March 2018 - Daz 3D New User Challenge - Posing

LaPartita

Ahhh! Computer keeps crashing instead of rendering! Will post ASAP.

 

Edit: Found an old render from a week ago and am attaching that just in case my comp won't render.

daybird

LaPetiteVerita said:

Ahhh! Computer keeps crashing instead of rendering! Will post ASAP.

 

Edit: Found an old render from a week ago and am attaching that just in case my comp won't render.

Sorry to hear that, but your last entry looks great. You catch the pose really perfect and alone that, gives the scene a feeling of emotion and movement..

 I especially like how you managed, to bend her leg like in the original photo.

So I wish all of you luck with your entries and a happy easter...and all the others who don't celebrate this feast, a peaceful weekend.

Knittingmommy

The March challenge is now closed. Thank you all for participating.

April is a Free/Fun Month so get your thinking caps on!

Diomede

Thank you for guiding us, KM.  Even though I ran out of time, I learned a lot from your posing tutorial and your advice.  I've book marked your guide and screenshots.  https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/3395006/#Comment_3395006.   Thank you to Linwelly and the other folks who popped in to share their expertise.  

 

And a big thank you to the participants.  Y'all produced great work, and you gave me great pointers.  It is very much appreciated.

Hopefully,I can return to some lighting and camera topics for the free month of April.  I am still struggling with the needed parameter settings.

Mollytabby

I really enjoyed doing this, though I really should have started much earlier in the month. I learnt so much! Thank you everyone for your brilliant input!

Now I’m off to look at last year’s April challenge to see what it is all about.

LaPartita

I finally got my render - too late for the contest (*sigh*) but I'd still love some feedback!

Original image:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My Attempt to Match:

 

The tips everyone gave on this forum were invaluable! I especially have to thank @daybird ), @knittingmommy, and @Wanderer for all the constructive critiques. That that Ctrl+D shortcut is amazing, and @Wanderer, I never would have noticed the way his hips and pelvis were angled if you hadn't pointed that out - and that turned out to be absolutely essential to posing him!

I'm looking forward to going back through the thread and seeing everyone else's entries!

Knittingmommy

Thank you, everyone, for participating. I had fun running the challenge. It was my first time and it wasn't as scary as I thought it would be. I'm happy I was able to give all of you some valuable tips.

LaPartita

I'm pretty sure I missed some people's final entries, but here are my thoughts on the ones I spotted:

• @sueya - really beautiful job capturing the pose you chose. You captured the sense of serene balance that the woman has. I'm especially impressed by how naturally her back curves and twists - I found achieving that to be one of the hardest challenges I faced, and I think you did an amazing job keeping the lines of her back and torso smooth and natural looking.
• @Tynkere - are you sure you didn't post a photography by mistake? Your image is sooo cool. I mean hot. Whatever - it's fantastic.
• @Wanderer - I think what I love most about your image IS the darkness - the contrast between the unsaturated blues of the sky and the highly saturated warm tones of the fire gives your image a great sense of depth - something that I find is especially hard to do with night scenes.

Random thoughts on my own experience:

• Like actual ballet, mimicking a dance pose turns out to be MUCH harder that it looks like it will be. I had to turn almost every limit on every joint off - again, much like actual ballet!
• Lighting does much more to shape the image of a pose than I had previously realized. With the dancers, the lighting in the original photograph was clearly designed specifically to show off the musculature of the dancers' bodies. The theatricality of the lighting does as much to dramatize the photograph as the dancers' themselves.
• Human spines are amazing - and Daz's Gen3 characters don't have nearly enough bones/controls! Daz gives you pelvis, hip, lower abdomen, upper abdomen, lower chest (which seems to be the entire ribcage!) and upper chest (which is actually the shoulders). I probably should have considered this before choosing my poses, because these dancers seem to use every single joint on their spines, and to do so in ways that I didn't think humans were capable of.
• FEET. Anyone who has ever attempted classical or contemporary ballet (and yes, I did. I was terrible at it, but I had fun right up until I tried pointe shoes. Then I fell over a lot.) knows that feet are everything when it comes to having good technique. According to Wikipedia, the human foot has 26 bones, 33 joints (20 of which can articulate), and over 100 muscles, tendons, and ligaments. I found I could do a decent job faking the feet on the woman, because pointe shoes hide a lot of that articulation, but the man was impossible.
• And speaking of feet - does anyone know of a pair of actual pointe shoes for DAZ characters? I could only find one pair - Lady Littlefox's "The Art of Dance - Ballet V4 - Toe Shoes. They are an amazing product, but still - V4? (Rant about different ballet shoes to follow)
  • I found a few ballet slippers (for Teen Josie 7, Gen2 Female, and Giselle 6) that are being marketed at pointe shoes. Toe shoes, otherwise known as pointe shoes, must have a flat section at the very end of the toes and a tough leather sole. It has to support a dancer's entire body while they dance (to get a great sense, there's a 17 second clip on youtube called "Ballet dancer's feet in slow motion"). A ballet slipper is essentially a very nice canvas or leather short sock with a band of elastic across the ankle. Imagine trying to stand on the very end of your big toe in a sock. It doesn't work very well. Toe shoes may look delicate, but they are very tough, so tough that ballerinas have to break them in so they have some flexibility before they can be used. Since every dancer needs a different level of flexibility in different parts of the shoe, they can only be customized to a certain degree before the dancer gets them.  If you're interested in how tough a new pointe shoe really is, look at this video of a professional ballerina preparing her pointe shoes for use. There's a reason she's using a box cutter on the leather sole.

