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I really enjoyed reading that! I followed it along in the WIP thread, but seeing the steps here was very interesting. I learned a few things too. I don't know that I'll ever have a project quite this involved, but I can certainly use some of the techniques you illustrated.
Holy wow that's amazing! my head is spinning, so much work! But I think it was well worth it this is really stunning!
Here's an in progress piece. It was actually the first time I used Lorelei Mertails and what started off as an experiment became a whole picture. Take a close look at the sunken ship...
Placing all those individual corals n' stuff was starting to drive me crazy. There's a lot I like about this piece, but I have to figure out how to give it that ocean haze to move the background objects further into the distance. I tried atmospheric cameras, but those put too much haze on the mermaid and I wanted her a little more clear.
I'm thinking about doing multiple renders of the background in successive layers as you move forward to the foreground. However, I'm not sure if I want to apply the atmospheric camera to each one and then assemble them - I might have too much build up. It might be safer to apply the haze to each layer in Photoshop, where I have more control over the adjustment.
Rendered in 3Delight:
Victoria 6
Lorelei Mertails
Christine Hair
Gardens of Poseidon (for ground and all rocks, plants, corals, anemones, etc.).
Orca
Underwater Ambiance (for the water reflection gel lights)
Vanguard
Underwater Relics Shaders (for the rusty texture on the Vanguard)
Photo background from Pixabay
(Got the idea for listing my stuff from you, Ice Dragon Art - thanks!)
Love the color palette. Really nice job.
I love that mermaid mandala! Very creative idea and good thinking outside the box! but the underwater scene looks lovely as well!
Its gorgeous! I really like how you did the hair too, its tough to get hair to look like its floating in the water. And I see what you mean about the background that's a tricky one. You could always do just one render with the haze background and see how strong it is then add or not as needed. Although honestly I would probably just do it in postwork because, well, I could lol. But its a challenge to figure out how to do it in studio so its kind of a toss up.
Thanks everyone!
I did try to render the haze background but didn't like the way it looked because the mermaid isn't close enough and it hazed her too much. Let's see what I can do.
To get floating hair, you have to start with hair that has lots of morphs, and then use quite a few of them together, i.e. both the right, left, up and down morphs. Christina Hair happens to be an especially good one for the underwater look. I used it in Mandala Mermaids too.
Here's a test I did with Calla Cascade Hair and assorted shaders.
3Delight
AoA's Advanced Lights
Lilith 6: Kyra
Calla Cascade Hair
Lorella Fantasy Outfit
Over the Knee Lace Up Boots
Garden Escape Porch
Skies of Reality
Pimp My Prop
Magical Granite Shader
Destiny's Garden Shader Essentials 2
I found this fantastic tutorial on YouTube about organizing and separating your Photoshop Brushes:
Oh I am going to have to watch that. I have several um ah more than 500 brushes....Good lord that's terrible (most of them are freebies though)
How did you like that hair? I like it but its a tiny bit complicated and a wee bit frustrating to use at first. Going to have to read the read me...
You have a gift for understatement. Anything by Arki is going to be out of the ordinary, often complicated, and terribly cool. It's probably no more/less complicated than Dragon Braid, Dragon Corona or Dragonkeeper Hair - and I have all three and love them. Just have a little patience.
I know what you mean about brushes. I have tons of free brushes too, and some of them are very good indeed. Ron's Brushes are exceptional, and so are Aaron Blaise's brushes (both aren't free).
Since I have just purchased Photoshop, I have the good fortune of installing my brushes using this technique rather than sorting through hundreds of them.
I had a short break before more overtime, so made this portrait for the Black is Beautiful thread.
Rendered in 3Delight using Niara's skin on Victoria 5, with the Head Morph Resource Kit for Genesis for the lips. I rendered it without the background and then played around in Photoshop. Got the lighting just right.
Zetra is the heroine for a book I'm working on. Heroines need to look kick-butt. Can't tell you how many times I've rolled my eyes over some little 120 pound cheesecake beating up a bad guy who outweighs her by 100+ pounds. Gimme a break. Zetra is 6 feet tall and 175 bounds of kick-butt tough gal... who doesn't wear high heels. That's more like it.
