NEW! Novica & Invited Guest Contributors Tips & Product Reviews Pt 6

mori_mann

Probably late to teh party, but when installing manually, I open the Content folder, copy all that's in there aps paste it into the Library folder (except ReadMe's). The rest sorts itself out. Never had issues with stuff not working that way.

Serene Night

What I do is extract it all to a single folder on desktop. Then I go to studio folder, expand and place content and make sure it is placed correctly. Then I launch studio find the item make sure it loads then categorize it immediately.

Novica

Rating: Recommend Iray Converter for Generation 4

Thanks folks!  I've figured it out that everything is inside Content (I don't have a My Library) and it's going smoothly. Rendering Sabby's Cynthia (V4) and showing the WONDERFUL Iray Converter for Generation 4 by 3VDigitimes. If you have V4 or M4 and use Iray, wow wow wow. I'm here wondering though- there's one for Genesis too (I have it) but if folks don't, if they use GenX2 to transfer V4 skins to Genesis, would they apply this first? 

Second, when we apply the optimized Genesis 2 Iray shader (it's a shader, right?) and hold down Crtl, get the Material Preset Load Options popup, then choose Ignore instead of Replace what exactly is that doing with the materials?  I am going to show you a side by side of Cynthia, I have to say I think I like the one where I DIDN'T hold down Ctrl better. Her eyes have more shine and the skin seems more radiant.

Regarding the What's Hot-  a $900 item is one of the most frequently purchased.  Really?  And the wonderful houseboat and robot (Helper) aren't on there. But yet there are many people spending $900 on a texture editor?  Hmmm. So I bought the houseboat as my book is tropical/water based but did any of you buy the houseboat or the bot? Any of you buy the $900 product? 

Below, Sabby's Cynthia (V4) (110836) with the mouth reduced/tweaked a bit, the first has default skin, then with the 3VDigitimes Iray skin converter without CTRL and third, with CTRL. I put the last two in my graphics program and clicked back and forth, and really, only the eyes were different. I like it without CTRL, they have more highlights.  I did not change any of the converter settings- but it's neat because you have the sliders right there to move and play. Seriously, you gotta get this product if you use Iray and Generation 4! (EDIT: Added a screenshot. SO easy to use! One click, then use the sliders to play with it.)  EDIT: Added the options when you click the glossy slider.

 BTW, ignore how thin her arms are, I was tweaking an outfit and had to slim the body down, then decided I wanted to see more skin to test the converter. Forgot to beef back up the body. She isn't that thin in the body, honest!)  The hair is Kelsie Hair with Slosh's UHT Iray shader on it. 

 

Novica

Tested the Iray Converter for Generation 4 to see how dummy-proof it is (referring to me, not you!) First, I assumed I needed to have Cynthia selected in Surfaces because this is a materials product. Then I started clicking each section. I clicked the increase glossy twice, the increase layered weight once, (what does layered weight do?) and the decrease roughness once. (remember the pebbles analogy? Less pebbles (roughness) then more shine.)  Then I went to the Scattering slider and went for 0.5. Then to the base skin color did the White Max Brightess two times. Could have lightened even more.

 Not saying this is the best result, it's my first one and just testing the ease of use. It's a winner. I did not lighten/darken/postwork anything, and put the default converter image as the first one so you can compare with the converted/slidered one. (Slidered LOL?) I used the one without CTRL so the eyes were more highlighted.

Remember this product is also available for Genesis and there's a product for Genesis 2. I have them all and will have to play someday. (I am not getting sidetracked from installing my Rendo stuff.) Here's the store link.

First, the converted without any slider tweaking. Second is the tweaked with the converter. 

