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Wow, that's pretty gnarly.... pretty interesting. Now, are the lights outside of him, or inside the model mesh?
They are parented to him, though the chakra ones look like they're coming from within. I don't know how Marshian did that, but it's a cool effect. Here's a comparison. I've got the chakra lights and aqua rim lights loaded. There's the render that's happening plus the viewport. All other lights are turned off.
There are many options in this set. I haven't begun to explore it yet. Just clicking on things right now.
Iain's like, "What the heck are you doing to me now, lady???"
Thanks! Yeah, I think including the traditional media in the render kind of makes the whole thing pop a little more. I took the advice from @Ice Dragon Art and changed it up a little... I took photographs of the still-life in process, too, so I used it in various stages of completion for this render...
http://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/283626/
@Lylnara I love this thread - It is great seeing your discussion and progress as you work on your renders. So, on Lain and the Fairy - I think it looks much better with the postwork - but I think if you either set up an emitter with the same color temperature as the aura around the fae, or otherwise cast that color on Lain's face - that is the final little touch that will make this image really pop.
And on modeling yourself... if you get a chance to pick up Carrara cheap and you don't have the content already - it is a great deal. You get like $250 worth of older content, plus the actual program. That was the only reason I bought it, originally.
Carrara has so much power, too. It basically has modeling, a hair studio, and a Terradome landscape generator built into it. With a little effort a lot of that can be ported out of Carrara and back into Studio. I've barely scratched the surface of it, but if you just bought it for the content, the M5 and V5 content alone is worth more than the $45 it is priced at right now. I see a low historical price of $32, and if you've got loyalty or stacking discounts going on, that price can go even lower.
The problem is that the learning curve is steep, and there isn't as much free information to get you started. I ended up purchasing PhilW's tutorials from the store when they were on sale - the first few lessons are available free, though - and there is enough there to get you started doing simple modeling in Carrara.
Hey, that looks very good, Donovan! I love that you have artwork inside of your artwork, LOL.
Glad you are enjoying the discussion here. Happy to have you with us! I'm going to play with the fairy some more this weekend, and that Body of Light set. Might be able to get some interesting effects.
On the modeling- I actually picked up Carrara, Hexagon and Bryce on killer sales last year (shocking, I know!) but haven't played with them much. I need to get around to using them sometime. I've been trying to learn DAZ and Poser first. But I may be hitting a time real soon where I need to start making my own stuff. I don't think I'm quite there yet, but soon. I'm guessing that's a natural progression for users as they get into 3D more. I also have some blender classes on Udemy I got real cheap that I wanted to look at. And plenty of other cool software to try out too. I need to figure out how to live forever so i can do all the things I want to do! HA
Could be said about some 3D art programs too:
Is that a render or a photograph?
That's a photograph that I thought was funny. ;)
Yeah. I've been sharing my time between DAZ and Carrara. I can feel myself crossing certain threshholds of understanding. Deciding to modle my own object when I couldn't find one - that kind of built on buying content like the Cast Away Dinghy and using shaders to make it look like a lake boat. Little "a-ha," moments where you realize what you can do and feel your limits jump ahead.
But Carrara is so difficult as an interface - the workflow, the content management, posing - and of course, it is limited to V4/M4 and Genesis models. I end up falling back to DAZ, even where Carrara is more powerful or flexible, because it is my comfort zone. I have Hexagon too. Didn't pick up Bryce.
The hair made me think so - but the lighting on her chin had me second guessing myself! :)
I think I opened Carrara once after I installed it, got scared, and ran away. LOL That interface looks a bit formidable. Maybe it's time to take another peek!
The first time I opened Carrara I walked away too lol. I've started working harder on learning it and have found that the stuff I learned in Daz and Bryce, have helped to make it far less intimidating and I am very excited about the modelling and terrain parts. And the sky and atmosphere. I'm actually trying to participate in the challenge this month and I have learned a LOT. The people over there are super helpful, I can't even begin to say how much I appreciate the time they take to answer my questions.
Playing with Body of Light (BOL) some more for the fairy picture. Thought I'd post this here so I'd remember. It's also on the BOL support thread:
HOW TO CHANGE THE COLOR OF A BOL LIGHTING PRESET:
BOL has lots of cool presets, but sometimes you like the effect but not the color. For instance. I'd like to do the rim lighting, but not in the default aqua. In the instance below, I wanted to change the Spectrum Soft preset, which is a rainbow of colors, to all light yellow for a fairy glow. Here's how:
CHANGING TO MULTIPLE COLORS: You can use this method to change something to multiple colors, but it gets more cumbersome because you'll have to deselect a bunch and then reselect them later. Creating groups and then selecting the group and changing their colors all at once may be a better way to do this. I'm finding that using the natural groups of the body, which the lights are already parented onto, is far easier than creating new, multiple groups. Gets confusing fast, and stuff can get snarled up.
Don't forget to save your work as a new preset!
Rough draft of fairy with lights, not rendered fully (make sure you turn up the max time on rendering, these lights can take a while if you drop into CPU.)
I'm still tweaking. I turned off the lights on her face so we could see her features. Note how the glitter on her skin still sparkles! Yay! I need to put some lights on the wings and antennae, though they are emissive. Also need to adjust their color to match the lights.
No postwork yet, so it's not blended at all but doesn't look bad, I just wanted to throw her against a darker background to see how the lighting looks. Once I get it right, I'll save as a preset and then integrate it into the scene with Iain. (Note: hands are messed up here, fixed it in later version.)
WORKING WITH MULTIPLE GROUPS OF LIGHTS IN BOL
So getting the lights on the wings has been a bit of a nightmare, but I think I figured out a method. I better post it before I forget, because it took some finagling. You could create and position each light by hand, but "ain't nobody got time for that!" I don't know how @Marshian worked with all these tiny lights without losing his mind, because figuring this out nearly made me lose mine.
