A new computer is on the way

Cue the hallelujah chorus:

Been having lots of trouble with the old beast lately, a large part of it caused by near-constant auto update attempts by Microsoft that just fail and fail. Huge chunks of my hard drive space disappear. The computer repair person couldn’t get things to work either, so it’s just time to say good-bye to this machine — it’s at least 10 years old — and get a new one.

Sent the computer person the specs for using the latest DS, so I should finally get to use dForce clothing and render HD characters more quickly too.

It’ll be a couple weeks though, so I have to fight with the old beast for a while yet.

I expect we’re rendering a bit more often during these interesting times. Hope you all are doing well and keeping healthy, wherever in the world you live.

Space BGs for pulp poses

Or other stuff too, but I made them with those poses in mind. A set of simple backgrounds, a few intended for toony figures. A couple examples:

(L) Mei Lin 7 escaping the ParasiteX, with fake dramatic shadows! (R) Space Princess Tiami hamming it up with a tiny Evo Girl.

The toony room was made with Ghastly’s free Sci-Fi sets, which I mentioned in this post.

All backgrounds except the toony room are 2500×3000; the room is 3000×3000. Under the cut:

Quick corrections for those wonky skin settings

Probably boring everybody following this blog by now! But curiosity (and yeah, irritation) compelled me to do a few quick-n-dirty adjustments to the default 3DL AoA Subsurface materials for Ollie 8.

Skin:

Ollie’s diffuse maps are already a medium-dark skin tone, so why make them that much darker? Changed the color on all skin maps to 255 255 255 and changed the diffuse strength to 80%.

SSS:

Ollie 8 has SSS maps, yet for some reason the diffuse maps are used instead. The color adds to that orange/reddish tint and the strength is too high. Replaced the diffuse maps with the SSS maps in the texture folder, changed the color to a light gray — 235 235 235 — and reduced the SSS strength to 25%.

Used light gray just as a starting point, to see what the maps looks like. Adding a slight red or blue tint helps some textures look nicer when rendered, to my eye.

I haven’t used AoA Subsurface enough to get a feel for the specular settings. There are two channels; I just changed the the first value down to 35% for everything.

Eyes:

Again, diffuse color is too dark. Changed color to 255 255 255 and strength to 100%. The sclera was still too gray so I upped the diffuse strength a bit.

He ended up looking like this in my usual light set (I forgot to lower the specular lights again.)

Not great, but better. A usable starting point, at least. I shouldn’t have had to make these changes though.

FWIW, I prefer Ubersurface. Here’s a couple renders with Ollie’s skin settings switched over.

With gamma correction on:

With gamma correction off:

Both look closer to the actual diffuse maps. I dunno…I guess the best I can hope for is to get to a point where I’m okay with how things look, and then go make renders.

Something more exciting than bald naked test render people anyway.

Like Elithia 8! I picked her up when she was in Fast Grab, and used one of those Flash Coupon deals to get her for about $5.00. She’s pretty — and I do like that little tin toy robot from Lab108.

Further adventures in baffling 3DL skin materials

Bear with me here. 😀

This is Ollie 8:

Ollie comes with 3DL materials so I expected him to look reasonably similar to this in 3DL when I loaded him. But this is what I got after rendering with neutral lights:

Hmmm…Ollie looks unexpectedly ethnic?

So I upped his SSS value to 75%, turned on Gamma Correction with gamma set to 2.2 and I got this:

OMG THAT’S EVEN WORSE!! HE’S FROZEN!!

Then I turned Gamma Correction off but left gamma on 2.2:

Well, didn’t expect that result at all…

Next I rendered with an Advanced Ambient light:

Those lips, lol!

Reloaded the first light set, toned down the specular values, and copied Ollie’s face settings to his metallic lips:

I’d say he looks much closer to his promo images than when I started out.

I also did the same thing with Alexandra 8:

A fairer-skinned Alexandra.

But I don’t think these settings are usable; without gamma correction turned back on all the other props, clothing, hair etc in the scene would be too bright/washed out, right?

Maybe I should take this to the DAZ forums where someone more Studio-savvy than me can explain what’s going on here.

A little 3DL rant

Feeling a need to get a complaint off my chest: I’m really annoyed with the 3DL materials for the DAZ core characters. Yes, I know everything is now geared toward Iray but I’m still a paying customer so I can grumble away. To my eye, their default settings look awful. Some are much worse than others. Like Alexandra 8.

Here she is one of her promos:

Here she is with the default 3DL materials, neutral lighting:

Yikes! She looks more like a bronze statue than a human.

I applied my default UberSurface starting point settings:

Better, but still much browner in comparison to the promo images which, of course, are Iray.

So I played around with the SSS settings and even a little ambient boosting using her diffuse maps (a trick I try to avoid.)

Finally closer to what the Iray promos look like, though the settings still need work. But at least I now feel like I’m in the ballpark, so to speak.

Alexandra 8 is listed at $44.95. Granted, I only paid about $10 for her, but is it too much to ask that a core figure get better default 3DL materials to at least approximate the Iray results? I don’t expect a perfect match, but there’s a huge difference between the paler Iray Alexandra and her bronze statue 3DL counterpart.

And while I’m being grumpy, I also want to complain about the separate HD add-ons for many of these core characters. It’s like having to buy the character twice. Ugh.

Happily, some characters do come with the HD add-on. I picked up the Floyd 8 Pro Bundle for $35.00 while it was on sale the other day and was relieved to see he came with the HD morphs.

So anyway, I continue to redo all the 3DL skin materials for the DAZ core characters…