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Bryce has metaballs. In fact, Bryce trees are made from metaballs. You may find it easier to do this with Bryce
And when you least expect her, there she is!!! :) I'll look into that, @Chohole! If I have problems with it, I know who to ask! Thanks so much!
I spent most of last night trying to get DS working in Linux again. I'm determined to get completely away from Windows again soon. I had gotten almost completely away and was using Linux exclusively for the longest time before I got lured into giving DAZ Studio a try. Well, now I've finally managed to get DS 4.9 working in Linux! Yay!!! There are a few problems to work out still, but it works and I got my first renders out of it last night in Iray! I haven't downloaded and installed much content yet as I can only manually download and install via DIM right now, but it works. I have to try to Connect working at some point probably. For now, manual download and install with DIM works fine. Sonja, you should be proud of me as I'm creating categories for everything I install before downloading the next batch! It will be a slow process, but I'm excited to finally get it working. I have no idea if I'll manage to get Bryce up and running on Linux.
So, here is a basic Iray render from the miniscule amount of content I've installed so far:
I like the way his skin looks in this lighting, and the pose is very natural - very balanced. His feet look prticularly good!
- Greg
Thanks. I like the lighting, too. At first, I thought it might be too much, but I really do like how his skin looks, too. I had only installed the G3 Essentials so there weren't many base poses to work with. Luckily, I like posing and I'm getting fairly good at it. I had to do some major tweaking on the feet and toes.
Afraid there may not be any more images from me for awhile from inside Linux. I thought I'd upgrade my graphics drivers as I wasn't using the latest ones and managed to lose my xserver. No xserver, no GUI and no DS. I have to see about fixing it over the next few days. First, I have figure out what it is I did as I have no graphical interface, at all, now, and I have to do any and all fixes from the terminal. It's been a long time since my old dos days when it was all mostly terminal run stuff! There have been a few changes since then. So, I'm switching back and forth between systems again.
Ugh it would be nice if stuff would just, I don't know, work with everything lol. I know I know asking for the moon...
Love the render though and love the pose as well - I just decided that I am going to learn to pose and pose well, and I am going to save all of my poses. It takes me just as long to find a decent pose as it does to actually just do the pose so I might as well do them myself. Of course if I want pin ups or muscle man poses I am all set....
And I AM proud of you! I think you will love having categories once its done. Its getting it done that is such a major pain lol.
I love doing my own posing. There's nothing wrong with using purchased poses and they are a great start for working toward another pose, I do get a great deal of satisfaction from doing a pose from scratch. One thing I do try to do every time I make a pose is to go through and setup a mirror pose. It is literally just a couple of mouse clicks to do and then save, but it really is worth it. I, also, try to make sure that I save a Scene Subset of each pose. That way I can always go back and break up the poses later, if I want, and save out just part of the pose for partial poses similar to what i13 does with all of her poses. Because sometimes I'll do all this work on a pose and find out I've made a really good hand pose or something that would work out well on it's own or in another pose. I love when that happens.
Great idea. Right now I am converting all of my premade poses across generations. Then I will get started on doing the stuff that I need from there.
I agree with Greg, the pose looks particularly good. You've got skills for it for sure! :D I often see poses where the feet don't look like they are firmly rested on the ground or the character looks off ballance (as he pointed out), with yours he looks very natural and realisticly posed.
Have you considred making a pose pack to sell? You may already be a vendor, if so, forgive me for not knowing, I'm still pretty new here. lol Also, how do you set up a mirror pose?
Ah, no, not a vendor! Maybe someday. I'm actually working on a pose pack for AM's Wolf 2. I'll be finished with that soon. I have both a pose pack that will be released as a freebie available on ShareCG and I'll list that in the Freebies forum when that is finished. Sonja and a couple of others have been nice enough to agree to test them out for me when I'm ready. I'll probably post here, too, when they are done to see if anyone else wants to test them out before I upload them. I, also, have a pose pack that I'm putting together with the possible intention of pitching to DAZ. I haven't completely decided on that yet. But, if I do, the pack will also include my LAMH presets I've done and exported for each of the poses for use in Iray so that those who like working with the wolf in Iray, but don't want to do all of the work to getting the fur to look good won't have to do quite as much work to get it there. I do really like posing. Unfortunately, I've heard that is one of the types of sets that vendors don't make a lot of money creating. So, if I were to be a vendor for poses it would mostly be a part time thing for poses I'm already working on because I need them myself. One never knows about these things.
