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Portrait of a Vampire
I'm not sure this is the right direction. Maybe a softer subject, or maybe not.
The first thing I like doing before each contest is search online for as much material on the subject as possible. That includes links provided here and various websites with tips by top pros. Besides the links that are posted here, which are very useful to me, I found this youtube video which was looong but filled with great information about lighting and positioning the models for classic portrait photography..
Hope it can be some use to anyone interested in watching like it has for me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxPkxS_ezVg
My first two attempts at portraits using iray.
The beach girl is v6 standing in front of a flat plane with the scene superimposed. hdr environment lighting only. I'd like to get her hair to have some shine to it and not look so dull, but I've tried everything except VO5 to no avail .
And the club girl is in a spotlight for the key, the camera light was left on, plus one primitive plane with an iray emmisive shader which I just learnt about using as a fill light source this weekend and am already a big fan. Would like to get rid of that shadow on her shoulder but will have to wait till next weekend alas.
Portrait focus on Lighting, and [removed]also included DoF)
Rendered in DS 4.8 Iray
All you guys have a great start going. Keep it up and fine tune everything.
I'm still experimenting with some emissive lighting so this one is different from the firs that I posted - same character though. But I'll think I have a better idea where I want to go now.
Thank you Dollygirl for your feedback. I'm still waffling if I want to use that particular one for the contest. I'll flip flop and work on different things and see what happens. ;)
This one was rendering too slowly so I killed it before it was finished. But there's enough you can see my point. The only light is an emissive for the campfire. I want to build from a single emissive and see where it takes me.
Here is my first WIP for this month contest, used DS 4.8 with 3d-light render. I'm rather happy with the result so far, only thing really bothering me is that whisp of hair standing out on his right head side. Have been fiddling around with the hair (it's Tristan hair, which I like otherwhise) for hours but that won't go away if not something else I want to keep goes away as well. Maybe I will have to do it in Postwork in the end.
I used one distant light, one spot as a rim light one spot as fill light (only difuse) and one comig from a similar direction as the distant light only specular.
I'm not really sure if the eyes are looking at the right place. I tried to let him look at the camera but that was to extreme, so I made it by hand.
So let me hear what you think about it.
KathrinLoch I like the second version better, even though I found the greenish glow interesting, still I would like to see him closer for the portrait.
Hi Linwelly, I think I would move the camera more straight on. So if he is looking up at something then I would move the camera so that the line of site from the camera is parallel with his face plane. Then adjust the eyes to look straight on and into the camera.
I am a bit late to the party but i hope to learn alot this contest round. Here is my first WIP for the month.
Daniel
Wow you guys are fast! Can´t even keep up with this thread.Love the diverse ideas for portraits that appear here ! : )
Here´s my latest update, not quite sure I like it so let me know what you think.
- Changed the background to something lighter.
- Added 3 mesh lights.
- Tried to get rid of that eye reflection although its still there.
- Decided not to do any adjustments to the skin. I find the iray settings for V7 just fine.
- Gave up with the hair gloss : D
Here is my first attempt on this months contest topic. This is a WIP as I am trying to come up with something for this one. Everyone has started out with some really good stuff this month. Coments and suggestions are always welcome.
Hi all, glad to see everyone, hope there is room for one more?
This is a WIP- would appreciate any feedback! (The background image is not rendered- ever since 4.8 came out I have been having a hard time with the laptop over heating when the scene has more than a figure in it- hope layering a rendered figure with a photo is okay! Photo is CC-BY0)
Hi Dollygirl,
Thanks for your comment, I have to admit I'm not shure what you mean with the changes of the camera position, thats why I added a screenshot of the current settings maybe you can put some arrows where you mean to push the camera.
please ignore the fact that he's standing wihtin his flying mashine, I optimized for the portrait view.
edit: ok I was sitting on my brain for a day before I understood what you and Kathrynloch were trying to tell me, then I started to try out the camera positions and that got my brain back in position... now I'm sitting on three different render variations and can't decide which way to go, becaus in each one there is something I like better than in the other ones and something that I completely don't like...
Thank you, Linwelly! Yeah, I like the green too and can move the camera in more and crop it, but I also like the fire. And here's yet a third! lol! This one I wanted to get to work for the contest but while I think it fits portraits just fine, my creative brain is uninspired with the lighting.
And dang that bird needs better textures! I'm working on those as we speak, contest or no- lol! The way they are now reminds me of a eagle balloon I won at the fair when I was a kid. lol!
I have a better bird but can't get the FBX to translate into DAZ - so no bones which means no pose. The bird, while much nicer, is all messed up as well. The FBX sends the bones flying in Blender and you don't even want to see the UV nightmare on the textures. What a mess! But I did manage to get all of that figured out. I tackled everything I didn't know in Blender with this one. I improved the meshes, turned them into quads, learned how to retexture in Blender, the built an armature and turned it into a rig! I I still can't get the FBX to translate into DAZ! lol!
