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Thx Jaderail
I know, I know I should have been here earlier but I am having some serious personal issues at the moment. I did it to help for the future to be honest.
I'm just hoping the next contest will be about something I understand and can help with. If it's not I might learn as the others get tips.
Thank you! There are some really nice compositions here that are ruined by trying to take short cuts with the render options. All the well placed lights in the 3D universe will just look washed and flat if you try and get away with using the lowest possible render settings, such as shadow buffers, etc.
That's not to say that you have to use the very best render settings, but you need to make educated decisions based on the needs of the image.. In this case, the needs are primarily lighting due to the contest, so that's the last place I would look to take a shortcut.
Keep up the good work guys. As I said there are some nice compositions here.
Very useful stuff. I feel like I'm learning loads... :)
Doesn't look like I'll have the time to finish my work before the deadline unfortunately, but at least I'll have learned some stuff ready for the next one. I'll still try though xD
Love what's already been done by people.
Post what you have already, if you don't get any edits done. You do still have another 3 days.
I want to see, please!!
Well that is what we all do isn't it? :) Pieces of eight.
Oh and I maybe a jedi but no master. :P
hehehe.
Pardon my ignorance here, I'm a Carrara user and not a D/S user. I've seen several posts in this thread where the artist has had extremely long render times using objects that are transmapped. What I'm wondering is, if D/S has the ability to exclude/include specific objects from the lights?
For instance, in Carrara I've been coincidentally playing around with portrait lighting (before I had come across this thread). My goal was to try and create a decent likeness of M. Monroe from a morph package I had forgotten that I DLed. Part of my goal was to try and use Carrara's dynamic hair. Dynamic hair is great, but if you want to use raytraced soft shadows it's a real time vampire. I learned a trick sometime ago that I could set up duplicated lights, with the exact same position, intensity, color value, etc. and set one up with raytraced shadows and the other without. The one with the raytraced shadows lit everything except the hair, and the one without the raytraced shadows lit only the hair. My pictures took about 2.5 hours to render at 1536x2048 on a Power Mac G5 1.8Ghz Single Core computer. Raytraced soft shadows and Global Illumination would have increased the render time to tens of hours.
Which leads me to another suggestion: Try and fake Global Illumination where you can. Use low intensity spot lights with high fall-off zones to simulate reflected light. You'll be amazed at the speed bumps.
The image I'm posting has no postwork such as levels. The only thing I did was composite a background and reduce the size for the forum. This is just a standard render with no Global Illumination (indirect light).
Here's the postworked version:
Unfortunately, at least that I'm aware of, (I am new at this), you can't select objects to be hit by lights in DS. (You can make objects not cast shadows, and be invisible, but not block specific lights from hitting them.) Also, I think to have light fall-off you need to buy the UberSpotlights, from what I've been able to gather.
I recently watched a video about lighting from Dream-lounge that demonstrated both those features in Lightwave, so I can definitely see how useful both features would be, so if they are in DS4 I'd love to find them. :) (And UberSpotlights are definitely in my wishlist.)
Man, that would be a bummer!
Okay folks remember tomorrow mid-night DAZ time is the end. Get your renders into the WIP and Contest thread. Nevermind the WIP thread just get your renders in the contest if you wish to enter. That means you Mr. EvilProducer.
Despite my low post count, I've been here quite awhile and don't consider myself a new user. I don't think it would be fair to the new people learning the software. I was just posting a bit of a tutorial to try and show people that you don't need to turn down your render settings all the way to get decent renders and decent render times. Hopefully I've helped a little bit.
Despite my low post count, I've been here quite awhile and don't consider myself a new user. I don't think it would be fair to the new people learning the software. I was just posting a bit of a tutorial to try and show people that you don't need to turn down your render settings all the way to get decent renders and decent render times. Hopefully I've helped a little bit.
It's really nice of you to pop in and give tutorials and hints and tips like this.
Thankyou very much.
And Jaderail knows we owe him a big vote of thanks as well, for the way he has been keeping up with all this, despite his own situation, healthwise.
SO everybody give 3 hearty cheers for Jaderail.
How about one big cheer from me. Cheer
All right folks! That's enough of that. You all know I do this just because I enjoy posting. If I can be of use when I post it's just a accident most of the time. :red:
Hip Hip Hooray:coolcheese:
I'd like to thank everyone for all the advice contained within these pages. It'll probably be a little while until I make some sense of it all though :P
I changed the plant because, damn, that thing took ages. And so it cut the render time down by about 20 hours. O.o
I don't think I've got the lighting quite right, to be honest, and the shadows are a little confusing because of the screen that you don't really see to his right that's kinda see through. I'm relatively happy with it though... any tips to improve it will be greatly received :)
Haven't really done a portrait before. Ok for a first try I guess. :)
I would be interested to see what your light set up is and what your render settings are. Until we get an idea of what lighting you are using we can't really advise.
The contest is now complete. We will give a extra two hours from the time of my post here to enter your image into the contest thread if you haven't already.
Great contest! I enjoyed it much. And Thank you to all for the praise even if I do find it a bit embarrassing.
And I did one just for fun yesterday. This is four spots following almost a three point setup with a distant light pointing up with no shadows to add ambent fill light.
That's one cool render, jaderail! Love it. Thanks for posting and all your help.