This is the video that goes with my article in the December issue (#18) of DS Creative magazine. My in-depth tutorial was based on this shot. Check out the article on page 72.
I originally developed this shot to test a complex keyframed camera movement in DAZ Studio. So far it looks like the DAZ software will be able to do the kind of animation I want to attempt.
This is just a quickie I did for Halloween. I followed SickleYield‘s demo for creating volumetric lighting in DAZ Studio’s Iray.
It’s the first time I’ve ever done an effect like this. What do you think?
Created in DAZ Studio 4.8
Rendered with Iray
Color Correction in Lightroom
Figures used:
Jack Pumpkin
The Streets of Old London
I’ve been spending the last few weeks experimenting with animation making a few test shots of people running down long hallways. I’m going to put them together and make a short video but I want to add sound and music so it’s going to take a few more weeks. In the meantime, I found an interesting frame in one of the animations and set a camera for a still shot.
This piece is rendered with nVidia Iray which I’m still learning. It took about five hours to render which is considerably faster than my previous high-rez image which took a full twenty-four hours. Why was this one faster? I bought a GTX Titan X graphics card and added it to my system.
Iray can use both the computer’s CPU and the graphic processors on the video cards to compute the render, eliminating the need for a render farm. (…at least for now.)
I managed to get my old Quadro K5000 and my new Titan X graphics cards to both work in the system at the same time, which some say can’t be done because the drivers conflict. So far it’s working for me and both cards chug away when building the image. The new Titan X ended up doing two and a half times the work of both my old Quadro K5000 graphics card and CPU together. It’s a significant boost but boy the Titan X runs hot! It screams at eighty degrees Celsius while building the image.
It turns out that if I render with the door on my computer closed, the Titan X throttles down because of the heat. I’m going to have to build a custom vented door for my system with maybe a fan or too. For now I’m working with the door off. At least I won’t get cold this winter!
I had two major problems with this render. The first was a strange shadow around the eyes caused by the photometric fill light I was using on the character’s face. It was as if the spotlight didn’t see the transparency part of the lashes.
Turns out this was a combination of increasing the size of the light making it soft, and the distance the character was from the center point of the CGI world. It’s a crazy bug that DAZ3D has promised to fix in the next version of DAZ Studio. In the meantime, I had to grab the entire scene – sets, cameras, lights, everything – and drag it all back to world center. Thanks to everyone on the DAZ forums for helping me debug this problem.
The other issue was a strange honeycomb dot pattern appearing in the wall texture. (click to embiggen)
Looks like Iray was compressing the wall textures too much. There’s a Texture Compression setting under the Render Settings / Advanced tab. I had to raise the Medium Threshold to 2048 and the High to 4096 to make the problem go away. Apparently this increases the RAM needed on the graphics cards during the render but my system didn’t have a problem. It also didn’t effect the speed of the final render. I know because my system built this image twice!
Created in DAZ Studio 4.8
Rendered with Iray
Color Correction in Lightroom
Figures used:
Victoria 6
Liquid Halo on Sky 16
Utopia Deck C
I started this scene with the intent of making a simple header for my facebook page. A reclining figure fit the aspect ratio so I started there. The rest came from that.
I also decided to use this piece as my first serious plunge into DAZ Studio’s new Iray render engine. I have been avoiding Iray since my first experience showed a significant increase in render times. I was right to be afraid. The original render of the image above took 24 hours to cook. But I’m skipping ahead.
For the lighting I decided to keep things as simple as possible and use the light built into the ceiling of the set. I changed the light fixture material to emissive and started the guesswork of how bright to make it.
Being a newbie, it took me awhile experimenting with the various controls. The f/stop in the camera doesn’t effect the exposure, only the depth of field but unlike 3Delight, there are exposure controls called tone mapping in the Iray render tab. For some reason the defaults are shutter speed 1/128, f/stop 8, and ISO 100. It seems to me that would give you a dark photo even outdoors in bright sunlight. I’m also not sure why you would change one setting or another. If changing the f/sop doesn’t change the DOF and raising the ISO doesn’t increase grain then why have different settings?
I’ve seen a few online tutorials that say you should raise the luminance of your indoor lights into the millions of lumens. That is extremely bright and seems wrong to me. Why have real world units like lumens with no connection to real world light levels? Anyway, I spent a day fiddling with all the various controls and eventually settled on something that looked properly exposed. In the end I decided to follow the advice of the tutorials. I kept the render exposure settings (tone mapping) at default and set the ceiling material to 2,000,000 cd/m^2 luminance units, which is excessively bright for room lighting. But the final image looks correct.
