Using Photos

glennblackphotos

When using a photo of a bed for example is there a way that I can make my character appear not to be hovering or floating above the bed but part of the bed?

Roman_K2

Depending on your skills and interests/priorities and so on this can be a challenge.

What I would recommend is a good image editor and LOTS OF PIXELS. By this I mean use the biggest picture of a bed you can get, and render the figure that is going to be on the bed REALLY BIG. If you eventually need the final image to be in a small size you can resize it later... work big to start with, at the onset of the project.

Sometimes I will take two separate photos of a bed with a digital camera, eg. one each of the "left" side and the "right" side with a bit of overlap in the middle, and I'll stitch the two photos together in my image editor. All this effort is solely to get more pixels because when it comes time to begin placing the character I know I'll want to have the largest pixel field possible for doing all the edge fuzzing and subtle opacity changes and fudging and everything else I'll need to do, to bring the final result "to life" as it were.

What you want to do is: pose the character or object -- like the Emotiguy or the DAZ subdragon or whatever -- in a suitable position and then adjust the camera angle so that the render will be "just so". When setting this up it helps to have two monitors or two laptops (or whatever)... something that helps you display the character in your scene (or just in a blank DAZ Studio viewport) side by side with the "destination" -- where the figure is going to go, eg. the surface of the bed.

You may also put the the JPEG image of the bed onto some sort of panoramic or background prop, and then you sort of arrange it behind your figure in what appears to be the best location relative to how the photograph of the bed looks.

If possible, adjust the lights in DAZ Studio to match the bed photo in terms of overall intensity and roughly the same direction and close-by reflective stuff.

The important thing with this approach is that the scene in Studio is completely empty save for your character and his or her/its hair and clothing and any weapons it is carrying or has strapped on. No backgrounds (save for the note on backgrounds below) no props no bedside table or glass of water... no book to read. Just the figure.

Now render the character and save the file as "TIF". When there is nothing in the scene, Studio automatically generates a transparent background, a feature that you can preserve when you choose "TIF" (Tagged Image File Format) as your saved format type. When you load the rendered TIF(F) image and the bed photo into your image editor, you'll be able to lasso the character in the render file, and Copy and Paste it onto the bed photo JPEG. Now move the character around and resize it and/or warp it, add a bit of perspective and shadowed edges etc., to get it the way that you want. For your first save back to disk choose .BMP or some other non-lossy format; saving back as TIF is a bit complicated on the other hand and I personally usually go with .PSD or something similar as this retains the transparent layers information but with what I believe is less hassle... your results may very but always save early and often and use a long filename like "xyz project early 2019 1st assembly".

If you haven't done these "transparent" renders before, perhaps now is the time to give it a try. Note that sometimes it is in a way desirable to have the character float above the bed... for instance you might be doing an illustration where the subject is in bed having a nightmare, and above him a "dragon" or monster is floating, like in a dream. Or he is dreaming that the boss is calling him over after a meeting saying "I am promoting you and here's that raise you wanted"... or conversely the boss is handing him a pink slip!

My experience with DAZ Studio to date has been that it is hard to get a transparent background in a scene, once I have adjusted the "Backdrop" drop-down choice in the "Environment" pane. I'll say it again: start with a fresh new scene and stay away from the Environment pane and if you mess up, go back and begin again with the fresh scene. Again I'm referring to the Environment Pane, not the choice that you get in the Render Settings pane, you know where it says stuff like Currently Used, All, Favorites, Render Mode, Alpha, Optimization, Spectral Rendering, and Tone Mapping, and "Enviroment" is the last choice. That's not the one. The Environment pane is a main, top-level thing in Studio - see up in the top left corner where it says File, Edit, Create, Tools, Render, Connect, Window and so on... the mane Panes are listed under "Window". To get a tranparent-layer, TIFF file you don't need to touch the Environment *PANE* so don't try to put in a black or gray background or sky blue colors or anything like that.

Also sometimes you want a physical shadow to extend from the character's position, across the bed. It is possible then to put the photo into the render as a texture on a flat plane that's behind the character. In this latter type of scene you won't be getting a transparent b.g. as described above, but you will get a simpler, different sort of shadow than the complex shadowing that Iray often produces. It's always easier to float a character rather than set them right down, but anyway I used the aforementioned technique to show my little dog flying the Toon Plane (available in the DAZ Store, heh) through the drive-thru at a local restaurant.

You didn't indicate why it has to be a photo, of the bed and not a 3-D bedroom prop like in the DAZ store... for what it's worth, here is part of a test render of Genesis 2 and the figure is on the Deco bed. Notice the nice Iray lighting on the pillowcases and such. The checkerboard pattern behind the bed is a sort of "null" area... what image editors (and also DAZ programs) use to indicate a transparent layer placeholder.

P.S. I can make figures look good on a photo of a bed that's less than 1,024 pixels across, but it's a lot of work. Bigger at the onset is a much better idea!

glennblackphotos

Thats excellent thank you very much.