Le thread de Chanteur-de-Vent
Chanteur-de-Vent
Posts: 567
Since my Glass Elevator thread moved over to the commercial forum, I had to create a new one. But this time I'm going to make it more general, so that it won't move to another forum every time the product is finished. That's like my nominal motivation.
The more underground one is: I'm again stalling. So if you good people can give me a kick from time to time to finish the stuff I started, it would be very helpfull
The big question is: do you want me to post only previews of the products I'm working on, or is there also some interest in some wip's and step-by-steps of my artistic works?
Will be posting some stuff soon!
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All of the above. XD Get to posting!
Gimme all! I like seeing processes, welcome back to the Art place :D
I'm interested in all of it :)
Ok, here goes nothing. Aka my attempt at a step-by-step creation. Trying to give comments on why I make such decisions and show how I went from first render to finished work.
Step 1: Pick something that you bought and never used and play with some poses/clothing/camera angle till you have something that strikes the inspiration. For me it was this pose in combination with shadowcaster outfit. Somehow it reminded me of ice skaters and inline skating.
Step 2: Start to play with materials to fix it up to interesting Iray level. I selected most of the red parts and turned them gold using PD shaders.
Step 3: I added some small toruses on the bottom of the boots, to turn it into inline skates. And changed the pose, to make it more natural and dynamic (no pic, sorry).
Step 4: Add an environment fitting your theme. I wanted something Sci-fi, so used the Marcoor Control Room. Of course having a roof messed up my lighting making everything too dark. So I added a simple emission plane on top, making sure it's set at 150.000 lumen and not showing up in my viewport.
Step 5: Didn't like the hair, so I changed it. Also the square format wasn't nice. It was clear I wanted a second character she'll be looking at, and like this there's not enough space to fit her look inside the viewport.
Step 6: So now we need a second character around which one she actually rolls. Added Damien in a sci-fi space suit, to fit the blue and white theme. Took some time to actually make sure he's looking at her and vice versa.
Step 7: Well, after all this careful positioning my Damien is still going through the floor. One way to fix it is to move him again, but after all this work, I prefer a different solution. Just merge the floor into some fluid, so he's actually trapped. That increases the tension of the story and removes the "going through the floor" problem. Now where were my puddles and splashes?
Step 8: Ok, that kinda got fixed. Not good enough, I'll come back to those puddles later. The general shader and concept is ok, it just needs some fine tuning. But what also needs fixing is Damien's red skin. It's too red for such a sterile white setting. Made his skin lighter in the shader tab.
Step 9: Ok, that went ok. Just put every color setting for skin on white and be happy. Made his hair blonde to match. The girl needs some weapons now, she can't be skating like that without any kind of stabbing thingie, right? Since most of my content is fantasy, I just retextured two swords into the right colors. Made the blades emissive. Sci-fi swords. Or kinda.
Step 10: Time to add some DOF. And start fine tuning that splash around the male character. Oh, and in the process I changed his gloves to white, since that gray was out of color.
Step 11: Had to fix the composition. The focus is now to centered on the girl, so I moved the viewport to fix that.
Step 12: Better. But now there's an attention point of Damien's behind, without being used. If our eyes need to look at it, he needs a tail, that points back to the girl. Used the Succubus add-on tail from Damine Pro bundle and applied the same "white" skin settings to it that I used on Damien himself.
Step 13: Now I'm very close to happy. Except for the blue marks on his suit. And lack of gold anywhere but on the suit of the girl.
And now I'm happy enough to leave this overnight. Might make some separate renders (girl apart, rest apart) to allow for postwork motion blur. We'll see. Be back tomorrow. Apologies for grainy test-renders, I don't have an Iray GPU to render those out full.
Comments on format or suggestions are welcome. If you have questions, feel free to ask.
I only have one minor suggestion, on her pose: she should probably be leaning a bit to our right(her left). I use to roller blade alot and when navigating corners you had to shift your hips in the direction of the curve or risk a face full of gravel. And angle her left leg a bit more behind her, because right now she doesn't really look like she's in motion, she seems very static.
I'm glad to see you here! I'm always interested in the process!
This is ice skating tho, not rollerblading. Is the movement to propel wheels the same as a blade on ice? That is a serious question as I don't rollerblade or ice skate.
Yes. Physics works the same no matter what's under your feet.
I've never ice skated, but since it's a single line of contact with the surface, just like in roller blading, I would imagine it's the same concept.
Thank you all guys for reacting and the comments.
Tried to change the pose (had to adjust the suit materials again, because now the material zones weren't as flexible, which is a shame) and turned the water into the floor material. Looks better to me, but the pose is a hit and miss. I've inline skated a lot, but I have no idea how it looks like from the side. I actually aimed more at something like a ice runner:
Anyway, here's what I got and where I'm still happy with the composition:
nice and inspirational work, I love the fact that you just added the toruses for the rollerblaes. that surface melt is very cool as well. I wonder if it looks better if you move her a tad up so the rolls don't sink into the surface
I've been busy and just now popping in. I like how you got to that bottom image. I love learning from others' processes! :)
Ok, rendered stuff out.
Original render, 46%:
And a lot of postwork versions, trying to add something that'll make me happy. Mostly Picasa filters, if you want a recepy for one of them, feel free to ask.
I have a feeling I'm missing something in the scene. Either it's the amount of gold in the girl, or some weird shift in the focus. So I'm doing expirements. Here's the first (using DG's Sci-fi emission shaders with gold overlay from PD shaders):
Might be experimenting more to see if I can fix this somehow. All comments and suggestions are welcome.
I really like the tonal range of the last render. The dome over the "demon" is a tad distracting, to me, anyway. Maybe add some gold, or even an opposing color to his outfit rather than the dome to add more dynamic coloring to contrast with the white?