 

 

Novica

Rating: Recommend Reinoa Hair, Arabelle Outfit

Used the Iray Converter for Generation 4 again and this is Elodie by Sabby (Rendo) for V4. I did NOT have to tweak the mouth at all, this is out of the box. I really like her. And Reinoa Hair is SO unexpected. Look at the promo pic, which would have stopped you if you didn't want cartoonish hair, and look at these! (And yes, looked really good without Slosh's shaders.)  The second one is Anabelle Outfit  (also available for Genesis 2, separate product) using the soft fabric Iray shader. 

This one has the Iray skin converter, out of the box. Fourth one is with slight tweaks.

 

RAMWolff

RGcincy said:

The toon renders are fun Novica. I find it's a good approach to try Iray renders of 3DL textures without changes at first because many of them come out quite acceptable.

Saw this Dali video today. Would be easy to render a fly-through animation like this in Daz Studio but I don't know how they do the 360 capture into a video. 

That Was Amazing!  WOW!

Novica

All kinds of cool things on the thread, lol. (Rich keeps us busy. Don't miss his cactus! (Couldn't resist.) )  BTW, in case you missed this on the Blink Sales thread, Taozen has a great script to let you know when the advertisements/sales change. Good for days when there are Blink Sales. Ferretmania already tested it and it works on Windows 10 too. 

 

RAMWolff

Novica said:

So far, you started with Film ISO, then Exposure Value (going back and forth and tweaking.) Then you used Environment Intensity to tweak a bit. We are going to use Environment Intensity .85 for our character here.  Pick what you think is best for yours, I went a bit darker because I want to show you two other options which really change your lights and darks. 

Next, let's tweak Burn Highlights and Crush Blacks. They are in Render Settings > Tone Mapping.

Burn Highlights makes your light areas lighter, but can also create that awful glare.  To balance that out a bit, I use Crush Blacks, it is similar to contrast; dark areas go darker. If you have white or light shirts, Crush Blacks is your friend, and you want to reduce the Burn Highlights. 

Look at the previous renders. Burn Highlights were 0.16 and Crush Blacks were .35. Look at  this first render below.   I turned Burn Highlights up to a glaring 30 so you can see what it does. If you have large areas of glare like this, you need to turn your Burn Highlights down and increase Crush Blacks. Let's do that.  

(Second image-)Turn your Burn Highlights down to .11 (which is less than the first set of renders, they were .16) and Crush Blacks up to .42 (they were .35 in the first group. That's where I normally have it.)  Now, when you reduce Burn Highlights, your character may look flat. Let's add some sheen to help catch the light, since we have highlights reduced.  In Scene, select your character. In Surfaces, click on your character and under Surfaces select the skin areas (not anything involving eyes, inside of mouth, toenails, etc. )   There are many ways to change the skin, keeping it simple, look at Specular Glossiness and Specular Strength.  Britany's gloss was 70% so I increased it to 73.2%  (which tightens the area I believe) and the strength was 20.6 and I increased it to 33.8%  Just play with those two and see if you like the results when you increase or decrease them. The higher the number on glossiness, that is how it affects the spread of the sheen (anyone correct me if I'm wrong) so by increasing it, I am making "streaks" or "toned" areas of light instead of it being spread out across the surface.

 When you think Specular, think sheen, wetness of skin. (For you folks using 3DL, this post explains it well as to what happens when you increase and decrease Glossiness.) Sickleyield also describes the settings. 

To help get the shine going, also look at the Specular Color. Since we've reduced the highlights, we need all the help we can get, so if the Specular Color is a blue, bluish-gray, then lighten it closer to white.  Specular Color 2 , repeat what you did with glossiness, strength, and color, but make it a different color. This second render has the Specular Glossiness, Strength, and Color tweaked. So you see a difference in the sheen of the skin which helps with the highlights, (that raised arm is really apparent) and with the Burn Highlights reduced the top retains details and glaring white areas are reduced. Don't worry that the skin is dark, we're still tweaking. We needed to get sheen introduced, and we're deliberately working with a challenging top- white.

