Post Your Renders - #4: A New Hope

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  • wetcircuitwetcircuit Posts: 0
    edited December 1969

    Garstor said:
    this is Goya Hair from Neftis3D (link). This is currently the best M4 hair I have bought - I really should expand that collection.

    There are certain hair props I look at and think "I could do that in Carrara..." Normally I am totally lying to myself and don't really attempt it... but THIS one I am pretty sure I could make in Carrara... LOL

    Unless I'm lying to myself again... :)

  • bighbigh Posts: 8,147
    edited December 1969

    Garstor said:
    this is Goya Hair from Neftis3D (link). This is currently the best M4 hair I have bought - I really should expand that collection.

    There are certain hair props I look at and think "I could do that in Carrara..." Normally I am totally lying to myself and don't really attempt it... but THIS one I am pretty sure I could make in Carrara... LOL

    Unless I'm lying to myself again... :)

    fibbing :)

  • wetcircuitwetcircuit Posts: 0
    edited March 2013

    bigh said:
    Garstor said:
    this is Goya Hair from Neftis3D (link). This is currently the best M4 hair I have bought - I really should expand that collection.

    There are certain hair props I look at and think "I could do that in Carrara..." Normally I am totally lying to myself and don't really attempt it... but THIS one I am pretty sure I could make in Carrara... LOL

    Unless I'm lying to myself again... :)

    fibbing :)

    LOL, not really... :-P not that I'm such a genius, and I LOVE Neftis.

    But short bedhead is something carrara does well. This is mostly just shaders controlling the shape of the hair. With a good set of control shaders for length and density you could get short men's styles without many hair guides...

    Here's like 15min of "styling". If I was really going to reproduce that hair I would use two shader zones (so the side can look softer and turn differently like the product pics), but you can see from the top that it's not so different...

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    Post edited by wetcircuit on
  • WendyLuvsCatzWendyLuvsCatz Posts: 38,233
    edited December 1969

    try Dark roots light tips
    some of AprilYSH's moda cuts that came with C6 & 7 are not unlike it anyway

  • wetcircuitwetcircuit Posts: 0
    edited March 2013

    In this pic you can really see where another shader should kick in, at the sides... It's because i "cut" the guides to get shorter hair (so the shader effects Wave and Clump get compressed to a shorter length of hair). I'm pretty sure a length map would create a smoother look on the sides...

    try Dark roots light tips
    some of AprilYSH's moda cuts that came with C6 & 7 are not unlike it anyway

    I wasn't really trying to duplicate it exactly, but you are right about putting in a darker root color, it makes it have more "depth".
    Highlights are still tough to work out... lots of trial and error and test renders (really would like the Spot Render tool to be fixed in the beta)... This is some brass-colored highlights, and brightness very low. Moved the lights around too...

    Although I think is starting to look more Laurie Anderson than Neftis' Goya Hair... LOL

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    Post edited by wetcircuit on
  • wetcircuitwetcircuit Posts: 0
    edited December 1969

    Ok... this was NOT what I was supposed to be doing today... But last ones:

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    Doc125.png
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  • GarstorGarstor Posts: 1,411
    edited December 1969

    Ok... this was NOT what I was supposed to be doing today...

    I can relate to that -- don't tell my boss!

    But I tip my cap to your superior Carrara hair skills. Maybe one day, I'll be this good...

  • evilproducerevilproducer Posts: 9,050
    edited December 1969

    Garstor said:
    Here's the facial hair... It turned out better than I expected...

    Indeed! Very nice. Let's see, my avatar's hair...your guy's goatee...age is about right...darn near have my portrait!

    A new business line! Carrara Portraits By Holly! :wow:

    PS: I am not a reclusive millionaire playboy...darn it all!


    But are you metrosexual? ;-)

  • GarstorGarstor Posts: 1,411
    edited December 1969

    But are you metrosexual? ;-)

    Now if I knew what that was...

    Be right back...

    Speakers.BeginAsyncPlay(MUZAK);

    Alright. Back...

    Hmmmm (Urban Dictionary) ... doesn't apply to me. I don't have to exfoliate...at my age that is happening naturally. ;-) Hair care products? I buy the cheapest shampoo I can find and use as little of it as I can get away with. "You can make her lamb shanks and risotto for dinner..." Strike out here too -- I can burn a fruit salad.

