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On a magazine pinup kick for some reason, still using Yve since I'm still writing about him (finally not only on target for NaNo, but slightly ahead!). He makes a pretty clothes horse, although I'm not sure how well a sci-fi thief would turn his hand to modelling. The second picture had to be cropped, since it's a little... risque although not explicit. I really like that Niko hood/cloak thing, although it didn't like me too much. Much meshgrabbing to get it into place before I could dForce it. I needed a clothing item that gave a decent view of his scars since I, yet again, forgot he had them (still undecided whether they're pre-story or post-story).
Glad to finally be getting some use from those sci-fi wall light props.
Did you do something special with the 2nd picture re pose and morph? Whenever I do a pose like that - really anything with lifted arms - I get wonky biceps and triceps, sometimes wonky traps and lats.
(Why do those subtle scars on his torso make me feel... excited?)
The pose is from Composed Poses for Genesis 8 Males ('Pose 01M', descriptively), but I rearranged the right arm a lot and the left a bit because they were not having a nice time with the hood at all. Also, I have both Ultimate Natural Bend Morphs on (I totally forgot that was its name until I had to make an educated guess at what the U of UNBM meant...), which does a lot of heavy lifting with some poses. And in part I think it's because a lot of his right arm got obscured by the hood anyway.
I usually avoid poses like this like the plague (same problem, I spent longer sorting out Alex's arm in one picture than I did setting up the rest of the scene and it still looked iffy) but this one worked out surprisingly well.
I'll admit to getting a bit... uh... distracted by his stomach as well...
Do you feel like Ultimate Natural Bend Morphs is worth it? Does it help with posing buff characters? I look at the promos and it doesn't seem like it makes that big a difference...
I tend to apply it on every character I render (but I need to render more really buff guys
). I didn't think initially that it made that much difference either, but I do seem to notice it when it's off. It gives Alex in particular some really nice shoulderblades (he's kinda semi-buff) and it's why Yve has those nice neck muscles in the last picture. You've still got to tweak stuff a little (like his pecs needed some assistance), but that's more down to Genesis than the morphs imo. If you've got a similar product already, it might not be worth doubling up, but I'm glad I've got it. Combined with the Skin Folds and Creases I like the look a lot.
I'll give it a play with Steffan, who's built a bit more heavily than Yve. You can't see it at all in most neutral poses so I'll need to do a new one. (I'm not complaining. :p )
After renders and proddings (and swearings), the effect is pretty subtle, so it's a real case of YMMV, but it does a fantastic job on armpits.
Back view - Left: no UBNM - Right: UNBM
It's more subtle here, but he's got slightly more defined shoulderblades.
Front view - Left: no UNBM - Right: UNBM
Of course, this one is a premade pose so you'd get better shoulders starting again using the pose sliders and with some manual adjustments, but I live in hope one day maybe DAZ will realise there's more to a shoulder than a ball-jointed doll approach. (Who am I kidding? G1's were iffy too, but G1 had excellent linked pose controls when moving eyes and G8 is a real step down from those, so... win some lose some, I guess, but there are some lessons they seem determined not to learn.)
There are some more noticeable adjustments here, mostly in the hip, some corrective work in the elbow, and the armpit. I never realised how lacking in armpits G8M is before.
And Yve's pose with Steffan, which is what I meant by the hood obscuring the iffier problems.
Thanks! This is helpful (and we get to ogle a cute boy while we're at it).
The back looks better with UNBM, but I'm generally not too bothered by how the back looks to begin with.
It does seem to help a little in the front... perhaps I'll get it when there's a good deal on it.
Ooh. A shiny new year. Happy 2021 all. (I still haven't got the hang of writing it yet. Did a whole blog post before I noticed it all said 2020, and now I keep trying to write 20201...)
Since he's started bothering me about finishing one of his stories, I started working on making a model for Caeso. I'm still deciding on skin and fixing up his morphs, because it's surprisingly difficult for me to get my image of my 2000-year-old Roman and current late-night radio host into 3D...
