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I would upload a previous render in the notebook and work on postwork skills.
In regards to expensive vs free like Photshop vs Gimp, I look at it as being similar to music. You can give an expensive, well made guitar to a lousy player, and he will still be a lousy player. He'll just be a lousy player with an expensive, well made guitar. But if you give a lousy guitar to a great guitarist, he'll make that lousy guitar sound good.
Simply being the owner of expensive software is not going to make great work. There is a steep learning curve, and months or years of trial an error. But then if someone put in the same amount of time and effort while using free software, they could get incredible results too.
I've noticed that the great artists of digital media are often very driven. They keep experimenting and trying new techniques. They never stop trying to improve.
Yep I agree LDP was the best. I did many of my early renders with LDP in DS3. I did snatch up Light Dome PRO - R when it was on sale recently but haven't had a chance to really use it. Still sitting in my downloads waiting to be installed. Too many things happening in my life at the moment.
...having to export everything to a second application and set it up with multiple layers is way to complicated to achieve basically the same results that the original plugin would do. When I emailed Waldemar about updating LDP for 4.5+ several months ago he replied that he didn't have the time. However, to dovetail two applications together like LDP-R requires must have taken a far greater amount of coding than simply updating a plugin. Needless to say I was very disappointed by this.
...Doh! Never even thought about that. Running a test now.
I would upload a previous render in the notebook and work on postwork skills.
In regards to expensive vs free like Photshop vs Gimp, I look at it as being similar to music. You can give an expensive, well made guitar to a lousy player, and he will still be a lousy player. He'll just be a lousy player with an expensive, well made guitar. But if you give a lousy guitar to a great guitarist, he'll make that lousy guitar sound good.
Simply being the owner of expensive software is not going to make great work. There is a steep learning curve, and months or years of trial an error. But then if someone put in the same amount of time and effort while using free software, they could get incredible results too.
I've noticed that the great artists of digital media are often very driven. They keep experimenting and trying new techniques. They never stop trying to improve.
...there is one major function PS can do that GIMP and PSP (well, before X5 and of course, I only have X4) cannot. which is directly load .abr brushes/effects without having to convert them. I've tried to use the conversion tool and just can't seem to get it to work right. I also find working with layers in PSP to be far more intuitive. X5 is now discontinued as Corel just released version X6 which now has 64 bit support (of course at a more expensive price tag thanks to inflation).
You haven't had to convert Brushes in gimp for a while now, just load them up and use them. and i haven't found and psd files i have not been able to open in gimp either at least as far as any deviney products that come that way are concerned.
...but what about .abr. Supposedly to use that format in GIMP or PSP you need the .abr converter utility.
yeah .abr brushes don't need to be converted not sure since which version but i have 2.6 been using it for quite a long time now.
...I know that 2.4 needed them converted. That's definitely news (and welcome news at that) for me. Meanwhile, PSPX4 and earlier versions still do need to have them converted.
I believe that may have arrived in version 2.4 (under 'Support for File Formats') though I haven't tried it myself:
http://www.gimp.org/release-notes/gimp-2.4.html
Currently, support appears internally for "v6" and "v12" ABR brushes, though not for "computed brushes" nor "wide brushes".
...having to export everything to a second application and set it up with multiple layers is way to complicated to achieve basically the same results that the original plugin would do. When I emailed Waldemar about updating LDP for 4.5+ several months ago he replied that he didn't have the time. However, to dovetail two applications together like LDP-R requires must have taken a far greater amount of coding than simply updating a plugin. Needless to say I was very disappointed by this.
have you considered making your own light dome for DS?..it's a very old school way of lighting scenes and relatively straight forward to setup,just a bunch of direct lights at low intensity with shadow maps to simulate ambient light and then another direct light with raytraced shadows to simulate the sun.
though I would recommend learning UE to get much better results with actual GI.
you might get some good info about light domes here:
http://www.3d-palace.com/xenomorphic/education/doc_globalillumination.htm
Good article. I'll have to give that a try. I was attempting a light dome just to see if I could, but got very washed-out results. I think I was trying to speed things up using a mix of no shadow and raytraced lights.