Phew! Apparently that rant's been building for a long time. Hope no one suffered too much reading it!

Anyhow, back to the challenge itself. I can't emphasize enough how much fun I had participating - @Knittingmommy, you did an amazing job running it!

 

Edit: Fixed spelling

Wanderer

@Knittingmommy - FIRST, you'll always have a place in our hearts because you helped us when we were needing it the most. Thank you for doing all you've done to help us grow. I now feel a connection to you. Thank you.

@everyone else - We've all shown growth this month. We've all learned something of value. Be proud of that and keep going. As much as I want to pull my hair out over this last image, it taught me more than I can ever put into words--even if I never am able to fix all that is wrong with it, I am proud of it for that reason. It is the first of these images I've chosen to put any kind of name to, and for a reason that's very personal. I wish I could explain it better. I guess it's like finishing the marathon that almost broke you vs. finshing the sprint that was over almost before it began. You may not finish first, but you will remember always that you finished it. (sorry that I missed giving feedback on several renders this past week)

@Diomede - my greatest challenge on this piece was the lighting... maybe it's my greatest challenge on every piece. Looking over the images I've created vs the ones I've shared, and even among those, yeah... it's like that. You've managed a good deal already. You'll get it.

@LaPetiteVerita - Thank you again for your kind words. I think you did an excellent job overall, especially matching that leg of hers. I'm glad I was able to help. I think you've much improved his pose. As for my scene, it pleases me that someone found that worthy of comment. I went back to January and tried to learn the things I essentially missed in that challenge by not being here (I still have a lot to learn). I tried to make a real distinction between foreground, middleground, and background. I know I made errors, but I still think what I did is worthy of sharing. I will share it briefly here in case anyone is interested:

• I attempted to render the entire scene as a whole, but it was too much for my VRAM and the time would've been much much too long. I wasted literally 2 weeks (if you count all my efforts from before the change in scene to do the very same thing) attempting to find a way to reduce VRAM usage, when it wasn't really necessary. In the end, I had to lose so much detail that the final image was awful, and I began to render layers.
• I moved all things into groups based upon their render layer or location in the scene. I then saved out all subsets of the scene based upon those groups. I kept the cameras and in scene lighting as groups in every subset. I kept the hdr and camera filters like bloom in render preset file. 
• One VERY important note: If an object exists in such a state as to interact with lighting with multiple groups/zones, then consider including it in each of those groups and just render it out along with the other items in that group. This will help maintain integrity of lighting between render zones/composite layers later in Photoshop.
• I turned draw dome off in all but the background scene and used careful manipulation of Iray section planes.
• I created one group/layer specifically to contain the lighting, the lady, and her shadow as it fell behind her on the ground and wagon farthest to the right. This version of the lady was very low-resolution. I included the skeleton on the far right in both background and middleground renders because his luminance and the bloom effect was interacting with both groups.
• The render of the lady contained only her and the fire so I could get a little higher resolution out of her without breaking the VRAM bank so to speak.
• I then used the distant scene as my base layer and used apply image to build up the image from farthest scene zone to nearest zone/objects. 
• I used a soft eraser to remove elements of the foreground in the lady's shadow scene/layer that I wanted to blend easily into the rest of the scene behind it.
• I did well, mostly, until I got up to the lady. I struggled to get her balanced between properly reflecting her proximity to the fire and completely washing out details. Photoshop gives many options in doing apply image. Perhaps I had too many choices to make.
• I got to the fire and here I made a crucial error. One of my renders that I was counting on was actually positioned a little differently. As a result, I ended up blending many layers of flames attempting to compensate for the fire effect. This was about 3 hours before the close of the challenge, and I still had to learn to do a heat distortion effect in photoshop for over the fire. Given another week, I think my final image and the methods I'm describing here would've been much much smoother.
• I went and found a decent tutorial on how to apply a heat distortion effect and did my best to work something relatively quickly out.

