I’ve spent most of the past two days trying to figure out lighting schemes and cheats for the new rendering software. I must say that I’m not used to the slowness yet, as with the old rendering the renders completed near immediately. Now? It’s between 15 minutes and an hour, depending on size of the render. It is painful, but I’m learning to do things in the time it is taking to produce art.
One of the things I seem to need to do is to dumb down some of the sets. I’ve been at this for a good 10 years now and I’ve purchased quite a few different props and scenes for Reallusion’s iClone over those years. Some of these are fantastic in their complexity.
For example:
Had to be “dumbed down” with the new rendering software:
Besides letting me relight the scene to make the new version of the character more menacing (same character, just different version of the person I based him on), the whole scene is different to make things easier to render.
I think I’ve mentioned before that I upgraded all of my character models to 4k. I also used iRay versions of the character skins in order to make things easier to render.
Unfortunately, (as I probably mentioned before), the 4k and iRay characters cannot use enhancements such as beard stubble, bushy eyebrows, tattoos, makeup, etc., must be applied to a non-iRay/4k model and then upgraded to a Character Creator 3 character. While they’re enhanced, they can’t be upgraded to 4k nor do they have iRay enhancements.
I’ve decided to use the old upscaled models for just a couple of iconic characters (Edgar and Solita), which is presenting challenges. Solita, for example, takes a lot more lighting on her to keep her eyes and makeup from making a solid patch of darkness.
The appearance editor for character Creator 3 is due in the fall. So until then, I’ll figure out a work around on a case by case basis.
Finally, cheating. See this stunning scene of Celine standing before a rift in space and time?
Total cheat:
I think yesterday’s blog talked about how the iRay rendering software can’t see particles to do special effects. Water, lightning bolts, magic, etc., all won’t show up when rendered.
My work around was just to set a video as a background because putting a video on a plane caught shadows from a spaceship. In this instance, I control the lighting. So rift in space and time? Throw it on a plane, make the plane semi-transparent and zoom in so the render can’t tell. Cheat.
I will probably make videos of all future particle based special effects with transparent backgrounds and then use the same process to put them into future scenes.
Stay tuned.
-Jim