Sorry, having one of those "caged animal" days

I'm working on "Sister ?, Orc slayer"

Using the physics to drop piles of brick on the orcs worked nice. I think I need to add more types derby though.

I love the pose and expression, but I'm not sold on the scene. There is more HDR back ground here then props.

Some place I know I have a ruined church model, but if I can find it, and if it's detailed enough to drop this scene in to is questionable.

My biggest worry with this is offending Catholics

oh, I'm playing around with a plane using a broken glass reflection map, that's the caustics you see.

Not bad. The brick distribution in the scene is good. My one concern about the bricks is that the color doesn't seem to match the color of the bricks in the background building (hdri?) Lighting looks good, too.

I'm still working on the brick textures, I want to use a displacement map to make the bricks less "new" looking. I also need to add a spotty layer of dirt and plants to the floor.

I found the Abby ruins, good for a ruined Abby on a hill in the back ground, but not good for close up work. I'm still checking my architecture props for some ruined structure that would add more depth to the render.

I got side tracked last night working on goblins for yet another render. It sort of explains why goblins fear Disney princesses lol But this is 2 of the goblins I came up with for the scene; doing their job, hunting the princes they have been ordered to kill. This just started with me preping a couple of figures to drop in a scene. That is a tracker and a runner, nether are done and I have to do the hunter yet.

So, I'm not the only one who gets sidetracked easily. It's a curse, I think. :)

Actually yes, artists can ether be easily side tracked, or obsess over small details. It seems common. Artists don't see the world the same as most people, they not only see the beauty and the horror, but the emotions of the scene, the story leading to it, and the possible stories leading from it. Who dosen't see faces in patterns, or patterns in chaos?

I know I could spend a day tracing all the faces in the marble paneling in my mom's bathroom lol

But it goes like this. You need a orc or two; or a person or two, for the back ground. So you load your figure, orc it, and start looking for suitable armor, this armor will work fine with new textures, that one will work except for the helmet, this one is good, and before you know it you have a small orc army all in different armors lol

This looks a bit better to me, that is stonemason's under the bridge model, I think it works good for the ruins of a second floor. The bricks are from a model set I can highly recommend, ART garbage sold at DAZ. I may not support DAZ, but I have respect and support for the artists that are still there. The collection has a nice selection of easy to texture debris{?}, I get a lot of use out of it.

There's something odd about the position of the added ruin model. I don't get a sense of it's position (is it in front of, behind or beside her?) You might want to adjust the texture on the ruin to come closer to what's on the hdr image. Otherwise, yes, I think that ruin model works pretty well.

And I hear you about faces on the bathroom wall. The previous owner of my house tried to get artistic with a trowel in our bathroom. All kinds of interesting shapes in there. And if you look at them from a different angle you get a whole new image.

If they were like that, I could make the effort be believer !
More seriously, I also think that the arch is badly lit and one does not locate it very well in the scene.
An indirect lighting could make the deal.
For the broken glasses, you should use a fractal embossing in the texture because one wonders if it's not water.

Good work all the same !

If they were like that, I could make the effort be believer !

Heh, heh. Always wondered what nuns did in their spare time.

I had to do a bit of rebuilding on the scene, 2 hours of set up died in the physics calculations

I've reset the scene, worked on the floor texture, extended out the floor, set the bridge in a bit better, added planks, and saved. I haven't run the physics calcs yet, I'm afraid it may be a bit much for my comp; but then this is a heavy scene and I had been running carrara for a while, so a fresh load may fix it.

Good luck.

Got it sorted and yes, it was the prolonged time I had been working on the scene that caused the crash while doing the physics calcs. Ran smooth with a reload.

I need to redo that floor texture again, less warped more broken bricks. I also need to reredistribute my brick piles. I had to move them so they weren't making contact with the bridge before dropping them. I also need to work on a transmap for the right hand bridge section, right now I just have the textures turned off and you can see gaps in the pylons.

Hmmm. Coming along, coming along. I think the repositioning of the bridge helps. Not sure if it's the presence of the bridge or not, but it looks like you might have to fiddle with your lighting some.

Hi Stan,
I suppose that the physical calculations, it's for all the rigid objects of the scene… Then, why are you not convert them into keyframes ?
I automatically do that for each object, and sometimes, I convert into NLA clips or save this part of the scene in my objects library.
In this manner, I can work on another element of the scene without having all to recompute.
Saving in the library works for soft body too, but we cannot convert these simulations into keyframes.

