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Two more shots.
The farther I get into this, the more I see that needs fixing.
edit: reuploaded with some edits.
Started experimenting with Octane toon rendering, but before I sink too much time into converting this whole project, I should see if I can make fire look good. The jury's out.
I commented in the NPR thread but I wanted to leave a comment here too - this came out super cool! I really like the effect you were able to get! It looks great, IMO!
Thanks. There's a particular look I'd like to achieve, and I thought it was in the game Okami, but looking now I'm not seeing it. Unfortunately, I'm already bumping up against the same problem I've had every other time I experiment with NPR: I'm not interested enough in creating NPR works to put in the work necessary to make it look the way I want it to.
ROFL! Yeah, that is the issue with the currently available technology we have. Getting the nice NPR looks does require a bit more time and effort. It IS getting easier though, and eventually, it will be pretty "plug and play". Right now though, you're right, you do have to have a bit more of a passion for that type of look to put in the extra effort for it. :)
Thought I'd try doing a full scene, and I might do the next shot as well just so I can see how that toony flame look I posted above looks in context.
I don't know how much it has to do with technology; NPR necessarily requires at least a little bit of art directing, whereas PBR is PBR.
Put a little bit more work into this scene, especially into tooning up the background more. There are still some things I can't figure out, like why his hands aren't outlined, or why it stops drawing the ground textures past a certain distance from the camera.
I think I've got most of the kinks worked out.
I've been pestering @Oso3D to make a bear for years, and he finally did, so you're welcome everybody.
Still missing a few characters.
Thought I'd take a break from this interminable shot I've been working on to do some quick render practice, and see what I'd learned about lighting and rendering in the meantime. The answer is "not as much as I'd hoped".
Eeyore's gonna feel sad that he didn't get to be muscular!
Fortunately, being sad is Eeyore's whole deal.
I need to figure out what to do about her clothing, because it's not simulating properly, her body keeps clipping through it, and at one point her pants slide down revealing her entire butt. Still, this is where I'm at on this self-imposed nightmare of a shot.
This shot came together much more quickly than the last, despite being more complex in a number of ways. Now I need to tweak the previous scene and re-render it before I can stitch everything together.
This is starting to look really good, holy wow!
Thanks! Now to see if I can actually retain the lessons I learned about rendering and apply them to the previous shots.
I've been re-rendering the same shot over and over as I keep making improvements, mostly based on things I should have known or thought to do long ago. Here's the first frame of the most recent full render:
Then, I watched a tutorial on making skin shaders in Arnold, so I tried redoing Katara's skin, and that led me to this:
It was less of an improvement then I'd hoped, but on top of the other valuable information I got out of it, I realized I'd been making a basic error in my shading since I started working with Arnold. If you don't put a normal map node between the actual normal map and the normal input on your shader, it just makes the textures worse instead of properly applying the normals. Once I knew that, I tweaked all my maps, and completely redid my lighting, leading to this shot:
Then I realized another way I'd been a total dumbass this entire time. The road was made with a voronoi shader, which worked great in Cycles because I could do displacement without regard to mesh density, which was not the case for Octane or Arnold. Getting the same kind of displacement to work in Arnold would have required millions if not billions of polygons, so I just gave up on the idea of displacement. The solution was staring me in the face the entire time: the voronoi fracture node in C4D. So after that, all I had to do was figure out how to color the different faces in Arnold, because the way to do that using MoGraph effectors and C4D shaders doesn't work with Arnold. The actual solution is even simpler in Arnold, so now I'm rendering out this shot:
Probably still some very basic mistakes I'm making, but I'm happy enough with the progress.
Interesting work...did you solve your dforce issues?
It wasn't a dForce problem, it was a Marvelous Designer problem, and I did. First was by taking the pants out of MD by themselves and rigging them to the figure in DS so I don't have to worry about her butt coming out. Since the pants are skintight, there was really no need to be simulating them anyway. The second was by loosening the sash, because when the front tail flapped up with her movement, it was getting caught under the sash. I've barely touched DS in the last several months except to re-bridge the characters over to C4D, where I've been spending the vast majority of my time, with occasional stops in MD and Houdini.
I'm glad you got it fixed.
Marvellous designer is a great program...I doubt I'll be able to afford it now I'm retired but I see what others do and it does a great job with draping.
I actually think MD is a pretty bad program in a lot of ways, and if it weren't the best option available for cloth simulations, I wouldn't use it. I was already making clothing in C4D using similar methods, and if I spent a bit more time with it, I could probably replace it with Houdini's Vellum system.
Here's the last full render of the previous shot with the fixed clothing, although it's gone through several rounds of improvements that will definitely require me to re-render every shot.
I also finally got around to figuring out how to make a decent procedural dirt shader, which won't make that much of a difference on this frame, but will pay off when it pans over to the riverbank, which no longer has a clearly tiled texture from Polyhaven. I also tried a few things with the water shader for the river, but I'll need to render more of this shot out to decide if they work, and made a mesh riverbank with actual displacement, but so far it's not as visible in the render as I would have hoped.
Well, I figured out why the changes I made to her skin weren't making as much of a difference as I hoped/expected: because they weren't applied. I loaded just the character in a separate scen and made all-new shaders for her skin, then copy-pasted them into the full scene. Either I forgot to apply them in the full scene, or they were one of the casualties of the scene file getting corrupted. Either way, I'm re-rendering yet again.
After a few hitches (there are a few specific frames where recent scenes always seem to crash the render, and it's a drawn-out process of figuring out how to get past those), and I'm kind of blown away by how much better it looks. I should be posting the new render tomorrow if nothing else goes wrong.
I think these frames do a pretty good job of demonstrating the progress. The lighting is much better (and the incorrectly-applied normals are no longer fouling up the shadows), her skin not only looks more human (even considering that Katara's people are based on Inuits, I don't know why I thought it was okay to make her so red) but also now has SSS in her fingers and more accurate specularity, even through the background haze (another improvement) you can still see an improvement in the textures of the background objects, and I love the bloom coming off the clouds.
Before:
After:
Got it all rendered out, and I'm super pleased with it, although I'll be re-rendering all the earlier shots, and those should show even more substantial improvements.
Before:
After:
For an even more stark difference, let's look at the first shot.
Original:
Redo:
I've also made additional improvements, so now I need to apply those to shot 5 and re-render that yet again in what is becoming a neverending loop.
When I said great I really meant it produces some really nice drapery on items. I haven't personally had chance to play with it since it first came out.
I've been playing with dynamic clothing also in zbrush which is fun and I like their shapes for clothing...it sometimes help to get an item where you need it to be. Also using daz's dynamics to add drapery to an item by sending objects between zbrush and daz is useful. That said I haven't had opportunity to play with Houdini or C4D but I have heard good things about both programs.
Nice improvement on the renders it's good seeing the befores and afters for comparison.
Houdini's free, so there's no harm in checking it out, although I'll warn you Houdini is a very singular experience, and you really have to think differently to use it.