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Aug 2016 New User Contest "General Render" (WIP-THREAD)

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  • IceDragonArtIceDragonArt Posts: 12,548
    kanegs said:
    Knittingmommy said:

    Yeah, I agree with Linwelly.  My sons' sensei is constantly telling them that their belly button needs to be facing what they are attacking.  Your character's belly button is fighting someone off to the left!  That being said, I love what you did with the lighting.  Great scene!

    Thanks for the suggestion. I did adjust the angle so his lead foot is pointing at the dragon (his belly button is still off to the side).

    That's a great piece of information.  Filing away for future use...

  • KnittingmommyKnittingmommy Posts: 8,191
    Ice Dragon Art said:

    Wow lots of good stuff going on here!  Was in bed with the flu for almost a week so I am probably not going to get my second one done in time.  But I will enter the first one as is and hope for the best. 

    I got distracted with lots of stuff and never even got started really on my first one.  Looks like I'll be sitting this month out completely.

     

    Ice Dragon Art said:
    kanegs said:
    Knittingmommy said:

    Yeah, I agree with Linwelly.  My sons' sensei is constantly telling them that their belly button needs to be facing what they are attacking.  Your character's belly button is fighting someone off to the left!  That being said, I love what you did with the lighting.  Great scene!

    Thanks for the suggestion. I did adjust the angle so his lead foot is pointing at the dragon (his belly button is still off to the side).

    That's a great piece of information.  Filing away for future use...

    Well, it works for karate, kobedo (weapons), and batto (sword).  I assume the same is true for other styles of fighting as well.  

  • Shinji Ikari 9thShinji Ikari 9th Posts: 1,166
    Shinji Ikari 9th said:
    tubbyfalls1 said:
    Defenistrat said:
    Shinji Ikari 9th said:
    Defenistrat said:
    Shinji Ikari 9th said:
    Ice Dragon Art said:
    Shinji Ikari 9th said:

    Finely found a set that my crue could be in and rendered all at once.

    The headlamp is washing out the rest of the scene and the only thing that really jumps out is the stone dragon on the left. You might consider getting rid of that entirely and finding a good fill light to light the rest of the area so we can see the dragon and your crew in action. And it does look like two of your crew have decided to take a break!

    Here's version b of this one.

    I agree with Ice Dragon that this is an improvement. I think you should cotinue to adjust your lighting to bring more focust to your dragon (I actually didn't notice the dragon in version a the first few times I saw the image, because it was so dark). Unfortunately, you also know have the opposite problem of your characters being too dark.

    Typically when we think of light phyically, we think of just one light source, like the sun, or the lamp. However, light actually bounces off of all the surfaces around us, which means that while light is strongest from you single light source (if there is such a thing), it's also being bounced off of all the walls. This is why our shadows (in the real world) are not just completely black, there is still light hitting the objects in our shadows. This is called ambient light.

    Unfortunately, 3Delight does not model light physically accurate. It just makes light and shadows, there's no ray tracing. To me, it looks like you have a single light source on the dragon that you are relying on. True, there are the flames... but I don't think they are emitting light realistically, and it might be worth supplimenting them with some spot lights.

    Setting up ambient light is kind of annoying, and for me was one of the biggest dissapointments to learn about when I first started studying 3D rendering. However, the Alchemy Chasm scene in Daz Studio has a really good example of an Ambient Light Setup, and I think might be worth checking out for the soft ambient glow of fire in a cavernous room.

    Aaaaand, you might have already known all this. I'm just assuming we're all noobs here...

    Here's version c of this one. I've been using Iray on it, and haven't a clue when I last rendered something with 3delight.

     

    We'll, look at my face. There's egg all over it. ;) It took me a long time to think of lighting from a physical standpoint to the way that 3Delight does it. And now I am struggling to understand Iray. It's strange to me that you are not getting more ambient light in your scene. Maybe you are using an HDRI? but it looks like your scene lights are working... On the other hand, maybe you want the characters to be dark silhouettes. In that case I would offer the advice that others have given for other images, and at least outline them with a rim light. (btw, like your user name. I'm waiting for the copy of NGE Platinum I found on Ebay to come in the mail... Hope I didn't end up buying a bootleg (fingerscrossed))

    2 options if you are trying to lighten the whole scene: Check your render settings.