So I'll just retexture this guy in Photoshop. But like I said, unless some real inspiration smacks me in the teeth, I'm probably going back to the campfire idea. ;)
Oh and Linwelly, I think the angle that the camera is now is causing your character to look a tad cross-eyed. If you use your perpective cam and make a straight flat shot at his eyes. You can get them to focus on that then it will be easier to adjust your regular camera. Or go completely the other direction and give him a pronounced turn of the head so he's obviously looking off camera.
Toyen - what shaders are you using on the hair and eyes? Are they DAZ default? I might be able to help with some settings maybe. :)
Hi Fiona, good to see you around again.
I love the way you placed the lights in this one and how one can see the it refelct from the skin. But I feel the placement of the left arm in relation to the head a bit odd,
and yay for blue hair!
I increased the size and made it larger so it's easier to see . I used an older portrait style to capture the whole body and not just the face or from chest up. Comments and sugestions are always welcome.
I like your idea and it is an intersting environment, but i have to admit that my eyes are drawn away from the woman and towards the dragon,
the same is actually true for Kathrinloch's render with the falcon.
btw yay for blue hair as well ;-)
This is turning out quite nice. I am not sure what you tried on the hair gloss issue. But for myself when i have hair that seems lifeless i play with the metalicity sliders on both the base and the top coat settings. Maybe it could work for you if you hadnt tried already.
Daniel
Portrait of an Amazon
Oh my, portraits are hard. Still trying.
Aren't they, Gallows! It's a fine line between composition and subject matter and going beyond the portrait and into an action shot.
I've been having fun with mine today. Gave up on the stupid bird. lol! And revisited the campfire scene. Glad I did because things really clicked for me with it. Let' me explain what I've done so far and where I want to go and we'll see what y'all think.
Our poor hero has had a crappy day and got pretty banged up in battle. Now his bad day just got worse with a letter - what bad news it contains, it's hard telling but he's taking it quite hard and our time-traveling photographer couldn't have picked a worse time to snap this shot.
I've got a couple of different cameras set up for different angles of shots I'm experimenting with. One thing that drives me nuts - in regard to the eye placement - where he's looking - and his expression, what I'm seeing in the viewport is a lot different from what renders. I swear he's looking at the camera in the view port but as you can see in the render, he's looking at the letter. I had to really tone down his expression because it was so exaggerated in Iray that it was almost a characture. But I like how the shadows are working in this shot, it helps add to his beaten up in battle appearance and his emotion at what he has just read on the parchment in his hand.
First off - nothing in this scene came in as Iray compatable. I had been using some iray lights but since I'm going with the emissives I dumped all the premades. The only thing purchased in the scene are the character (he's Atlas for M4) and his clothing along with the sword which is Valiant for M4 with the Winter Warden textures I believe. The hair is Jai hair which came along with one package or another - I don't remember exactly which.
But I did a lot of work for the iray shaders.
Atlas comes with two mats one regular and one battle mat which is him beaten up and bloody. I used the iray base on his skin and it only took a few subtle tweaks to get it looking just right.The Jai hair I started with the OOT Hair shaders but then tweaked everything significantly on my own.
The medieval tent, campfire flames, the smaller flame and the parchment he's holding are all freebies from most-digital.
Thel tent I hit with the Iray base and nudged up the roughness on the diffuse to help it look a bit more realistic.
The campfire the hellfire freebie that's basically a nice little 2d high res shot of flames with an alpha channel. When I hit it with the default Iray emmissive shader and turned it into it's own light I was pleased with the results. In the original image I had a an iray light preset that I purchased so I wasn't sure how it would look making it it's own emissive. I then hit it with a deformer but I need to tone that down. I want the campfire close enough for him to light the parchment but not so close that it looks like he's on fire. But I'm also seeing if I can get it to help frame the image a little.. I did the same with the smaller flame turning it into it's own emissive, and it looked a lot better when I did the spot render, but I think I've got it scaled wonky, so I'm going to go back and fix that.
The parchement itself is the freebie morphing tissue from most-digital, but I had created a texture for parchement in Photoshop so I brought that in and made it into a 3d texture and use that for the diffuse. I'm discovering that I can use photoshop's 3d capabilities to do a lot with some great textures for iray. The image started out as a hi res skin - like the rabbit fur you can by commercially. I found it on CG textures awhile back and in photoshop made it look like parchment. Well that parchment I then pulled into photoshop again and applied it to a 3d postcard mesh. I then had photoshop create the bump and normal maps on its own from the defuse layer. When I pulled the morphing tissue into DAZ I hit it with the Iray base as usual, but then brought in the diffuse layer, bump and normal maps and played with those adjustments to get a strong bump and texture. So now I know how I'm going to be doing various fabrics rough paper from now on.
