Novica & Forum Members Tips & Product Reviews Pt 8
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All things considered, Cararra handles this kind of wide-screen, landscape, custom shader kind of 3D scene better stock than Studio with all kinds of plug-ins - and my best bet would probably be to spend the time becoming competent in Carrara, create these kind of landscape scenes there - then export them to DAZ.
Haven't bought it yet. It is tempting though. Wish there was more documentation. Sometimes it's hard to figure out how to use some of these things.
An even easier way to open Windows Task Manager - hover your mouse over the Task Bar, right click, and the option to "Start Task Manager" is right there.
Thank you!
That is assuming your mouse is working ... a friend had the fun of the mouse dying and closing all software by hand ...
I think some of the products go with the assumption that you know how to use certain features of Studio. Like geo shells. Of course, when I first started I had no idea what it was, how it worked and how to use it. So I really struggled with products like Let It Snow and Jepe's Body Jewels etc. Once I understood how geo shells work, the product became much easier to use. I do agree that a simple read me is helpful, to point one in the right direction at least.
And when you're dealing with real advanced features, like shaders that implement bump, diffuse, and displacement to create special effects - maybe indicating that being competent with advanced DAZ surfaces features and techniques is critical to being able to fully utilize the product - if there isn't a built in tutorial?
I mean, some vendors are great about this - and their tutorial on how to use their product helps you learn how to use these techniques in general to make better renders. Zev0 is one example of a vendor like this that springs to mind. Cayman Studios is another.
Others, not so much. Part of the problem is one that exists in technology and art circles in general... the people who create aren't always the best at communicating and teaching. Great artists who don't have talents that transfer to making actual, complete content packages. Which is too bad. Sometimes there seems to be language barriers at play, too.
Anyhow after working with this all day yesterday, I finally got a rough render I'm pretty happy with. There are still some details that could use postwork or some more props to hide things that are going on - but overall - this is the rabbit hole Novica sent me down yesterday when s/he suggested using instances ot make wide angle backgrounds.
Rane (G3F) Daria Dress (G3F) Manhattan Hair and Newsboy Cap (Gen3F)
The first thing I checked out on the hair was the removal of the cap, and yes, you can. It's a nice, short hairstyle. There's a discussion on the sale thread about another hair and how all the different parts add up, and frankly I never buy colors because OOT and Slosh have great hair shaders. I use Slosh's and will have to look at OOT's when I get time, I do own it. The point is, consider getting one of those and they quickly pay for themselves.
The Daria Dress has good movement and morphs. Put a top underneath it and that becomes family friendly, and depending on the camera view, you might not need to worry about the ultra high slit. I thought this would be a good elegant swimsuit cover (think of a mansion pool-party.) And it was bought yesterday when I got the great discounts. The thumbnails of the promo will show you the cute materials. Very tropical (but also includes an animal print, so great variety.)
Rane's teeth need major tweaking, as green was used for one of the colors and they come across as extremely discolored. I reloaded her, just to be sure I hadn't done something drastic. This is the default, out of the box. Depending on your lights, they can really appear darkish brown/green. I tried with another set of lights, same thing. If someone else who has her can double check this (although I used the exact same lights I use on all my gals who look fine) I would appreciate it. I really like Rane, her eyebrows are different, she has dimples, and a very nice, unique face.
The thing is... there is no way I could get this into a Terradome 3 landscape and have it render on my 2GB Nvidia card - and without details like this, Terradome3 is pretty barren. I'm still not convinced Terradome 3 is of much utility for people who don't have GPUs with massive memory - but the individual components, especiall the HDRI skies and the water, are pretty useful for kitbashing other world scenes like this one.
This is Novary's teeth, same lighting.
LOL- and Novica (which is Cathie, I'm a she), when she "sent you down that rabbit hole" made sure to tell you she had zero experience with that particular tunnel. (aka, instances.)
It looks good, Donovan. A bit dark on my screen, but you're brave to tackle instances. I haven't ventured there yet.
I totally hear you on Terradome 3. I had the same setup you do when I bought it last summer. I was disappointed that I couldn't really use it, even after they optimized it. I have used T2 in Poser and it's great. So I was so excited about seeing it come to DAZ and Iray. That said, T3 works quite well on a 4GB card. I recently swapped out my 750Ti for a 1050Ti. The cost wasn't bad, a little over $100 (I used Amazon gift cards from Christmas so it was a pretty cheap date for me.) I'm sure I'll outgrow this card eventually, but am much happier with 4GB. It does everything I want it to do right now, which is mainly portraits and some landscapes. I'm just starting to really play with T3.
That's really weird with the teeth, Novica. I don't have that character or I'd be happy to test it out. Sorry.
Teeth Swap 101
So I've never done this before- swapped teeth maps- and all I did was put Novary's in the base color for Rane (I didn't change any other maps) and then put the base color a tad gray, and translucency a bit blue/gray. Voila! Here's the tweaks:
If you copy the map from the Base Color (right click, copy) you can simply right click and paste into the Base Color for Rane. Change the colors to:
Base Color: 249 249 249 ( a whitish blue, barely blue)
Translucency Color: 219 238 239 (blue gray)
Glossy Color: 194 208 209 (blue gray)
There ya go. She kept her teeth shape but got the materials from the other character.
It's important to note that if you purchased any one of the rodent kits (https://www.daz3d.com/rodents-by-am-squirrels-of-eastern-hemisphere) you musn't teach them to attack people. https://worldnewsdailyreport.com/woman-arrested-for-training-squirrels-to-attack-her-ex-boyfriend/ LOL.
And Rane with Anjou Hair (added smoothing modifier.) Click to enlarge.
