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That's a good looking first attempt. Your hair diameter seems pretty big so I'm assuming your figure is scaled up, or maybe I'm just missing something. Posting my settings in case anyone can use. This was Cathy Hair imported from DAZ with Diffeomorphic and lots of work afterwards. I set the 'strand shape' to 0.99 so the roots are very fine (0.001m * the radius scale) and then the hair gets thicker (kinda backwards from how it is supposed to work, but it works). Someone else suggested adding transparency to the material with a color ramp. It thought that was a great idea. I think I saw that in the Diffeo settings as well.
Norbz - loved the tutorial video. I think I'm your first subcriber! Woohoo!
Hey brother, thanks, and yeah I think you are indeed :). The hair on the model there looks super real wow, just needs to be filled in more. Anytime I start messing with high-poly hair (err pretty much any hair) renders take too long and I meh my way to another render lol. I've worked my way backwards to lowish poly style and quality half by design half by force due to render limits, realism and lights just kill my setup and it's a high end mac desktop (bye bye iray/cycles - eevee isn't too bad).
@Krampus Thanks!
The model is actually scaled down. I originally imported the model with DazToBlender8 and then ran the #real size command. That scaled the model to .01 it's imported size. When I used the default settings the hair was so thin it did not render. I can increase the Diameter Scale but using larger numbers for the Root and Tip settings achieves the same result.
Nice looking hair!
I composited two images with a mask; one DOF very close and the other none
I've been cleaning up my harddisk, and found some gems from the deep, dark past. So here are some Blender renderers, 2.83.5 and 2.23. ...
I rememeber 2.49 and used it, but can't actually be sure when I first tried it; it wasn't really until 2.5 that it really made sense though.
Much the same for me, though with 2.23 as the first one I certainly downloaded, but it didn't make sense until much later - I'm impressed that it runs in Win10 (and impressed that I can actually do a bit of modelling in it, more than I could at the time, even if I have to look up some of the key combinations)
I used Blender 1st in Feb 2012 I did a tutorial of how to make a character model and did a poor one of Calvin of Calvin & Hobbes comic strip fame. I didn't rig it though I used what was then Mixamo's upload autorigging solution; then low & behold it managed to actual rig my model which I then promptly added a looped Mixamo gangnam dance clip which also worked. I did it all in 8 hours following youtube tutorials with no prior 3D modeling experience and most of that 8 hours was spent panning back in the videos' play progression to hear something I missed, so that should be encouraging to those that don't think they can learn to 3D model. All that was I think in Blender 2.52. Hmmm, so as it turns out it was Blender 2.62 I used. I only remember it was greater than 2.49.x because the keyboard layout changed & I was looking for a image of a template to learn shotcuts from.
All of the textures are procedural, built with nodes
Moving on to environments and ships.
@Wolf359
This is great work! I love the anodized metal and frosted glass. And the worn look you've mastered is something I am still trying to ge right.
But have you noticed any decrease in VRAM usage and increase in render times from all the procedural materials? I've read conflicting advice.
I've noticed it tends to use less RAM, but can take longer to render.
OK, that's what I've more often heard. I'm interested in that trade-off.
@nicstt ,your asssement is largely correct and IMHO it is a desirable trade-off from an animation production perspective
I own Three PC's ,two of which are capable of running my major programs. (Blender , Reallusions Iclone 7& Character creator3 and the Davinci resolve suite of finishing tools)
I prefer to work and perform look Dev with near realtime viewport peformance and 96 percent accurate preview of what my final shaders& lighting will be , and let the final renders take as long as they need to on my new PC while I can still set up character animation, build models,shaders Watch tutorials (Goof off),on my older PC.
4K ,image based textures, are just retarded for animated filmking IMHO and I also have a deep seated,visceral HATRED of the whole UV process and avoid it whenever humanly possible.
I used the included " Discombobulator" add-on to quickly generate this fully procedural sci fi city rendered in EEVEE of course
That's amazing. And nice Blender badge as well... let the world know "da Troof"
Made a few tweaks
Very nice
I was careful with my wording.