The moon is also made from scratch. I found a hi res image from NASA - all those images are in the public domain. But because I only have one half of the moon, wrapping it around a sphere was awkward and getting it right was more work than necessary. So I first made an alpha. I pulled the image into photoshop then did a color select on the midtones. I saved the selection then switched to multichannel and had photoshop split the channels which automatically takes the saved selection and makes it into an alpha. I can then save the alpha as a psd or PNG file to mantain the transparency. Once that was done, I pulled the original moon image back into photoshop and extruded it to a half sphere. I then had photoshop make the bump and normal maps from the diffuse layer. With the new 2015 version we have more control as to just how much detail it puts into those maps. But unfortunately it crashes quite a bit when doing that so it's one step, save immediately, one step, crash, open saved file, one step, save immediately, and so on. lol! But it did a great job one the maps once I got through the crashes. Then I brought my alpha channel and put it on the specular. Exported the whole darn thing to obj and kept the texture files as PNG to preserve transulcency. I know DAZ can read photoshop but the PNG files are smaller. All in all that part only took me 20 min and that's just because photoshop kept freaking out on me.
Although when I imported my moon into DAZ, at first I couldn't find it. I guess DAZ took me seriously because it sent my moon into outerspace - literally! lol! When I framed it in my camera the ground was a tiny, tiny little square, very far away. I had to parent the moon to the tent otherwise I'd still be translating it into position. lol! But once in the proper position I again hit the base geometry with the emissive shader and used the mats I created. The alpha channel, turned specular, I put on the cut out on the emissive to get the effect I wanted. I had to tone down the cut out really far because it was way over the top with the effect. Then it was just a matter of tweeking color and luminance. Which I'm still working on.
So now the plan is to fine tune my emissive lighting - I want to brighten the campfire for one - make it less orange and a little more yellow, fix the tiny little flame, and bump up the luminancy from the moon so I can get a good backlight going. You can see a slight blue shine on the back of his hair so I know I'm going the right direction with that. I just want to strengthen it. That will help outline the tent a little better too since the moon looks kinda funny - it's behind one of the tent poles.
Oh speaking of the tenpt poles. I used the wood shader for cars. I believe it was mahogany with a semi-gloss. I toned down the gloss and raised the bump to get a nice used wood and grain effect - which you can't see until I turn up the lights a little more. lol!
So that's how it's been going with this one. Whatcha think? Going the right direction?
Thanks all!
Victoria 6, Domina for skin, Elite Ponytail and the Superhero suit for G2, rendered without background in iRay and then grass background and blur added in Gimp.
She is lit by the default iRay environment with the Intesnsity ramped up to 1.36 and she was rotated catch the sun :)
Hi Kathryn, yes its getting much better. From the story your render is telling, letting him look at the letter make more sense than looking at the camera, so I would leave it that way. Maybe even turn his look to the flame on the letter. I do like the colour an light that comes from the fire, only thing bothering me is that the top is curved. I would try to get the moon standing lower in the sky so you could crop away more of the "unimportant " part of the image. Last point of nitpicking is about his right arm, right now it looks a little like he has his arm in the fire. Logic tells me he holds the sword but I can't see it.
I'm pretty happy with my portrait so far.The raw render looked blurry to me to I opened it in GIMP and set the sharpness to 49 to clear it up a bit.this is what I have so far:
Character is custom dial-spun using V6, V6HD, The Girl 6,and includes shapes from the "Genesis 2 Female(s) Morphs Bundle"
Hair is "Crazy locks" by:Goldtassel and Daz Originals
Found here: http://www.daz3d.com/crazy-locks-female-hair-for-genesis-v6
Earings are a freebie called "Serenity" by Inception8
Found here: http://inception8-resource.deviantart.com/art/Serenity-Chinese-Earrings-179084708
Outfit is "TOA Ryder" by: Frances Coffill
Found here http://www.daz3d.com/toa-ryder
Lighting is from a single HDR called "Waterfall" that I can't recall where I got it from :(
The outfit had a map included with it called "onepiecealtcontrast.jpg" that I placed in the "Displacement Strength" surface and set it to 0.49.The minimum Displacement I set to 0.0 and the max displacement I set to .10.That seemed to give the cloth a bit more texture to it.
