Poser/DAZ Studio WorldBall Render Gallery

3dcheapskate

Danger Often Lurks Where You Least Expect It...

I was having problems today with some textures, so I just decided to have some fun instead. I'm sure it's been done before, but who cares?

As usual I found the default lighting wasn't great (basic Sand set), so I increased both Sun and IBL intensities ending up around 60% each, and also lowered the sun's elevation to about 60 degrees.

3dcheapskate

Dawn Raid

(although looking it it on other computers 'Moonless midnight raid' might be more appropriate. It didn't look that dark to me when I did it!)

Poser 6, misty mountains moonrise environment set. Sun/IBL intensities adjusted as usual (Sun=15%, IBL=100% - the IBL on this set is very dark, so even boosting it to 100% isn't doing much)
I also moved the Sun (moon?) to a very low elevation as I wanted a sun-just-about to rise lighting.

Plugged the environment set's reflection map into the sword and shield's reflection channels too.

(Edit: I've posted a reworked version of this on my own render thread as Dawn Raid [Version 2] - just adjusted the lighting and added some flames and smoke in postwork. I think it's quite a big improvement though)

3dcheapskate

Simple Idea For Getting Roughly The Right Lighting For Overlaying On A Photo Backdrop

I was surprised at how well this simple experiment worked out.

One big problem when you overlay a render on a photo is that the lighting of the model doesn't really match the photo.

So I loaded up the worldball with the snow set (that's the one I load by default), plugged one of my old photos into the WorldBall IBL image (for DS it's 'Diffuse IBL Environment Map' at the bottom of the Parameters tab for the WorldBall IBLs. In Poser you'd need to look at the WorldBall IBL in the Material Room), made the WorldBall itself invisible, and rendered.

Then I simply overlaid the render on my photo - the sun/shadow were wrongly oriented for the photo, and the intensities didn't seem right, but the general colouration seemed rather good. So I went back into DS and fiddled with the sun az/el and sun/IBL intensities until I got the result on the left below. (I also adjusted the shadow colour WorldBall Ground > Surfaces > Shadow Catch > Shadow Colour)

Maybe that was just a lucky fluke, so I tried exactly the same thing with a different photo. That's the result on the right below.

(Of course, this idea can be used with any global lighting setup, and it's by no means original - I bet many people have been using a similar method for years...)