Carrara Challenge #32 They Only Come Out At Night - WIP Thread - Meet Our PA Sponsor, GKDantas!
UnifiedBrain
Posts: 3,588
This is the Work-In-Progress thread.
It has now been almost 4 years since Carrara Challenges began. Head Wax got the ball rolling, prizes were offered by Daz and Carrara PA's to provide added incentive, and the passion of Carrara artists has kept it all going. Although I have only been a Carraraite since the end of 2016, I continue to be astounded at the friendliness, creativity, and sheer inspiration radiated by this community. Thank you for letting me in.
1. The Current Theme: "They Only Come Out at Night."
Old rock-n-rollers will undoubtedly associate this with an Edgar Winter album by the same name, released in the early 1980's. It's a coincidence, but if that idea inspires you, go for it!
Others will likely think about vampires or horror scenes. - a natural connection - but the theme can just as easily reflect goodness and great beauty. I will put a variety of example images in the next post.
A partial list of things that come out at night:
Nocturnal animals - Owls, Bats, Raccoons, Mice, Badgers, Cougars.
Insects - Moths, Fireflies, Scorpions, Tarantulas, Giant centipedes.
Plants - several species of plants only bloom at night, including the once-a-year Night Blooming Cereus.
Other - Vampires, Werewolves, Monsters, Santa Claus, Stars, Aurora Borealis, Prostitutes, City lights, Spacecraft lights, Nightclub goers (night life), Criminals and so forth. And false teeth
(thanks Wendy!)
These are only suggestions. The goal is to create a render somehow connected to the theme, based on how the phrase inspires you. It may even be a daytime scene if it expresses the theme in a clever way.
2. Specific Render Rules (Carrara functions required)
1. Special Lighting - all renders (except as noted) are required to contain at least one usage of any ONE of the following lighting effects: Anything Glows, Aura, Light Cone, or Lens Flare.
2. Carrara-only. All renders must be done entirely in Carrara, with no postwork (except sigs). For example, multipass and compositing in other programs is not allowed. If you need to composite, you are of course allowed to use the Carrara texture room and composite on a plane or other shape using channels in the shader tree.
3. NPR/Toon. If you enter more than a single render (you are allowed 3), at least one of them must be done by using either the NPR render engine*, or the Toon! part lll filter.** The lighting requirement is waived for these entries.
*NPR is the Carrara Non-Photorealistic render engine located in the render room.
**Toon!partIII is the (awkwardly-named) Carrara cartoon filter located in the Assemble room. It can be added from the "filters" tab in the upper right. Like many other filters in Carrara, it is an effect which is processed only after the regular render is finished
Notes on requirements: Because of the night theme, it seemed appropriate to require special lighting. The second requirement - no postwork - is merely an artistic constraint, in line with the idea of displaying the wonders of Carrara, and reflects my own desire as a relative newcomer to see what is possible when staying almost entirely within the Carrara environment. It infers no judgment towards postwork, as postwork is important to every working artist. And the third requirement is connected to showcasing a part of Carrara that many feel has been virtually unexplored - NPR - which means that a new game is now afoot for those who love drawing and painting in 3D art. Who knows what interesting discoveries will be made in the coming weeks? See this thread for some great Carrara NPR renders and tips.
In a nutshell, the requirements are 1) the use of one light function, 2) no postwork, and 3) one NPR render if you enter more than one image. My aim was to make these requirements less intimidating to those newer to Carrara (much like in the previous Challenge), and encourage greater participation.
3. General Rules:
1. Each participant may submit up to 3 images into the Challenge.
2. Images must be new (previously unpublished).
3. Images must be entirely set up in Carrara, except signature, and follow constraints as outlined in the Specific Render Rules.
4. Images must be rendered in Carrara or in an external renderer for which there is a Carrara plug-in (e.g. LuxRenderer, Octane).
5. At least one WIP (work in progress) image must be posted to the WIP thread
6. In the WIP thread, a screen shot of the final scene as it appears in the Carrara assemble room must be included.
7. The winner of the "Best Participation" category becomes the next Carrara Challenge host, and sets the rules for the next competition. But should the winner decline this honor, the winner of the next category (Best Photorealistic Render) will then get the opportunity to step forward and fill the role. This is a proposed change to a previous rule.
4. Sponsors and prizes
Once again Daz will generously sponsor the monthly Challenge.
I am working on adding a Carrara PA sponsor(s) as well.
I propose a slightly different prize format this month (and it has been OK'd by DAZ). For this contest, there are different categories, much like the Academy Awards (Oscars) and the prizes are all more-or-less equal. Comments about this change are welcomed. I explain the process in more detail in THIS THREAD. Please read it if you have questions.
The four categories are:
Best Participation
Best Photorealistic Render
Best Non-photorealistic Render
Best Demonstration of Theme.
This translates into:
Most votes total for one artist: $50.00 towards DAZ 3D owned item(s)
Most votes single image (Photo-real render engine): $ 50.00 towards DAZ 3D owned item(s)
Most votes single image (NPR or ToonIII filter): 50.00 towards DAZ 3D owned item(s)
Most votes single image best demonstration of theme: $45.00 towards DAZ 3D owned item(s)
Dates to Remember:
All dates are Daz Utah Time http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/usa/salt-lake-city
WIP Thread Opens: Friday April 7, 2017
Entry Thread Opens: Friday April 21, 2017
Entry Thread Closes/Voting Begins: Friday May 5, 2017
Voting Ends: midnight Friday May 12, 2017
Promotions
I made an announcement in the Commons. Moderators have made it clear to not place a mirror thread there.
