Whispers65 - Learn by Doing Render Thread

whispers65

Background:  It's been sometime since I did any rendering, but I'm picking it back up again and believe it or not, I remember quite a bit so it's not so much a learning curve this time around.  I am a place oriented person,meaning I like things like pools, forests, camping grounds, locker rooms, houses, space ships, etc.  I'm not much into fantasy.  I do like Cyberpunk and SciFi a lot.  I also like elements like rain, snow, oceans, underwater, etc.  So my current goals are to learn the process of modeling and maybe one day model some stuff on my own (yeah, yeah, I should have done it by now, but life isn't as much fun as I had hoped).  

So in every render, I'd like to accomplish a couple of things - one have at least one object in the scene that I created myself, two incorporate some level of learning into each render.

What originally got me intrigued in modeling was the Bedroom Lighting Challenge over at 3dRender.com.  It amazed me to see all of the different variants people came up with even though it used the same bedroom.  I was hooked at that point and wanted to learn to model and texturing on my own.   These are my baby steps.   I can't model much on my own yet, so I chose something I already had and I am working on how it is put together. Any and all suggestions are greatly appreciated!

I started with this one:

Here is the store link:  https://www.daz3d.com/spa-changing-room-and-showers

Here's what I did (not sure  how the pictures will come out)

Lock01 - Original Locker Room

Lock02 - I duplicated the Org Locker Room, knocked out a couple of walls and did some remodeling.  It still had some things like the shower floor on the duplicate part.

Lock03 - One thng I didn't like was since I duplicated the room rather than mirror it, it left a rather ugly seam down the middle.

Lock04 - I don't know hardly anything about modeling, but I created a plane with some thickness for the new floor and added a shader (all of this is rather new to me)

Lock04, Lock05, Lock06 - What I'd like to work on:  baseboard on the 2nd half of the room (under sink and along mirror wall), shower water (no matter how hard I try and what products I try with I just can't get it look right especially from a distance), different wall color and floors.

 

 

whispers65

Nighttime, backyard, snowy, Christmas scene.

For this one I used:  https://www.daz3d.com/the-neighbour-s-yard and https://www.daz3d.com/snowball-fight-poses-and-props-for-genesis and other stuff.

Challenges:  Turning the neighborhood into a winter wonderland.  The main challenge was the Christmas lights.  I did have some christmas lights in my content folder, but the main drawback was that I couldn't change the bulbs individually.  One string had 3 sets of four lgihts and each set was it's own.  So I went into Blender and with the help of a tutorial, I created a basic string of lights.  When I imported everything into Studio, it was all separate.  So I grouped everything together and resized and it all worked out pretty well in the end.  I was able to change the color for each bulb like I wanted to.  Still have a TON to learn.

 

whispers65

Here's my latest.  I guess because it's summer, all I can think about is water.  It took me the longest to get the pool water to at least be passable.  It's okay.  The render is super grainy because I didn't finish it.  After about 7 minutes, I stopped and saved.  According to studio it was 0% complete. 

I would like to do some underwater scenes, but haven't figured it out yet.   I have my eye on a couple of products, but money is like non-existent at the moment.

https://www.daz3d.com/iray-water-caustic-lights

https://www.daz3d.com/sy-rigged-water-iray-3-dforce

https://www.daz3d.com/rigged-water-iray-2

On the underweater pic, if I play with the opacity setting I can at least see the figures in the water before.  But there's no water surface or bubbles or anything to sell it better.   I'm looking to do something along the lines of the "How to Swim" picture.

If anyone has any suggestions, I'd would be more than willing to listen and try things out.