I return after quite a long absence, again.
Things are better. I’m contracting for a major tech company.
The 15 remaining cats are fine.
I’m still dealing with Romeo’s death. I’ve never had a pet impact me like this before. It’s best not to dwell, but I’m not over it.
Right now I’m keeping busy, it’s a Sunday afternoon and I’m figuring out lighting settings in the new version of iClone.
Traditionally, iClone used a built-in rendering system, which was ultra fast but not very life like. You can see examples of it in just about every comic I’ve posted over the years (or here: https://www.reallycoolsite.org/2018/08/14/retro-retro-retro-01/ since I’ve taken most of them all down again).
Reallusion, the parent company of iClone, came up with a character creator that eventually added a plug-in to render life-like figures.
The process takes forever on a basic machine. I have an AMD Ryzen 1800x processor with an NVIDIA 1080 founder’s edition card and 32gb of system ram and the above render took over 10 minutes to finish.
Since they also upgraded the models to 4k skins, I, of course, decided to redo all my characters to 4k. Not knowing that they hadn’t yet released the more important skin texture editor for 4k characters. Meaning to add stubble, lip stick, makeup, scars, tattoos, etc., you had to start with low poly characters and upscale them to 4k, kind of negating the point of the native 4k models.
Eventually, they introduced the rendering to iClone.
Before:
After:
The new rendering process (iRay) took about an hour to produce the second image. Just to get it to somewhat match the original, I had to take the brightness all the way up and change what lighting I could to image based lighting.
It still omitted things. The nice blue lighting on the floor, the copper floor in the foreground, for example, will need workarounds. But ultimately, it’s going to produce stills for the comics much like this:
So what am I up to again? I’m debating if all the time and effort (literally) is worth it to switch to the new rendering plug-in. When it’s good, it’s great, when it’s not, it’s maddening (the damn thing can’t even render water and it’s been out for ages for other software).
Since I have a long weekend coming up, I’m planning on a test run with a simple prequel story to Retro Retro Retro and we’ll go from there.
Stay tuned.