On the up side, at least it means he can wear almost all the historical clothes I've not yet found uses for. Downside is, contemporary clothing still seems surprisingly hard to come by, so I think he'll be raiding the women's folders as much as Yve does.
Annnd I got there in the end. Mostly. I think? There's not that many really pale skins for men and I'm not in the mood to go Photoshopping things at the minute so I'm using the Quinton texture, except it has this really weird dark shelf where the eyebrows go for no apparent reason, so... it's gonna be Photoshop one way or the other I guess. *sigh*
This is all procrastination so I don't get around to editing the short story I wrote, anyway. (Since I don't really have the time or the peace to do a decent job of it anyway, so it's just gnawing away at me, little snippets and smudges of inspiration that I have to crab down before they escape again...)
Not that not being able to write is sending me (more) peculiar or anything...
That's a good idea! I'm a bit thwarted tho in that most of my favourite textures use the base map as the SSS and one of the other textures I liked has a great SSS map... but is only great for the SSS and turns him green otherwise.
I quite like this one (or maybe it's Stockholm Syndrome after getting through so many others) but this weird dark shelf above his eyebrows is irritating me so much. Maybe it'd be less noticeable if he had dark brows...
Really beautiful characters! Steffan has the exact kind of graceful masculinity I wish I could achieve more often in video game character creators.
Really nice work, as always!
Aw, thank you.
I really enjoyed making (and writing about!) Steffan, he's a real favourite of mine from that story. (Also he's just a little bit weird, which turned out to be a lot of fun.)
Did this one for the PC challenge with the Atmospheric Smoke Camera. Most of it is just... well, smoke, not fog, so it make setting up the scene quite tricky but I like how it came out in the end (almost 2 days of rendering later; don't ask). It's from the first chapter of a NaNoWriMo story a couple of years ago, when Caeso is walking to work and thinks he sees someone he couldn't possibly be seeing: his best friend and lover, who died approx. 2000 years ago...
Figured I should actually render some of the stuff I have, and Yve couldn't help being Yve. Guards never take too kindly to thieves laughing at them.
EDIT: I have no idea where the file went. Another one in this thread - uploaded, not linked - just upped and vanished too, but since I redid this one I won't reload it.
Great posing and composition! But I think the lighting is off, the protagonist looks pasted-in to me.
Yeah, the lighting is terrible. (Why is there no crying with laughter emoji?) Although there's only two tunnel sections of the environment, the corner and the straight bit (and the straight bit has a window!), for some reason it doesn't want to light at all. A bunch of it was down to experiments to see exactly what I could push my poor gfx card to do (it can *just about* fit all that in, but it really hates me for it) and after that it was some Photoshop experimentation (which would go better if my tablet actually liked PS) so I'll redo it soon to work on it better.
At least, if DS will let me: with some advice from someone else on the forums I'm just in the process of trying to update to 4.15 to see if it works...
Right! Redid the lighting by adding in three ghost lights at both ends and behind the window and realising only... I dunno, 3,000 iterations through the render? that it meant I didn't actually need the IBL any more, and I'm now much happier with it.
(Click for big, the forum's munched it a bit.)
What I'm much less happy with is that after three or so attempts in DS4.15, I had to stop and go rerender in DS4.12 instead. Luckily, I could just load the file I'd only just saved in 4.15 and hit render (I was worried it wouldn't work since it'd been saved in a later version of DS, even though no special shaders had been used) and although the lighting was a bit different (always fun!), it actually rendered properly.
One weird thing is that the render doesn't fit onto my card in 4.15. It drops out almost immediately, which isn't really a surprise given it has three figures in it (albeit two with Resource Saver shaders and basically zero sub-d). What's weird is that the same render fit perfectly onto my card in 4.12 and didn't drop off - my render iterations go weird on the card, but it sticks rigidly to its alloted update figures on CPU.