    A) You can adjust the "Exposure Value" on the "Tone mapping" tab (lower = lighter; higher = darker). 

    B) You could adjust the strength of the "Environment Intensity"  on the "Environment" tab (lower = darker; higher = brighter).

    Thanks for the tips. Here's version d.

    Here's a few changes from version d.  Have to come up with a title.

    august2016-5e.png
    850 x 300 - 465K
  • Shinji Ikari 9thShinji Ikari 9th Posts: 1,166
    Ice Dragon Art said:

    Wow lots of good stuff going on here!  Was in bed with the flu for almost a week so I am probably not going to get my second one done in time.  But I will enter the first one as is and hope for the best. 

    Good to see you back Sonja. Hope you get back to rendering soon.

  • kanegskanegs Posts: 80

    Final (???) adjustments completed.

    Thanks for all your suggestions!

    dragon13.png
    1920 x 1080 - 3M
  • IceDragonArtIceDragonArt Posts: 12,548
    Shinji Ikari 9th said:
    Ice Dragon Art said:

    Wow lots of good stuff going on here!  Was in bed with the flu for almost a week so I am probably not going to get my second one done in time.  But I will enter the first one as is and hope for the best. 

    Good to see you back Sonja. Hope you get back to rendering soon.

    Thanks!  I've been doing some easy stuff mostly drag and drop on some new stuff.  But the second render I had in the works involves god rays etc which I've never tried before and I've not used the godrays props I am planning on using before.  And its my daughters birthday tomorrow so lots of family stuff after work.

    Shinji Ikari 9th said:
    Shinji Ikari 9th said:
    tubbyfalls1 said:

     

    Thanks for the tips. Here's version d.

    Here's a few changes from version d.  Have to come up with a title.

    This has come a long way since I first saw it!

     

    kanegs said:

    Final (???) adjustments completed.

    Thanks for all your suggestions!

    I like the use of the light coming through the arch to light the scene.

  • IceDragonArtIceDragonArt Posts: 12,548
    edited August 2016

    Here is my second one.  Its not quite where I want it to be but this is going to have to be the final for my second entry.  I will probably do the post work I had in mind for this once the contest is over.  Its a little dark but any lighter and it just doesn't convey the mood nearly as well.  Again, doesn't matter I'm out of time so this will have to do.  Feel free to give some more suggestions though since I will be working on this one some more once the contest is over.

    Heartbroken.png
    1186 x 948 - 2M
    Post edited by IceDragonArt on
  • LinwellyLinwelly Posts: 5,802
    Ice Dragon Art said:

    Here is my second one.  Its not quite where I want it to be but this is going to have to be the final for my second entry.  I will probably do the post work I had in mind for this once the contest is over.  Its a little dark but any lighter and it just doesn't convey the mood nearly as well.  Again, doesn't matter I'm out of time so this will have to do.  Feel free to give some more suggestions though since I will be working on this one some more once the contest is over.

    Actually yes the contest is over soon, so everyone remember to post in the entries!

    I would like to see a bit more light on the acting people here as well, some general environment light (whatever that is in iray) and the flames and ember look a bit off to me. Everything else is looking good!

  • IceDragonArtIceDragonArt Posts: 12,548
    Linwelly said:
    Ice Dragon Art said:

    Here is my second one.  Its not quite where I want it to be but this is going to have to be the final for my second entry.  I will probably do the post work I had in mind for this once the contest is over.  Its a little dark but any lighter and it just doesn't convey the mood nearly as well.  Again, doesn't matter I'm out of time so this will have to do.  Feel free to give some more suggestions though since I will be working on this one some more once the contest is over.

    Actually yes the contest is over soon, so everyone remember to post in the entries!

    I would like to see a bit more light on the acting people here as well, some general environment light (whatever that is in iray) and the flames and ember look a bit off to me. Everything else is looking good!

    Thanks Linwelly!  Ya I was hoping that the god rays would light up his face more but its the first time I have used that set so I am sure if I fiddle with it a bit more I will figure it out.  And I wanted to add some blood and grime to them both to show that she died in battle. I will be working on this one some more once the contest is over.  This is one of those renders that I have actually had in my head for over 6 months but didn't feel I had the knowledge to pull it off then.  Its close this time around though...