But, thank you for the nice comments on my posing. It is nice when others can tell the extra work that went in to creating something.
So, I don't know how many, if any, looked at my entry for the Suicide Squad contest, but I had fun with it. I did have to upload it with some mistakes. I've decided that I liked it so well that I'm fixing the mistakes and I'll be rendering it again before putting it up in my gallery. I thought it would be fun, though, to show you a before and after of Harley's outfit. I used a lot of @DestinysGarden's tricks and tips in this and I even learned a few things on my own. The top is from Day by Day Mada and Sarsa. The underwear (yep, you read correctly!) came from Horror Movie Patient for Genesis by Ravenhair. The skin for Harley came from RawArt's The Clown Clan and, yes, I had to go and fiddle with the texture on that, too. I really had a blast doing this entry and I'm so glad that @RawArt kind of challenged others to enter. I'm not sure I would have tried entering otherwise as I'd never even heard of the Suicide Squad before this contest came about.
Harley Quinn Before
Harley Quinn After
edit: I can't find the belt so I don't remember which one it was so no before picture. If I happen to find it, I'll show you what that looked like, too, but I just used shaders on that, no special texturing.
Harley's skin. I started with the Clown Clan texture that was closest to Harley's makeup. First problem is that The Clown Clan is for M4 and V4 and I was using Genesis 2 Female for my figure. I had to convert the skin from V4 to G2F. First step, load the materials onto the V4 base figure and save the material as a .duf for use with later figures. This is pretty easy and DS does all of the work here. I just have to load the material onto V4 then go to: File>Save As>Material Preset. To use on G2F, select Genesis 2 Female in the scene tab and the surface tab. It should autoload onto the figure. It will look really wonky!
Harley Quinn Face with Base UV:
Next you have to go to the Parameters Tab and almost all the way at the bottom you'll find UV set. Select that and change the UV to V4. You will need the V4 UV. I got mine in Victoria 4 for Genesis 2 Female by MallenLane, a product specifically for that purpose.
Harley Quinn Face with V4 UV:
Next problem is that I wanted to do the smeared paint look that Harley has in part of the movie. While RawArt has a smeared paint look it wasn't quite like the version that Harley sport so I had to go into GIMP and do a little creative tinkering with the texture for the face. I added some blue eye shadow for one eye and red for the other. Then I did some smearing around the eyes and down around the lips with the Smudge tool. It was kind of fun, actually, to mess up the makeup. Just make sure to do the additional makeup onto a new layer. If you mess up, it's fairly easy to go back and start over and you haven't really messed up your original image. As an additional failsafe, the eyes were done on one layer and the lips were done on their own layer. When I was done, I saved the face texture under a new name in a different directory because I didn't want to accidentally mess up the original face texture image. RawArt does great work and I'll definitely be using his textures again in the future without my rather dubios talent for messing up his paint job!
Harley's skin before:
Harley's skin after:
And that's it for the skin. Tomorrow, I'll show how I did the outfit.
The Outfit!
The shirt was done with both a new texture map and an opacity map. First, I'm using Iray so all surfaces had to be hit with the Iray Uber Shader as the textures were designed for 3Delight. The Day by Day shirt has a texture map in the Base Color. I simply grabbed a copy of that and took it into GIMP to use as my template. So, first I had to do was change the color so that I had that bit of red at the top of the shirt and sleeves. I used the Free Select tool and traced around each of the parts of the shirt one by one. I created a new layer and then Bucket filled each section with red.
When I was done with each of the parts of the shirt that needed to be red, I added a new layer and simply filled that layer in with all white. Next I added a Text box and picked a suitable font for the 'Daddy's Lil Monster' that is on the front of Harley's shirt. Since I wasn't using any part of the original template, I needed to add in some texture to Harley's outfit. Luckily, GIMP has a filter called Clothify which I believe came installed in GIMP originally. I don't believe it is one of the filters I downloaded. I simply ran that filter on the my image and added a texture to my image.