So, in the end, as Tynkere said, it'll have to do. @LaPetiteVerita - Hmmm... sounds like a niche needs to be filled. Perhaps some enterprising person will read your words and decide to fill it. We can only hope. I must say that there is a terrible shortage of decent ballet items and such. I originally considered doing a ballet scene, but then realized that I'd have to likely resort to a non-ballet wardrobe and dropped it precisely because of lack of footgear/wear choices in my library.

DAZ_ann0314

March 2018

Showcased Participants for the March Posing Challenge
 

You Spin Me Right Round
For this Showcase we looked at the artist who created the most realistic and fluid posing which conveyed motion or movement.

For those reasons we have selected Wanderer to showcase
 

How Did You Do That
For this Showcase we took a look at who we felt chose and achieved the most bendy, twisty, or difficult pose to attempt to duplicate

The New User we felt best showed that this month was Night678winG

This is Life
For this Showcase we took a look at who we felt created a natural looking everyday type pose

The New User we felt best showcased those things this month was Mollytabby


New User - Welcome

cathan01_6e39852829


Also this time around we have decided to add an extra Showcase, given to LePetiteVerita as we were all very impressed with the challenge of the pose selected to try to replicate as well as the changes to the posing and all the hard work you put into the dancers even though your entry didn't make it in time officially

 

 

Congratulations to all the winners and well done to EVERYONE who participated. You all are doing an incredible job

 

 

Scott Livingston

Congratulations! Great work, everyone!

Tynkere

Congrads everyone.  Esp. LaPetiteVerita-- better late than never.  Am happy for you that they made an exception.  You earned it! 

--Bruce

Kismet2012

Well done everyone.  Posing from an image is REALLY hard and you chose some challenging poses.

 

Diomede

Excellent.  Congratulations, Wanderer, Night678wing, Mollytabby, Cathan01 and LePetiteVerita.

Mollytabby

Oh! Thank you! I've never won anything like this before! This has put a huge grin on my face 

Congratulations to Wanderer, Night678wing, Cathon01 and LePetiteVerita. I'm in awe of everything you achieved in those renders! 

I was working in the early hours of this morning on setting up a new render and was thinking to myself about how much I'd learned through this posing challenge. There are so many things that I do very differently now. I'm in for the April challenge as soon as I've finished what I'm working on at the moment.

daybird

Congrats to all winners and nice to see two of my favorites under the winner. :)

Wanderer

Oh, wow... This is so cool. They even overlooked my bungled attempt to improve it. Thank you so much. Thank you, guys, for all the helpful feedback. I couldn't improve without such brilliant advice. Thank you, Daz, judges, and volunteers, for being so kind to me.

Guys, congrats to all of you. Congrats especially to those showcased, but also to everyone who has stayed on course for this journey. Don't give up! I've been here 9 years, and if I'd had the courage to try all those years ago, who knows what might have happened? I already had a decent gaming card when Iray arrived, but it was very limited in capacity. Still, I saw that small things could be done quickly, and I began playing. I then saved up for a much better card to go into my aging system (still on Windows 7 i-2500k--almost as old as my Daz membership). When I did that, the things I could do and improve began to increase dramatically. Finally, @Linwelly was kind to invite me to join (I didn't even know this challenge was here--I'm not much on forums). Iray changed everything for me, but if I hadn't been afraid to try maybe I would've figured 3DL out. Maybe I'd even be a PA today. My point is, don't give up! Don't let fear stop you! Pain can be traded for knowledge, skill, and one day perhaps mastery. I hope one day I can be as good as those who host this challenge. I'm very grateful for this opportunity to learn and share with each of you!

HighElf

Congrats to all winners :)

DangerDetective

Life got a little busy about half way through march and I didn't get a chance to check in until now. I was pleasantly surprised to see my submission was highlighted at the close of the challenge. Thanks to the judges for noticing the complexity of the pose, and congratulations to everyone else who has also been featured. And to the contributors who were not selected, I know you worked hard, all of the submissions this month had merit, keep up the good work, everyone perusing this forum noticed your effort.

Anyway, thanks again and hopefully I'll see you all in a future challenge! 

Knittingmommy

I'm so proud of everyone who participated in the thread this month. You guys all did an amazing job and it was great fun helping you out where I could. Awesome job, everyone! Congrats to all of the winners.