  • MiloMilo Posts: 511
    edited December 1969

    Koukotsu said:
    Garstor said:
    Koukotsu said:
    Nope, I just leave my shaders as they are, I simply check ambient occlusion in the multi-pass/image output options and let it render. ;-)

    I think I'm up for some early morning education. Can someone please explain at a high-level what ambient occlusion is about and when I would or would not want to check that box in the Render Room?

    It's basically just a fast approximation of full indirect lighting, and works by darkening the scene's ambient light based on object proximity.

    Suppose you have 2 cubes that are placed far apart; the ambient light between these 2 cubes will still be fairly bright.

    But, if you place the same 2 cubes very close together, the ambient light between them will be much darker.

    In order for it to work properly you'll have to have some degree of ambient light in your scene, which can be controlled by selecting "scene" from the instances list and under the effects tab you'll see a percentage slider for the ambient light level. Then, you need to increase the occlusion radius from the global illumination panel to control the size/scale of the effect.

    As far as when you would want to use it... keep in mind that it's basically just a quicker alternative to full indirect lighting, it's particularly handy to use for interior renders and for portrait style renders where you need that indirect lighting look but there are little to no objects for the light to bounce off of.

    Crude versions of it are becoming fairly common in video games now as well, which look incredibly dull and flat with the effect turned off.

    Just play around with a simple scene (Place a few spheres and other primitives on a plane) and do some ambient occlusion tests, you'll learn to love it most likely, lol. :)

    I have never been able to get a AO pass like you showed. The only thing I was able to do while doing a tutorial was to place a basic dome of lights and change every shader to white and do a long render to get a simulated AO pass. I usually just quit after trying to get it to work. But I told myself I would get 2 items done so I am plugging away at them.

    When I try to get the AO (working on a contest scene) I get all white, or all black. So I set up a scene, 3 planes, bottom and two back ones forming a portion of a cube/room. I place a sphere in there with one light. I used a single light trying a spot, distant and bulb. I tried with no GI, GI-skylight, GI indirect light. I turned scene ambient lighting all the way up and off. I left the sphere the original color and set the walls to some others. I have the multi-pass set to Ambient Occlusion and I am using PNG. What I get with this is big black and white section. I have tried this in the past and hit the same wall. Is there particular lights or other rendering settings one must use?

    I am using C 8.5 build 172 64bit

    Any thoughts would be appreciated.

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  • evilproducerevilproducer Posts: 9,050
    edited March 2013

    -_Milo_- said:
    Koukotsu said:
    Garstor said:
    Koukotsu said:
    Nope, I just leave my shaders as they are, I simply check ambient occlusion in the multi-pass/image output options and let it render. ;-)

    I think I'm up for some early morning education. Can someone please explain at a high-level what ambient occlusion is about and when I would or would not want to check that box in the Render Room?

    It's basically just a fast approximation of full indirect lighting, and works by darkening the scene's ambient light based on object proximity.

    Suppose you have 2 cubes that are placed far apart; the ambient light between these 2 cubes will still be fairly bright.

    But, if you place the same 2 cubes very close together, the ambient light between them will be much darker.

    In order for it to work properly you'll have to have some degree of ambient light in your scene, which can be controlled by selecting "scene" from the instances list and under the effects tab you'll see a percentage slider for the ambient light level. Then, you need to increase the occlusion radius from the global illumination panel to control the size/scale of the effect.

    As far as when you would want to use it... keep in mind that it's basically just a quicker alternative to full indirect lighting, it's particularly handy to use for interior renders and for portrait style renders where you need that indirect lighting look but there are little to no objects for the light to bounce off of.

    Crude versions of it are becoming fairly common in video games now as well, which look incredibly dull and flat with the effect turned off.

    Just play around with a simple scene (Place a few spheres and other primitives on a plane) and do some ambient occlusion tests, you'll learn to love it most likely, lol. :)

    I have never been able to get a AO pass like you showed. The only thing I was able to do while doing a tutorial was to place a basic dome of lights and change every shader to white and do a long render to get a simulated AO pass. I usually just quit after trying to get it to work. But I told myself I would get 2 items done so I am plugging away at them.

    When I try to get the AO (working on a contest scene) I get all white, or all black. So I set up a scene, 3 planes, bottom and two back ones forming a portion of a cube/room. I place a sphere in there with one light. I used a single light trying a spot, distant and bulb. I tried with no GI, GI-skylight, GI indirect light. I turned scene ambient lighting all the way up and off. I left the sphere the original color and set the walls to some others. I have the multi-pass set to Ambient Occlusion and I am using PNG. What I get with this is big black and white section. I have tried this in the past and hit the same wall. Is there particular lights or other rendering settings one must use?

