Post Your Renders - Happy New Year yall
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Thx Dart, much appreciated. I was just appreciating your Pier View too. You really nailed the comp, lighting and atmosphere. I thought is was a photo.
WRT the Shading Domains... I think I tried all you mentioned, I reassigned polys to new Domains and there is a way to remove them like you said, but only one at a time. On my PC it was taking like 15-20 sec to delete just one (no multi select).
Felt a little guilty "crawling in the back door" and editing the .car file, but hehe where there's a will there's a way. Thx again.
- Don
Hey magaremoto, did you model the hair in Genny and Tenny? Liking the guys hair especially.
- Don
cool DB it works fine, thanks
hello Dondec, maybe I could model hair! the ten24 guy has hair meshes embedded, as for the gal this should be the product: http://www.daz3d.com/minnie-bow-hair-for-genesis
ps: your nice scene made me laugh a lot
Haven't posted in this thread for a while. This is a test render from a WIP, I thought it came out rather nicely. Lighting is just a single distant light from outside, cranked up to max. Full GI and AA set to best. Left to render overnight (5 1/2 hours render time). Like many low light GI renders, it does suffer from sooty shadows (anyone know a solution?)
Have you tried gamma adjustment? A value of 2.2 is "correct" for realism, but something between that and about 1.6 often gives the contrast needed in an image. It will make the shadows lighter and the sunlit areas less intense, without it you get that burned look.
@TangoAlpha
Sooty Shadows are AFAICT an artifact of RGB 8b color imaging, there’s just not enough resolution at the low end to smooth out the fractional variations. You can see the same thing taking a low light 16 bit image and downgrading it to 8b. Blotches appear. And while adding more GI samples is generally a good thing it may not actually solve the problem.
Everyone seems to have their own solutions for this. The one I use is to create a replication grid of extremely low intensity bulb lights by the windows, or if far from a window (deep inside a room say) near the problem area. Really dark color for the bulb, like L=2 thru 12, with Fast Hard shadows, which render almost instantly. The replicated bulbs, unlike Scene Ambience, create faint shadows reminiscent of AO - good.
This provides a base low level lighting that smooths out low-light variations. Use this together with GI. Always works for me, though there is some experimentation on setting the Bulb value/color.
BTW: since you’re now solving the sootiness with light instead of samples, you can generally back off on the time consuming sample settings. You can save some CPU cycles by putting the light grids just inside your windows and Exclude the window geometry in the Bulb’s General tab.
Don
another test with carrara IL, no postwork
...but now... tee hee hee... she's got buggers in her nose! =D
Nice. These are all using that volumetric light dome thingy you've perfected?
thanks DB, evry carrara render has to be touched up in post (as almost all out of there anyway). Mostly I find hair difficult to adjust too, very hard colors if compared with skin and environment; what do you suggest about?
volumetric light dome is being used in each render of mine, it simulates atmospheric scattering pretty well and may be quickly tuned up, very useful in animations which is my actual purpose
below a quick example of what I get by using the light haze dome with an increase of 10% in rendering time. This lighting gain is particularly evident over 3k resolution
are you using indirect light? or is that the dome cloud doing that? I see a beautiful difference in the shadows... I really need to try this. Animations, you say.. so it's fast? My experience with v-clouds is that they'd slow me down... but I'd use them anyways.
I never agreed with the need for postwork before. No I look back at my renders from those days and go: Eeegaddds! LOL
I have some hair experimentation note to share... be back in a bit ;)
Okay... back.
I've done a lot of experimenting with transmapped, mesh hair models' shaders. Here's the thing, and ep often says that I over-think this stuff... but sometimes we just do what we do anyways, right?
I look at real hair on real heads and I see that hair really reacts to light. Rim lighting makes hair really shine - almost glow. Key light makes hair color come to life against its own shadows. Hair's fine nature allows a lot of light to pass through the depths, however this depends on how the hair is treated and styled. Dry, natural hair is what I was talking about just then, but we have to rethink those very statements if the hair has a stiff style with gel, for example.