Since the light is all top down and my character is wearing dark clothing I needed a little fill for the underside of his body. At first I tried using a spot light.
For some reason the emissive mesh lights do not show when you are in working mode in DAZ Studio, only the regular lights do. So to balance the mesh ceiling light with the spot fill I had to render each time I adjusted the light. This became quite tedious since you really couldn’t see any of the nuance in the test render before ten minuets or so. Here’s an example of a screen test render after about six minutes. It’s still hard to tell what’s going on in the dark areas. (Click to embiggen and see the grain.)
I abandoned the spotlight fill idea and tried what I would do in real life in this situation, which was to use a white bounce card.
It worked but unlike real life I wasn’t able to subtly position the card to get the reflection going exactly where I wanted, again because there isn’t any live feedback from the overhead emissive light. My character was still slightly dark on the bottom but I fixed that in color correction.
My first renders for the 851×315 facebook header ended up a little grainy with the default settings so I raised the max render time and max samples and was able to get a final result with 95% convergence. I think this took a couple of hours. I don’t remember. All I remember is that it took a lot longer than I thought it would for such a small resolution. My system can render the same 851×315 scene in 3Delight in a minute or two.
After I posted the image to facebook my wife CAT mentioned was that the red in the back might be too similar to the orange in the character. Since I wanted to eventually render this scene again at high-rez and make something suitable for framing, I also decided to try and change the red elements in the set to blue.
Up to now I have avoided directly editing the textures in a model mainly because there are so many other things I have to learn in CGI work. I’m very familiar with photoshop editing.
Changing the color of the background set surface textures was easy although a simple color conversion left the set a soft baby blue which didn’t really fit the theme of a gun battle.
Individually adjusting the darkness of the various blue elements I was able to balance things the way I wanted.
At this point I set a new camera with an appropriate aspect ratio, set the resolution to 10K and hit render.
As I mentioned above, I rendered the 10,000 x 6667 image for a full twenty-four hours. Well, I should say the FINAL render was twenty-four hours. I did a lot of test renders at various resolutions including 10K, 8K, 4K, and 1080HD. This took a few days. Most of the tests I set to time out at fifteen hours since that’s already more than “overnight.” They were all a little grainy but not bad, perhaps similar to something shot on film. I was able to get 95% convergence in fifteen and a half hours at 1920×1080 HD resolution. That’s the resolution I would use for animation and that’s just way too long.
This picture shows the grain at about twenty minutes into one of my Iray render tests, which is about how long one of my 10K 3Delight renders takes. I believe this one was 8K. (Click to embiggen)
I’m hoping that there will eventually be a few ways to speed this up. I’m guessing that the emissive lighting used here takes a lot longer to render than lighting with spot lights. I haven’t tested that yet though. I could also throw more graphics hardware at the problem but my computer is no slouch as it is. All the work I’m describing here is on a dual eight core 3.1 GHz Intel Xeon processor system with 128 GB RAM and an nVidia Quadro K5000 with 4 GB RAM. The render logs say my CPU’s are doing a little less than half the work so I’m guessing installing two more graphics cards (maybe nVidia GTX 980s?) could double the speed. So that means a 24 hour render could be done in 12 hours, still a long overnight render. And how much heat will build up in the case with three graphics cards? I don’t know. I need to do more testing.
The final render is still a bit grainy even after cooking a full 24 hours. Click the image below to see the 10K image at 1:1 pixel ratio on the left. The complete image, however, has enough resolution that it looks pretty good. I’m quite happy with the light too. I didn’t do much color correction on this one, just brightened up the shadows and color a bit.
Iray is still a big question mark for me. I got into DAZ Studio because it made CGI easy which I felt could make it possible for one person to do short animation projects. Iray makes everything harder. It takes a lot more time to light. You have to essentially work in the dark if you are using emissive mesh lights. You have to futz more with all the material settings on the models. And the render time is a killer, not only at the end but throughout the process as you are changing things and checking your work. For my first steps into animation Iray is probably going to have to take a back seat.
Created in DAZ Studio 4.8
Texture editing in photoshop
Rendered with Iray
Color Correction in Lightroom
Figures used:
Zorn
NWX Section 18
I’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.
