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This is great... how did you do the little floating lights? Tried to do that in the past and could quite get it but those look great :)
Thanks! I can take no credit for the sprites though. I've just used this: http://www.daz3d.com/iray-sprites .
Making your own fur sounds like quite the task. I wish you the best of luck with that and it will be interesting to see what you come up with.
I think I prefer the tile like this, probably reduce the specular strength, as it looks very glossy now. Just for information if you ever want to subdivide the surface of something that comes as one like this tunnel, you can use the geometry editor and assing a new surface to some areas which then can be handled independently. Once you have marked all surface parts you want to change with the yellowish grid of that tool right click on the selected surface and the popup menue offers you several options, I ususally go by geaometry assignment and the select "create new surface from selection" That will show up in the surfaces tab of the object.
You can as well try to make a "Blood splatter" map (sorry for the goory) in Gimp, make a geometry shell for the girl and import the bloodmap into the geometry shell, similar as described for putting grime on things.
Sonja, the scene is coming toghether nicely now. Two things I would like to point out. One is the shadow on the back where noe shadow should be, meaning the sky open arches, thats where ist becomes to obvious that you are useing a backtrop photo instead of a real scenery. If you have available try to use a real prop for the wall and the architecture in the back and move the panel showing the sky far back so its out of reach for the shadow.
If you don't have a prop available, there is again the possibility to use the geometry editor, select all areas of blue sky assign a surface and turn the opacity down. Then you still need to add another layer of blue sky further back.
The other thing that I would change is the structure of the floor. I believe this is the DTTS-groundset D from the tiler shader? The Displacement is always rather high on these and I tend to reduce the max/min values to 5 and-5 (that would be on the Gound 2 for the stones) and to 10 and -10 for the grass. Additionally the stone surface has a rather high specularity.
Onle last little nitpick (yea I'm a posing freak, I know) think if you'd spend the evening with your dragon in that stretching position with your right elbow over your left knee.. ;-)
When making changes try to do 1 at a time. That way you know exactly what that change is doing. Try reducing the glow on the wings first and see if that fixes some of the other issues you are having.
Did you know you can spot render in iray?
Here is a Wikipedia entry on colour temperatures.
I wish I could make some suggestions on her hair but this is an area I have not payed with much.
take 2, i put shadows in it this time and changed the shaders on the crown ,lips and finger nails.
take 2
Ok I agree with you on most points. I like the work on the wings but yes its a bit too much and the bloom colour is too different from the rest. For the shape thing on her head but it made me think on your hairy problem, You do uses Iray hair? or put an iray shader on it? I find this still somewhat annoying that its often not clear from the icon of the prop if this is iray and that is 3ldight version, often I have to look it up in the surface tab...
back to your render, I have to say the angle of the camera weirds me out. The tilt of the camera is mostly used in action scenes but I guess this is supposed to be a moment of calm, why not make it so. Additionally you have a case of serous foreshortening with the hand and in consequence the wrinkly details there. Spontaneously thinking I would return the camera to normal give the render a cineatic wide frame and turn your model sideway, head on the lefthand thirds grid with a lot of empty space to the right, the whole scenery somewhat darker with the afterglow of the mystikoi creating a soft flowing line through the empty space giving the idea of the way it came flowing in... Ok I ran away with my ides here, take with a gain of salt.
If you found a good tutorial let us know, I will have a look around, but up to now have no experience with fur myself. If you have a noisemap for that fur you can try to dial that up, not sure about the result though.
What you shoud keep in mind though is that your girl is on the toony side of characters. Think if you want to go further that way, then it would make sense to do so with the fur experiement as well.
Much thanks for your input Kismet and Linwelly! Thought it best to say that now as I have a limited time each day for DAZ so I will probably not get too much done in a while now.
Hi wflaks!
She looks much nicer and so does the crown. To me it's still appears as if it's not truely setting on her head. Her hair is still straight. I wonder if you need a D-former or Push Modifer or something. Unfortunately those are outside of my expertise. But because her face and the crown are the focus of the image, she should have "hat hair" you know what I mean?
But the changes you've made are really nice! Great job!