Thinking of my original example of natural, dry hair, I wanted to experiment with a very subtle subsurface scattering, which is where ep warned me of my over-thinking things. In the end, I believe he was right. SSS can certainly help us get to where we want to be, with subtlety, but it still isn't quite right and it makes the render engine work even harder - the transmaps are bad enough on it.
So speaking of transmaps, I couldn't help but notice that such a thing gives us a free mask for where the actual hair should appear on the mesh.
Taking that into account, I decided to use one of the texture maps multiplied by this transmap in the Highlight channel, and reduce the shininess value way down to let the light spread evenly across the mesh, allowing the bump map to do it's thing, and letting the color of the new texture map control the intensity of shine of the hair, which I control with the Brightness slide of the texture map.
I want dry, natural hair here so I adjust that texture's brightness low enough to not create too much shine, and lower the Shininess enough to encourage an even spread of that highlight, helping to act as sort of a fake indirect light cause by the hair itself upon itself. If I need help getting the highlight channel just right, I may need to layer in more than one texture map - sometimes even using the bump map instead of a colored texture. Bump map multiplied (or otherwise blended with) some color can give an accurate control, as well as a color gradient controlled by the bump map.
So now I go back and have a look. My characters each have their own highlighting light rig attached to them, so I use that to cast the light across the mesh's highlight/shininess combination to further enhance the effect. My highlingting light rigs are very subtle as to add to my usual Carrara scene lighting methods - so I bring the character into a scene to test it properly.
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=============== Eyes =================================================
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I was having incredibly similar thoughts on eyes, and went through the same darned workflow to try and get the Iris Shine the way I want it. The SSS experiment was really fun... it really was. But the same applies: It can get us close... possibly even nail it. But it taxes the render engine and, again, is fairly difficult to control. If we did find a really good SSS setting and used the appropriate highlighting, we could theoritically get a great amount of control, as long as we have a true understanding of what our SSS settings are doing.
Tweaking my Fresnel amount, intensity, absorbtion... SSS was really neat. It's amazing how fun these sorts of experiments can be! I thought I had a beautiful amount of control, so I started turning the head and applying different emotion... Argh! I was wrong about my having any control! But I know I could gain it with time.
In the middle of that whole experiment, it occurred to me what the Highlight/Shininess combination does with light across our surfaces and smacked myself for not starting there in the beginning! I mean... I did have a decent Highlight/Shininess thing going on, but I knew that I could use these to gain a nice Iris Shine effect, simply by using my Highlighting rig!
I've already tried the tweaked glass shaders on the various clear parts of the eye, each with slightly different highlight/shininess settings to work together.
So now I add, multiply, and/or otherwise blend various eye maps into the Highlight channel, using a mixer to blend between the various nests. I did all of this before I realized that 8.5 came with these awesome Multilayer channels, which gives us even better control over making such materials!
Again, I bring the Shininess way down because I want to light to spread across the surface but I keep the value high enough to stop it from going all the way across the entire Iris. For this effect to work properly, we need the Iris to be inverse concaved, getting deeper toward the pupil, and having the Cornea bulge to create refraction between the Cornea mesh and the eye surface. If you don'y have the two layers to work with, see if you can make a duplicate, giving one layer a bulge and leaving the other spherical to get the light to refract more heavily directly over the Iris.
I was using individual highlight lights, each parented to their own eye to add control to the effect, but have since aborted that idea since the way my Character light rigs and scene lighting work together works plenty well already. If not, it's easy to add something to add some extra shine to them. The image here still has them in the scene though... I don't like it as well as without them.
As you can see in the above image, I go the opposite direction in texture resolution. This character's main shaders have had the texture maps reduced from 4k to 2k and I have a LR version which uses 800 x 800. That's all temporary, though. My goal is to hand paint my figures for the final production.
Oh... all of that without finishing my point!