  • frank0314frank0314 Posts: 13,439

    Friendly reminder. Today is the last day to post your entry.

  • NeilV_1NeilV_1 Posts: 442

    By my reckoning, there are only a couple of hours left to post your entries for the contest.

    So don't delay and post away.

    smiley

  • HollokoHolloko Posts: 75
    edited September 2016

    I just haven't had much time to work on this this month. Added the toon effect. Boat ended up quite flat because the surfaces are too smooth to get much differentiation in the colors. I've been playing around with toonycam pro to use with the visual style shaders, but I haven't been very thrilled with my results - especially on my people. I'll have to keep playing with it some more next time.

    lost an eye pirate with sky.png
    1920 x 1080 - 3M
    Post edited by Chohole on
  • DefenistratDefenistrat Posts: 68
    edited September 2016

    I don't know if the time for entries officially closes at midnight, or when the moderators say that the contest is closed. So for the record, I submitted my image at 12:17 and then updated it at 12:49 Sept 1.

    So, for the sake of wanting to rant somewhere where others will understand, this image was kicked my trash this month. I had decided that I was going to submit early so I started on my idea right away. Almost immediately, after I started building the scene, I realized that it was too much for my poor little 512 MB Graphics Cards. I spent a lot of time adding to the scene with the visibility of the rest of the scene turned off, and would then export the characters as scene subsets and pose them individually before importing them back into the scene. Unfortunately, you can only do so much on a scene without tweaking it as a whole. As soon as I turned everything one (esspecially those soldiers wearing the Galactic Armour), everything just turned to a crawl. I wanted to do more with the scene based on the feedback I got earlier, but changing anything was so slow that I decided not to change anything compositionally. 

    I had tried adding a few more things, like freckles on the girl, but it wasn't looking right and I was running out of time, so a couple of nights ago I decided to render and submit. Unfortunately... something... wasn't working right. The tank in the far far back (it's not even clear what it is, I am thinking) was rendering solid black. I'm not sure what the issue was but after trying a few things, I found that it rendered just fine if I removed a few other things out of the scene. I figured... maybe my machine couldn't handle everything, so I decided that I was going to have to render the scene in chunks.

    Last night, I went through a fairly painstaking process of breaking the scene into far-back, back, mid, and foreground, and rendering them all individually. It wasn't too painful, except that my machine is churning so slow that it took 2-3 seconds for any mouse clicks to register (ok... actually it was really painful). It took all night. As an added bonus, I rendered each layer with les color levels, which I had hoped would add more atmosphere.

    So this evening, after getting the kids to bed, I sit down to start compiling all the layers. After loading the second layer, I realize with horror that I had saved all the renders as JPEGs instead of PNGs! I wasted a bunch of time trying to work around it, but it was looking like crap. I had to re-render all the layers again. Fortunately... I had saved each of the different layers as individual scenes, "just in case". Unfortunately, I didn't save them all right before or right after I had rendered, so each layer still had a little bit of redo to get ready to render again.

    I think I must have been in a panic, because for some reason I had the distinct impression that I couldn't render with the Toony Cam and have a transparent background. So I turned off all the outlines in Toony Cam Pro, and rendered with a transparent background. In retrospect... this makes no sense... but it sure seemed like the thing to do at the time. So I rendered everything individually, with the plan of rendering the outlines seperataly and overlaying them on the image. The outlines took the longest, mostly because right where the robot's foot looks like it's on the window sill, with a fire escape directly to the right, are all of the teeth of the Genesis 3 character that I have with opacity set to 0 so that the robot can be holding an eye. Even though they're not visible, Toony Cam spends a REALLY long time on that section calculating all the normals and where it would draw lines if I had them turned on. So, yes, it's calculating for something it's not going to draw.

    At 10:50, I started rendering the outlines and started playin solitare. It wasn't until just after 11:30 that I saw that in the file I was rendering on, I had not turned off the outlines for the hidden Genesis 3 male that I was using for the eye. The render had taken 40 minutes already, and was only starting to render the outlines for those darn invisible teeth!

