Novica & Forum Members Tips & Product Reviews Pt 8
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Knights of Valor for Gen3M. Simple plain render with spot light facing sceen. Used on stock Michael 7
Poke thru on Torso Armor and belt had to increase to almost 50% on each.
@Genaris
Thanks for the detailed breakdown. I have experienced the same thing with Poser models. Poser morphs hardly ever work right with DAZ, unless there are Studio specific morphs as well. There are a lot of props out there that do interesting things, only not in DS. :(
Some Poser items, no matter what I do, I can't get them to work at all. I don't know enough about what I don't know to know what is wrong, in those cases. :D
Thank you to all of you that posted pictures of The Knights of Valor set. Very helpful !
OK, I had another try with Gumdrop Granny. Fixed the eyes and added a little Zev0 magic appropriate for her age. No portrait lights this time, just a quickie render with the standard environment.
Much better eyes!
What particular Zev0 sorcery did you use?
Agree, her eyes look much better this time.
Oh, it's so nice to look at thumbnails and see what's in products. This Kibamusha outfit includes a tent/scene. The Iyo Matsuyama Castle has SO much in it, as does the outfit- for both rider and horse, and the scene. I don't need them right now, but Sugatak's store is growing my wishlist!
Okay, it's April 1st (did you see the Bearded Lady in the wee hours of the morning when she was $300+ dollars?) and it's time for you to pick your Top 3-5 products you rendered this month. See the first post of this thread for the information and the guidelines. The question that comes up for newcomers is "bought" this month- and the answer is NO, it's products you RENDERED this month. (And only one product per render can be picked, and no repeats from previous months.) All information is in the first post of this thread. We need more participants so we can see the great products and renders! (From your galleries and other areas of the forum. Doesn't have to be on this thread.)
You have from April 1- 8th midnight, Daz time, to do your writeups. A minimum of three renders/products, up to five.
January 2017 Top Picks Random $5 Gift Card drawing winners: RGcincy, Llynara, Isidorn
February 2017 Top Picks Gift Card Winner: Ice Dragon Art
Here's the list of what has already been showcased (no repeats by the person, but other folks can pick those items)
I didn't get a lot of renders done this month either, and using some of my old favourites limits the selection. But here is...
Isidorn's Top 4 For March
1. Kawaii Dreams Outfit for Genesis 3 Female(s) - Render and Render. Even though it's a cute outfit, I'll admit I only bought it for the slippers, and those are also the only part of it that's in the renders.
2. Tube Socks for Genesis 3 Female(s) - Render. All the socks you can need in one product!
3. Easy Environments: Snowy Mountains - Render. The footprint morphs are great! And as you can see, the set can be used for other things than snow. (although I admit my attempt at turning it into sand is probably not the best...)
4. Kobold Woodland Spirit - Render. Because who can resist a cute critter from the AntFarm?
Donovan's Top 5 for April March!
Rundown Bedroom I like the versatility of this set when used with shaders. It can be a shack in the woods, a decaying bedroom after a zombie apocalypse, or with the right shaders, a teenage princesses bedroom. Lots of value for your money.
Example 1
Aiko 3 Pro Bundle The Aiko 3 pro bundle is a great package for lightweight figures that can be used in unique ways in a variety of scenes. Aiko 3 has a huge amount of Freebie support available across the web still.
Example 1
Big Bill Truck The Big Bill Truck is a steal at its discounted price, and you don't really need to spend the money on the Iray updates if you've got a good collection of shaders.
Example 1
Melody for A3 I bought Melody for A3 because she was so cheap - but she is actually super cute. The cat-like expression is very convincing.
Example 1
Ultragenesis Faces of G It was someone else who made me go back and look at this package with their render of Gumdrop Granny. It is nice to have some choices for age-range in your figure renders in DAZ.
Example 1
My favorite thing about all of these products is how much fun it is to repurpose them in creative and unexpected ways using custom D-Formers and shaders. They all have great geometry and lots of material zones that make it easy to stretch the limits of the original content.
