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PostPosted: Wed May 02, 2012 9:25 pm 

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OT:The fact that you needed to annotate what maps goes where makes a shortcoming in current Mxed very clearly...
Hopefully they change that in the next Version, not only for the purpose of sharing screenshots but also for the sake of increased usability.


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PostPosted: Wed Sep 26, 2012 6:39 pm 
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Just testing as I convert another character and texture set from DAZ Studio to MXMs (similar settings to my last post).

Image

Best,
Jason.

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PostPosted: Sat Oct 06, 2012 5:08 pm 
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Here I was refining the settings for the "hair" MXMs -- I tried a bunch of lighting scenarios and these settings seem to give pretty good/consistent results. However ultimately nothing can really cover up the fact that this is just a texture stuck on some polygon strips...

For mid-range to distant figures this will be convincing enough, but for any type of closeup the illusion breaks down pretty quickly.

Best,
Jason.

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PostPosted: Mon Oct 08, 2012 2:54 pm 
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Still trying different settings for hair MXMs and playing with character MXM tweaks...

Image

Best,
Jason.

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PostPosted: Wed Oct 10, 2012 2:58 pm 
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In this render I finalized all of the MXM settings for the character, hair and swimsuit. The differences can be subtle but I tweaked just about everything in a variety of lighting setups and with a variety of camera angles to make sure the MXMs will perform as I want them to in any setup I may choose to use in the future.

Image

PS: all of these are setup for viewing on a common sRGB monitor -- if you have a wide gamut monitor you will likely find this looks better if you switch to sRGB mode (they look overly red/magenta unless I use sRGB mode on my wide gamut monitor, but display as I expect on all sRGB monitors).

Best,
Jason.

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PostPosted: Tue Oct 16, 2012 10:39 pm 
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Hello Jason.
I like it, but until the beginning I find the skin too red particular on the nose.

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PostPosted: Wed Oct 17, 2012 1:48 am 
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They do trend toward the reddish tones -- bear in mind I'm using commercial textures and models at this point just trying to see how much realism I can squeeze out of them without doing any custom modeling/sculpting or changing of textures... simply using MXM trickery. But it should be made absolutely clear these are not my creations in any way, shape, or form... I just want to explore the limits of what can be done with Maxwell for typical DAZ users. They have unbiased rendering already (Lux and Octane) but skin/hair tends to be the big letdown and sticking point for staying with Biased rendering (more than rendertime even).

As always, if anything were to be used for final work it would need to be heavily post processed, which these are not... most did not get any post at all.

Actually if you want to see something pretty funny here is the same figure (with the same textures) rendered out of DAZ studio (this is their SSS effect in 3Delight)... now that is pink with a capital "P".

Best,
Jason.

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PostPosted: Wed Oct 17, 2012 7:23 am 

Joined: Sun Jan 07, 2007 7:23 pm
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Half Life wrote:
Yes, David. You are right, the skin is too red, but I will not admit that it is too red. Instead I will shift the topic to reasons beyond my control because I cannot face any direct criticism and do not have the courage to accept ownership for anything I have done. I will go back into my hole and appear again within several months once I have regained notoriety in the only corner of the world wide web where I can once again try to hide behind my computer screen in order to become the person I so wish to be in this world.


Jason, that's a valid point, but is there any way to make the skin look more like skin?

I understand it's a hard material to fine tune/zero in on, but I think exploring the material itself would benefit this exercise.


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PostPosted: Wed Oct 17, 2012 12:44 pm 
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rusteberg wrote:
Half Life wrote:
Yes, David. You are right, the skin is too red, but I will not admit that it is too red. Instead I will shift the topic to reasons beyond my control because I cannot face any direct criticism and do not have the courage to accept ownership for anything I have done. I will go back into my hole and appear again within several months once I have regained notoriety in the only corner of the world wide web where I can once again try to hide behind my computer screen in order to become the person I so wish to be in this world.


Jason, that's a valid point, but is there any way to make the skin look more like skin?

I understand it's a hard material to fine tune/zero in on, but I think exploring the material itself would benefit this exercise.

Nice. Putting words into my mouth -- Let's dissect this:

First off, I did not say it was "too red". Skin comes in many thousands of subtle colors and some people are naturally redder than others... so to say anything is absolutely wrong is simple minded (I can understand someone of your limited intelligence making that mistake). It may not look right (to you), but there are many factors that could create that. One of them is monitor/colorspace issues which I've outlined already elsewhere in this thread. If you like I can post 4 different versions that will have entirely differently coloration just based on sRGB/Adobe RGB colorspaces and whether it has a embedded profile (which will of course depend entirely on your monitor/OS/browser configuration).

Secondly, I can certainly face criticism, however after private discussion with a few higher-level people here I decided not to allow punks like you to use me to turn this forum into a useless flame-war zone. That said, I truly was ready and willing to engage in an all out war with you sorry chumps -- because I know for a fact that I can beat you back into your little troll holes. However, I was persuaded it would be a major hassle for everybody else (you know the normal, intelligent and polite users that use this forum for something constructive rather than a place to stalk me out of misplaced jealousy).