    Now in an even greater panic, I immediately stopped the render, and went through the slow grind of digging down to my Genesis 3 character and turning off all the outlines except for the eye and starting another render. Then I opened up GIMP and compiled all the other layers in aticipation of the outlines. Then I started hunting down background processes on my computer, killing them, hoping it might free up enough CPU to speed up my render in time. But it was no use. At exactly midnight, all the outlines were rendered except for a small rectangular chunk just to the right of the robot's foot where all the lines for the fire escape are. It would have been very obvious if it was missing, and at this poing, I figured if the deadline is midnight, then I was already late anyway.

    I think I finally posted my image at 12:07. I sighed in releaf and sat back in my chair to admire it. That's when I realized that in an attempt to remove the white pixels that cling to the event horizon of opacity and transparency in Daz PNGs, I had removed too much from the edges of the character in the front. In just a few places around the character, not completely around, but just in a few places, there was a small, pixel wide gap between the outline of the character, and the coloring of the character, and the background would shine through that gap. I tried to ignore it, tried to go to bed, but I just couldn't. I had gone to far. So I calmly redid the layer mask for the foreground layer, and resubmitted the image at 12:49. At that point, I figured if the image was going to be disqualified for submitting it after midnight, then it was already invalid when I submitted it at 12:07.

    Anyway, the image is not perfect... but I am DONE with it! Thanks for letting me rant!

    (takes a quick look at his image and sees something new that he's not entirely happy about...)
    No! Walk away... walk away!

    funandgames2.png
    1920 x 1080 - 3M
    Post edited by Chohole on
  • KnittingmommyKnittingmommy Posts: 8,191

    Well, I never did end up getting my render together this month.  I do want to wish all of you the best of luck with the contest.  I saw some really great renders in the wip thread!  Good luck, everyone!

  • HollokoHolloko Posts: 75
    edited September 2016
    Defenistrat said:

    I don't know if the time for entries officially closes at midnight, or when the moderators say that the contest is closed. So for the record, I submitted my image at 12:17 and then updated it at 12:49 Sept 1.

    So, for the sake of wanting to rant somewhere where others will understand, this image was kicked my trash this month. I had decided that I was going to submit early so I started on my idea right away. Almost immediately, after I started building the scene, I realized that it was too much for my poor little 512 MB Graphics Cards. I spent a lot of time adding to the scene with the visibility of the rest of the scene turned off, and would then export the characters as scene subsets and pose them individually before importing them back into the scene. Unfortunately, you can only do so much on a scene without tweaking it as a whole. As soon as I turned everything one (esspecially those soldiers wearing the Galactic Armour), everything just turned to a crawl. I wanted to do more with the scene based on the feedback I got earlier, but changing anything was so slow that I decided not to change anything compositionally. 

    I had tried adding a few more things, like freckles on the girl, but it wasn't looking right and I was running out of time, so a couple of nights ago I decided to render and submit. Unfortunately... something... wasn't working right. The tank in the far far back (it's not even clear what it is, I am thinking) was rendering solid black. I'm not sure what the issue was but after trying a few things, I found that it rendered just fine if I removed a few other things out of the scene. I figured... maybe my machine couldn't handle everything, so I decided that I was going to have to render the scene in chunks.

    Last night, I went through a fairly painstaking process of breaking the scene into far-back, back, mid, and foreground, and rendering them all individually. It wasn't too painful, except that my machine is churning so slow that it took 2-3 seconds for any mouse clicks to register (ok... actually it was really painful). It took all night. As an added bonus, I rendered each layer with les color levels, which I had hoped would add more atmosphere.

    So this evening, after getting the kids to bed, I sit down to start compiling all the layers. After loading the second layer, I realize with horror that I had saved all the renders as JPEGs instead of PNGs! I wasted a bunch of time trying to work around it, but it was looking like crap. I had to re-render all the layers again. Fortunately... I had saved each of the different layers as individual scenes, "just in case". Unfortunately, I didn't save them all right before or right after I had rendered, so each layer still had a little bit of redo to get ready to render again.