...basically that is how LDP was set up. An array of skylights in the skydome (I believe 16 - 24) with DSMs, A set of ambient lights (8 - 10) beneath the ground plane to simulate global illumination, and then the "solar primary" with raytraced shadows.
Had LDP2 been designed strictly as a light set (like many of the IBL ones are) rather than a plugin, there would have been no need to update it with each new rollout of Daz studio. Not sure why it wasn't done this way from the beginning as they could have easily just grouped all the lights with the skydome (either parenting it all to a "null" or using the new grouping tool) so it could all be rotated as one unit using the general rotation sliders.
Also, not sure if 4.6 can instance lights (haven't tried that yet).
As to creating the actual skydome, the one thing that makes it difficult is a lack of good free 360° high resolution stock photos of just the sky (no imagery along the horizon). Most of what I found are fairly expensive and/or are not royalty free. The net issue is applying a photo to the dome so it is not only seamless, but also does not distort. I tried this with one of the Azure Skies domes a couple months ago and while it basically worked the horizon did not line up correctly with the ground plane, and as it was rotated along the Y axis, and thus the image did not stay consistently level through the full 360° of rotation.
I've used CG generated domes (like the ones available at RDNA) but they really do not look as good (particularly when they have clouds) as the photographic ones (eg. LDP2, Azure Skies) since the tiling tends to be repetitive.
I don't totally buy the line about Ambient lights being something to totally avoid. LDP used an ambient array and in the final render things didn't look dull at all. Also again, seeing what AoA has posted with the forthcoming Advanced Ambient Lights, I feel thy actually add presence to a scene.
I'm sure AoA is using more than just shadow mapped direct lights for the ambient effect.
there's a reason none of the studios use light domes anymore & it's because true GI (like uber lights) are far more impressive,for example you wont get any ambient occlusion using LDP,light domes are very,very old tech..it's what Pixar & the like were using for toy story back in the 90's..but really no one uses it these days.
to simulate the basic look of LDP using uberenvironment:
uber environment tinted pale blue for your ambient (sky)light,set at around 20-40% strength,lower the spread distance to something around 100-200(this controls how far the ambient occlusion spreads)
add a direct light for sunlight,tinted pale yellow,strength around 50-75%,raytraced shadows with a bit of softness.
check out CGtextures or CGskies.com for free skydome maps.there is a small amount of horizon but you can easily remove that in an image editor
I swear by UE2. Which method do you use Stefan? IDL? It's slow as hell but I'm addicted to the GI/bounce setting. Really wish there was better documentation for UE.
See if this helps at all: http://www.omnifreaker.com/index.php?title=UberEnvironment2
It's not huge, but it does cover it, and has example renders.
Also, the "manual" for the first UE. Covers things that aren't in the UE2 "manual" (for instance all of the dials and what they do) but still apply to the newer version.
http://www.omnifreaker.com/index.php?title=UberEnvironment
...part of my waning interest in IBL/UE is because it is too "real", and as I have been discovering far more complicated to deal with than the normal distant/spot/point lights.
...as to the Advanced Ambient Light - From AoA:
In one post he mentions performing two renders of the same scene. The first used IDL and took 9 - 1/2 hours and still looked a bit grainy. The second one with a single AAA set to no shadows and one distant light took 10 minutes and was a lot cleaner.
As to LDP true it faked global illumination, true, it did not have AO, but that is part of what I found attractive as it looked more like the lighting I'd see in a finely executed painting instead of a photograph. Heck in some works I've seen done with UE, the characters look more like rubber dolls instead of people.
I just use the basic GI option(not IBL) and use a direct light for the main light/shadows..most of my stuff is exteriors so its a good solution,if i was doing interiors I'd probably use area lights,I actualy find it renders just as fast as any other lighting,it's certainly better(& cleaner) than waiting on 20 odd shadow mapped lights to do their thing,I do my main promos with a setting of 256 samples,most important though is to adjust the spread distance,I think it's 1000 by default which is way too wide,and if there's a skydome in the scene I adjust the bias to avoid the grid lines on the skydome
got any example images of where LDP works/looks better than GI lighting?..I really think your limiting yourself by being so wedded to the LDP lighting ,& if you don't want AO you can turn the intensity to zero,the rubber look may come from the materials being used or by the user only using uberlight with no other light in the scene,which would just create a very even light all around the scene
...here's two:
The first is with LDP1 and no extra lights:
The second one Cloud9 which uses UE (AoA's fog camera was used to give a bit of depth haze to the structures in the background) and also used a low intensity linear point light to soften the lighting on her face.