She definitely looks like someone who should not be messed with.
Here's the mermaid: "Revealed in the Deep."
I rendered this in stages with various items turned off:
1) Background underwater photo.
2) Orca with Atmospheric Effects Cameras, fog cam set to 500 meter visibility
3) Sea bottom including the sunken space ship also with the same fog camera.
4) Mid ground rocks and critters with fog camera.
5) Mermaid; no fog camera.
6) Foreground; no fog camera.
[edit] I used the gel light from Underwater Ambiance for the rippled lighting.
Postwork included going over the far background rocks with some pale blue to make them recede even more. I had to clean up the seaweed - the flat plane figure showed up around the edges, as well as the mermaid's hair was too light around the edges. This could be the result of rendering them without the background, oh well.
Here's the first one again for comparison:
Fantastic job on the mermaid! And Zetra definitely looks like she can kick some butt....
OMG Dracorn you do some of the most beautiful renders I have seen thus far!!!!! I really have to spend more time going through you tutorials to see what makes your brain tick!!!! :D
Thanks Ice Dragon and Saphirewild!
The post work in Photoshop can easily be done in Gimp: I used a large, soft round brush and took an eyedropper sample of the background water, then brushed it over the background rocks to make them recede. The rest is the fog cameras and a little cleaning up here and there.
I added an edit above: I used Underwater Ambiance for Daz Studio - there are several gel cams with water ripples. I set one on the mermaid and a couple others on the mid-ground and ship. That really made the difference.
AoA's Atmospheric cameras for the fog effect. I had to fiddle with the visibility settings and color to get the look I wanted.
The background rocks aren't as far away as they look - they are shrunk down to 10% size. That's why I added postwork to fade them, because they looked the same as the mid-ground.
Now THAT is truly an amazing image!! I don't even like underwater scenes, but this is great!
I liked your chess pirates image so much that I had to run out and try my own version of it, but there's no way I am going to pull anything like this off.
/tips hat
Simple amazing...
I've set up an ocean scene, i.e. set up a lot of the plants and coral, but never got around to actually trying to render an ocean scene yet. Yours is truly beautiful!
Thank you so much. Truly the best part about art is meeting people who enjoy my work.
I wanted something different, so I decided to sink a space ship. Underwater Relics Shaders hides it a bit.
Seriously, I grew so tired of placing every little coral, seaweed, etc. that I finally gave up. Note that the mid ground rock and the whole seabed isn't covered with them. Let's load 50 (OK, 21) objects at the zero position and move them one by one...
I was thinking that maybe a better way to do this is to load up a rock formation, save it as a scene subset then load it into the scene and move it where it needs to go.
I'm thinking about the new contest and my idea will require placing lots of objects. I hope I have the time to work on it - I've been buried in so much overtime for a project lately that by the time evening comes around, my brain has turned to soup and has leaked out my ears. I'll find out tomorrow morning if I get a little more time or if I have to work on the weekend.
Precisely why I stopped and took a break from my ocean! I'm seriously thinking of getting back to it now that I have that Instances Plus and I got some new coral from Traveler's store along with some more kelp and sea grasses. It will be interesting to see what I can come up with to improve my underwater world.
That might be a great way to do it! Of course, me, I just started with my ocean and dove right in. It got tiring after awhile. :)
Sounds messy!
It's been a long time since I had to worry about a job with overtime, but I can vaguely remember long hours and tired feet! as most of my jobs were more manual labor than ones requiring my brain. Still, same effect, nothing got done after I came home except maybe zoning out in front of the TV.
Check this out - I completely wigged out the Reptilian.
It's not easy getting a decent expression on this dude, though.
Yeah, but you managed nicely! :)
I love those speed platforms. They are great. I had to be careful not to overuse them.
It was worth the effort...the expression looks great.
Here's a reboot of an old render from my lame old computer (rest its soul). The second pic is the original. 3Delight.
I tried the fog camera but the sunset sky turned gray and I wanted to keep the color.