The other weird thing, the reason I had to re-render in 4.12, was the weird black spots that developed after around 1k iterations and only got worse. They're black in the render... but once I loaded the file into PhotoShop, I discovered that they're actually transparent. The expletive-deleted render engine is poking holes in my render. And it's only in 4.15. Drivers are fully updated and everything. I'm not impressed at all.
This render was at around 4k iterations. All those white spots, totally transparent, across four different surfaces (modified skin shader, the new transluscent fabric shader, the MEC4D PBS fabric shaders and the default pants texture).
I guess unless I'm rendering V/M8.1 I won't be bothering with using it at all. So glad I kept the previous version.
May I ask how much GB your graphics card has?
It's a GTX960M with a dinky 4GB memory (which tbh I didn't know for sure 'til you asked, I didn't buy the computer with the aim to take up using DS again but as a similarly-priced - £~800! - semi-upgrade for a computer that started acting up on startup - I only wanted something that ran my PC games
) and a CUDA level of 5 (which I did know, but only 'cause I had to check as it's the minimum level for 4.15).
Computers cost a bloody fortune in the UK, even before the pandemic.
(ETA: I should add Yve is the only bit I can see with holes in. The rest of the scene seems to be fine.)
Thanks for answering!
I'm asking because I'm trying to calm my anxiety brain, LOL. I just ordered a 8GB card and while I'm waiting for it to arrive I'm starting to worry about how much I'll be able to put in one scene. I'm really hoping for two 8.1 characters plus scenery, rendered in 4.15. (three characters would be amazing but I would be ok with two.)
According to SereneNight 4.15 uses more VRAM by itself already than previous versions. Which explains why the same scene fits on your card with an older version of DS but not with 4.15.
4GB an interesting amount to fit a scene on. Some will fit on quite well, some fall off quite quickly for no apparent reason. The chase scene has, iirc, a geometry size of ~350MB (which came as a surprise, but there's only two modular scenery units and of the characters, only Yve has sub-d on) and it was the textures that took up more space (I think just over 1GB?) - although I reduced the ones in the background because they're blurry, so who'll notice anyway?
For contrast, one nekkid M8.1 with vellus and arm hairs and wearing Corporate Hair, has a geometry size of ~440MB and a texture size of over 700MB, so with the incoming frankly huge 8GB memory on your card (from my perspective
) you'll be be able to fit a lot on! And have much less of a wait too.
I finally had a chance to play with M8.1. He still has no shoulderblades of his own (I turned on Skin Folds & Creases for this, but not UNBM. I'm glad they both still work though.) I don't really like his face. It's all squishy and hard to work with, and as I'm one of those irritating people who prefers to spin dials for expressions rather than wrestle with PowerPose, there's... nothing. There's zero fine control unless you're willing to dig into the face rig itself. I really, really miss the mouth widen and corner height morphs for a start, because default smiles are always freakishly narrow and curved like something from a horror movie, and while I'm genuinely excited that the eye poses work like they did in Genesis 1 ... it's pretty much the only thing I like about it. There are almost no fine controls for cheek morphs, so smiles don't actually reach the character's eyes - it looks instead like he hates the viewer and he's just smiling politely.
I'm gonna do that folder thing later and see if I can get some morphs back again, because in terms of expressions I find M8.1 basically unuseable as-is. I'll never be able to get Milos's dorky grin or Alex's "I'm going to murder you" smile in this thing.
Oh, and 4.15 is still poking holes in my renders. You can't really see them once you reduce the file size (as opposed to rendering to the right size, in which case I'm stuffed) but I waved a bright green brush behind the render and they're still there. There is more than enough space left over on the card, so it's not a memory thing. It's a 4.15 thing, which is just ridiculous.
Got my expressions back, complete with mouth wide-narrow and corners - and moving the lower lids! Even that does wonders for softening an expression. Maybe I'll try moving Alex across and seeing if the new skin shader works for him tomorrow.