I saved that and exported it out as a jpg before moving on to the next step.
Opacity mask:
So, my next step is to get rid of the bottom of the shirt, make it look ragged and add some rips. For this, I used the same basic idea as the new texture map. I used Free Select to outline each part of the bottom on the shirt and, on new layer, filled those sections in with black. I have to admit that I reused the white layer I had made for the shirt texture. Instead, I should have opened another new layer and filled that in with white since most opacity maps are usually black and white. The black part is the part that you don't want to show and the white part is for the part you do want to show. The filled in black on the first layer got rid of the bottom of the shirt. Then I used brushes from Ron's Ripped Fabric to add in some rips on my shirt in black. Everywhere there was a new black rip, a hole with the rip would show up on my shirt.
After all of that, I ended up with a new shirt. If anyone has this shirt, I've included the actual images I made so you can duplicate Harley's shirt should you so wish. Keep in mind that this is messy and was in now way intended to be distributed. It was just for my project. If I get ambitious, I may clean it up and update it later since I am in the process of fixing my mistakes and plan to do a proper render to upload to my gallery so I really should polish up my textures. There are definite mistakes in the textures and I could have done much better if I hadn't been under the gun of a fast approaching deadline.
Texture for the shirt:
Opacity Mask for shirt:
The Shorts:
For the shorts, I did the same as for the shirt. I selected the part of the underwear I wanted to be blue and bucket filled that onto a new layer. Then, I selected around the part I wanted to be red and bucket filled that layer. I thne had a new layer under all of that which was bucket filled to black.
Texture Map for the shorts:
Final Complete Outfit:
So, there's what I did. I hope I explained that well. If anyone has any questions, feel free to ask. As for the texture maps, feel free to do what you want with those, use them, improve on them. If I do manage to improve the texture maps and polish them up, I'll post them for anyone who might wish to use them for their own Harley Quinn renders.
How did my thread get buried at the bottom of page two! :) Too long since I posted anything, that's how! I was out this morning and came home determined to do @TabascoJack's space tutorial, but I got distracted by what is in the latest beta version of GIMP for Windows build. I had an image that I finished last night and thought I'd see what the NIK Collection could do for it. I also found some changes in GIMP that I liked. There is more control over the Vignetting. And, there have been a couple of changes to the Cartoon filter that comes with GIMP. All for the better, I think. Turns out it can do quite a lot. Here are some of the results of my tinkering.
Original Render
NIKColors ( I do kind of like how this one turned out.)
NIKSilverEffects (My favorite and the one I put in my gallery.)
GIMP Vignette Filter ( You can change where the center of the Vignette starts and squeeze it, rotate it, and all sorts of things! Fun!)
There was lots of stuff I still have to play with. This was just my first initial meanderings into the NIKCollection. What do you think?
Edit: Fogot to mention that this is Cole. He is one of my characters off the Leo 7 base figure. Kind of cute isn't he?
And, for anyone with eagle eyes who might have thought they recognized that character on Cole's T-shirt, that would be Stan one those great @MortemVetus characters. I made a couple of really small changes to his face, but he's mostly original with my own expression (love those expression dials) underneath all that paint. I thought I would share what the original render of Stan looked like before I put him on the T-shirt. The original is a .png so that I can use him as a transparency. I used L.I.E. to apply him to the T-shirt. I'm not quite sure how to get rid of that slight shadow in the background while rendering. Luckily, I didn't have to clean it up in post because it didn't show up against the materials in the shirt.
I kind of thought Stan needed his own page in my gallery so I made a background for him and also made some slight adjustments with one of the NIK filters. This is what he looked like when I was finished:
I have a full body render of Stan that I'm playing with. I'll post that when I done figuring out what I want to do with him.
Nice work, @Knittingmommy! You can work on my tutorial later.
Thanks, @TabascoJack. I get so easily distracted at times! :)
Looks like I forgot to put up the image that went through the GIMP cartoon filter so here it is:
NICE! Don't you just love the Nik Collection!?
Cole looks great and I really like the different effects you've created here.
