Tuesday, August 11, 2015

Agent Maya Issue Five Production Post Two

After some adjustments to the various render settings, I remembered the render time setting (in seconds) and set it at two hours, fixing the time issues I was experiencing. Sometimes wrapping my head around the differences between 3Delight and iray takes a few tries before I realize the tutorials I've read gave me the answers, but they've just sunk in too well!

So now I've got nearly two pages of renders complete with more scenes set or needing to be. Everything looks great so far; I'm happy with the texture rendering and ease of creation of lighting rigs out of simple objects for fantastic new effects.

There's a lot of work ahead—and I'm glad I upgraded to finally bring my imagination through to the final renders.

Tuesday, August 4, 2015

Issue 5 Production Post One

Now that I've settled the transfer from Daz 4.7 to 4.8 (with some minor annoyances still in effect, unfortunately), I posted my first render for Issue Five a couple weeks back, under the new iray engine in Daz 4.8. While I think it looked better than good (or at least better than the 3Delight engine), I had to tweak some settings to get a second render image with less grain and a decent enough light source to be usable. However the speed I have hoped for is still elusive—right now the render time is still nine hours plus for a reduced image size of 5000x3750, nearly half the size I used to do at 9000x6750. So, now I need to research this and see what setting or lighting or some other unknown is keeping the speed at the multiple-hour tortoise range.

Saying all this, I am pleased with the render quality I'm getting with iray. 3Delight looked great, in my opinion, with graduated shadows and light, but not so good in either extreme (washed out in brightness or bizarre over-saturated darks). In this issue there will be many scenes in near darkness with some bright lights punctuating here or there, so I'm looking forward to seeing what iray gives me in the pursuit of closer to photoreal.