Side note: the other thing that irritates me about default!M8.1 is that his eyes are freakishly massive. I own a lot of asian ball-jointed dolls (turns out if you don't buy 3D content, you end up saving a startling amount of money) and only the most stylised ones even come close. I shrunk them by about 20-30% in the pictures above (ETA: in the previous post; these ones are untouched) and they're still quite large.
I tried moving Alex over to G8.1, but his face doesn't look right - which is bizarre considering I just loaded the actor. Plus, I tried copying his skin textures to Michael 8.1's textures but they all blew out. I quite like M8.1's texture though, so I tried that, but that bit of facial hair under the chin looks... not great, especially on someone like Alex who for Plot Reasons has patchy, slow-growing facial hair anyway. So... shelved that.
Thing is, as much as I dislike G8.1 in general (can't even find a PowerPose facial rig now; is this ridiculous face overlay supposed to be the same thing? PowerPose was already, like... just there...), I really, really like those eyes. So I tried Caeso instead, copied him across and found that after applying the new PBR skin shader, he looked just a little too pale even for him. Maybe if he lives another 2000 years, but by then I think he'd have just (finally) lost his temper and tried to kill Mars instead. So I found these shader settings and gave them a go.
And so far so good. I mean, the geometry for a naked man and his hair (head only) came to almost 1GB (but it is a nice hair) and for reasons known only to DS4.15 the whole thing dropped straight to CPU, but it looked okay on initial iterations.
Until I got to around 1,000 iterations and thought... wait, is that a moire effect I can see on his skin?
No, it was the background. He's weirdly transparent. *scratches head*
At this point I think I'm just going to go back to 4.12 and give up with G8.1 entirely. It's clearly not meant to be. I've got more than enough content to last me now anyway.
(Edited to reattach the image, which had weirdly disappeared.)
While chatting with JeniMorris about Leonard (who does, incidentally, work really nicely and render beautifully on regular old Gen8 aside from a couple of little issues around the tail he doesn't have if you don't have Torment), she suggested checking out the Nvidia site in case there were updated drivers. And to my surprise there were - thanks, GeForce Experience, for failing to tell me! And these seem to have fixed the weirdness around 4.15, at least for now (because I updated the card drivers the same day I updated DS and... well, see above).
So I can now render in 4.15 without fading characters and weird holes, so I sprung for Torment too, mostly because I really wanted that nice pale skin for Caeso.
But first, a building.
This is a place from the story I'm supposed to be writing, where Caeso works while investigating a murderer. This is also what made me consider buying Torment anyway, because there are places where the texturing has really visible seams and the chimney is a bit odd, and I had to spend ages painting them out... and I figured if I can do that, then filling in a couple of holes by painting underneath the layer isn't so difficult. (And now I don't have to, whee.) Despite spending bloody forever on it, I like how it finally came out... although probably not enough to rerender it for possible covers.
And these are both Caeso with the Torment texture, and a very light makeup overlay in white to take out some of the redness. I still find working with expressions on 8.1 a weird experience, and very clearly need practice, haha. Caeso is generally patient and quiet, which is great for his sometime-lifetime job of being a psychopomp... but he's also occasionally an agent for divine justice and based on that expression you really wouldn't want him angry at you. (And this is before we get into the glamour created for him to really scare the baddest of people...)
And this is Torment proper, a very handsome guy who reminds me a lot of DmC, which is no hardship as it's my favourite 'recent' Devil May Cry game; can't get on with this new one at all, it's too much like fancasting. The suit reminds me of Saint's Row though, so I now have a very conflicting set of urges for which game to replay...
Well this is weird.
One naked Caeso in DS4.15, as seen above = 1GB geometry.
But when I opened this really old file with Genesis 1 Kirill in 4.15, then added a G8.1 to try moving the character over, and then render both G1 and G8 in the scene together, one of which has hair, the other has fibre brows and eyelashes...
Apparently both figures combined only come to 87.634MB in total, slightly under 1GB for textures (G8.1's, not G1's) and it all fits on the card and is going like the clappers.