Gorgeous! And smart on the t shirt design too! I think I am way down there too lol. Been too busy to do more than load my new goodies.
@divamakeup Yes, I love what I've seen so far. There is a lot to play around with and I barely touched the surface yesterday.
Sonja - Thanks, I think the T-shirt turned out really well. I may have to do something similar more often as it turned out better than I expected. I hadn't done anything like that before.
I get so easily distracted with all of the cool toys to play with inside DS, but I also love playing with Filter Forge and I've been learning more and more how to use it effectively with my renders. I did some playing around with more of the filters I've found and I'm starting to do things in layers like use one filter on an image for the lines, save it, then load up the saved file and use another filter. It is amazing what you can do when you layer filters on an image like that. Here are some experiments with my Cole image. I've included the names of the filters for those who have Filter Forge and want to try them out. Don't be afraid to mix them up. You'll have to save after each filter and reload or Filter Forge just moves onto the never newer filter and deletes what it did with the previous filter. So, if you see something you want to keep, save your work and then reload before trying to apply a secondary filter. Sorry if anyone is getting tired of seeing him, but I find it does help to see the differences if you use the same picture for experiments. Next round of experiments will have to use a new image. :)
Edge And Tones
Artrification
Artrifiction + Edge And Tones
Artrifiction + Edge And Tones + Sketch My Pic Up
Artrifiction + Edge And Tones + Aquarelle
Artrifiction + Edge And Tones + Paint With Texture
Artrifiction + Edge And Tones + Paint With Texture + Colored Pencil
Artrifiction + Edge And Tones+ Colored Pencil
Now that I know a few things I like, I'm going to have to do some renders with NPR images specifically in mind. It turns out I'm really liking some of the things I can do with it and I never even knew. Of course, thanks for that goes to @Algovinican for opening my eyes to all of the possibilities! So, thanks, Greg! I'm having fun with it.
Excellent! I sure do love me some NPR!
Now that you've gotten a little more experience with it, I think you may be ready to take the next step and include some masks in your workflow. Masks can be used to identify and differentiate areas of the image. Different parameters for the filters (or different filters altogether) can then be dynamically applied to these masked areas. I make use of multiple edge detection masks, saturation masks, brightness masks, fine detail masks, low detail masks, z-depth masks, etc.
Keep 'em coming!
- Greg
@Algovincian I'll have to do a little research on that. I'm not all that familiar with using masks. I have, at least, heard of them and know, somewhat, what they are. :) Thanks for the encouragement. I'm really starting to like NPR the more I explore it. I do still like the realistic stuff, too, so I'm not giving that up. I'll just have to try and do an even distribution of styles! :)
I use z-depth masks on occasion - you can render them with iray canvases. Drop the exposure down and use the thresold layer to get the depth you want. Then use that as the mask.
The tail end of this video show him doing it in GIMP. (It also makes me want to get VUE, but that keeps falling outside of my budget).
Thanks, @TabascoJack! I'll take a look at the video. I appreciate the link. I have the older version of VUE which I bought here. I got on sale way back when I first started 2 years ago. I still haven't gotten anything done with it much. I keep going in and playing with it, but I haven't actually made anything worth posting. They do have a newer version of view that is free and I've played with that. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles of the paid version, but nice to play with to get started. If I can ever figure it out and manage to get some good landscapes out of it, I might consider upgrading, but until then that isn't something I'll be getting. It is definitely something I would like to get good at using, though.
Carrara also has metaballs and caustics for the bubbles. Daz should promote the capabilities of Bryce and Carrara more, rather than send people to non-Daz products.
@ diomede I have Carrara, too, but still have not figured out how to use it well, yet. I keep thinking I'm going to work on that, but I haven't yet. I was thinking of giving it a go again this month. I've been lurking a little in the Carrara forums again. So, we'll see.
@Isidorn reminded me recently that I've been doing this for about 2 years now. Of course, I had to figure out exactly when I started and when my anniversary is. I created my DAZ account on July 31, 2014 according to the timestamp which is on my forum page. I think I must have been lurking for quite awhile because I didn't make my first post to the forums until September 30, 2014. I actually made my first order of freebies and downloaded DS almost a month after I heard about the software because my first order is dated August 23, 2014.
