Quote - Should you use or avoid DS public betas?

Here is my humble opinion: http://preta3d.com/blog/2012/12/05/why-you-should-avoid-public-betas/

Cheers.

I don't think the last official release of DS was ready for release.  I'm sure never touching their beta's. 

But good post with good points. 

Quick test of the character before I put together a bigger scene.  Spent some time last night looking through cosplay outfits at ShareCG and have Dark Phoenix ready for him to fight.

Playing with another beautiful Alfaseed outfit. 

Quote - > Quote - Here's my first Daz/Bryce hybrid.

Built and rendered the landscape in Bryce.  Exported the Bryce scene to .hdr and used it as an IBL in Reality to render the figure in the foreground with Alpha channel checked.  Then placed the png from lux over the Bryce image in photoshop.  

Nice job!  How long to do the whole process?

If I were to quibble about anything, it would be that the straps on her dress seem to be too thin.  But it's only a minor thing.

Jay

I can accept that quibble.  I only spent about 10 minutes in Daz, loaded the character, threw on the dress, added the lights and let it go overnight. Already had my settings saved for the skin and hair and used a preset pose from V5 with some minor adjustments. 

Don't have a total time for the Bryce work, but it was a few hours a day over 3 days.   3 pieces of terrain that I built and tweaked textures, water was pretty much just drop in and adjust the placement.  Most of my time was spent in the Sky Lab.  Render time was about 28 hours. 

After all that I really wish that the "Send to Daz" function worked so I could have actually placed my character in the scene and not have to Photoshop it.  All of the textures came out screwed up in Daz and looked horrible with both 3Delight and Reality.  I didn't feel like redoing textures again.

I think the best thing I've learened in Bryce so far is that I can make some nice skies and turn them into IBL's to use in Daz.

Here's my first Daz/Bryce hybrid.

Built and rendered the landscape in Bryce.  Exported the Bryce scene to .hdr and used it as an IBL in Reality to render the figure in the foreground with Alpha channel checked.  Then placed the png from lux over the Bryce image in photoshop.  

Finally done with this after multiple attempts. After it rendered without the face texture I tried another version with just the top half of the man with plans of just placing it over the first, but forgot to change the file name and wrote over the original. So I eneded up starting the whole thing over again. 

Quote - You could try reloading the scene in Studio, and see if that image file gets recreated. If it does (same filename), then see if resuming the render will fix it. Once it is going, then close DS and don't restart the PC until the render is done.

That recreated the files and lux finds them when it starts, but he still has a white face.  

I used the the refine brush to add importance on his face and going to let it go a while to see if it just needs to re-render that area. If there's no change in the next 30 minutes I'll restart the whole thing.

Quote - > Quote - your puter is french and decided u needed to render a mime?

:lol:

I suspect that when the PC was restarted, the image in the temp directory disappeared. They are supposed to be cleared when Studio shuts down, and recreated when starting Studio again. In cases like this, it is where one needs to check the Collect Textures option. The images in the temp directory are usually created by LIE, etc.

Yeah, I checked that folder and there's nothing in it.  

So is my only option to restart the whole render?

I'm really, REALLY unhappy with DS4.5.  I held off upgrading until just last week and I've had nonstop problems.  It took me forever to get this scene ready to render with clothes and hair that used to fit perfectly not going on at all, objects that I have to locate files when I load them in the scene, and now this. 

And I don't even have any use for the new stuff they added.

I have 4 different spots in the log with messages similar to this one: 

[2012-11-28 08:44:42 Error: 2] Error hashing file 'C:/Users/Brad/AppData/Roaming/DAZ 3D/Studio4/temp/d2.tif'

[2012-11-28 08:44:42 Error: 3] Unable to open image file 'C:/Users/Brad/AppData/Roaming/DAZ 3D/Studio4/temp/d2.tif'

I wanted to add more people, but Daz wasn't liking how much I already had in the scene and started crawling with one more Genesis figure. 

Quote - On a separate note, I went and checked out all the links for the hair diddy program and Infinito. Looks cool enough to try, but like some others, I'm holding out for Allessandro's look at my hair plug-in. 

Looks like he (Allessandro) wrote the infinito terrain program too, coincidentally =D  I slapped that on the wishlist as well.

The thing I've found with using Vue to create a landscape is that they've made it exceptionally difficult to export a terrain. Everything has to go out as a separate prop, and it takes FOREVER for vue to write the save file for the texture and bump maps (talking a full day for one rinky dink 4kx4k desert set piece). They really want you to import into Vue and render in their program. It's nice, but its not Reality, not to mention the render engine is even slower than Lux when you get a rather complicated scene. 

End result, if you've got a renderfarm and extra horsepower, Vue can be great. Home users, ehh.. Just not worth all the extra effort, IMO. 

I downloaded the Vue PLE and it's nice, but too much work to try and use with Daz.  I've decided to learn Bryce since I already have it free from the same time I got Daz.  Sometime this weekend I'll do a Bryce to Daz scene and see how it all looks in Reality. 

Quote - > Quote - Thanks. Just added a Daz gift card to my Amazon wish list so I can grab Infinito.

Here's what Terragen can do in about 10 minutes.  I'm going to render a figure without a background in Reality and put them together to see how it looks. 

Looks cool, I have Terragen but I've never played with it! Shame the free version is limited but I can understand why!

Here's a lava preset from Infinito used with Reality.Lighting is IBL and the Infinito terrain converted to a lightsource. Old render but really helps show off how well they both plug ins work together :D

Very cool, hopefully I can grab Infinito soon.

Right now I seem to have gotten myself addicted to Bryce.  I spent last night and this morning working through tutorials and have all the basics down.  Now it's time to work on photorealism.  Where's my Reality for Bryce?

Quote - If you want hair for Studio have you looked into "Look at my hair" by Alessandro? He uses Reality and his hair plugin seems very usable.

I've been keeping an eye on that one, but last I saw there was no release date yet.  If it's out, I'd go buy it right now. This one is in beta and didn't cost me anything so I figured I'd give it a try.  Probably write to the creator and give him some feedback, ask about any plans for it to work in Reality. That's a good chunk of business he's missing if it doesn't. 

Quote - > Quote - Just found this for making hair in Daz 4.5.  Just enter your email and and they'll send you a link to download the beta.  

Haven't played with it much yet, but seems pretty awesome.

Its....alil painful to use

It seems to be hard to use but has nice results when it comes out right. Unfortunately so far it doesn't seem to work with Reality.  The hair is listed in the materials window, but nothing shows up in the render.  I had the same issue with fur materials from the Daz Supersuit.