Tag Archives: 3Delight

Who Are You?

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Prints are available on my Deviant Art profile:
http://ericsusch.deviantart.com/art/Who-Are-You-612998410

Who Are You?This is an update of the first CGI image I ever completed in DAZ Studio.  Back then I didn’t know how to do lighting so I moved the character into the lights that were already pre-built into the set.  This is the original:

v6 test 09 cam 01It took me days to place the character properly and learn how to aim a camera and render.  The image is dark and I’ve grown to hate it as I’ve become more experienced.  And so, like George Lucas, I decided to go back and change my earlier work to add new characters and “make it better.”

Back to the Beginning

I loaded up the old project and continued right where I left off.  As I re-familiarized myself with everything it became obvious how little I knew at the time.  It was interesting to see how I solved problems back then.  I’m really deep into all the technical details now and the way I work today isn’t necessarily better, just more complicated.  It was surprising.

I knew I wanted to add more light and make everything brighter, but what else?  I hate pieces where people just stand there so I added another character for the girl to react to.  She’s looking out a doorway so I put a little alien guy there who is startled by her.

I tried many camera angles to get the best interaction of the two characters but eventually decided to keep it wide and head on similar to the original.  You need to see the distance between them for it to work.  These are some of the test angles.

v6 15 cam100 possible angle v6 15 cam103 possible angle v6 15 cam101 possible angleThe last one isn’t bad but you can’t tell the alien is a tiny guy.  I think you need to see that to understand he is scared.  The middle one’s good too but you don’t get the sense of him coming around the corner.

Straight on wide shot seems the best but I still think it’s boring and too far away.  Will have to work on that in another piece.  For now it will have to do.

A Brighter Future

If I knew how to use an ambient light back when I originally rendered this scene it would have looked much better.  I’m a big fan of the Advanced Ambient Light by Age of Armour.  It’s the easiest fill light I’ve ever used and it renders fast.  While I was playing around with it, I tried something new.  I set three ambient lights in the scene.  One was set to light everything overall like I usually do.  The other two were placed very close to the characters with the light limited to their immediate area.  That gave me the ability to adjust the brightness of each character and the background separately.

v6 12 cam07 00 amb key 2 meters around character 100 percent + amb fill 40 percent v6 14 character ambientIt worked out very well.  The light from the stairs and the blue back light from the windows were still the main lights but the ambient lights in this configuration allowed for very fine brightness adjustment during the final tweaking.  I’m going to use this technique whenever I work in 3Delight.

The Small Stuff Is Always the Hardest

The most difficult part of this re-imagining was actually the back wall.  The set had a window that looked like a portal or hatch right where the lines on the floor converge at the back.  It drew your eye right past the two characters to the window.  I had to eliminate that panel and take a different wall from another part of the set and replace it.  The other wall had a larger window that extended behind the corner so it wasn’t as distracting.  Finding the right panel to use took some time.  Adjusting the glossiness of the window and darkening it with a semi-transparent black plane helped too.

v6 15 back wall 01 v6 15 back wall 02Know Yourself

After struggling with the complexity of Iray for the past year it was a joy to build something in 3Delight again.  You forget how simple it is.  And that’s the key, isn’t it.  Simplicity.  Working in this old project, I was surprised how much I was able to do originally with how little I knew.  I didn’t have a lot of options – not a lot of knowledge about surfaces, materials, render settings, shaders, UV maps, morphs, or even lights.  I didn’t have all those things in my head slowing down my creative process.  I just did it whatever way I could figure out in the moment.  I’ve forgotten what that’s like.

Not What I Thought 2016 BTS 00 lightwaveI encourage everyone to do this at least once.  Open up a really old project and see how you used to work.  See how you used to think.  You may learn something from yourself.

Who Are You?Created in DAZ Studio 4.5 and 4.9
Rendered with 3Delight
Color Correction in Lightroom

Figures used:
Victoria 6
Liquid Halo On Sky 16 for Genesis
Grey Alien for Genesis 3 Female
Sci-Fi Corridor 2013

Color Correction Test

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Run (CC test)For most of the films and television shows I’ve worked on the goal of color correction was to make the picture look technically correct and pretty – healthy skin tones, bright colors, maybe a bit “hyper real” but still normal.  Anything that degraded the image was bad and needed to be fixed.  What I’m trying here is relatively new to me.  I want something more stylized for this animation.  I’ve thrown in some grain and even a faint hint of scan lines to roughen up the super clean CGI.  I’ve also washed out the skin tones in favor of the blue and orange.  For comparison here is the original render before color correction.  (Click both to embiggen.)

Run (no CC test)I’ve been using the CC tools in Lightroom for most of my CGI work to date but since this is an animation I’m using the tools in Adobe Premiere.  I’m finding it much harder.  I love the CC tools in Lightroom.  They’re more intuitive than the controls in Premiere or photoshop.  I wish Adobe would create Lightroom style CC tools for all their products.

If this were a still image I probably would have gone a lot further with the grunge but it has to work as an animation.  It has to look good in motion and on all the other close-ups and wide shots too. I’m pleased with it right now although I’m a little concerned that the grain will be lost when the video is finally compressed and uploaded to youtube.  We’ll have to see what happens.

Created in DAZ Studio 4.8
Rendered with 3Delight
Color Correction in Adobe Premiere

Figures used:
Aiko 6
XTech for Genesis 2 Female
Modular Sci-Fi Kit 01 + 02

 

Frozen In the Life I’ve Chosen

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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 logic – D/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