    I am using C 8.5 build 172 64bit

    Any thoughts would be appreciated.

    I did this with ambient light at the default brightness, but the color chip was set to a grey color. I had selected Ambient occlusion only in the render room and rendered an AO pass. Worked fine. I tried to render an AO pass with full Indirect lighting enabled and just got a black picture for the AO pass.


    I did use the default scene light and I'm in C7.2 Pro. I changed the shaders for the cube to a flat white color

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    Post edited by evilproducer on
  • edited March 2013

    -_Milo_- said:
    I am using C 8.5 build 172 64bit

    Any thoughts would be appreciated.

    Hmmm that's odd, I've never had any difficulty in getting Carrara to create an ambient occlusion pass with the multi-pass render feature :smirk:

    Could it possibly be a bug? What operating system are you using?

    Post edited by K0daKumi_8e8836aac0 on
  • MiloMilo Posts: 511
    edited March 2013

    Koukotsu said:
    -_Milo_- said:
    I am using C 8.5 build 172 64bit

    Any thoughts would be appreciated.

    Hmmm that's odd, I've never had any difficulty in getting Carrara to create an ambient occlusion pass with the multi-pass render feature :smirk:

    Could it possibly be a bug? What operating system are you using?

    Koukotsu - I am using Windows 7 64-bit ( I tested it in my 8.1 and the 8.5)

    evilproducer - At least you got gray.. I just did a render to make sure.. Ambient occ in the scene at 20%, No Gi at all, one multi-pass set to Ambient Occlusion. I got 2 images since I did PNG the full color normal one and the AO which is.... solid white :) I would post but the color is the same as above and the other well we don't need a white square :)

    I am at a loss. I could even post my .car file somewhere if you want to take a look at it. its like 2k

    Post edited by Milo on
  • edited December 1969

    Same here, Windows 7 64-bit :-/

    Sure, post a scene if you can, I'll have a look and see if things turn out any different on my end.

  • evilproducerevilproducer Posts: 9,050
    edited December 1969

    I'd look, but I'm in C7.2 Pro, so if it's a bug in C8, I can't replicate it.

  • wetcircuitwetcircuit Posts: 0
    edited March 2013

    I had always thought that Ambient Occlusion works with the Ambient Scene setting. A quick test suggests I am right. Although reading the manual might also be a good idea since sometimes I'm wrong...

    Scene lights do nothing. It's all about the Ambient setting.... Crank it up to 100% with a white chip.

    Here's what I got:

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    Doc133_AmbientOcclusion_copy.png
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    Post edited by wetcircuit on
  • evilproducerevilproducer Posts: 9,050
    edited December 1969

    I had always thought that Ambient Occlusion works with the Ambient Scene setting. A quick test suggests I am right. Although reading the manual might also be a good idea since sometimes I'm wrong...

    Scene lights do nothing. It's all about the Ambient setting.... Crank it up to 100% with a white chip.

    Here's what I got:


    Good to know Holly. I try not to use GI, and if I do, it's usually just the Skylight.

  • MiloMilo Posts: 511
    edited December 1969

    Koukotsu said:
    Same here, Windows 7 64-bit :-/

    Sure, post a scene if you can, I'll have a look and see if things turn out any different on my end.

    http://miloart.lmre.com/tempfiles/ao.zip I had to zip it for some reason the webserver unzipped the .car and sent it to the browser.

    I have tried upping scene ambient to 100 and GI and no GI It is set to render a .png AO multipass which comes out just white on my system. I even loaded the white png into a paint program and did a fill to see if there was another shade just nearly white in there, but its solid white.

    Evilproducer I actually tried doing this back in 7 and never got it to work, its probably me.

    Great info Holly! Thanks

  • RoguePilotRoguePilot Posts: 239
    edited March 2013

    Hi, I've mentioned previously that AO is an entirely geometry driven effect. The only purpose of any light (including ambient) is so that you can actually see the darkening that it causes. Although it now seems that increasing the ambient level does improve the quality for some reason.

    Looked at your scene and you have AO switched off in the render settings. You must tick the box for indirect light and select 'Ambient Occlusion Only' for it to show even if you already have render layers selected.

    Also increase the occlusion radius to about 2 feet. Experiment with differing radius settings to see how it changes the spread of darkening where geometry intersects.

    Post edited by RoguePilot on
  • RoguePilotRoguePilot Posts: 239
    edited March 2013

    Er, thanks for your experiments holly, makes sense that it only occludes ambient and not direct light.