Cheers,
Kath
Thank you! Yes I agree I need to just suck it up and put a prop in the background instead. I have something similar to the background that should work. I don't think she would stay in this pose all evening, I was more trying to convey a sense of conversation and paying attention to what the dragon is saying. But I will play around with the pose to see if I can find something similar but less uncomfortable looking. I will give those settings a try on the ground. I may have something else that would work as well. I really want that covered over stone look
I think I would start with giving the dragon some color and texture. And maybe seeing if you can get a woolen or linen look on the girls dress. Maybe turn her body a bit more toward the dragon so they are interacting a tiny bit more.
Have you considered doing a texture and slight color change on her skin? Like maybe a dryad (greenish or bark like, not overdone but just a hint)
They do have a couple of hair systems out there. Garibaldi Express hair is one of them. I caught it on sale, but haven't had a chance to try it yet
I really like the lace on her arms and hands. The crown does look much better but I agree with what was said above. The hair needs to indent where the crown hits and curve out away from the edge of that indent so it looks like the crown is pressing on the hair and not floating on top of it. I think crowns are pretty heavy
AH HA! I think I figured out at least part of the problem. Sorry but for some reason this predicament wouldn't leave me alone. I hope you don't mind but I swiped your image and pulled it into Photoshop. You see, painting hair is sorta my thing - in Photoshop that is. In DAZ hair can kick my behind quite quickly. lol! But I thought maybe if I painted the hair how I thought it should look, it would help me figure out what's going on, so that's what I did.
Now this was just "rough draft" you might say but because of it I realized, it's not the crown - it's the lighting! And possibly the hair shaders.
I redrew the hair adding more shadows and hightlights especially around the crown. If you compare before and after she actually has quite a bit more hair now. lol! But you can see how the shadow around and underneath the crown helps. Plus, I added shadows under the hair around her face and again that helped give it depth. So that's when I started asking, what's the lighting set up, and what hair shaders are you using? Also did you back off the shadows in an effort to speed up rendering?
Hope this helps!
Cheers,
Kath
Thanks Kath! I will be trying this out pretty soon! :-)
Okay gang - here goes nothing, I've been putting together video tutorials on using Photoshop for PRE work. lol! I'm planning on posting them to YouTube with some of my custom brushes for Photoshop available for download on deviantART.
I'm primarily concentrating on hair and fur. Now this is taking the original textures, developing your own in photoshop then bringing them back in for use on your model. So they're only personal use, you can't use them commercially.
That project got a little sidelined when I had to reinstall Windows 10 and then of course my dad going into the hospital. But I do have all of the videos and stuff, they just need to be edited and put together. If this is what y'all are going for, I can share what I have here, if you like.
If you're going for creating hair like with Garabaldi or LAMH, then this wouldn't apply at all, so I didn't want to post anything and derail stuff. hehe!
Cheers,
Kath
I would find this useful.
Boy, you guys are just posting like bunnies this month. There are already more posts than we had at this time last month. I still need to go through and catch up on posts and look at all the renders, but thought I would put my bear up so others can see what I have done while I catch up. I followed AM's tutorial with his new wolf and everything went well. I changed a few surface settings to get the wolf the way I wanted him to look. He turned out so well that I added some woods and a knight and decided to enter him in the PC Anniversary contest. I had a few hangups when I then tried to do the same with the bear cub. I don't know if it is because he is an older model, but I had a more difficult time getting the bear cub to render after hitting him with the Iray Uber shader. Let me tell you, naked bear isn't quite the look I was going for. However, I did manage to finally get him to render and then played with his settings. There are two renders. The first one is the bear with just the Iray Uber Shader applied and only the ruins HDR for lighting. I didn't have the camera setup correctly and cut off his head, but since this was just my reference I didn't fix it before going on to the next step. I used this as my base reference to see if the changes I made actually made a difference. The second bear: I changed some of the surface settings like the surface color and the glossy layered weight as well as a few others. I added some lighting that I think helps him look a little more realistic. Now I have to find an appropriate background and add the thing he is looking at and playing with. I have Orestes Falling Leaves and Orestes Trees and thought it would make an interesting render to have my bear cub sitting amonst the trees playing with the leaves floating in the air. So, that is the scene I'm setting up and will render overnight now that I think the bear is where I want him. The only thing I don't like is how his back feet are so shiny now. I think it is a lighting issue and I will try adjusting the pose to see if that helps. Now, I'm off to catch up and see what everyone else has been doing..