Third, I don't need notoriety for any reason -- it doesn't benefit me in the slightest. Unlike you, I'm not trying to become anybody "in this world" because I don't belong in this world to begin with. If you knew anything at all about me you would know my only goal is fine-art painting, and by painting I mean real paint in the real world (watercolor/oil/egg tempera). 3D is simply a means to an end for me (and I have always made that as clear as possible)... I use it as a lighting reference generating tool, in the same way I would use a camera as a reference generating tool. I expect and want nothing more from the 3D world -- I have no interest in spending the rest of my life stuck behind a computer screen.

That said, I do find 3D to be an interesting (if still nascent and overly technical) artform, and like many other artistic mediums before it, I am having fun exploring what can be accomplished.

Finally if you want to know what can be done for more realistic skin -- first off start with a more realistic model (ie sculpting), then there are plenty of areas where poor decisions were made in the texture mapping (whether that be diffuse/specular/bump/SSS) so those would need to be edited. However the average DAZ user does not have those skills which is why they buy ready-made assets. So me doing that defeats the purpose of these test.

So what is the real purpose of these tests then? Since it's early to announce it, I wanted to avoid talking about it, but since you are so intensely interested in my activities here's the scoop: I'm building a Maxwell plugin for DAZ Studio. These renders are tests to develop formulas for auto-conversion of DAZ materials to MXMs.

Now why DAZ studio (or even SketchUp for that matter)? Because as I said before I am interested in 3D as an artistic medium -- when I paint a watercolor I do not make the paper/brushes/paint I use to make the art... as an artist what I bring to the table is myself, everything else is simply tools/assets I purchase/acquire. Much the same way, 3D is gradually evolving into similar tools where to create images you simply purchase/acquire assets and arrange/render them to express your creativity. DAZ and SketchUp have both actively pursued this model of the 3D future and this grabbed my attention (and made me take 3D more seriously as image making tool). The medium still has alot of developing left to do before it reaches the point of the ease-of-use that would allow a novice to use it and get realistic results, but it has made great strides towards this over the last 10 years... and at the current level of development it may be as soon as 5-10 years. I've played with 3D many times over the last 18 years, but it was only recently that I felt it was far enough along to really invest serious time into.

I have no time for elitists snobs, IMO that is not that way forward. I am interested in users who want to create images without having to re-invent the wheel every time... because they are out there and they outnumber the elitists many hundreds of times over.

I have no intention of continuing this farce and will not respond to you again (you are joining Nixon on my ignore list). But I understand that you (and your cohorts) lack reading comprehension and the adult attention span to read through an actual response. So I will finish this off with something that will fit your intelligence, attention span and emotional development level:

"I know you are! but what am I ?" :roll:

Best,
Jason.

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PostPosted: Thu Oct 18, 2012 5:01 am 

Joined: Sun Jan 07, 2007 7:23 pm
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Half Life wrote:
rusteberg, Thanks for your feedback. I really appreciate it.


No problem, I'm just here to help.


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PostPosted: Thu Oct 18, 2012 4:05 pm 
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Some more renders of the same model/MXM set -- some light post, I switched to Corel Painter to see if the RGB color profile issues would resolve (my version of Photoshop is old).

Image

Image

Best,
Jason.

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PostPosted: Thu Oct 18, 2012 4:21 pm 
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rusteberg wrote:
Half Life wrote:
rusteberg, Thanks for your feedback. I really appreciate it.


No problem, I'm just here to help.



lol ... for a limited intelligence person ... that was a smart reaction 8) :lol:

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PostPosted: Thu Oct 18, 2012 4:51 pm 
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Yeah that was sarcasm on my part -- they like to play dumb, not actually having a real conversation but rather just trolling it up with excuses like "that was too long to actually read through" :roll:

None of them are idiots, although their behavior can be idiotic... and is at best counterproductive. We have established long since we don't like each other (at all) -- hell, I didn't like him before I even started posting here (because of things he did and said to others here)... but you don't see me going into his threads stirring up shit. But maybe I should just be a punk like that too... have myself a good old time running the forums into the ground with complete trash posts. After all what is the use of me blocking him if you come into this thread and quote him... if every thread I post in just becomes solely about our mutual dislike of each other then I feel absolutely OK with making every thread he posts in about the same topic.

Best,
Jason.

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PostPosted: Fri Oct 19, 2012 3:41 pm 
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Here's 2 more -- still using Painter for light post, but after looking at yesterdays renders on a few different monitors I decided to stick with an embedded AdobeRGB profile (which is what I render with and my monitor is set to most of the time)... I just haven't had much luck with consistent/predictable results whenever I use sRGB (it probably doesn't help that I avoid sRGB most of time).

Image

Image
Best,
Jason.

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PostPosted: Sun Oct 21, 2012 12:21 am 
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These renders would have been impressive maybe in 1991,...But its actually 2012, and this looks no better than your average game character :roll:

Image

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