The thing is... there is no way I could get this into a Terradome 3 landscape and have it render on my 2GB Nvidia card - and without details like this, Terradome3 is pretty barren. I'm still not convinced Terradome 3 is of much utility for people who don't have GPUs with massive memory - but the individual components, especiall the HDRI skies and the water, are pretty useful for kitbashing other world scenes like this one.
My video card isn't anything special It's (GT 640 - 2MB). I have 32gb memory with quad core i7 3.4gz. I also use SSD hard drives for both OS and content and my swap files go on mini SSD. Just alone gives me fantastic speed. Noting that I also have 2 28" monitors connected to this card. And, you can tune settings via the NVIDIA control panel. I tweek mine from time to time depending on what I'm running. Sometimes gets slow and working only with DAZ gives excellent results.
4 of my last 6 renders were in terradome. https://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#galleries/1495671/ ;
Upgrading your card will probably give you a huge boost. I know it did for me. I went from 2GB to 4GB and the difference is amazing. I'm using a rebuilt i5 computer with 14 GB of ram. It's five years old, nothing fancy or fast, but once I put the 1050TI in there, it opened up a whole new world- like Terradome 3, multi person renders, etc. Yes, I can still max it out. I recently rendered 3 G3Ms to show the differences in Dante 7 and his add on characters. I used the free reduced textures script and was able to fit them on my GPU without a problem (they also weren't wearing much and were bald, LOL.) Every little bit helps! Some day, I'll graduate to a bigger, badder, card and computer, but happy with this for now.
I have an i5 with 32gb and a 750ti with 2GB.
Unfortunately, it is a SFF HP system that won't take anything more powerful currently than the 750ti in the PCI-e slot.
I either need to gut the components in it, CPU, and memory, and put them in a new case and motherboard...
Or just build an entirely new machine. One or the other. Can't decide which. The motherboard and case is the cheapest way to go. But then I've got to add a new GPU on top of all of that business.
But... I also have a Surface Pro 4 i7 with 16GB of memory... so, I'm kind of being a whiny spoiled kid about the whole thing. Nothing is PERFECT... but nothing is TERRIBLE, either. :)
Oh my gosh!
I will have to look at the stats on my PC, I am at work at the moment. My laptop struggles a bit even after moving all of my content and everything else I could think of to an external drive. But, its 6 years old so I can't really complain.
My PC rarely has trouble with anything, (except, for some reason, the nvidea preview render sometimes slows thing down to a crawl which drives me absolutely batty) but I can't think of the specs off hand. I am considereing adding to it as well though because well, one can never have enough lol. I also have all of my content and rpg game collection on an external drive for the pc as well.
That makes a huge difference Novica. Although I will say the original teeth would work for some realism if you had a bum or a beggar in medieval times, it might work okay for that.
I actually think that Rane's teeth are not so far off from what you can find in the real world right now, especially amongst the older, heavy smoker crowd. I wouldn't say it's the norm, and I, personally, don't think it's all that attractive, but I can't say I've never seen teeth that color before. Not everyone uses whitening products, especially where I grew up in Georgia. :)
Yeah, I don't ever have my characters with Pepsodent white teeth. I change the colors to a blue-gray, sometimes with a hint of gold in translucency, etc.
Did anyone get the shader tutorial? I'm on the fence about it... I need that information, but even on sale it is really expensive...
And it could be over my head!
Oh my. Looking at it gives me a headache. I know you can do it if you try, the question boils down to- do you want to? If it's explained step by step, at least it's color coded!
It looks like an April Fool's, but still way too funny.
I haven't been able to use Terradome personally. I do occasionaly use the HDRI's but they render really bright at default, and so I have others I like better.
Those are some awkward looking teeth. I don't care for them.
I've tried a couple of shader baking tutorials, with bricks and paths and all those lines and network topology maps...
I'm an IT professional, we work with topology maps like these all the time - and although I did figure out the paths and flow - I went, "yup, this isn't for me." AND... as a bonus, it is significantly different in 3DL than in Iray - so you've really got to learn two methods of shader baking.
YMMV.
It is a deep rabbit hole and once you get done - the RESULT is only going to be leveraged by those who have a conceptual understanding of Studio that is *itself* kind of "expert" class. Most people are going to buy textures, not use shaders, for example.
I'd suggest getting Carrara and playing with the shader engine there - it is more logical, less complex and seems less buggy - before deciding to dig into it on Studio, myself.
If I load one of the Promo scenes, like the Mountain Lake, with an atmosphere and HDRI sky, it brings my system to a crawl. I need to switch to wireframe or turn off objects to make the system run at a tolerable speed. I can custom build my own zones and use the texture reduction script to make things faster - if I'm real careful to ensure that I'm being as conservative with memory as possible - I can do things with it... and they always turn out gorgeous.
But it isn't just a load and go solution for your average DAZ artist with a modest PC. Terradome is designed for those with experience and powerful machines. It isn't a cyclorama or backdrop/background on a primative plane outside a window.
I crashed daz last night trying to play in tera dome. I have a EVGA GeForce GTX 750Ti - 2GB, the AMD 6300 6-core - 16 gig of ram. I bought a great motherboard used off ebay for cheep, and built the system myself for gaming . The motherboard is really expandable. I'm think I'm going to try and grab a used geforce 1080 next month, and upgrade my ram to 32.
if your building your own system this is a must have link https://pcpartpicker.com/ - I have my system saved in it so I can just pop things in and see if they will work before I buy.
I can use terradome. I just don't particularly like the results. It looks somehow more computer generated than I like. Everyone's tastes are different, but it doesn't appeal to me. I guess I really don't tend to render big landscapes. I'm more inclined to do smaller scale scenes where the characters are front and center.