Brighter this time. Used blood brushes from KeRen-R in the Gimp on the basic genesis 2 female textures. Now for more detail I guess
Thx ;). I was thinking the same thing so i tried a new environment. And i have more room for lights and other objects. Now more work on the pose and then the rest of the objects. For the texture for the carpet i used the free pixar texture library https://community.renderman.pixar.com/article/114/library-pixar-one-twenty-eight.html. They all have a bump and a normal map
Couldn't find a good single tutorial but there is a lot of info out there... I was going to make this more toony but then started getting stuck into the fur so may have to change it which is the great thing about 3D... you can just change it.
My latest cat fur :)
This came along very good, the fur is reacting nice to the environment light so thumbs up!
Some hints: The hair on the head looks a bit short to my feeling, but I don't have your reference in my mind right now. The skin surface on the paws looks very glossy, I guess the secularity is very high? The eyes look a bit strange to me, do they come like this with the bear cup? For most animals you don't see the white in the eye except they are in great fear and the irises should be almost as dark as the pupils.
I look forward seeing it in the leaves.
I experamented with the geometry editor to keep the floor the concrete I was using, while changing the rest of the tunnel to brick. Still need to mess with the specular strength.
This looks pretty good! I think you need to make the weapons less shiny. If she just got done using them on a corpse they would not be so clean and shiny
The materials challenge is really cool. Keeping up with the thread is a bit of a challenge.
I recently purchased the IDG Iray Fx Props and Shaders and have been having a lot of fun playing with these. One thing I wanted to do was to experiment with the Layered Image Editor (LIE). It is pretty amazing what you can do with this and I figured I'd show what I did. I wanted to create an electric type effect in the eyes of the actor.
This is pretty straight forward and I repeated the exercise with a different effect as well. The end result is really cool - subtle, but cool. IMHO
The image I've attached is Arabella 7 with the LIE image applied. I've also included the two LIE images I created in case someone wants to play with it more quickly (I'm assuming a save as will download the image - although not sure if the transparency will be preserved). This is the first thing I've done with the LIE and I find I'm starting to dream up more stuff to do with it. When looking through the user gallery, it seems like it is the little touches that really transform an image from average to really eye-catching. Love these challenges.
Now I have to learn about geometry shells.
Hope this helps or inspires.
Thanks Sonja for the great advice, I think you right as I was reading your comments.... I looked at the woman and she is kinda ridged almost no expression so I will def be tweeking her and the dragon to cause he is certently in bad need of color.
The fur length is the way AM did the fur. All I did was export the geometry that he had in place. I could lengthen the fur, but the reference photos I grabbed from google all had the fur for cubs at about that length. I'm guessing their fur doesn't lengthen and thicken up until they are older. However, even the full grown bear has shorter fur on the top of the head. From what I can tell with a google search, AM did a spot on job with his cub. I'm not happy with how shiny his feet are either. I thought it might be the lighting, but I'll play with the specularity settings and see if that makes a difference. His eyes are how they are on the texture map. I haven't ever played with modifying a texture map, but it is something on my DAZ todo list. I may have to see what I can do if there isn't a eye option that I like in the materials section. They are kind of dark and I don't think they were quite that dark in the 3Delight version which means my settings may have impacted the eyes as AM doesn't have the bear parts split up the same as most of his newer models. I don't know if I can set new materials on the bear, but that may be an option so that I can split the body from the eyes. I'll have to look into that. It isn't something I've played with yet.
I don't have an updated render yet. I managed to crash DS last night. I think I discovered just how many resources my computer can handle before it screams "NO MORE!!!" Even though I had the bear saved, apparently, the geometry has to be exported each time you load your file. At the moment, DS doesn't keep a copy of the exported geometry anywhere. That may changed as AM does more work on it, but currently, I haven't discovered a way to save it and when I crashed last night I lost the geometry. It does look like all of my settings were saved, though, so I don't have to start completely from scratch.
I've attached a few bear cub reference photos that I found on Google. The last one is so close to my pose that I'm lucky to have it as a reference. It was totally coincidental, too, as I had my pose (one that came with the bear with slight modification) set before I found it.