It's rather funny- during big sales, when people buy or look at a lot of stuff, they're so busy doing that, they don't get much rendering done. I'm guilty! And I'm doing weight mapping and tweaking/editing bones so I'm doing other things and not rendering much. (I did mention that if I did Thread 8, I couldn't do as much rendering.) Thought I'd do one for you, and glad I picked this outfit. Here goes.
FW Brianna HD (Gen3F) Floral Jeans Outfit (Gen3F) Yumi Hair (Gen3F)
Here's my opinion- Yumi Hair is quite fun, due to all the morphs. Those pigtails can fluff way out or shrink for a more elegant look, and there's morphs to do that with one click. Always nice. The hair is quite shiny, and it does remind me a bit of toon hair in this lighting (which is what I use for a lot of my portraits, and other hair doesn't look like this.) So I'll keep an eye on it for future renders and change up the lighting. (Headed out to the barn, it's in the upper 70's and gorgeous today. Going to go clean Stetson's fans and get ready for the heat blast coming this summer.)
The Floral Jeans Outfit has a cute necklace and nice shoes- but- the top falls short on material zones for the bottom piece. Very disappointing. It's got a zone for the lace trim on the sleeves, and the band in the middle, so why the heck would you not do the bottom trim? What if I don't want that green top to have transparent lace?
For Brianna, I would have liked more lip options. There's too many dark ones IMO. Mine was a custom color, I used the pale lips and then for the diffuse, a mauve/gray. See Tip for a nice balanced color- not light, not too dark.
TIP Change glossy for lips from white to a pale orange/yellow. You'll get the nicer glow. Also, lower the glossy roughness just a tad, to get more shine. If you have a neutral lip color, try base coat color 192 / 160 /154 and glossy 255 / 230 / 189 While I lessened the glossy roughness, I increased the base and topcoat roughness slightly. It looks really nice in regular portraits/normal scenes as you can see in the next renders, this is extremely close up and still holds its own.
I chose the higher translucency for the skin.
This is with an ISO of 135 and Exposure Value of 13.65, and I put Crush Blacks down to .15 while raising the Burn Highlights to .40 (Due to darker skin)
Now, to the barn. Happy shopping! If there's anything in the March Madness sale you really like, NOW is the time to tell people!
Can I use a product that isn't out yet as one of my renders? I can't remember if I asked that before or not.
I love that you're giving custom tips on how to best tweak settings on individual content, Novica. The great thing about things like that is you learn things you'll then try on other content.
Ice Dragon - It doesn't seem like there are any limits on what content you can use in a render - but you can only highlight one piece of content from that render per entry. I'd use the content that hasn't been released, but focus on another piece of content in the render, and just "mention" the unreleased content and what you love about that in your description, too. :) Better to ask for forgiveness than permission. :)
Lol true! I used a new character in the render I am thinking of so that will work.
I'm pretty sure the featured products are limited to things sold in the Daz store.
Its not a problem, I have a new caharacter in that particular render that will work.
I wanted to show how well the V4 to Gen2F batch skin converter works for even the more.... odd skins. This is Myreal by Arki. Everything converted perfectly except for on make up, so I count that as a win. A lot of the V4 characters have beautiful tatoos, designs and make up and I am totally thrilled that I can move most of it to Gen2F which is still my favorite generation. I also have Genx so at some point I will be moving the shapes over as well.
I've been doing a bunch with GenX and V4 and even Generation 3 skins.
I just purchased Cayman Studio's V4 for G3F geografts - they were on sale for $13 with 18% off over at the other place.
Then today I picked up Cayman Studio's V3 for G3F geografts.
And I've been moving the V4 and V3 characters over to G1, 2 and 3 for a while.
It really opens up your content library - and you're right, some of those old skins work excellent in very unexpected ways. If I had known about Gen X2 and mapping different UVs a year ago, I would have spent half as much as I have on my content library. Between Zev0, Cayman Studio and GenX2 - you can cover a whole lot of ground.
