite far away, which is illuminating the landscape and rimlighting the figure. This is not naturalistic at all; it's a choice that's almost purely for drama.

Hylas said:

Woah, nice render! And welcome to the Art Studio subforum!

Also, since you're "vulnerable to challenges", let me dangle this months Freebie Contest in front of you like crack... erjack popcorn!

Hey, thank you! But also, oh no. I don't always keep up with what's happening in the freebie contest, but this is a really interesting theme. Hmm. Hmmmm.

Ninefold

Verbena, also posted over in the gallery.

​This one got silly on me. I remember looking at it as I was finishing it and thinking, "What does this remind me of?" Coming back to it a couple of months later, I think the answer is lowfi-aesthetic motion graphics. The doodles, the sort of collage-iness of the way Lawrence sits on this background. It looks like it should have line boil.

I rendered this for a DAZ+ forum challenge about using (among other possible items) this verbena model. I started off by stealing a pose from Alphonse Mucha, which led directly to me spending like two weeks in the weeds, trying to make this robe behave itself. In the end almost none of that pose remains (or at least, is visible. I promise his legs are very Mucha) and I used many fewer flowers than I expected to, but I did circle back around to that Mucha influence with the halos. Finishing this off came right down to the deadline and I was feeling pretty goofy by that point, which I think is what we have to thank for the doodles around the flower.

csaa

Ninefold,

Nice! Very emotive. The hues are go well together and the shadows give the cloth the right texture. Speaking of the robe, I can't imagine spending weeks wrangling it into the right shape! Gotta look up Mucha. Art Nouveau is timeless.

I hope more folks would post their Gallery images here in the Forum.

Cheers!

Ninefold

Oh, you've definitely seen Mucha's work, or at least pastiches of him. He was a prolific commercial artist and largely defined what comes to mind when you say "art nouveau" to anyone who isn't a huge art nerd or an architect.

csaa said:

I hope more folks would post their Gallery images here in the Forum.

Me too! I already haven't been good about it, but I really like art discussion spaces.

Ninefold

Ipomoea alba, aka "I've been fiddling with this for weeks and don't have a title". Also posted in the gallery.

I intended this to be a quick one, but I ended up futzing around with it on and off for something like three weeks, first replacing the DM wall prop I started off with with one I made myself, and then just spending ages adding grime and variation to that wall until I was happy with it. I think I also lost a couple of days to figuring out how to make the Blender extension I used to grow the ivy play nice with objects at this scale (in retrospect, I should've just exported from DAZ Studio at a different scale).

This piece also represents me failing to come to grips with dForce cloth simulation. My more recent experiences with dForce have gone much better -- I get the impression dForce is specifically not very good at the thing I asked it to do here, which was a lot of layers of cloth interacting with each other in a strong wind. Or maybe I was just giving it the wrong inputs. Either way, I wound up back in Marvelous Designer for this one, and just cut her some new sleeves.

Anyway, who is this? What's she doing? I don't have no thoughts on the matter, but I spent more time as I was making this wondering about her than making decisions about her. Her leaf-themed jewelry and the gardenlike setting give me urban druid vibes. I also like the idea of her being a civic maintenance wizard who's here to repair this big intake(?) fan.