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I've been playing with iridescent effects, scales and wings. Fun stuff!
You know, I went through the considerable effort of figuring out how to transform a dragonfly image into a bump map into a solid object mesh in Carrara, only to find... it's frankly not significantly better than just using a simple plane with surface textures.
Here's an early test, using public domain images. I might try to buy some higher resolution stock images to work with if I pursue this; I'm pretty happy with the shader effects I'm capturing, but the texture resolutions are fairly small (better than older products, but not by much)
Ah that's too bad. My morphs are Genesis 8 (I don't know how to do other generation morphs - I keep getting error messages when I try). Daz made working with G8F super easy with the Dev Tools they included with her release.
WHOA! That's incredible! That would most definitely make an amazing creature texture. Such detail and realism - great scales! A mermaid tail with those scales would be SO COOL!
Oh wow! That looks really good ...like some seriously cool wings! I really hope you pursue that - I think they would be a big seller in the store. I've never seen really detailed pixie or dragonfly wings sold before. The closest ones I've seen come with this outfit: https://www.daz3d.com/spriteling-for-giselle-6
And while those are cute, they're lacking realism. And also over three years old, which means they might not be as Iray ready detailed as they could be. Your wings look a lot more real and more functional looking.
Um. Ok, I was stupid/wrong. Substance Painter _can_ handle G3F/G8F, I just have to export it right.
So if you still want a partner...
Holy Wow!
I'm thinking, given some of the stuff I'm poking at lately, that I might want to put together some sort of 'Realms of the Faerie' product, maybe with scaled nereids and various pixies and whatnot. Mmm.
Here's some experiments with a facial morph that might serve as a cool faerie face.
I'd definitely be interested in teaming up if you can do some good textures. I'm looking to work with at least a couple different texture artists as I know that textures tend to take a bit of time and I'm really cranking out the morphs. lol
I'll send you a PM later with some renders of some of my morphs to see if you might be interested in teaming up. :)
BTW, I really like that morph! It looks a bit like one of Brian Froud's faeries! :)
If my camera was better I'd try to get some closeups for you. It's good with a good lens but not dedicated macrolens.
I have my eye on a stock photo source, but I need some pending payments to come in first.
It's also not a rush since I still have the snake thing to get done.
Well we have snakes too but I won't try and get close enough to them, dragonflies are easy, the damselflies though are much less common to see.
I keep debating between modeling the wings or just using planes.
Modeling the wings would stand out against other options. Although, come to think of it, I COULD do BOTH... since the planes could use the same texture map as modeled wings.
Ultimately I think planes with bmp will be easiest but can do do cool things with planes with create surfaces for lmaterial usage flexibility? At any rate it the photos I get are any good I will post them here for you.
Most of the ones here are the brown ones but I do see the light blue ones sometimes and more rarely the green ones. The damselflies I rarely see unless I go to a watery swampy or pond type area and they are usually deep blue or deep green although I seem to remember red ones. They are much more difficult to photograph than dragonflies.
The problem with both is the wings are clear mostly so you will need to be good at image editing to get a good set of wing models.
So I struggled trying to turn a cutout mask into a solid object model, and it was consistently terrible. Until I then did the much simpler approach of 'trade the cutout and turn it into a shape,' which did the job in MANY fewer polygons. (Seriously, some of the original wing model stuff was hitting 50-100k, when a human figure is only about 6-10k, and every time I tried to reduce it it looked TERRIBLE).
Here's the result!
The thing about a solid model is that it allows volume effects, which provide subtle improvements over doing it as a flat plane.
And a face closeup (you can juuust make out the faceting in the eyes)
very interesting look
Also, all of the morphs and modeling have been done in Carrara; it has a lot of potential!
Cool. I'm working through my Blender book I bought. I tried for like 5 days to get Carrara Pro 8.5 work on my computer but it has some sort of viewport lag issue. A shame as I really like the UI.
Yeah, people keep recommending this or that other modeler, but they are generally super expensive and have UIs that are either not thrilling or actively make my brain hurt.
You know, I just wasn't getting the iridescence I wanted out of thin film, just... argh.
So I made a new iridescence shader. It doesn't work with a few things, like refraction, but as a layer on top of stuff, it works fine.
I'd love to see some color to the wings.
Perhaps your Thin Film or Soap Bubble shader would give that lovely touch of color to the translucent bits?
they do look to be half-bubbles of a sort...
Here's your soap bubble shader with some tweaks (attached).
This is what the shader looks like on some fairy wings:
Maybe that would help? :)
Just can't resist saying that it was possible to make irridescent Dragonfly wings in Bryce, back in 2004.
Here's another render with the modified soap bubble shader.
I don't know if it's helpful at all, but thought I'd post just in case. :)
It's a thought. mmm. Torn between that and the iridescence thing I worked up. We'll see. ;)
I have to poke at the fae some more, but here are some earlier tests.
I'd REALLY like to be able to use refraction with this Iridescence, but so far I've been unable to. It's easy to work around by adding an Iray decal, but that's a little beyond the comfort level of many users.
(The woman's dress and hair uses my Iridescence, which is essentially a highly modified version of the Flip Flop car paint)
And oh wow, this is going to look great with the scales... mmm.
Ohhhh YEAH I agree - that iridescence is going to look amazing on the scales!