My digital comic book composed…
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I tried lowering both and I don't see a change. Am I missing something?
Opps Spec should go UP not down.
Personally, I think that looks fine. Probably your audience would accept that there are some blown out highlights here and there, just so long as you don't do that to the skin. Watch the last Star Trek movie and see just how much the lighting varies on the bridge of the Enterprise. (Yes, way too many lens flares, but hey, that's his style.)
It looks to me like you didn.t lower the reflection map enough.. I rarely go more than 5% on a reflection map myself..
Back on the blue light for darkness thing, I put this together last night and thought I'd share; in this image there is one distant light set to 50% brightness and made blue coming from the same angle as the camera, and then five spotlights; two casting shadows for streetlights, two lighting the shadows from the streetlights, and one lighting the doorway behind the soldier.
Of course I also did my standard postwork in Photoshop, but the coloration is only a bit brighter and more blue than the original render..
I see a Reflection Environment Map on the Surfaces Tab, but there's no option to lower the intensity. Am I missing something?
Incredible job! I had a lot of fun reading the first 2 issues. The characters have a very defined and cool personality. And the script took my attention inmediatly. Wish you a lot of success.
H.
I see a Reflection Environment Map on the Surfaces Tab, but there's no option to lower the intensity. Am I missing something?
I'm sorry, been a hectic week or I would have addressed this sooner; What program are you using exactly?
To be honest, I'm not interested in this issue anymore as I'm okay with the way the picture currently is.
I'm a little confused by this render. I seem to be getting a lot of soft shadows, but I checked all the lights and the Shadow Softness setting is set to zero for each one. Does anyone have any ideas about this?
If you're using raytraced shadows, they'll get softer the further apart the objects are for spotlights, point lights and such, just like they would in reality. I think only distant lights are exempt from this.
I'm not sure what you mean by "the further apart the objects are". Can you elaborate?
I'm not sure what you mean by "the further apart the objects are". Can you elaborate?
If there's a spotlight with one object close to it and the other object far away, the shadows of the first object will be soft on the second object. When you move the first object away from the spotlight towards the second object, or move the spotlight itself away so the relative distances change, the shadow should get sharper.
It's pretty similar to real life. Stand with your back to a bright light and move your hands back and forth in front of each other to see the effect.
Hmm, that may not be what's causing your soft shadows entirely, though. I did a quick couple of renders to get a feel for the changes, and from what I'm seeing I wouldn't expect it to be that soft unless there was a pretty extreme difference between the object-object and object-light distances. The graininess around the soft edges can be a symptom of that, though. Is the light setup something you could share?
How exactly would I share it?
If you're using DS4, File>Save As>Lights Preset, then upload the file to ShareCg or you could e-mail it. If it's someone else's lighting preset don't do that, though. I'm mostly interested in the light that's casting the shadow from his arm to his chest, if you prefer to just post the settings and location of that one, and the location of the main figure, it would be helpful to see if someone can replicate what's happening. You could just screencap the light parameters tab.
EDIT: Like this; this should be all the relevant parameters.
I saved the light set and posted it to ShareCG. Here is the link:
http://www.sharecg.com/v/69425/view/21/DAZ-Studio/Temp-Light-set
I'm using 6 different lights. 3 of them are focused on the front part of Max's body: The Key, Fill, and Bounce lights.
I'm also using the Vanguard spaceship model.
Unfortunately, the problem is that you're using deep shadow maps. I rendered a quick test comparing your current setup to the same thing with raytraced shadows, and the raytraced one had nice sharp edges. Do you prefer the deep shadow maps? I've always found that unless I have a lot of transparency, rendering all the DSMs for multiple lights often takes longer than just raytracing, and raytracing is easier to control plus generally looks nicer.
Turning the shadow samples up in the render setting will help with the graininess around the edges but not the softness.
It will probably be faster and more effective overall to use raytracing at least for this scene. If using deep shadow maps is cutting down on your render time significantly enough that you'd prefer to keep them, try just changing the key light or another light that casts the most interesting/important shadows to raytraced, and leave the others.
DSM is on the left, raytraced is on the right.
EDIT: I'd also like to say, wow, your lighting skills have shown amazing improvement.
Thanks for the compliment.
Yes, I prefer Deep Shadow Maps over Raytracing because of the lower render time. But I guess for certain scenes, I may just have to use raytracing. Anyway, thanks. You've helped me with this.
Check out this render of Cleo! I'm really glad I worked on this!
I have not look in this thread for a while...and I gotta say...your renders are a thousand times better than the first images you shown.
Amazing growth!
Rawn
Thank you! I'm very happy with the way my skills are improving!
I could use some help with this picture of Destiny. I think this looks okay, but I don't like how her hair blends in with the background. Perhaps a glow around her head would work, but I don't know how to do something like that. I'm also not totally happy with her face, though it's hard to explain. Any ideas wold be greatly appreciated.
Ill try to help...the problem with her hair is that they have the same color as the background..you should seperate them by adding some highlights to define them better....not a halo...use a hard edge airbrush and paint some strands...
Her face...you dont like it because her expression is wrong...she is almost ready to sleep, while she is driving a spaceship? And whats with the smile..? She's like on drugs or something..
Its not natural if you know what i mean...
How would I use an airbrush? Can this be done in DAZ Studio? I'm not looking to do postwork.
As far as her expression goes, this is part of a comic book scene that I'm working on. I actually like the way her face looks pre-render, but the extra lights just aren't working the way I had hoped. I'm using the 7-point light setup that I learned from a Dreamlight tutorial.
You could add a rim light to add highlights to the hair on that side, but you'd need to figure out where that light is coming from. Possibly some tell-tales (equipment lights) on that side? Another thing you could do is add some reflection to the inside of the cockpit canopy. That would make the canopy a little less transparent, and not quite as dark.
I was wondering if someone could help me figure out how to break a model up to look like it was smashed or destroyed. I have hexagon and blender but only basic knowledge of the tools inside it.
I do have some ruins and debri sets but I need to blow things up in my comics.
Thanks in advance!
You need to Carrara!!
Carrara Module has to break things.
Take a look here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eDov7NwxGU
Thank you for the link!
Sigh, it would mean having to learn a whole other program though.
Well ... You do not need to learn all the software Initially, you can learn just the break module.
Since you can import Poser and Daz models there ... On the other hand ... has reason, you will need to learn lighting techniques ... But anyway, it will give you what you want.
it may be that someone knows some script / plugin to do this within Daz Studio.
I have Poser Pro 2012, and I have a script PhillC:
http://www.philc.net/exploder.php
But that's just for poser
True, True.
I'm open to any suggestions at this point.