I just find myself more attracted to the warmer oil painting-like quality of the first one.
In the second one, even with the linear point light, it appears she is missing all her teeth. This is something I have noticed occurring with UE in a number of scenes.
I found that before rendering with LDP2 (in DS3) the background in Daz Studio has to be set to black. If it's lighter then the render came out too light. This maybe what's happening with your washed out results using light domes.
I always work in a bluegrey background colour similar to Hexagon (I like its workspace / tool bar colours) then switch to black background just before rendering. This also stops the background colour bleeding into the edges of a rendered image. Maybe Daz could set up DS workspace background to automatically switch to black when rendering (and revert back to user setting afterwards).
BTW for anyone who's new to Daz Studio render settings check out this helpful free script DAZ-Studio-4-Render-Presets. they are a good starting point to get familiar with the effects of different render settings. I use it constantly, with a few tweaks here and there, when doing my own renders.
The original Light Dome Pro is just a light set, not a plug-in, and it does work in DS 4.6 (both the latest official release, and the latest beta--I just tested it in both). I don't use it much, as I prefer UE2...but it does work.
(Apologies if you knew that already, or if it was pointed out earlier in the thread)
Yep saw those while I was enjoying rummaging through your dA galley. I like the bottom one because there is a more depth of field / fog of distance effect (whichever) that makes the front image pop out as the main focus.
Cool. Time to reinstall the original LDP and test it out. It must of been LDP2 that was giving me trouble in DS4.
...lately I tend to swear at it a lot.
Yep saw those while I was enjoying rummaging through your dA galley. I like the bottom one because there is a more depth of field / fog of distance effect (whichever) that makes the front image pop out as the main focus.
...without the haze it looked very flat.
Sill, it lacks that warmer quality that LDP gave the first one. I actually applied a canvas filter to it in GIMP once and it really did look like the style of oil painting I used to do.
Here's one using the same Cloud9 set light but without any depth haze.
Came across this wonderful video at Ted-Ed on "how to take a great picture" relating to cameral settings in the real world. I think much of what she says can be translated to the camera settings in the 3d world. I normally don't play around with DS camera settings (except DOF), but at least my renders don't have my thumb across the image like in the real world. lol.
Actually I think that one is one of my favorite renders of yours, Kyoto Kid. Was going to compliment you on it elsewhere but I didn't want to hijack FirstBastion's thread too much. I really like the lighting...but if it's not the effect you're personally after, then yeah...maybe UE2 isn't the best option for you. Although, if you really want a painterly look, in my experience that's easier and more effectively done in postwork rather than in render. Wish I was better at it (and yes, I also wish I could afford more expensive tools) but I've gotten decent results from free stuff alone (mainly GIMP and FotoSketcher).
...unfortunately my arthritis precludes me from going the route of LycanthopeX or Kurt Lundqvist as I just don't have a steady hand to use a tablet and stylus for digital painting. Therefore I have to impart the feel through the render process by use of filters, custom shaders, and in scene effects (like Jepe's special effects and AoA's cameras).
No disrespect KK but if nothing else please read the PDF. This is really me trying to help...
http://www.sharecg.com/v/67783/gallery/21/DAZ-Studio/Golden-Rules-Camera-Prop-v1
Second this! Probably the one tool I use in all my renders. The rule of thirds is fairly easy to get by eyeball but the golden spiral and rectangle as well as the slanted sections can add a new feel to your images.
Also learn to use the Depth of Field on the cameras as well as the Focal Length and f/Stop settings. With DoF you can achieve the same effect of putting fog in the background to add depth but without the added render time of the actual fog.
I think you could soften that last scene a lot by adjusting the DoF to put all of the background stuff out of focus. Then, and this is just a personal preference here, I'd adjust the color of the lighting to something warmer and maybe tone the intensity down a bit. A good starting point for a nice golden sunlight tone is something like 255,216,197.