Replaceing textures with nodes (just one or three say) will reduce RAM, and have no real negative affect on the render times, but start adding nodes (especially maths nodes), and especially many of them, and times are going to go up - and a lot.
No, thanks @nicstt... That's actually exactly what I was hoping for. I inadvertently built a system that exceeds my render speed expectations, but that often gets Optix out-of-memory errors. I just didn't know what I was doing and had no points of reference to choose my hardware better.
I will do the VFX shots in Cycles(with a denoise node pass) because the smoke and fire simulations just look better in Cycles IMHO.
EEVEE is a Game engine renderer and Game engines have become good enough for making animated movies and many people are doing just that with Unity & UE4.
Blender has empowered me to consolidate all of my content creation and rendering pipeline into one powerful ecosystem just as CC3 has consoldated ALL of my character creation animation and lipsyncing into a unified eco system where every Avatar( male or female) can share all textures clothing, morphs and hair assets wether I create them or harvested them from my Daz old content going back a far as millenium 3 and Poser 6.
"Galactus Rising" Started as Poser/C4D "short film" project with a self imposed frame budget of 7- 10 minutes per frame
There is not a single genesis figure or ,Iclone created animation, in the first ten minutes of that Movie.
It was Rendered on an ancient Mac Computer(Where my Old C4D is installed), with a 2.16 GHZ intel dou core and 2 gigs of RAM but that is NOT why this film took 6 years to complete.
Most of my time was lost having to do full on,ray traced test renders to check texturing and lighting...Before the final rendering could start
Those days are thankfully over and I am willing to accept anything under one minute per frame with EEVEE or even a "couple of minutes" per with Cycles because I will not have spent endless hours in Lookdev&lighting.
Also ,with the exception of the Base Iclone CC3 Avatars& skins, I am now creating All of my scene content ,OPTIMIZED FOR BOTH VEIWPORT& ANIMATION PERFORMANCE thus I am not crippled by Daz content with Multiple material zones all with ridiculous 4K textures that were designed by a PA to be rendered for one single still frame in Iray.
Trust me.... when you have Decent modern hardware, at least two work stations and complete end to end control of your Asset creation pipeline... Actual render times will be the least of your concerns.
Thanks
I often use a combination, and find it a good compromise; I have a texture I like, but can manage with just the diffuse.
Experimenting with the building addon for Blender, and wanted to kill some of the tiling effect; I don't mind the pattern repeating but wanted to reduce its effect.
The roof however, really looked terrible, so needed to add some variation to blend it away.
I could add an RGB curves to bring some of the red back, which I might experiment with, but I'm happy enough atm; it's just an experiment so far - no plans. Comparing node images two and three, you can see what I did to add the variation. There are a variety of procedural textures to experiment with.
I remember doing this tutorial back in the 2.48 days. I finished it... and then didn't use blender again until the 2.5 ui overhaul
I'm a stanch apologist for the 2.5+ ui. I personally found it perfectly intuitive, but I get any and all complaints before that
Agreed.
Thanks for showing your node setups.
Cinus - Hair is looking good. What skin node setup did you use?
@Krampus Thanks.
Attached is an image of my skin node setup. I found that the Subsurface radius is critical. Small changes can significantly alter the way the skin looks. The subsurface radius is dependent on the character scale, so if you are going to try these and your character was imported with Diffeo then you should multiply the values by 100.
I created some particle brows yesterday. The particle hair system in Blender is fantastic.
More of a small test, default diffeo HD import, didn't fiddle with anything, other than hiding the non HD meshes. The vegitation was made in blender. The renders were also two times larger, but for some reason the forum would not accept them, maybe file size too big. I linked to fullsize version under each
Cycles render took 8 mins 26 seconds
https://i.imgur.com/hWgyUPX.jpg
Evee Render took 3 mins 48 seconds
https://i.imgur.com/9nUssmc.jpg
post renderers with the V-Ray render plugin
then things can start to be interesting ;)
all these renderers looks like Daz 3D and iray already
nothing new