So, the Art Studio thead is here if you would like to share your entries with others outside of the Carrara forum!
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Comments
Attached are a variety of images which illustrate elements of the theme.
Our PA sponsor this month is GkDantas (Marcelo Teixeira).
I will write more about him and his work, just before voting begins.
Check out some of his great renders below!
Terrific Mr UB. Wonderful theme. I like it :) !
This was my first thought...
Handsome woman Tim.
Here's a wip character to start off. No post work.Toon1Part111. Fast aa at the moment. Better fuzz out the glow channel in the iris a wee bit.
I can already tell. This is gonna be awesome.
Q: can one artist therefore win all four categories?
Great theme.... do squirrels come out at night I wonder.... hmmmmm.
Headwax!...... shouldn't you be out surfing ...
Fun theme and new requirements. This will be an interesting change of pace. Thanks for the reference images.
@Headwax, way to start off the WIPs.
I'm not ready for a WIP yet. But here is an image that I thought about when I saw the theme.
Nope. Only one. From the other thread: "No artist can win more than one category. If an artist gets the highest score in more than one category, he/she can only accept the higher category, and the lower category is won by the 2nd highest image vote."
Nope. But their less-cute looking cousins do.
I sense a cartoon in the making.
"Hey, if we put on these fake tails, we can go out in the daytime!"
Or, two squirrels looking at their rebellious child - "Jr decided to shave his tail and experience the dark side."
We don't have squirrels in oz so wasn't sure... may have to try and push and pull it into a possum then... they come out every night and sit in the dead tree out the back growling and hissing ... blood curdling stuff really, even the Roos steer clear!
or maybe a drop bear .....
You can still use squirrels (and your squirrels are great btw). I added some off-the-wall ideas in the post above.
No squirrels in Oz? I had no idea. There are a lot of trees around my house. We probably have 5 or 6 squirrels.
Thanks! I always look forward to seeing where your curiosity takes you.
1st thought popped in my head, think was hall and oats song, she's a man eater
thinkin goin horror
bruxa mebbe, literal maneater
@UnifiedBrain et @stezza et @ Diomede - thanks - no surf today I have been pulling down walls for our new arts' centre :)
great poster Diomede
Stezza, you could do drop bears :)
Go for it! I've heard that if you leave the soul out of the blended weight conversion, G3 makes a great vampire. :)
Already 2 different ideas are churning in my head... wonder which I'll choose... hmmm... .. .
traps the souls of his victims in his freckles
My first WiPs and render for this challenge to match @headwax
a challenge to render NPRs & PRs with NO postwork not even for sig and to use AM's squirrel
... but I did it 
used the glow channel to brighten up the models
TITLE - Going Nuts
Casper!
Ha ha, what a scream Stezza~!
Bit of a play today before the sun went down. Used aura and light cone and a fire and cuastics
very very frightning me!
Yes, at first I was going to make him a minister of religion....
Wow, they must be putting speed pills in the water in Oz. Stezza and Headwax,
it was either that or do house work :)
Decided on a nightclub scene. Trying to find options for the lighting requirement. Blocking out a test of light cones.
1) used some primitives to block out a stage and curtains. In scene tab, set ambient light to zero. Turned the default distant light to zero. Inserted a text object for the test.
2) inserted some spot lights. Brightness, half angle, and angular falloff are under the general tab.
3) spotlight, under modifiers tab, point at text object
4) spotlight, under effects tab, check light cone. There are options for light color, intensity, falloff, fog, 3d shadows, light through transparency
.
5) toon settings found by selecting scene and look under the filters.
.
NPR renderer with outline, diffuse, shadow, highlight, and background checked. Light cone does not appear to be effective with NPR renderer, but I may just be using the wrong settings.
So, here is a test of combining the photoreal test render with the NPR test render. I inserted a plane, adjusted its dimensions to 64 by 48 (dimensions of previous renders), and changed the shader to a multichannel mixer. Inserted the photoreal and NPR as texture map in each channel.
Just dang.
Yes, I don't think that light effects work in NPR, which is why I waived the requirement there. But you figured out how to add one anyway. :)
Then again, I know that many entering this Challenge are Carrara geniuses, and that a restriction here or there won't hardly even slow you down from doing what you want.
I'm not sure if I will enter this one - not being able to do even simple color and light corrections post-render means doing dozens of test renders and on my slow old laptop that's a real time killer when I only have a few hours a week to spend on my art hobby.
Below is what I have now, but I am not sure how far I will pursue it.
The bats were just made roughly in the vertex modeller by extruding a few pieces from a low-poly vertex sphere, then deleting two spots and putting in spheres for the eyes. Fur is Carrara dynamic hair. The ceiling is vertex object and the floor is a terrain. The mid-ground bats are replicated on an invisible plane. The distant back-lighting uses a light cone and the render has a 20% toon effect on it (render without the toon affect is also attached).