Anyhow, here goes (screenshots attached if you need them):
Here's where it gets crazy- even if you save this as a light preset, pose preset, whatever, no matter what you do, you can't have a bunch of lights on the wings at the same time you have other Body of Lights on the fairy without them all getting mixed up. I don't know why, they just all stick together and get snarled up real bad. And you don't want that- we're talking about hundreds of tiny lights. So, what to do?
WORK AROUND: FAIRY WING SCENE SUBSET
At 80%, still cooking with no special render settings except max render time. I'll tweak the rest later. This is a rough draft so I could figure out how the heck to even do this. I really like the effect I'm getting here from altering the Spectrum Soft Preset. If done right, I think these lights could be used to create a classic look reminiscent of the Renaissance and the Romantic era of painting. With some postwork, this would be entirely possible. The effect also reminds me of the Painter's Lights set.
I think Marshian needs to do a set of Fairy Lights, or an add on pack. I'm mean like that.
(And yes, her hands are still messed up, this is a practice run.)
The fairy looks interesting. I may have to reconsider my thoughts on getting this. I wasn't sure I could make use of it but I think I might put it in the wishlist afterall.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/103416/learning-carrara-and-need-some-help/p1
This is the thread to follow - and PhilW has the tutorial to get you started, if you want to learn Carrara fast and have it demystified.
I am rethinking as well. Already in my wish list but moved up
And that's the tip of the iceberg. There is a LOT of helpful info over there.
So much to learn! Here's the "practice fairy" rendered at 94%. She went on forever and still wasn't done (like 8 hours.) There are these weird scratches too. That's not on the original product, so something I'm doing must be changing more than just the color. I'll have to experiment some more. There are a ton of options in the products, so there's probably more than one way to do what I'm trying to achieve. Plus there's postwork. I think a combo of both will really look amazing.
Raw render:
Preview window- the scratches seem to align with rows of the lights. Maybe something got reset when I changed the color to all of them at once:
Render with darker background behind it:
I just tried it with default Spectrum Soft BOL, and the scratch marks are still there in her hair. This is at 80% rendered. It goes fast until it hits that point and then stays there for a while. I'll keep playing.
EDIT: My guess is the lights aren't playing well with some other shader. Note that it doesn't affect the clothing or the skin (even with all the sparkles), just the hair and the wings (in the above picture). Perhaps something is reflecting it there in some weird way, like a glossy top coat. More experimentation needed!
this is very interesting to watch your experimentations on this. Thank you for that. :)
Happy to return the favor, LOL.
Round Two: Time to try it for real! Did all the steps, and attached more screenshots to the post above. Didn't want to clutter it up by sticking them all in the text of the post. So if you need them, they're there. The steps actually work pretty well. I got the extra lights in there fairly quickly and painlessly.
NOTE: I decided to delete the extra lights you see in the scene pane below, as well as the HDRI. The only lights in the bottom render pic are the BOL lights.
Here's a preview of the render. It'll probably take forever, but what a difference it makes to have something the light can bounce off of. In this case, Iain. So excited with how that looks, it's what I'm going for! I may have to turn some lights off because it's pretty bright, but that's very close.
Not sure what I'm doing for backgrounds yet. I tend to render those separately because my card is small. I may stick them in the Infinity Cove or one of the studios just to see what happens with the light.
At nearly 25% rendered, I felt like I was looking into the sun. Too bright, and we're losing some of Aibell's beautiful features.
I decided to lower the intensity of the lights by selecting a light, right clicking and doing a "Select all lights", going the parameters tab, highlighting everything, and then changing the Intensity to 50%. The preview light color changed, but the rendered one looks fine. Will post results once I have some.
Iain is now looking good but my Aibell fairy is still blown out. I want her to glow softly, not crazily.
So I lowered the intensity to 25%:
The wings still seem way too bright.
Here's where having the second BOL set parented to the wings as a group comes in handy. It's much easier to select the zillion lights stuck there so you can make adjustments. I knocked down the wing lights to 10% intensity. I may have to delete or turn off some of them as well.
And I think I found where the lines are coming from. They are rays bouncing off everything because they're hanging in midair, not really on the wings, which are semi transparent anyhow. Let's hear it for plain old stubbornness! Stubborness for the win! That's the Gordon way. Bydand, baby!
Almost there. I've turned off about half the wing lights, as well as some on her face (I forgot I did that in the test version.) I also dropped all light intensity to 10%.
The wings now look pretty good, but Aibell's chest and neck area are still a little too bright. I'll probably turn more of them off. It's strange since the test run looked very good at 100% light intensity BUT- the rendering settings are very different. In the test, I used default DAZ settings and turned off the HDRI. Here, I have the detail turned way up like I've been doing lately (from DarwinsMishap's lighting walkthrough.) That could account for how sensitive the light seems to be here.
Iain, of course, looks gorgeous as ever. Darwin did a fabulous job on him.
She's still a bit bright, despite lowering parts of her body lights to 5% and turning off more of them. I really like how the wings look now. I'm going to let this run for a while, save it, and then try using the test file render settings to see what happens. I also added back the ElianeCK HDRI, but it's only at 20% intensity. I don't think it makes much of a difference. No other lights at the moment. The details are starting to show up, and they look pretty good, but the scratches are back too. I love the lighting on Iain. With the right background and postwork, this will look really good.
Decided to give my poor computer a break when it hit 80% rendered after 7 hours. I'll be purchasing a more powerful card on Friday. This will work as a rough draft. Will do some post work tomorrow and figure out a background. I'll also try the original test render settings and see if those help at all.
That's definitely coming along. It looks much better than when you started. :)