Am just going to add a comment for myself, perhaps somewhat self-congratulary but actually I really do wnat (hopefully constructive) criticism, and please if there's stuff that you recognise or think I should give appropriate credit for LET ME KNOW! I don't wish to take credit for others' works and I know I have used various items or props or clothing or even models from around about, many from this very site, so do tell me and also how and where the proper place to do so is. I'm new at the whole establish a gallery thing, and I have a strong sense of self-critical nature so often things are better than I'd let myself believe.

Also any suggestions or advice are welcome, I really do want to get better at most of the aspects of creative 3D that I can do, some things I find easier than others, and often as in the case of Aiko 7 near the poolside, the working begins with no special idea but just in the process of doing some exercise or testing out some item/prop/pose/setting/lighting/character I get a sudden inspiration that results in something like that. Believe me it has taken me a very long time to even get close to this and I guess I am a slow learner, but then again there is really quite a LOT to learn with these things, so perhaps I should cut myself a break?

Also if any of these are too naughty or rude let me know, I am not sure quite where the line is, I tend to be fairly open to adult stuff and nudity generally doesn't offend me, but if there's anything that might be for others, I wouldn't want it to be for general viewing, so let me know and how to go about placing those into a more appropriate gallery. I don't /think/ there's anything here that I haven't seen in other galleries, but perhaps I have my settings different?

Like I said, I'm new, so would just ask for a bit of consideration, if I have something wrong let me know how to get it better. Thanks for your comments, regards.

Congrats on your first post :-) When you upload your work you can put what you used from renderosity in the link provided.

Some people put what they used in the comments. Some people don't put anything. You can choose what you want to do :-)

The hardest part is the lighting for me. I like the lighting on the pool that you've done. I also like that beach scene, the first one.

When i first started rendering I was using Gaussian with a pixel radius of 1.40 In one of the render settings tab. Found my images were to blurry.

I changed it to lancoza 1.4 Makes it sharper with more detail. Takes a bit longer to render.

And the post denoiser helps speed things up, sometimes I turn it off to get a bit of noise with some models like the daz dragon.

Awesome work, keep striving forward. I tried daz didn't know how to use it, gave up for six months, then tried it again. Took me a while to learn and still am learning.

I'm wondering whether you have a "camera" in mind when you do your adjustments? I mean a physical one, as in like, do you do photography as well? The settings for the render tab are sort of still a bit of a dark art to me, though I do actually understand some of the physics being emulated. It's just that because the image is being generated in a virtual world, it will depend strongly on the particular rendering engine you've chosen for your image. I tend to use the "HDR / Image-based-lighting (IBL)" for my scenes, just because I found setting up lighting quite tricky and it never seemed to work the way perhaps you'd have a better understanding if you were familiar with studio or outdoor lighting techniques. I do want to get into trying to get lighting set up, but I wound up just buying light-setups from various places so I could focus on the scene more. It's interesting though, isn't it? Daz gives you in a package the ability to be creative artist, scene designer, lighting tech, narrative writer, editor, even to some extent a movie/animation producer and it's just so many things, camera tech, fashion and posing - it can be overwhelming at times but I love it!

Thank you for your kind words, I ought to understand lighting a bit better but to be honest I generally am using HDR/IBL and either rotate it around until I get something or sometimes I actually leave the Camera light ON (which some say is a "no-no" but it can work for me) - I might have used other's "lighting sets" also, to be honest it's hard to recall exactly what I used in some of these, they span quite a few years, but the better ones are probably the later ones. I haven't toyed around much with render settings other than the more common ones, am a bit wary of fiddling, but given I /did/ study physics at uni I /ought/ to have a fairly good understanding of what the various parameters do. Still you can change the entire dynamic (emotionally and physically) of a given scene by adjusting lighting even in seemingly minor ways... It still boggles my mind that we can even /get/ images like this and given some of the artworks I've seen in others' portfolios I can sometimes get a sense of "I have so far to go", so your encouragement is welcome and greatly appreciated. thanks and I will keep going.