Five days later, my second order included the PC+ membership so it didn't take me long to get sucked in after playing with the software. I know I was doing a lot of research at the time about creating book covers so there was probably a lot of visiting different websites and different software companies trying to figure out if DS would help me with that before I decided to download it.
I still have my first saved file which I must not have rendered. I had no lights in the scene and no clothes either! Just V4 with her painted on bikini and some hair standing in the Multiplane Cyclorama which was free. I had no props to speak of and no clothing! I made my very first image in DS which I posted in my gallery on September 19, 2014. I had created this character from my book and I really liked how he turned out. I thought I had saved it as a Character Preset or a Scene Subset, but, when I opened the file later, all I had was the outfit he was wearing and no character to be found. I wasn't doing very well at learning how to use the software effectively. I did try to recreate my character, but he wasn't quite the same. I posted that first image, along with the attempt at recreating my character, just a little shy of one month after I started playing with DS. I must make note that I was still enough of a newbie that I didn't understand the difference between using the Perspective View to shoot a still versus using an actual camera. Things got much better for me once I discovered lights and cameras!
Lost Character:
Second Attempt:
I keep working on this character and he has changed a bit over the last two years. For one, I got rid of that hair which was never going to be permanent anyway. I've been working on a LAMH preset for him. I'm not sure if I'll use LAMH for his hair as well or if I'll try making a hair for him. I'll reveal his updated version once I've finished him.
Here is one of my earlier renders which shows just how much I needed to learn. It definitely has all of the earmarks of a newbie render. :) The clothing has that shrink wrapped effect (no Fit Control back then!), but I was trying my best to figure out the lighting stuff. The posing wasn't great as I hadn't really deviated from pose presets yet and hadn't discovered how to tweak poses so that body parts weren't clipping into other body parts.
Once Iray happened, my 3D world truly opened up. I'm having a blast and I think my work has gotten better once I started understanding lights and investing in some good quality light sets and learning how to use them.
Of course, it wouldn't be a very good anniversary post if I didn't post my most liked image to date. It is one that I'm quite proud of and it won second place in the December 2015 New User Contest. I learned a lot doing that image including my first attempts at postworking. It made it on the Banner in the Gallery and stayed there for almost month before being knocked off. It still gets a like, occasionally. To date it has 46 likes. I hadn't expected to get on the banner, but it was a very nice feeling. I don't expect I'll get on the banner again, but I might be surprised by some future render.
I've learned a lot these last two years and I expect to learn even more over the next two. I have found that I love posing, especially animals. I have found that I enjoy creating characters of my own and I hope to expand on that in the future. I've found that while I do enjoy doing renders that look very realistic, I'm also enjoying the forays I'm making in the world of NPR. Looking back at some of the files I saved, but never finished, I have discovered a few gems that I think had good starts, but I left them because I didn't have the skills to fully bring out their potential. I think I have those skill now and I may revisit some those earlier saved files and attempt to bring them to life in a render. I have some long term projects that I hope to finish this year and actually get some renders out of them.
I think I've come a long way. Hopefully, my work has gotten better.
What I want to accomplish this year in the world of 3D:
More modeling in Blender and Hexagon
Create my own skins
Finish my big Diner scene that I've been working on for the last year. Stay tuned for sneak peaks soon.
Finish my big underwater scene I've been working on for the last year. Stay tuned for sneak peaks soon.
Finish modeling the outfits I've been working on and actually get them in DS and rigged!
Finish my wolf poses. That's almost done and should be finished this month.
Get better at using 3Delight
Learn how to use Bryce and Carrara.
To all the friends I've made here in the forums, thanks for making me feel welcome and for all of your encouragement. I wouldn't have had near as much fun without becoming friends with you guys, too. And, a special thanks to Isidorn for becoming one of my best friends. This last year has been so much more fun sharing it with you!
I've only known you for about 8 months - but it's been a pleasure getting to know you, seeing your work, and learning. I look forward to the next year as well!
I love the beast man - he's a really cool character. And I can definitely see improvement in your work (even just in the past four months that I've been here).
PS - I really love that winter scene! It's magical and enchanting!