Tag Archives: day

Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun

Set the Controls for the Heart of the SunI’ve been wanting to do an abstract piece for some time.  I love the way this came out.  I’ll definitely be doing more art like this in the future.

Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun BTS wireframeThere’s not much to say about this piece. It’s pretty straight forward.  The light is from the HDMI which is essentially a gradient with a bright spot that becomes the “sun.”  The gradient did create a very slight banding across the sky and I had to bring the piece into photoshop to add some noise to try and smooth it out.  That was the only postwork I did in Photoshop.  You can still see the banding a bit but it’s much better than it was.  You can see the grain actual size behind the mountain in the color correction image if you click to embiggen it.

Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun BTS ccI tried to make the ground look like ice by playing with the Metallic Flakes Weight setting in the Surfaces tab.  All in all I’m very happy with this one.

Created in DAZ Studio 4.9
Rendered with Iray
Minor post in Photoshop
Color Correction in Lightroom

Figures used:
Blank Boi
Planet X-3
Mec4d PBS Shaders vol.2 for Iray
Wireframe and Hologram Shaders

 

Frozen In the Life I’ve Chosen

Frozen In the Life I've Chosen 10KI was testing out special snow shaders I purchased and decided to make an image of frozen pants.  Why?  Well, a fellow discreet logicD/Vision editor from back in the day, Tom Grotting,  started a trend in Minnesota.  He freezes jeans and stands them up all over town.  It’s caught on in other places this winter.  Check it out.

In my image, special shaders called Let It Snow created the snow on the pants and the tops of the mountains.  It took a bit of fiddling but in the end it looks quite good, at least from a distance.  The shaders are added to an invisible shell around the object and if you look very close, especially along the edges, you can see the shell and the snow hovering above the object.  You can shrink the shell but that changes how the snow looks across the surface so it might be a bit of a compromise to get the right look.  I set the mountains in the background a bit out of focus which helps.  All in all though, the shaders work quite well.  What do you think?

Created in DAZ Studio 4.8
Rendered with 3Delight
Color Correction in Lightroom

Figures used:
Urban Survivors HD for Genesis 2 (pants)
Winter Terrains For DAZ Studio

Stepping Outside She Is Free

Stepping Outside She Is FreeI’ve been wanting to do a “big character” for a long time.  CGI scales easily so I thought it would be simple.  Well, the scaling was simple, then I needed a city so you could tell the character was twenty times normal size.

urban renewal

I used Stonemason’s Urban Sprawl 2 The Big City which is absolutely fabulous.  Once I found a good spot for the “incident” I needed to add some buildings and extend the street another block or so in the background.  I also moved some buildings around and shortened one in the back to get the skyline I wanted behind the girl.

Big Aiko BTS - city 01Big Aiko BTS - city 02I’m tremendously impressed with Stonemason’s work on this city model.  It’s incredibly detailed with 20 or so different buildings – lots of props like streetlights, signs, mailboxes, and trash bins – and yet the model is very light.  It doesn’t slow things down that much even when you have all four city quadrants loaded as I do here.

bad skin

The scaling of the girl created a problem I didn’t anticipate.  When I started lighting I did a screen render and the skin was all messed up.

Big Aiko BTS rendering SSSI tried different skins and some were better but all seemed to have problems.  I eventually figured out that the Subsurface Shader (SSS) was the issue.  Apparently it didn’t scale well.  While I was trying to fix the problem I discovered that it got better if I added in HD details.  The character Aiko 6 doesn’t have an HD add on so I tried adding the Victoria 6 HD details.

Big Aiko BTS - V6 HDThe screen render turned out better but there was still some problems as you can see here on the arms.  (click to embiggen to see the issue)

Big Aiko BTS - HD skin renderIt turns out though, that the problem doesn’t present itself if you render it out huge (at 10K) which is what I always do at the end anyway, so I stopped trying to fix it.  The final render came out fine.

crazy pants

This was a most annoying problem.  Every time I closed the project and re-opened, the guy’s pants over on the left would go nuts!

Big Aiko BTS - normal pantsBig Aiko BTS - crazy pantsNow maybe this was because I had Genesis clothing on a Genesis 2 character, but I’ve done that before and I’ve never seen this.  It’s the Morphing Business Suit on Gianni 6.  Never found out why this was happening.  The only solution was to delete the pants and re-load them onto the character.  That worked at leased until I closed the project and re-opened.

big finish

For the final color correction in lightroom I decided to pump up the color on the main character while keeping the city bland and gray.  What do you think?

Big Aiko BTS - lightroomCreated in DAZ Studio 4.8
Rendered with 3Delight
Color Correction in Lightroom

Figures used:
Aiko 6
Michael 5
Gianni 6
Victoria 7
Urban Sprawl 2 The Big City