    I've always run an AO pass at very high quality settings without lights to get a fast AO layer. I can now see that there is another option to just max out the ambient and to keep the AO settings quite low. I wonder what the faster method is.

    Post edited by RoguePilot on
  • edited March 2013

    -_Milo_- said:
    Koukotsu said:
    Same here, Windows 7 64-bit :-/

    Sure, post a scene if you can, I'll have a look and see if things turn out any different on my end.

    http://miloart.lmre.com/tempfiles/ao.zip I had to zip it for some reason the webserver unzipped the .car and sent it to the browser.

    I have tried upping scene ambient to 100 and GI and no GI It is set to render a .png AO multipass which comes out just white on my system. I even loaded the white png into a paint program and did a fill to see if there was another shade just nearly white in there, but its solid white.

    Evilproducer I actually tried doing this back in 7 and never got it to work, its probably me.

    Great info Holly! Thanks

    Hi, sorry for taking so long, but I noticed right away that you didn't have ambient occlusion enabled from the global illumination tab, lol.

    You need to check the "indirect light" check-box, then directly underneath set it to "ambient occlusion only" and adjust the occlusion radius to control the range of the effect. ;-)

    That should do it, here's a little screenshot of the GI settings I used:

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    Post edited by K0daKumi_8e8836aac0 on
  • GarstorGarstor Posts: 1,411
    edited March 2013

    I still have not given up on the art gallery idea -- yes, I am still using LightWave for this (sorry! :-) ). Here is what I have so far; everything is procedural but there is still so much that I don't understand about LightWave surfacing that I'm probably going to bring the model into Carrara.

    The lighting is 6 area lights that are set (obviously) just at the flourescent lights ballast. Full GI is on. I may try replicating the crushed sapphires texture in LightWave (well, it started there, but evilproducer made those awesome tweaks in Carrara).

    EDIT: I am trying to get a parquet flooring pattern. The red ceiling alcoves may become windows or maybe murals...

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    Post edited by Garstor on
  • GarstorGarstor Posts: 1,411
    edited December 1969

    A different angle...yes, that door is a hideous nightmare...I hate it...

    The room is 6 meters wide and 3.5 meters from the floor to the ceiling edge.

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  • evilproducerevilproducer Posts: 9,050
    edited December 1969

    Looking good Garstor! It's coming along nicely!

  • FractalDimensiaFractalDimensia Posts: 0
    edited December 1969

    Some years ago, I toyed with the idea of worlds where fractal images and art were a normal part of everyday life, and pondered how people in such a place might live, and what they might have around them.

    I'm still running down some lighting issues (e.g., blotches under the table). BTW, if anyone has a possible reason for the blotches, I'd appreciate your thoughts. I do know they appear in low lighting areas coming from a tube light (firelight) and using GI Indirect Lighting - Full Indirect.

    Room layout, lighting, and all furniture and objects were designed and modeled by me. I also created all the artwork and images that appear. This study has been great to dig deeper into editing, lighting, and shading effects. Unfortunately, even @1920x1080 resolution, some details embedded are not distinguishable.

    Thoughts and suggestions always appreciated.

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  • evilproducerevilproducer Posts: 9,050
    edited March 2013

    Awesome detail!


    The blotchiness is sometimes called ashing and it's an artifact from using GI. There may be some things you can do to correct for it. Might help if you could post a screen shot of your render settings for the GI stuff like the photon count, accuracy, etc.


    Also, for the fire, try using a lighter color for the base- A nearly yellow/white and a slightly less saturated orange for the tips. If the tube light is causing problems for you, like banding artifacts, replace it with a bulb light or two.

    Post edited by evilproducer on
  • GarstorGarstor Posts: 1,411
    edited December 1969

    JimDHart said:
    Some years ago, I toyed with the idea of worlds where fractal images and art were a normal part of everyday life, and pondered how people in such a place might live, and what they might have around them.

    That is an exceptionally cool idea! Very nice scene!

  • WendyLuvsCatzWendyLuvsCatz Posts: 38,233
    edited December 1969

    if they are anything like my friends who like fractal art, you left the bong out! ;-P
    nice esp since you modelled everything yourself!

  • wetcircuitwetcircuit Posts: 0
    edited December 1969

    wow! stunning!

  • MiloMilo Posts: 511
    edited December 1969

    Thank you for those that looked. I said it was probably something I was doing. I have been plunking at that since 7 and that simple step was what I was missing. I even turned on full indirect lighting and I didn't get it.

    Thanks!

This discussion has been closed.