 

So while in Surfaces, let's discuss noise. Think of rough, like little pebbles. So if you have a lot of noise (particles) what does that do to sheen? Would there be more glisten to surfaces like glass, or with pebbles/noise?  So we are going to turn down (reduce the number of pebbles)  noise in Specular Noise Strength. I reduced it from 70.1 to 64.4 in the second render above. 

So we've fiddled with getting a sheen introduced, and now I'm going to show you how to rotate your dome and get different lighting. Then I'll show you a few more things in Surfaces.  Go back to Render Settings>Environment to Y Dome Orientation. Let me show you a couple. My character is facing front, so this third render shows you with the Y Dome at 180 degrees. Not a fan, but you can see the sheen, particularly around the cording of the neck and the bent elbow on our left. So  fourth render let's go to 210 degrees. 

 

I like that for now, except with the Specular being so light, the face is a bit too splotchy for my tastes. So go back to Surfaces with those surface areas selected and change the specular color from the bluish-white to a light peach. 209 / 173 / 167 is a nice color to jot down and test on your characters. So fifth render, below with Y Dome Orientation still at 210 and the Specular Color changed to peach. 

Can't really do much with the Specular and Glossy settings you suggested as my character I'm working on is set up using the PBR Metallicity/Roughness set up so none of that is present. 

Novica

Gotcha. Well, think of those as an added bonus, you were wanting to tweak the lighting settings so we have that covered anyway. Give it a try and let's see what you end up with. Your character already looked much better (we are referring to the lighting question thread over in Commons that he started.)  And others who use Metallicity can perhaps hop in and help you. 

Novica

Rating: Recommend Amarseda Hair, Iray Sequins Shader, Metal Abounds, Fantasy Separates Vol 2.

Continuing on with featuring V4 stuff (see, I haven't forgotten you V4 folks!) is Amarseda Hair using Slosh's Iray hair shader, and EmmaLee (Rendo, Sabby) also has an outfit shaded with the Iray Sequins Shader and Metal Abounds (featured New Year's Day on the spacesuit) for the buttons and lacings. I also used that for the thin trim on the jacket but missed the neckline on the first one. Oops!)  You'll like the Sequin product because there's a popup and you change the tiling right there and a little box shows you what it's doing. You don't have to go to Surfaces and do tiling. Easy to use! 

EmmaLee has a very olive skin tone, I changed it by adding a bit of red. She doesn't have as much variation in the skin as the previous gals IMO, but I really like her nose. Edit: Someone asked what outfit- it's Fantasy Separates, Vol 2  I think due to the jacket. Second one is the Iray optimized skin shader on her. What exactly do we tweak to reduce the eye reflections? I turned it down and didn't see much difference in Surfaces. I made the color darker too. 

 

Novica

Good luck to both teams in the Super Bowl! I was stationed in Colorado when I was an Army officer and love Colorado (and who doesn't admire a dude who hadn't even practiced that week he entered the game to save it) but the NC Panthers have a great record (17-1 compared to 14-4 of Broncos) and they were out practicing that Friday night in the blizzard- what heart!  So I hope it's a close game and no one gets trounced (that's no fun and very disheartening for teams who put their heart and soul into it) but I'm rooting for the Broncos! (Gotta go for the older quarterback and where I used to live. Has nothing to do with being horse related. I love panthers too!) 

Novica

Flash sales, some great stores. Handspan Studios/Thorne is 76% on most of it. Even if you don't use Genesis 3 right now, you can get those morph kits for under $5 and use them later.

RGcincy

 

Novica said:

Don't miss his cactus! (Couldn't resist.) )  

While I was busy with the art fair, the cacti started multiplying like rabbits! Some even took CGH (Cactus Growth Hormone). 

Novica

OMGOSH RICH!!!!!

Ya know, I'm sure you could find a statement and do something with Rabbicus / Rabbicac  (you pick!) for the Because I Said So! contest.  Amazing what that CGH will do. 