for the earings I applied the iray gold shader
for the hair surfaces I set;
Base Color 0.59 0.59 0.59
Trasnslucency Color 0.71 0.71 0.71
Tranlucency Weight 0.012
Base Color Effect and Glossy Color Effect are both set to Scatter Only
Glossy Color 0.38 0.38 0.38
Glossy Roughness 0.035
Base Bump 0.048
For the camera, I set:
Frame Width 18.35
Focal Length to 200.0
Focal Distance 1000.0 (I'm not totally sure what this does, but it made the eyes look better to me)
F/Stop 5.0
under "Render Settings" "Tone Mapping" I set;
Exposer Value 11.64
Shutter Speed 128 (default)
F/Stop 5.00
White Point 0.77 0.77 0.77 (this took alot of the "white wash" effect out of the clothes)
Burn Highlights per component Off
Burn Highlights 0.00
Crush Blacks 0.00
under "Environment" I set:
Environment map 1.90 (this is where I put the waterfall.exr)
Environment Lighting Resolution 504432 (this setting says it's the number of pixels to consider when lighting with a higher value increasing realism so I just took the image Length x Width to get this value)
This is the final result
Please feel free to critique my work.I'm sure I have more than one rookie mistake :)
So after switching back and forth between a sideview and the front view I decided to go with the front view for now. He should be looking directly at the camera now. I adjusted the lights a bit as well, so that there are still some interesting shadows.
Maybe I should mention that he is custom dialed from the G2M.
so what do you think?
That looks really good
I don't know a lot about Iray so I can't say anything helpful about that. I like the way you used the DOF here. I would suggest you crop a part of the greenery so that her head moved towards the upperleft sweet spot. Other than that the only thing I would change is that I think the fingers of her left hand are sunk a bit too deep into her right arm
I think you you have done an excellent job on the lights, and the arrangement is beautiful.There are two things that need a bit of work I would say. For one the bias is drawn too deep, I think. I would crop the render somewhere a little above the armpit. The other thing is that it is a bit too static. maybe a lttle tilt of the head would help there.
Never give up, the result will come. I will try to give you some ideas.
I like the environment, the position and the skin on you amazon, but unfortunately my eyes are permanently drawn to her breasts in the moment. For one those circular "breasplates" are truly an eyecatcher, but as well the strands of hair, the line of the sword and the lines of the building turn the focus towards the lower part of the render with the breasts in focus.
My suggestion would be to crop out the breasts completely, which will bring the face to the upper right sweetspot. For now your camera position is lower than her head, I guess it could be fitting if she is looking down on the camera, so focus her eyes on the camera and bent her head a bit.
If you want to keep her breasts in the render you could try to get the DOF to blurr them as well and tilt the sword in a way tht the sword line directs the viewer towards her face
I think this is a much better angle Linwelly. Now I would suggest that you make the render in a more portrait proportion, this will draw the viewer into the image because his eyes become the focus. If you still want to have back ground then I would either use DOF or work on getting it lighter then him to seperate the foreground from the background. I took the liberty and cropped your image. I like it.
Quick question - are we allowed to upload entires larger than 800px now? In past contests there was a limit on the size but I didn't see it in the rules this month so I'm wondering (hoping) that might have changed? I'd love to render this entry a little bigger, I feel like my fairy's expression is getting lost...
Right now my biggest obstacle is backgrounds - I love playing with characters but matching scenery is an uphill struggle. I feel like I just can't seem to get the characters to stand out, any thoughts?
Any feedback and suggestions are greatly appreciated - thank you!!
This is a really nice image! I agree with Linwelly's comments but wanted to add that I think the added blur is a bit too strong. I like the way it draws the focus to the face, but because of it's strength it kinda makes her head look a little detached. Maybe play around with that a little? Otherwise it's a very nice image!
Thank you, Linwelly! You mean the top of the letter being curved? I'll see if I can get the morphing tissue to behave. It's rather tricky a times adjusting that in relation to his hand since neither have collision settings. If you mean the top of the flame being curved, I can adjust the deformer on that and was planning to play with that a bit. I understand exactly what you mean about the moon. Let me see what angle I can get with it because my goal is to get something of a three point lighting with the emissives. We shall see how that goes! lol! But thank you very much for the feedback. Let me see what trouble I can get into today. lol!
If you use a secondary camera too look at the one you're adjusting you'll see the outline of the focal distance move back and forth as you adjust. You can get some really fun settings with this. I did that earlier with the hawk image. I attached it to this post because I thought it was hilarious. While it wouldn't work for the contest I thought about the popularity of the "Go-Pro" type cameras right now. So this turned into a "wrist cam" shot messing with the focal distance. lol! But you have a very nice image!
Definitely much improved with the eyes! He's got a lot of character and the basic composition is very nice. I think you just need a touch more "personality" - maybe as you suggested with another a tilt of the head or a quirking the lips on one side. He's smiling but in this case you might want something to add just a bit more - like people ask about Mona Lisa's smile when they look at the image. Does that make sense, I hope?