Quote - > Quote - My First completed Reality/Lux render.  Loving this!

Great reander with a very unigue figure. Is she a custom figure you made?

Actually it is.  I've used her in a few of my renders, which is rare because I usually don't use a model more than once.  Thanks for the compliment!

My First completed Reality/Lux render.  Loving this!

Honestly, it just takes some patience and a bit of work to get the look right.  Gravity is often overlooked, and when the dial spin only goes so far, most people just leave it.  It really just takes time to find the right combination of things.  It's never just one dial, or 'morph', but a combination of many things to achieve what YOU are looking for.  I use morphs, dials, magnets, etc. in all different combinations to get what I want.

Just take the time and experiment, as there is no 'easy' one click way.

This for example took me two hours to get the look I wanted.

-Jeremy

Another good thing I would love, is the ability to 'Pause' and 'Resume' things.  Like simulations and renders.

I'm all for every one of those things!  Especially the hair room!  With all the improvements they've done with adding realism components such as SSS and IDL, they still have every image produced from us handycapped by fake looking hair.  Really irks me.

Wow!  This is perfect for the scene I'm working on.  Thanks LaurieA for the prop, and Vilters for the tweeks!

Looking forward to giving this a go.  Thanks a lot!

Thank you!  I thought of using that preset, but wasn't sure if there was a better shader.  Tanks BB!

Not much I can think of to add that hasn't already been stated above.

There are a lot of variables when it comes to trying to achieve 'realism' no matter what render engine you use.  It's not just one thing or the other.  A great material can look like absolute crap if the lighting is bad, and vice versa.  Even when you get that right you have to have a natual looking pose if using figures.  It goes on and on.  

In my opinion though, it really comes down to patience.  A great image can take hours of rendering, tweeking, rerendering, tweeking, etc.  Add in that sometimes your 'test' renders might need to have higher render settings, and you are looking at a good chunk of time.

There are a lot of tools and information out there on these forums and RDNA that you can learn from.  Just don't try and do it all at once when learning.  Learn a new technique, apply it, improve it, THEN move on to another technique.  It's all really about TRYING to get better and then noticing when you DO get better.

One other thing, is the little details.  Our eyes notice when these things aren't there or are done wrong.  Things like shadows, accessories, DoF, reflections, etc.

Quote - I designed the separate cover for the cornea because we want to use refraction, not transparency. But - without transparency, the cornea shadows the iris and so the iris gets no light.

My solution was a separate cover prop, and then turn of cast shadows for that. Thus the iris is fully lit even though completely covered.

OMG!  I LOVE that eyeball!  I gots to start playing with that.  Great idea BB!

Personally I'm loving the emiiter approach.  The thing I can gather, is that it is definitely not for every day use.  Just like everything else in this CG world, it's situational to the scene you are creating.  I find now that I am trying the traditional approach as well as this emitter technique and just going with what works best for the needs of the scene.

On this one, the emitters gave the right shadows for what I wanted.  Two emitters, one squared for fill, one rounded for main lighting and shadowing, opposite corners .  Envosphere with hdr image to help with reflections.

Nudity Advise:

All great info here.  Loving this tread.  I have learned a lot.  One thing kept bugging me though and I couldn't pin it down till just this morning.  When it comes to these emitters what seems to be getting missed is the shape of the emitter.  So I decided to do some test renders to see if what I was thinking was true.  Turns out it does have an effect, esspecially on shadows.

What I did is make 3 props as emitters all in the same location roughly the same size,  in a closed room.  One Round/elliptical, one as a One-sided Square/rectangle, and one cube/rectangle.  Turns out, although minute, the shadowing is different.  Which makes sense as each would direct light off of itself in straight lines in different ways.

Normally this wouldn't be that much of a bother, but if you have refective surfaces it adds another variable of how the reflected room is illuminated.  Add in the color of the walls and you have ANOTHER variable.  Quite interesting stuff!

The ball does a good job of reflecting the whole room, so if you look closely you can see the differences on the room lighting.

I guess the point of this is to show that when we do this type of lighting, we should also consider the shape of the emitter if we are to try and figure out realistic lighting senerios for our individual scenes.

Pics to follow.