By using the Highlight/Shininess techniques mentioned above I've noticed a huge difference in shadows not being so troublesome on the hair results. I've also been noticing that this two channel combination is a great way to tweak a lot of different shader wishes.
Very thorough Dart!
I will say that I have experimented with getting better looking hair figures/props as well, and in addition to what you are saying about the highlight and shininess, I have found that a slight translucency also can help, especially with the back lighting or rim lighting. The caveat is of course, a hit in render times, so I only use the method for still renders.
The two pinup style renders use translucency in the hair.
About the eyes, I usually crank the reflections on the cornea and eye surface down, and do as Dart does and increase the highlight and shininess on them. Additionally, I have found that if I have blue irises, I will add a bluish color to the highlight for the iris, and lower down the shininess to around 4%. The eyes of the chicken use this method to give the eyes more depth. I also make the iris concave and have the pupils bulge more.
Right! I've forgotten to include my experiments with Tranlucency! Ya... renders can slow to a crawl.
I do love the dynamic hair. I think it looks freaking real! But I can't seem to get the curly shaders to not jitter. :(
yess, DB and EP, highlight, shininess, translucency...and alpha channel tweaking, to add a bit of softness; you substantiate I'm on the right path to manage transmapped hair
; all of them extend the rendering time but the result is 99% realistic imo. I would suggest to use the curve filter operator to take full control of maps if needed
As for the light dome, jointly with glare effect ( I use it always in presence of sunlight) contribute to get the natural radiosity of real ambience, otherwise you render a scene in a rarefied atmosphere or in high mountain
this is the final shot after adjustments on hair skin and eyes. no postwork. Now colors and lighting seems more homogeneous imo
I forgot to talk about animation.. I think carrara is more suited for animations than many other softwares; for single shots DS and iray are a better choice but animation is different in many ways. Carrara is powerful and flexible enough to bid against many generalist softwares even for top notch animations despite the "freezed" development. It can't do anything but who can out of there? all have limitations of some kind and need plugins or such. I could disclose lacks of 3dmax, maya, modo, c4d, houdini - to mention the most expensive in the market - that carrara has instead. If we had a good story to be created in carrara I would join the team to demonstrate what I'm stating here
Yes. I like Carrara too! ;)
Ah ah DB I forgot you are a carrara addicted, btw you are a very good animator and many other things, when can we see an awesome animation story by you? That could be emblematic of what carrara can do
Soon?
really? I look forward to seeing that and of course if you need help of some kind consider my free support
Thank you! ;) Yeah... days seem so short when doing this sort of thing! LOL
w.i.p. testing diffuse lighting and reflections
carrara on steroids
That really admirable lighting there magaremoto. Beautiful flow of lights to darks. In scenes like this I personally look for a little bit of burn out, like on the woman's chest. Full range lighting should include that, and its something a lot folks try to avoid.
I'm sorry I've missed a lot hear lately. EP, loving your earlier renders... very theatrical.
Dart, confess I don't know anything about Dynamic Hair, nice render there though, especially considering the model is someone you know. That's cool. In terms of tweaking render settings I usually render an Index Channel in multi-pass rendering then tweak hair (and everything else) in Photoshop. That's a good tip if you don't know about it. The Index channel is a grey-scale mask, like Alpha Channel, that has one unique shade of grey for each individual object. Click on the grey shade with the PS Wand tool set to range 0 (exact match) and you instantly isolate any object in your scene, for Bright/Con, Hue/Sat or other changes done in PS, Gimp or other artwork package. I'd be interested to know if PD Howler has this, as I know you've got it.
- Don
Off topic: I tried my first few IRay renders. Character setup and rendering are wickedly fast BUT its sort of a WYGIWYG (what you get is what you get) sort of thing. No multipass layers like Specular, Diffuse, Ambient, GI, no lighting exclusions, no shadow controls, you lose all that and the valuable Index layer I mentioned above. So in effect, WYGIWYG, and post work loses out big time. I willing to be proven wrong on this, but till then, I got my Carrara native-render game plan going here.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/79791/how-to-do#latest
- Don