Improving with learning

kyoto kid

Szark said:

Kyoto Kid that is a great improvement, the lighting works well, nice one.

...thank you. I submitted it to this month's DCC gallery.

kyoto kid

HeraldOfFire said:

It's fun to revisit an old scene, so I did it again. The last one I did was more a spur of the moment thing after getting my hands on Merlins Infinite Gardens. I had an old render I'd done with one so I thought I'd redo it. This time I'm going waaay back. This is probably one of the earliest renders I have and it was originally done in Poser.

Now, love it or hate it but Poser doesn't make it all that easy to work with lights, especially fiddly point lights and such. As such, the lighting in the original was awful. On top of not being able to work the lights, I had virtually no skill in doing so anyway. Diffuse IBL sounded like a swear word to me at the time because it would 'blow out' every thing in the scene. So yeah, the fledgling years of my rendering.

The only real reason I was particularly pleased with this one at the time was because of the book. No, it's not my prop, I can't take credit for that, but it is my artwork on the cover and it actually contains a readable story on the inner pages written by a friend. Or a portion of it, at least. Though, I did rename her main characters to Sadie and Sam, the former of which I used to make the cover image.

In the updated image, Victoria 5 takes the place of Vicky 4, and the lighting has been redone from scratch in Daz Studio. I've said it before and I'll say it again, indoor lighting is REALLY tough to get right. My first attempts with area lights were awful, with most of the area blanketed in darkness even with very high intensity. The lampshade was as easy as throwing on UberSurface2 and making it translucent. The lamp has no bulb of its own, so I placed a sphere inside to emit light.

The hardest part of this really, besides lighting, was figuring out which part of the Dream Home I needed to bolt on in order to ensure there was something for the mirror to reflect. Anyhow, enjoy.

...that is very nice. I like the touch with the book cover. I know the feeling about revisiting an old scene, especially one that was troublesome to work on and see it turn out so well.

Herald of Fire

Kyoto Kid said:

...that is very nice. I like the touch with the book cover. I know the feeling about revisiting an old scene, especially one that was troublesome to work on and see it turn out so well.

It's a three year old render, give or take. I had a different user name back then and didn't even get my DA account for another year. Mostly I was just interested in seeing whether I could make something sickeningly cute. Needless to say, I failed. At the time, virtually all of my works were of children at play, though I did later get acquainted with Sam and Sadie after acquiring a new account. Technically still children, but toon children.

They were the characters I used in the first render that I genuinely felt was actually good. It's probably why I have such an affinity for them both. Testing diffuse IBL lights in Poser as I recall. Still, for the longest time I was using Poser's built in characters. No offense to the modelers in question, but boy are they ugly. Getting Victoria was like receiving a goddess from upon high.

And now, Genesis. I'm in seventh heaven.

MegaP

Kyoto Kid,
Thank you for your advice:-)
Yep you hit the nail on the head with the point lights.
Spot render has become my friend.
I was churning out renders like there's no tomorrow and now I know why...NO lights to deal with!
I have a spotlight in front and a linear point light in front,both with raytrace lighting and set down low.
Up close I still have that crappy fuzzy look.
How do I lighten the shadow??
For my liking it seems too harsh
Is it due to settings in shadow softness and shadow bias?
Feel like the higher,I go the worse the render
Also love your work Herald...you've got me to this point and everyday I seem to improve

Herald of Fire

megabixel said:

Kyoto Kid,
Thank you for your advice:-)
Yep you hit the nail on the head with the point lights.
Spot render has become my friend.
I was churning out renders like there's no tomorrow and now I know why...NO lights to deal with!
I have a spotlight in front and a linear point light in front,both with raytrace lighting and set down low.
Up close I still have that crappy fuzzy look.
How do I lighten the shadow??
For my liking it seems too harsh
Is it due to settings in shadow softness and shadow bias?
Feel like the higher,I go the worse the render
Also love your work Herald...you've got me to this point and everyday I seem to improve

Raising the shadow softness will help, but I recommend small values as they go a long way. Other than that, ensuring that you have light filling in the shadowed areas will certainly keep them from being too strong.

Totte

Another image revisited after over two years, improving old images is a good way to tell yourself that your skills have improved.

Sedor

I wanted to do re-do also some old scenes, but unfortunately they won't open :(

Totte

sedor said:

I wanted to do re-do also some old scenes, but unfortunately they won't open :(

That's weird, that one was made in DS 3.1, opened in 4.6 with a completely new Runtime configuration. But the Poser files from that time just crash Poser when I try to open them.

Sedor

Yes, it should work - could be very possible that I've done at that time something really strange with my runtime. I've reorganized it in a massive way since then, maybe that causes it.

Totte

Here is another rerendered image. Lucky Lenny and the Riff brothers