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.
I’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.
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.
I 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.
The 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)
It 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.
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!
Now 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.
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?
Created 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
This image was created by mistake. Occasionally while you are working in DAZ Studio the materials and shaders get screwed up, disappear, turn solid white, etc. and have to be reset. This happened while I was creating I Spit My Last Breath At Thee. I was trying out a wet body geometry shell attempting to make it look like sweat and as I was adjusting it the guy’s skin material disappeared. The water droplets created a ghostly transparent shell and you could see the inner mechanisms of the mouth and eyes. Creepy! So I set up a camera close on the face and rendered it out at high quality. A happy accident.
Created in DAZ Studio 4.8
Rendered with 3Delight
Color Correction in Lightroom
Figures used:
Gianni 6
Wet Body Geometry Shells
Kaylum Hair
Trapped in a space time loop with no escape.
Most of my work is dark, film-noir like with tiny spotlights in a black void. It was time for something different. I wanted something bright with lots of negative space, hard graphic lines, and very little color. Something that looked like Space:1999, or THX-1138, or any other SciFi that has a number in it. (2001: A Space Odyssey?)
Creating this piece was pretty straightforward. The only trouble I had technically was a strange shadow line on the egg ship. The front of the ship was significantly darker even though that’s where the light was coming from.
I finally realized the line was a reflection of the edge of the huge white background. The environment was simply two planes.
I had to put a huge side and top on it to solve the reflection problem.
It probably would have been easier to create a white dome over the whole scene but I was worried the horizon would be curved and ruin the grid line effect.
When I’m building a scene I usually drop cameras here and there when I find a new perspective that looks good. It’s the filmmaker in me I guess, shooting from multiple angles. When I’m finished setting the scene and lighting it’s always hard for me to decide which angle is best. My original perspective for this piece was a full body wide shot that featured the expanse of the void.
I finally settled on the medium shot because it was easier to see she was crying and I think it conveys more emotion from the character. Of course I also came up with this crazy extreme close-up which I totally love.
It was a difficult for me to pick only one. Which is your favorite? Wide, medium, or close?
Prints are available on my Deviant Art profile. CLICK HERE
Created in DAZ Studio 4.8
Rendered with 3Delight
Color Correction in Lightroom
Models used (from DAZ3D.com):
Teen Josie 6
Letizia for Lilith 6
Awesome Fantasy Eyes
Stalker Girl Hair
Sci-Fi Body Suit SF-001
Actual Tears
Nomad Module 2
DAZ3D released a new model yesterday, Victoria 7. It signals the beginning of a new generation of figures, Genesis 3. Here’s a quick comparison of the new model to the old Victoria 6.
For this comparison I set V6 (on the left) with pose #4 from ‘Perfect 10’ Standing Poses for Genesis 2 Female and converted the mirror pose for V7 via the new Genesis 2 to Genesis 3 Pose Converter. It wasn’t 100 percent. I had to pull the right hand out of V7’s side and her left foot was in the floor a bit but other than that it was a close conversion. The V6 pose is unmodified except for the head turn.
Hongyu’s Bikini for V6 was auto fit to V7 and that too is a little off as you can see. Pyrit Hair for Genesis 2 Female is auto fit to V7 as well and that seems fine. (Note, the weirdness on V7’s left wrist isn’t a problem with the model, it’s the shadow of the bikini tie.)
V7’s expression is using the new Genesis 3 Female Expressions (100% happy and 10% excitement.) It looks good and there are lots of controls to play with. V7’s eyes were horribly cross-eyed however, maybe from the pose conversion? I don’t know. I had to work with pointing V7’s eyes quite a bit. I don’t think I got it resolved. Right now her eyes are pointed at an object in the sky and they look better but still a bit cross-eyed.
Figures posed in DAZ Studio 4.8. I used the V6 Belle all (default skin) materials for V6 and the default all 3Delight materials for V7. Rendered in 3Delight with no postwork.
My wife CAT suggested the idea of a man fighting a dragon some time ago. It’s been banging around in my head but I wasn’t sure how to compose the characters in the heat of battle and still see both of their faces. I had a few false starts that really didn’t work but then DAZaholics, one of my favorite groups over on Deviant Art, announced a weekly challenge with the theme: Trial By Combat. I strapped myself to a chair Monday morning with the goal of figuring this one out. Apparently the challenge worked because by Monday evening the pieces were all fitting together quite nicely. I had the basic construction of the piece, but if I wanted to enter the contest I would have to finish and upload it by Thursday 7AM Pacific time.
