I got nuthin’ today, so here’s a pretty piccy instead. Back soon!

DAZ Studio, no postwork.

What I like most about it is that it’s fun. Start a new project, load in an image and hit the filters until the little man in your head says “Ooo, I quite like that!” and save it. Job done. The demo version gives version gives full access to all 350+ filters and the entire build-your-own interface (but adds a watermark) but it’s a matter of seconds to get a free serial number which magically turns your demo app into the fully fledged Basic Edition. This gives you 50 filters to play with and no watermark. That’s an ingenious choice – unrestricted-but-watermarked or limited-but-complete – and it gives you a good taste of the app as a whole. It’s pretty likely that you’ll never need to migrate from the free, Basic Edition at all. The Artistic Edition (350+ styles, can create your own free Styles) is $49, while the Pro Edition (create commercial  Styles, Batch Processing) is $99.

Enough of that though. Here’s a few examples of my own humble messing about. These all started life as bog-standard DAZ Studio renders. Enjoy.

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This is what happens when I start messing with morph dials. Sheesh. If I ever generate a Kender Seeker, she would so look like this.

I’m nursing the mother of a flu’ bug right now, hopefully back to speed Real Soon. Ick.

Ok, they’re calling it the Big Cat Armour but we all know what they mean, right? Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve a certain He-Man to render. His pet is getting lonely.

All together now:

By the Power of Greyskull!

Next: Giant Riding Chickens. No, really.

Alice, if Alice in Wonderland was directed by Quentin Tarantino.

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It doesn’t get more Endday Campaign than this.

Get them now!

DAZ Studio, no postwork. Click to enlarge.

The world needs more Femme Noir, don’t you think?

But first, the setup. I’m using Vicky 4.2 with the Morphs++ pack, the 3Dream’s free Boy Hair, RecieCup’s free Doll character & textures and the Sports Bra and Shorts (included with DAZ Studio 3), so y’all should be able to follow along just fine. If you don’t have the Morphs++ pack you won’t be able to use Doll’s morphs, but otherwise you’re good to go.

Load in Vicky 4.2 with the morphs, add the clothes & hair and apply the Doll texture & morphs. You should have something which looks like this:

In Render->Settings, the dimensions are set to Custom, 640×800. Time to pose Vicky and adjust the camera position. For this setup I used one of the poses included with the (free!) Girl 4 Base. Select the Default Camera in the Scene tab, set the focal length to 180mm and position to suit. I set the SportBra’s ClothThickness (in the Parameters tab) to 1, and adjusted the Cloth and Trim materials in the Surfaces tab to Black with a light grey Specular shade.

Now for the UberEnvironment2 magic. In the Content tab, go to DAZ Built-in Content->Lights->UberEnvironment2 and double-click !UberEnvironment2 Base. Go into the Scene tab and select it, then hop right back over to the Content tab again. Click on Set HDR KHPark then Set Quality 3Hi. In the Parameters tab, change Occlusion Samples from 64 to 128. This will slightly increase the rendertime, but increate the quality dramatically.

See how a backdrop appeared when you set the UberEnvironment to Park? By default it’s set to be invisible when you render, but if you like it (or are feeling lazy and don’t want to add a background scene of your own), you can make it visible by clicking on the little + next to the UberEnvironment in the Scene tab, selecting EnvironmentSphere then settting Visible in Render to On in the Parameters tab.

Hit CRTL-R, and………..

Even though a scene like this is quick to set up (honestly, it took me much longer to explain than it did to build), consider setting up couple of default scenes – one for Victoria, and one for Michael – with your most commonly used morphs (Morphs++, Aiko, FREAK or whatever) in place, UberEnvironment all set up and the camera in position. This will shave a lot of time off your workflow and help deliver consistently great results. But don’t tell anyone I said that, ok?

In summary

• Set the camera’s Focal Length to 180-200mm for 3/4 shots, 300mm for head shots
• UberEnvironment Quality Hi and Occlusion Samples upped to 128 is a great compromise between quality and render speed
• Hair kills render speed when using UberEnvironment. If necessary, turn the Shadows off for the hair, or consider investing in the Uber Hair shaders. These let you turn off Ambient Occusion for just the hair – a great time saver!
• If you want an outdoor look to your lighting, use the HDR Park setting
• Once you’re used to this setting, look at ways to break it. Add other lights, drop in a full backdrop and use Depth of Field, experiment with camera angles. It is your render, after all, and there’s no such thing as wrong

Till next time!

To continue the theme, here’s a mashup of the four-colour American Hero and his Iron Age alter-ego as USAlien. Note the similarity between American Hero’s costume design and that of his daughter, All American Girl.

These things don’t just happen by accident, y’know.