Add in Sim Tenero's Randomizer and the Skin Builder for Gen2F and the coming soon Skin Builder Pro for G3F and its going to take some really unique characters to get me to buy. There are a couple of vendors that I totally love though so I will still be buying some. Just not as much. I think I could render two females a day for a year and still not be able to render all of them with all of the tools I now have available to move them to different generations. Its actually a bit mind boggling and wee bit embarrasing to have that much stuff.
Back from the barn. For the favorite Top 3-5 products, yes, they have to be from Daz. You can render things the PAs are having you showcase which aren't released yet, not a problem. Myreal looks very nice!
I'm in the same boat.
Along those lines... the Bearded Lady is not just an April Fool's gag gift.
This is Leo 7 with the Bearded Lady and Dorian hair and Tom2099's Iray Faux Fur shaders with limits turned off on both Dorian Hair and the Beard and the Myrddin Wizard for G3M outfit. Just a quick test render to proof of concept the idea.
According to the threads in the Commons, the Bearded Lady beard is a refit of the beard that comes with the Leandros hair that is in the Leo 7 Pro bundle.
Deathbycanon's top 3 for March
Staff Pack - 7 staff bases, 9 staff tops and you can reshade all of it. I used the bird skull top in my example and I used new shader on the skull, the beak, the talons, and the claws. I used the twisted wood staff and put new shaders on the twisted center staff part, the leather, the metal rings, and the wood end pieces - which could be a different color from the center if you wanted. I'm really looking forward to trying one of the globe top ones and using an emissive on it! With all the options of the set options and all the shader options, I think I'm set for staffs!
EXAMPLE
Dominator Planet - to be honest, I don't render ANY space sci-fi stuff, but I wanted to enter a contest and this was one of the required items, so I bought it. I am so glad I did! This set is amazing. I LOVE light. I love the way it bounces, and reflects, and the way shadows are produced. I spend hours messing with it - I didn't touch the lighting in this render. It's flipping amazing! Not just all the red lights on the buildings but the red glow on the skin, the highlights on the gun, all coming from the perfectly lit lights from the Dominator Planet set. I will be rendering lots more sci-fi in the future! *disclosure* I did do the reflection in the glasses in post, but had the glasses come with a shader settings for both the lenses and the frames, I totally could have gotten that effect in Daz on this set.
EXAMPLE
Diesel - A pretty boy to go with all the pretty girls. Seriously fantastic morphs and top quality textures. I really love the goth style face makeup options, and that fact that he comes with the piercings that are shown in the promo. Really top quality work.
EXAMPLE
@deathbycanon By doing it right, do you mean so far as listing your top 3-5 products in renders for March? If so, yes, partly. The writeup and link are fine, now you need to add the title as described (shown by previous participants, just follow the links I posted that shows how everyone did it last month.) and two to four more links/descriptions IN THE SAME POST. Very nice render btw!
Ohhhh, I don't retain things well going from page ot page (memory issues) so I was trying to use Donovan's as an example and I spaced off his the title, and I missed the "same post" part too! I'll edit it to add some more. Thanks for the compliment and the help!
OK, I think I got it right now, I was a little confused as to if the title should be top picks for March or top picks for April - isidorn has it one way and Donovan has it the other way. :) Just let me know if I need to change it - also sorry it took so long, my oldest popped by unexpectedly with her "new" boyfriend and I had to make nice. :)
*snicker* Me being nice would be "See that jar? See the tape on that jar? I'm putting your name on it. You know, just in case." and leave it at that.
It's top picks for MARCH. We render to the end of the month, then the first week of the next month, post our picks.
LOL, behave yourself @darwinsmishap!
lol my husband reminds them he has a chain saw and we know how to get rid of bodies. :D
Thank you!
pssst: donovancolbert change your title to March :D
Well, this is doesn't make sense DAZ. That 95% off an item (old ones, I might add) gets removed if you have TWO of the Newly Mad items in your cart. Sorry, but I'm not going to get a great discount on old items and increase the price on NEW ones. Do I want Genesis and V4 stuff dirt cheap, or 50% (plus 10% BB discount, plus 20%+ gift card discount) on New items? It makes sense if you're going for the bundles, or if you don't have most the items, but for the rest of us, yawn!