That first day I focused mostly on the character poses, facial expressions, and camera position. I wanted to try a vertical frame which I had never done before. As a filmmaker I’m used to a horizontal frame and I wasn’t sure if I could make it work. I also wanted to keep the shot as close as possible for the most dramatic impact. Ultimately that meant losing the shield off the edge of frame but It felt so much more dramatic in close.
I’m spending more and more time in these pieces getting the expressions right. It’s not easy. There are hundreds of morph sliders to adjust and it’s hard to get a realistic expression on a human. Lots of tedious work with breaks to keep perspective. Much of the dragon’s expression is due to the shape of the head so I concentrated on that, and getting the eyes right. For our hero, I just kept at it over the three days.
One Light (or six)The light was tricky. It’s outdoors so it’s basically just one light, the Sun. I wanted to dramatically rake the light across the guy’s chest but at the same time I needed to get the light in his eyes and illuminate the dragon’s face as well. I found a position that worked but it took some doing including adjusting the characters a bit. Unfortunately that left the sword arm in darkness under the wing. To bring it out a bit I shot a warm spotlight up from below simulating a reflection from the ground. I set another cool spotlight from the left to simulate skylight. That highlighted the ribbing on the dragon’s wing and added a nice rim light on the side of the guy’s chest.
The dragon’s eyes are very deep set. It was impossible to get the sun in there so I also aimed two spotlights at just the eyeballs. I’ve been doing this for awhile now, especially with robots. It gives the eyes a nice glow.
What the hell is a Cucoloris?Another first for me in this piece was the use of a “cookie.” I added a dapply light grayscale image I found to the Opacity Strength of a plane primitive (in the surfaces tab) and used it to break up the light on the dragon’s torso. This darkened the area behind the guy’s left shoulder and side making him pop forward. A few other “flags” and “nets” (semi-transparent planes) took care of other hot spots on the dragon.
The body scars and blood smears were several separate add on products I bought at DAZ. They had a lot of customization in terms of the types of injuries, color and size, but not much when it came to placement. I would have liked some scratches on the right thigh and I needed more at the belt line where the dragon was grabbing him. Maybe there’s a way to move the scratches but I think that would end up being a huge manual slider nightmare. Anyway they worked for the most part.
I also used a Vascularity product to make it look like our hero was straining and his veins were popping out. It caused a lot of problems though. The veins kept popping through the clothing, especially the right arm and leg straps. The veins screwed up the scratches and blood smears too. Lots of fiddling with tons of sliders eventually fixed all that up. It was worth it though, the veins really sell it.
Left-wing DecisionsI spent a lot of time debating the dragon’s wing at the top right. I set it there to look like our hero was surrounded. I think it also works moved out of the way with a clear sky above, with our hero looking for a path to heaven, if you will. It’s certainly simpler that way… I don’t know. I’m still second-guessing my decision to leave it. I just hope the wing isn’t too distracting hanging up there.
The End of the LineI eventually stayed up all Wednesday night fiddling with details. It was starting to look quite good and I didn’t want to upload it before I had smoothed out all the problem areas. I managed to render it out of DAZ Studio, color correct it quickly in Lightroom, and upload it to Deviant Art an hour before the deadline! What do you think?
Created in DAZ Studio 4.8
Rendered with 3Delight
Color Correction in Lightroom
Models used (from DAZ3D.com):
Gianni 6
DAZ Dragon 3
Peter for G2M
Dry Mud Desert
Body Scars for G2
Dirt and Blood for genesis and G2
Fantasy Weapons collection 3
After Man destroys the planet Earth with nuclear weapons, God creates machine life to take his place.
In light of the close up experiment I did last week, this one was a no-brainier. Once again I didn’t just crop the original image. I went back into the 3D space, set another camera in the exact position, and composed a new shot with a longer focal length. That allowed me to create a new 10K render and also control the focus on the mountains in the background.
As I was color correcting this piece I noticed that you could see a reflection of God’s face in the machine-man’s middle finger. Not sure what that means but it’s obviously important.
Created in DAZ Studio 4.8 beta
Rendered with 3Delight
Color Correction in Lightroom
Figures used:
bot Genesis
Lilith 6
Dry Mud Desert