Yes the physics is for the dropped bricks and boards. If I save my scene after rework and before doing the calculations, close carrara, restart, reload, then run the physics it's no issue and does it fast; about ten minutes. Which is quick for the number of objects dropped. Not sure if the issue is a memory leak, or the DAZ tmp folder filling up. But it's an easy fix/workaround.

I don't have HD lighting turned on in that render, it was just a quicky to see how it looked. Today I am doing textures, got the uvmap for the bridge and am working on a brick texture that matches the background better, and making a alpha map for the metal bridge parts I don't want visible.

Off topic. Had the bejeezus scared out of me this morning. Turned on my comp and W8.1 wouldn't take my pass.   After an hour of fumming and assuming my comp had been highjacked, I was locked out, and I thought I was going to have to buy a hard copy of windows 8. I checked my pass visualy; clicked the eye to see the letters of my pass... shift key wasn't working, had some grit caught under it  

Here it is so far. Worked up a displacement map for the bricks, but they still look to square/new.

This scene, which doesn't appear that heavy, is taking a half an hour to save, 10 minutes to load, and after I let carrara run to render this last night my comp was about locked up this morning. Render was done, carrara was using no amount of the CPU but nearly 7 gig of ram. I had to force close carrara because it was totally unresponsive; not sure how I managed to save the render.

Coming along. I like the distribution of bricks. Don't know if I noticed this before, but some of the glass looks like it's floating.

Yep, you're right, so is the sword; thought I had I fixed the sword. I'll get back to it.

Was prepping an animation of optitex dynamic clothing, was not happy with the clothing passing through the hands, but the other option was the hands snagging the cloth and pulling the dress off. I had to move the camera about 3 degrees to keep the action in frame, but with the next run though the camera did a 357 degree rotation around the figure I've had issues with camera movement in C8.5 before.

Maybe your camera has been drinking. Sounds all the world like your camera is drunk. :)

The drunken camera is new to carrara 8.5. Guess carrara decided it was time to start drinking. I'll see if I cna work uo a vivid example of the issue.

Taking a brake from zombies and goblins, just a "hanging out" pin-up. G2F, dial spun character, Was just playing around with the soft body physics on this funky vest by amaranth   Made it real stretchy so it drapes like fine cloth. Need to pose the hands and keep this spartan; very few extra props. Those heavy scenes get aggravating to work with, and this comp is no slouch i5 3.2, 8 gig DDR3, and it still lags horribly try to work some of my scenes. ...

WT... carrara isn't rendering the last/currant frame of the drape oooK. been thought it a few times, everything it right, assembly room shows the draped scene, still renders frame one

I'll get back to this.

Ok, been at this a while, saved, closed carrara, no difference, cleared and reran the draping, same. I'm stumped. The render room is just not rendering the last frame of the drape.

I may not be able to do any more with thew battle nun, the scene file is 800 meg, when I open it in carrara it takes up 4.5 gig of my 8. Then I click render and it starts filling grid and rendering. With out the HDRI lighting it's eating 93% of my ram and 96% of my cpu.    And explains why I don't do complex scenes. I have a few scenes I have abandoned because they got to difficult to work.

That is close to final for this one I think. Just turning in to a big pane to work. I hate the floor texture, looks a lot better in Genetica, just losing something in the bump map. Going to save it here and do a HDRI lit render this evening. 

Couldn't you export the figures as obj.s and replace the figures with the obj models? That would decrease the overhead quite a bit, I'd thinkl

I could but I'm not sure that would solve the problem. I think it's the few hundred bricks with displacement in the scene. But I have done larger scenes with more people and far more props that was about the same for load and save times, I worked it by making people and props that I wasn't using, invisible. That was that rather well developed house bout scene with I believe 9 genesi and 6 surface replicators. I had 9 cameras set up to render but only got one rendered out. Part of the reason I want a render farm is to render those 24 hour plus scenes and still have a comp to work with lol As it stands these renders tend to lock my comp for the day; rendering just using too much cpu and ram to do anything else.