Novica

Oh, how cool. Over in the "you've been heard" thread- did you get the memo on mousing over someone's name and seeing what member number they are? Chohole is only  6,799  and I joined Sept 2013 and I'm 2,153,969.  Looking at this page-  Rich, you've been around awhile because you're 7496!  RAMWolff is 179,477, SereneNight is 1,837,787 and mori_mann is 2,219,244.  So mori_mann and I were pretty close together bringing up the tail end of the group, and Rich wasn't too far behind Chohole waaaay long ago.  I'm going to go check out a new user and see what the number is....ooooh, a newbie with one post as of February 6 was 2,823,235  so if I joined in Sept 2012 then there have been:

669,266 new members from Sept 12 2012 to February 6ish

Which if we round down to make those whole months (Sept 2012 to January, as that was only 6 days in Feb 2016) that is 52 months (Sept 2012-Sept 2015 is 12 months x 4= 48 then Oct, Nov, Dec of 2015 plus Jan 2016 so 48 +4=52 months.

52 months divided into 669,266= 12,870.5 new people PER MONTH (what do we do with the .5 person? Is that the Genesis Baby?) 

And with 226 weeks (assuming 52 weeks) 2,961 new people a week. 

So now you know (well, maybe not. See next post) (If my membership, and the new person as of Feb 6ish are correct.) And as someone mentioned, if the company actually started at zero, many set their counters higher to influence the perception of the number of members. However, it may not be the right number of members, but if it goes sequentially, the statistics above should be correct on the number of people who become members.

Novica

Daz Jon later said 3 million registered users, that "The IDs on the forums aren't your IDs on the store. They are in the same ballpark, but not directly correlated." But my math is fun!

Fisty

What's my number?

 

337,984 I guess

Chohole

Try Cris Palomino if you want a surprise number

ZarconDeeGrissom

Chohole said:

Try Cris Palomino if you want a surprise number

Some one that's been around longer then Zircons, hmmm. I'll spare Cris the silly questions regarding the formation of stuff and Theia, lol.

TJohn

#13231 

eta: palindromic number. 

Novica

Ooooh, Cris is 425! 

Now everyday I'm gonna be surfing through and seeing if I can find one lower. Thanks for the info Chohole- that was fun!

Edit: Subtropic Pixel is as low as I've found, 1,345

Chohole

Tjohns is the most interesting so far,  I like the idea of a palindromic number.

mori_mann

That's a loooot of people!

I generally don't do crowds, but I'm good with this way of being part of one ;)

 

RGcincy

Novica said:

  Looking at this page-  Rich, you've been around awhile because you're 7496!  RAMWolff is 179,477, SereneNight is 1,837,787 and mori_mann is 2,219,244.  So mori_mann and I were pretty close together bringing up the tail end of the group, and Rich wasn't too far behind Chohole waaaay long ago.  

Hmm, how time flies!! I took a look to see when my first purchase was at Daz: Victoria 2 for $49.95 on May 19, 2001. I bought 8 items that first year and a few more in subsequent years. That was back when I was using Poser a little and Bryce a lot. I made a bunch of purchases in 2006-2008, then I dropped out of 3D for a while and came back in December 2012 although I didn't do much even then until recently. I would have saved a lot of money if I stayed at 8 items a year! 

I wonder who's #1?

RGcincy

Novica said:

OMGOSH RICH!!!!!

Ya know, I'm sure you could find a statement and do something with Rabbicus / Rabbicac  (you pick!) for the Because I Said So! contest.  Amazing what that CGH will do. 