    I think I must have been in a panic, because for some reason I had the distinct impression that I couldn't render with the Toony Cam and have a transparent background. So I turned off all the outlines in Toony Cam Pro, and rendered with a transparent background. In retrospect... this makes no sense... but it sure seemed like the thing to do at the time. So I rendered everything individually, with the plan of rendering the outlines seperataly and overlaying them on the image. The outlines took the longest, mostly because right where the robot's foot looks like it's on the window sill, with a fire escape directly to the right, are all of the teeth of the Genesis 3 character that I have with opacity set to 0 so that the robot can be holding an eye. Even though they're not visible, Toony Cam spends a REALLY long time on that section calculating all the normals and where it would draw lines if I had them turned on. So, yes, it's calculating for something it's not going to draw.

    At 10:50, I started rendering the outlines and started playin solitare. It wasn't until just after 11:30 that I saw that in the file I was rendering on, I had not turned off the outlines for the hidden Genesis 3 male that I was using for the eye. The render had taken 40 minutes already, and was only starting to render the outlines for those darn invisible teeth!

    Now in an even greater panic, I immediately stopped the render, and went through the slow grind of digging down to my Genesis 3 character and turning off all the outlines except for the eye and starting another render. Then I opened up GIMP and compiled all the other layers in aticipation of the outlines. Then I started hunting down background processes on my computer, killing them, hoping it might free up enough CPU to speed up my render in time. But it was no use. At exactly midnight, all the outlines were rendered except for a small rectangular chunk just to the right of the robot's foot where all the lines for the fire escape are. It would have been very obvious if it was missing, and at this poing, I figured if the deadline is midnight, then I was already late anyway.

    I think I finally posted my image at 12:07. I sighed in releaf and sat back in my chair to admire it. That's when I realized that in an attempt to remove the white pixels that cling to the event horizon of opacity and transparency in Daz PNGs, I had removed too much from the edges of the character in the front. In just a few places around the character, not completely around, but just in a few places, there was a small, pixel wide gap between the outline of the character, and the coloring of the character, and the background would shine through that gap. I tried to ignore it, tried to go to bed, but I just couldn't. I had gone to far. So I calmly redid the layer mask for the foreground layer, and resubmitted the image at 12:49. At that point, I figured if the image was going to be disqualified for submitting it after midnight, then it was already invalid when I submitted it at 12:07.

    Anyway, the image is not perfect... but I am DONE with it! Thanks for letting me rant!

    (takes a quick look at his image and sees something new that he's not entirely happy about...)
    No! Walk away... walk away!

    Well...bummer! Sorry you had such a difficult time. For what it's worth, I think your images are turning out great, and I wish my toons were turning out even half as good as yours. This month I totally gave up on the Toony Cam because I couldn't get it to look right and ran out of time. Keep up the good work!

    Post edited by Chohole on
  • LinwellyLinwelly Posts: 5,802
    edited September 2016

    New User Contest is closed!

    Good luck everybody!

    Post edited by Linwelly on
  • LinwellyLinwelly Posts: 5,802
    Defenistrat said:

    I don't know if the time for entries officially closes at midnight, or when the moderators say that the contest is closed. So for the record, I submitted my image at 12:17 and then updated it at 12:49 Sept 1.

    What in is is in wink, seems you had enough of panic moments to last for a while.

  • DefenistratDefenistrat Posts: 68
    Holloko said:
    Defenistrat said:

    I don't know if the time for entries officially closes at midnight, or when the moderators say that the contest is closed. So for the record, I submitted my image at 12:17 and then updated it at 12:49 Sept 1.

    So, for the sake of wanting to rant somewhere where others will understand, this image was kicked my trash this month. I had decided that I was going to submit early so I started on my idea right away. Almost immediately, after I started building the scene, I realized that it was too much for my poor little 512 MB Graphics Cards. I spent a lot of time adding to the scene with the visibility of the rest of the scene turned off, and would then export the characters as scene subsets and pose them individually before importing them back into the scene. Unfortunately, you can only do so much on a scene without tweaking it as a whole. As soon as I turned everything one (esspecially those soldiers wearing the Galactic Armour), everything just turned to a crawl. I wanted to do more with the scene based on the feedback I got earlier, but changing anything was so slow that I decided not to change anything compositionally. 

    I had tried adding a few more things, like freckles on the girl, but it wasn't looking right and I was running out of time, so a couple of nights ago I decided to render and submit. Unfortunately... something... wasn't working right. The tank in the far far back (it's not even clear what it is, I am thinking) was rendering solid black. I'm not sure what the issue was but after trying a few things, I found that it rendered just fine if I removed a few other things out of the scene. I figured... maybe my machine couldn't handle everything, so I decided that I was going to have to render the scene in chunks.

