The only answer I can think of to this is 'print screen'. Newbie Rendering Blues.
andykarta
Posts: 84
Hi.
I hope this is the right location for this post.
I got me a character which I really like the look of. I did her face in facegen pro. Its about 95 percent what I had in mind. But for the life of me I can't get her to look anything like it when rendered.
I'm a noob at this. Still learning lighting and rendering which are huge subjects.
I've tried washing out the face more with intense lighting but that doesn't work. It still looks matted and plasticy. So I tried with the lighting and surface textures but again, big ole noob and frankly most of the time those setting don't seem to do anything to help.
I'm going for a specific look. Kinda human, kinda comic booky with bold colors and not a lot of intricate detail. I'm using both gen 2 and gen 3 models because the movement poses I want don't work with Gen 3 even with the converter script. And the expression poses I want don't work with gen 2. Plus homegirl looks better in gen 3 close up. But why bother if the look I get is totally wrong?
Oh, and I'm really stupid. So please consider that when detailing any solutions.
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Comments
Looks like you might need to play with the material settings. But don't ask me which ones as I'm still clueless with those. :(
So help us out.
Which rendering engine?
Which skin shaders?
If you want "Kinda human, kinda comic booky with bold colors and not a lot of intricate detail.", you probably want to use 3Delight for the engine.
Sorry for that. I've attached a file specifying the rendering engines.
Skin shaders. Hmmm.... I certainly didn't apply a skin shader on purpose. I think I'm using the DAZ default shader. Where would I find out for sure?
Okay, I'm thinking facegen might have something to do with it since it makes you replace skin textures.
But
If you have a skin shader then you would've manually applied onto the surfaces under "surface" tab, if you haven't done so then you haven't applied a skin shader!
which kind of skin are you looking for? I'm not too sure what you mean by "bold colors", my guess is flat but high contrast skin? Or simply skin extraggerating shines colors
To be honest tho, a good place to start is to go into your surface tab, and play around with it under one single light setting - yes do not touch the light if you are happy with it. The only thing you should change would be the camera settings and the skin surface settings
I guess what I mean by bold colors are faces without a lot of shadow. The Daz version's face is very light while her lips and eyes are bright and easily seen. Its like how her uniform is very basic. I want her shadows to do little more than show the shape of her face. Ideally if I showed you my finished render, I'd want you to say, 'okay but you might want to turn down the light intensity because she's a little washed out." (And yes I played with the light intensity for over two hours.) I don't want actual washed out where her features are diminished. I want just on the edge of washed out so her skin is light and the shadows on her face are minimal. She's going to be fighing a lot and that look will hopefully stand out in a comic book like fashion.
Here's how much of a noob I am. Never even thought about using camera settings. Been deep in surface settings. I guess i know what I'll be doing today. Thanks.
ok, I think I'm getting a bit more understanding of what you want now.
I would turn the camera's headlamp on, but turn down it's light
I would then put a bright light behind her to bring out her outline.
The soft light towards the face should lessen the shadows and if it's low enough, keep her face from getting washed out while the light behind should bring out the outline of her body
Boy this is an awesome forum. The backlight definitely helped. And headlight intensity helped. Though its by far the touchiest setting in Daz, I've come up upon. Weirdly, headlight offset helped too.
I'm using Basic GL since I'm basically doing an animated storyboard and polish isn't as huge a deal as usual.
One odd thing, and I included a jpg of the phenomena in case someone knows what's up. When I render in Basic GL the picture that appears in the new popup render box it looks different from the rendered jpg. This is what caused me to reject Basic GL initially since I didn't think to look at the actual jpg. But its counter intuitive. The jpg is generated after the render. Why are the two images different?
But regardless. Thanks everyone for the advice. Pretty much everything helped point me in the right direction. This was holding up my animation efforts and I can now move forward.
Hi Andykarta,
This is a very interesting discussion to me because we're talking about using OpenGL and GLSL to get nice and fast renderings. The bad side is, actually DS has a very limited support both for OpenGL and GLSL so I wouldn't expect much from it. If I was you I would rather export my scenes in Blender then render the viewport there. But this involves learning at least the basics of Blender so it's not a fast solution for a newbie.
As for Basic OpenGL, as you already discovered yourself it has issues with transparency so you can't use it for rendering.
That said, if you like her as she comes out from the viewport then using Intermediate OpenGL with GLSL turned off should get you 100% exactly what you want. Leave passes per light to 4 since this is what fixes the transparency issues. If this does not work then it means there's something very weird with the materials. Hope this helps.