Well, it was a thought. :)

I gave it a 16 hour render, not at all happy with the floor or the bricks. If I tap up the displacement too much the bricks look like balloons, and the floor looks like something from a fun house. Not enough and they are too flat and square. Back to genetica. for some reason I am losing the nice brick surface bump in the texture build,

You speak about displacement, I suppose that it is in the texture room… have you tested displacement with the brushes ?, they are very precise.
You could also try to apply the texture of a wall, to see what is the result (the rear wall looks good)…

Painting in the assembly room and I have never gotten along. Works fine on objects with 1 shader domain. But I can take the brick model  in to Genetica and paint textures on it there. Thing is the displacement maps I make in Genetica are a bit high contrast for carrara so I have to find low settings that work; some times the lowest isn't low enough. Dropping the brightness of the map helps but loses small details.

Yesterday I got obsessed with that floor texture and ended up spending the day going through 58 builds to get something reasonable. Had to abandon the gravel in it because it just made the texture too complex for the bump; but I can always add it with the complex shader mixer. I have one more layer of weathering to add to the brick floor, and I don't want to over work the individual brick texture/displacement map. That looks ok and I am afraid I'd only make it worse lol

had to get my head out of the battle nun for a bit. Was obsessing on it and that ain't good. Here is G2F "you're late" Real early with props and people to add.

nice pose, the pose is better than a lot of the 'pros' do for their pa images on daz, the right hand looks a bit strange,

that's all -

I'm hunting for a clutch bag.

ah not a crutch bag . lucky :)

As long as it's not an old bag. :)

ARGH! I'm trying to add some gravel to battle nun, no matter what I do the small spheres come up on the bottom of the plane using the surface replicator and I can't seem to fix it. This is one of the regular things that puts me off the surface replicator some times. The plane is uvmapped, vertex object, and I am using a distribution map. No matter what I do they com up on the bottom, and for some reason I see bounding boxes for 7 foot rods on the small spheres. And I am out of ideas on what to do about it.

I'm sure you've already tried this, but what about moving the object's hot point?

hmm, I forget you can do that lol

But, I found the bag I was looking for, had to do some minor model work on it, it not being a new DAZ product made it was easy lol

edit to add, moving the hot point did nothing. This is an issue that has came up before and I never found a solution then, just gave up on it.

time line issue.

That was me being thick, I was adding the surface replicator to the last frame which causes it to do weird things. I'll work up a better distribution map, this is just a toss on and is actually a caustics map for a pool scene. I'll also add some bump so they look less like gray marbles.

That actually looks pretty good to me. You might try blurring the distribution map. That will spread out the gravel a bit but still generally follow the map.

Bad news, it wont render. I mean there is so many objects with displacement maps, and the surface replicator, that it takes an hour and a half "filling grid", maxes my memory for half an hour, then crashes before it starts rendering

I'm going to try dropping the AA, and other render quality settings to see if I can actually render it; I'd love to have this comp maxed at 32gig, but DDR3 8gig sticks aren't cheep.  

Aw, man. That's too bad. Good luck.

Beef cake?

This is a minimalist scene, Just G1 and a plane. Loks nice but no idea what to do from here lol Got a lot of those

"Have you seen a big bad wolf"?

Those are some of my Studio prestaged figures. I was sorting through yesterday to delete the one's that wont load. And I ran in to an odd one; why do I always hit the weird bugs? The scene is simply G1, ghastly's killer hoody and the only scene I have every done that has errored out rendering; crash/lockup is common in my elaborate scenes. I've reset the pose, worked on the textures, checked models, the only thing the stops the render erroring out is not having the feet in the render

To top that off trying to save the scene crashes every time.

Fixed it as well as some other new issues. If I have any issues with clothes loading I just open them in Studio and resave then to their folder.

So here is the raw staging of "assassin in the mist".

I'm going to have to abandon the surface replicator with distrbution. It only sees 2 colors black and white. if it isn't one it's the other, so 99% white is black. Meaning no gradation, if I showed you distribution map I used you would swear it was solid white, as you can tell from the picture, it isn't.

Still I think it is to the point of final render, itching to get to one of a dozen or more other scenes lol.

As you can see most of my scenes are portrait style so I'm trying to get away from them.

It's not a bad render. Really makes you think twice about messing with a nun. :)

Those pesky goblins again.

This is ready for final, but I don't like the way the nun is lit. I may turn the scene 45degrees to put more light on her face.

Well I managed to over work the battle nun scene, it crashes now. I can open it, but that is about it. The only fix I can think of is to deconstruct the scene, take it apart and save the parts, then rebuild it.

Figured this out. Seems as soon as the bricks hit the replicated stones C8.5 locked up. Deleting the surface replicator fixed it.

Good news.