    Last night, I went through a fairly painstaking process of breaking the scene into far-back, back, mid, and foreground, and rendering them all individually. It wasn't too painful, except that my machine is churning so slow that it took 2-3 seconds for any mouse clicks to register (ok... actually it was really painful). It took all night. As an added bonus, I rendered each layer with les color levels, which I had hoped would add more atmosphere.

    So this evening, after getting the kids to bed, I sit down to start compiling all the layers. After loading the second layer, I realize with horror that I had saved all the renders as JPEGs instead of PNGs! I wasted a bunch of time trying to work around it, but it was looking like crap. I had to re-render all the layers again. Fortunately... I had saved each of the different layers as individual scenes, "just in case". Unfortunately, I didn't save them all right before or right after I had rendered, so each layer still had a little bit of redo to get ready to render again.

    I think I must have been in a panic, because for some reason I had the distinct impression that I couldn't render with the Toony Cam and have a transparent background. So I turned off all the outlines in Toony Cam Pro, and rendered with a transparent background. In retrospect... this makes no sense... but it sure seemed like the thing to do at the time. So I rendered everything individually, with the plan of rendering the outlines seperataly and overlaying them on the image. The outlines took the longest, mostly because right where the robot's foot looks like it's on the window sill, with a fire escape directly to the right, are all of the teeth of the Genesis 3 character that I have with opacity set to 0 so that the robot can be holding an eye. Even though they're not visible, Toony Cam spends a REALLY long time on that section calculating all the normals and where it would draw lines if I had them turned on. So, yes, it's calculating for something it's not going to draw.

    At 10:50, I started rendering the outlines and started playin solitare. It wasn't until just after 11:30 that I saw that in the file I was rendering on, I had not turned off the outlines for the hidden Genesis 3 male that I was using for the eye. The render had taken 40 minutes already, and was only starting to render the outlines for those darn invisible teeth!

    Now in an even greater panic, I immediately stopped the render, and went through the slow grind of digging down to my Genesis 3 character and turning off all the outlines except for the eye and starting another render. Then I opened up GIMP and compiled all the other layers in aticipation of the outlines. Then I started hunting down background processes on my computer, killing them, hoping it might free up enough CPU to speed up my render in time. But it was no use. At exactly midnight, all the outlines were rendered except for a small rectangular chunk just to the right of the robot's foot where all the lines for the fire escape are. It would have been very obvious if it was missing, and at this poing, I figured if the deadline is midnight, then I was already late anyway.

    I think I finally posted my image at 12:07. I sighed in releaf and sat back in my chair to admire it. That's when I realized that in an attempt to remove the white pixels that cling to the event horizon of opacity and transparency in Daz PNGs, I had removed too much from the edges of the character in the front. In just a few places around the character, not completely around, but just in a few places, there was a small, pixel wide gap between the outline of the character, and the coloring of the character, and the background would shine through that gap. I tried to ignore it, tried to go to bed, but I just couldn't. I had gone to far. So I calmly redid the layer mask for the foreground layer, and resubmitted the image at 12:49. At that point, I figured if the image was going to be disqualified for submitting it after midnight, then it was already invalid when I submitted it at 12:07.

    Anyway, the image is not perfect... but I am DONE with it! Thanks for letting me rant!

    (takes a quick look at his image and sees something new that he's not entirely happy about...)
    No! Walk away... walk away!

    Well...bummer! Sorry you had such a difficult time. For what it's worth, I think your images are turning out great, and I wish my toons were turning out even half as good as yours. This month I totally gave up on the Toony Cam because I couldn't get it to look right and ran out of time. Keep up the good work!

    Holloko, thank you for your very kind words. You've made my day. I esspecially loved this last image of yours, I thought it was a lot of fun. One thing that might be causing you grief with the tools cam might be the shading blend and color levels. I won't go into what all each of those do, but I usually put the color levels at around fifty, and the blending at around 0.01. This prevents today cam from distorting your shading and keeps it looking like it was just shaded with Visual Style Shaders.
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