So what the actual hell is going on with this program?
(Please ignore the lighting, the lack of G1!Kir's face textures because they've apparently gone wandering and everything else, this isn't what I usually share with the world...)
EDIT: Removed the G1 figure, geometry amount stayed much the same, and this is probably the fastest 4.15 has rendered for me. I'm sure I'll break it again very soon.
This isn't the final version of Kirill, but getting that is going to take some Photoshop work, which should be Fun. It's nice to see an unscarred version of him though.
This was weirdly fun. My original Kirill figure was Gen1 with a Surreality V4 skin (Fog) in 3DL, which was also fun back in ~2013 because it wasn't designed to look human and convincing it to look so for a male figure was distinctly Interesting.
Pyrit Hair is still a colossal pain in the arse. It also used to be Alex's hair, but autofitting it to G8 makes it go even more nuts than it does already so I'd mentally consigned it to the vault, but there isn't really another hair these days that matches it well. (No one needs to know the hoops I went through to update Alex's...) This time I just parented it to Kir's head (I moved him into the hair, rather than the hair onto him; it was weirdly easier).
The Photoshop work wasn't as bad as I'd expected. An integral part of Kir's face is his gold scarring, which was built into the original texture but also had a mask - it was originally designed for Poser, not DS - so after a little unsuccessful faffing with LIE, I just loaded it into PS along with the face texture and scaled and liquefied it into position. It almost matches, which is... well, good enough really. I also had to edit out some of the moles from the Karl texture as they didn't quite suit.
He looks pretty good with just the raised scarring (which was fun, I forgot the hoops you have to jump through with displacement; I haven't done anything like this since ~2014, soooo...) and then I had to convince top coat and metallic flakes to play nice too, which was even more interesting because I've become lazy in the intervening years and I still haven't really figured out the new Uber shader. (This is 8.1, but I'm not using the new PBR shader because it gives me even more of a headache right now.)
Ultimately I'm happy with how he's come out. Looks enough like an updated version of the original without looking too weird, I think.
Now I've just got to work on Niko...
(Did have a weird mishap though. Using Natural Eyes II, I accidentally selected Blue 4 in the Uber folder instead of the PBR folder and basically got a version of Cherubael instead... No idea what happened there, but given the strangeness going on with my copy of 4.15 right now, a little demonicness wasn't entirely unexpected.)
Exactly the same skin surface settings as I've done with Yve without incident for ages, but in this version of Iray I get neon men instead. Increase the transmitted measurement distance and I get a pretty flowery yellow instead. Absolutely fascinating, if not exactly good for my workflow.
(The second was just checking that it really was that the SSS colour was now spitting out an opposite. Sadly toning the colour down doesn't tone down the violence of the result.)
Loaded Milos onto 8.1 and fiddled around with the PBR skin. It's... in some ways easier to work with, given everything I had to do to get his skin this colour in the first place, and in some ways harder. It's much less reactive to whatever you whack into the transluscency channel, for a start. But I didn't like the way the new expressions worked with his face, so I kept the shader and moved him back to G8.
And one of Kirill too, since I've been trying to fudge a ~1880-90s British military uniform and mostly failing. I've got an old Optitex one, but half the time these days using it is more hassle than it's worth. Bloody steampunk -- well, that whole book was a pain in the arse so why would this be any different? I blame Johnny Flynn. The thing is, this was a really quite sweet smile until I angled his head down.
Also, on the subject of G8.1... I did a test Filament animation using Ruo Xi (so I won't link it here 'cause she's not a boy) but tried loading her onto G8.1. Woah. No. Never again. That face did not play nice.
I just love your work. You haven't posted about him in a while, but I'm especially captivated by Vaana -- love his daring color scheme, love the use of the Fi brows! And I like that ear morph you use on him (and maybe some of your other pointed-eared characters, at the bottom of page one?). Long/pointed ear morphs don't tend to stretch the antihelix, but it looks so much more natural to me! Where's that morph from?