I'm thinking about it, I might have an idea or two 

RGcincy

OK, I tried out your "Wanna Render?" tutorial Novica. It was very helpful to learn about some of the settings, especially the burn highlights and crush blacks. I haven't done much in the way of portraits so this was a chance to experiment. I used the updated SimTenero Randomizer and Zev0's Aging Morphs 2 for Genesis 2 Male(s)/M6 HD​ to modify the basic Genesis 2 male. He's dressed in jeans and t-shirt from Diesel Outfit for Genesis 2 Male(s). The hair and mustache is from Boris Hair for Genesis 2 Male(s) with shaders from Mec4D Unshaven 2 for Genesis 2 Male(s). I did it first with just the default Iray dome light but for the render below I added the Chiaroscuro 2 Portrait light set from Painter's Lights which added a touch of highlights on the left side.

I played around with the depth of field settings but wasn't liking what I was getting, so going to try that some more. I wanted to put his face in focus with his hips out of focus.

I really like the Randomizer. It was just updated today with a text filter which makes choosing morphs to randomize so much easier.

(click on image for larger render)

Novica

He looks really, really good. The crush blacks/burn highlights does so much when the clothing is light- did you  also change the diffuse to a light gray? Glad the tutorial gave people some ideas or a different approach to tweak. Your portrait really conveys the mood. It makes me tired! 

Novica

Also, to get his hips out of focus, I think that is frame width. That way you can move the "planes" over to your left and the right (hips) won't be in focus. At least I THINK so.

Novica

Rating: Recommend The Artist Studio Poses and Shader Presets, Casual Comfort, Ron's Backgrounds, Terri Hair

Okay, so showcasing a product which you may have skimmed past and not realized what nifty poses are in it. The Artist Studio Poses and Shader Presets has a nice variety of sitting and standing poses that I think are a bit unique. Great attention to detail. And Aave's close are (pun) a perfect fit for those because her shirt flows so realistically with the figure. This is featuring her Casual Comfort (G2F) with Ron's Backgrounds (and I lightened the background, again, to decrease the intensity of it.) Terri Hair is a very nice hair for windblown  hair, tousled hair, casual looks, etc. If you have collars, ponytails are always nice to use for a quick cheat. I did put a brighter color for the diffuse in the pink pants, as they were paler and I wanted to match the pink/fushia in the top. Shown is the same outfit, but with several of the material options. There are several more not shown. It's really a nice casual outfit and the top is incredible!

The last pose reminds me of a gymnast on a balance beam.

This character is Mayda skin from Rendo but I used Meridiana's face with very few changes. I slimmed the bottom lip down slightly. Next post I will do a head closeup for you and a few tips on toning down those glimmering Iray lips. I like them moist, but not looking like she's wearing an entire bottle of baby oil!

My experience (checked it several times) was:

1. The pants load onto the T pose figure. Parent in Place is checked, it is parented to G2F. so is the top. 

2. The pants do not follow the poses. The top does.  Tried with two different pose sets. (TIP If this happens to you, select the clothing, click the pose. The clothing usually goes into the pose and onto the figure. This works with Aave's.) It is the outfit, not the poses.

3. If the figure is posed, the pants didn't go on the figure, they load in a perfect T even though it says it is parented to G2F and Parent In Place is checked.

 

 

Novica

Rating: Recommend Ahoy For V6

Note: I changed the materials in the previous post- I had identified it incorrectly. it is Mayda from Renderosity. Wonderful eyebrows!

The rest of the poses, and also wanted to show you Ahoy for V6. It renders very nicely with Iray and UberBase was NOT added. 

Now for the settings for the lips. This isn't every setting, but the ones I tweaked to get rid of Monster Glare. 

The base color was white, I left it that way.

Diffuse Roughness .43      Translucency Weight .50      I don't remember if I tweaked Glossy Layered Weight but it's .077

Glossy Color (this is a cool warm beige, works great!)   .50  .34    .27

Glossy Roughness    .54          Top Coat Weight  .64       Top Coat Color (another great one)  .63   .51    .43

(both those colors are good to have when tweaking skin tones too!) 

As you can see, the shine on her lips is acceptable and looks like lip gloss, not GOO. Her lips have roughness/realistic too.