Ok. Tried to add some gold to the guy and do some weird photoshop holes in his sleeves. I'm weird...
Personally I like the last one the best, so here's a postworked version:
But I'm still feeling like there shouldn't be people on rollerskates in a sci-fi confined space... My brain can do strange stuff sometimes.
This is awesome! Since it's scifi, you could go the hoverboard way, like Back to the Future 2. That might be cool.
Well I think it is different and kewl all at the same time!!
I very much love the posing of her, I do have a suggestion for you where it is si-fi maybe you could put like little rocket boosters on the back of the skates.
I think that would give it a more of a catch me if you can type of render.
Ok, worked on some idea's: trying to make some thrusters, then to add some lightning between her swords. After several Ron's brushes, I think the lightning is the one I'll go for.
And here's the postworked version:
I like the postworked version quite a bit, watching the progress is very interesting. :)
Only thing I may suggest is to see if you could use some glow effect on the lighting to make it pop. Electrify it, as it were.
Like this?
There ya go!
Last beauty marks, and I'm posting. Brushed the blue things away, they were distracting.
that glow helps to the last bit of making this awesome. The tail of that guy irritates the heck out of me, but that is just me :D
What is the spiky thing she has in her hair?
The spikes are a crown from a hair set, actually. Well done, CdV, I like the final version a great deal.
I love watching the progress of a piece of art from start to finish. Its really interesting to see how different people's minds work. I really like the final version as well, and am very impressed with your attention to detail (the blue bits part, I knew something was bothering me just a tiny bit but couldn't figure out what it was until you got rid of them)
Thank you all. This work is officialy finished and posted. It was interesting to actually post all of my "let's try this" renders, I tend to make quite a lot.
@Linwelly - the tail has a purpose. If I remove it, you'll stare at the guy's ass. And your eyes wouldn't know where to go. The tail points you back. Or at least it's supposed to. But I can imagine it's a bit weird for a sci-fi creature to have a tail...
@IceDragonArt - my eyes for details comes from staring at my pictures for a long period of time with the "what the hell annoys me here?" question in mind. After some practice you learn where to look.
I see what you intended, I know I'm late for the show, so just as a though, I would probably have not curled up the tail, but just one turn backwards and then moving in a wave but pointing to the skater girl
Ok, so I'm not dead yet. It's been a strange month, I just recovered from a week-long virus and have been pre-occupied with different things than DAZ. I also have been making a categorizing script for old content (one that automatically sorts your Poser-format folders). It's quasi-finished but got stuck in the beta-tester phase. Something didn't add up and I haven't found time to fix it yet. As I said, I've been pre-occupied.
Anyway - here's another step-by-step of my last render. It actually started out as a spontanious vision, just saw that scene before my eyes and knew I had to make it. It was a white kitchen full of morning light with a skeleton making tea for a couple of kids.
So first of all I needed a kitchen. I found only one (part of some Cafe set), so I removed most objects and left only the sink and floor. I added a set with chairs and table from the Eclectic set, added a simple plane as a the rest of the floor and used a book vignette as a window.
But as I said, I wanted a white kitchen. The one bright with white colors. So all those grey, red and green wouldn't do. Plus the wall would obstruct my lighting, so I hid it for the time. And started to re-shade stuff using Marble Iray Shaders, Elegant fabric shaders, Homestyle shaders, some basic DAZ shaders and Photoshop.
I was unhappy about the chosen wall, so I used a wall from Mage's tower. That one fit better with the wood-and-white theme I had going on:
Now the lack of a back wall for the sinks annoyed me. Usually you don't place a sink in the middle of the kitchen, but against the wall, since the pipes have to go somewhere. So I added a simple plane and used a Homestyle shader.
Ok, now the bulk of the kitchen is finished. The empty wall looked weird to me, so I used some furniture from Gothic Decor to make a cupboard on the wall, that looked more natural. And added some sweet stuff from Curiouser set on the table. After all they had to eat something, and those plates and cups fit perfectly with my white kitchen concept.
Now it's time to add people. I needed two kids and a skeleton. So I used Tween Ryan (I mean I didn't pick his pro bundle at the time for nothing, right?) and used Growing up on MRL's Willow. Skeletong is from LOREZ Skeleton bundle.
I wasn't happy with the standard lighting, so I switched to Sun-Sky, 10:00 in the morning. That fit better.
Added a huge DOF since it gave me this fluffy white light mist effect and changed the rest of the floor to the same texture.
Insert here a lot of renders struggling with composition. Something about it just was wrong. I moved the girl a lot of times, and decided in the end to add a bunch of skelly dragons to compensate the composition.
Still a bit unhappy with the composition I started to move around furniture and adding new pieces.
So here I was relatively happy and even rendered it out. But then I realized that the skeleton was completely getting lost between all this white. I added a crown.
This looked better, but now I saw his pose didn't make any sense. If he's at the table he should have something to do. So I added a teapot and changed his pose. Now he had some purpose.
Rendered out. Now I wanted a bit more fluff and whiteness. Like the whole scene was showing up in a movie, where you see a blank screen slowly going into an overlit picture and then a normal view. You know, like the scene with Frodo in LOTR when he wakes up after the ring has been destroyed. All clean and white. PS to the resque - I selected the whole picture with some feather and fuzzy edges and added a white background.
And now some slight tone of postwork in Picasa:
Quite happy with the end result. Sorry for so many pics. :)
Final version in DAZ gallery: https://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/518606/
Final version on DA: https://chanteur-de-vent.deviantart.com/art/Breakfast-party-729722148
It looks great. Thanks for the peek into your process and kitbash in skills.
+1