11

Dec

by admin

I’ve been playing with a scene for the upcoming adventure Wicked Times: Bratwurst und Sauerkraut, and I needed some Germans walking through a piece of rubbled town. Using some of the cool props and scripts I have for DAZ Studio 3, I made the scene, but I then needed it to look realistic, like a photo, and here is the long way there.

First, I quickly rendered the scene without much though of lights used, just a weak sky light.

It looks pretty OK, specially if the goal was to make it a black and white old photo. Now I played with the different light I have. This one is rendered using Light Dome Pro 2 and a morning daylight, look much better.

Now, a quick fast render using Ah’s Global Light and HDRI setting, as you can see the picture is rather rough and grainy, and no shadows either.

This one is done using the Uberenvironment light and GI (Global Illumination). A good night image, as the troop is walking towards the light.Too dark for my purposes though.

So, using LightDome Pro 2 and full settings for the render quality, I get this, lack of shadows but look pretty damn good.

Using the Ah’s lights with full quality I get this very nice looking result.

Now, I decided to go all in, and started up the render farm of LuxRenders as I have a module for DAZ Studio 3, Reality, that can export the scene and render that using LuxRender. Using about 18 cores (setting the render server not to use all threads on all machines) This render took only 8 hours, compared to a maximum time of 10 minutes for the highest quality from the other renders. The LuxRender really tries to simulate real lights and real, sharp shadows.

But, what will happen if I add yet another level to this, multipass, or blending two or more images together, will it be even better? This is the technique use by the iPhone 4 when it takes photos, called HDR.

I first took three images, the fast grainy Ah render, the dark GI render and the final Light Dome Pro render, using OmniGraffle to blend them together, I got this result. It looks even better.

Now, the icing on the cake, blending the high quality LuxRender already photorealistic result with the AH high quality render? Would this be the best of the best?

Just look at this, is it a photo taken during the second world war with a high quality camera or is it just a computer generated image? What can we learn from this? That multipassing is great and that a photo no longer can be proof of anything.

Tags: , , Filed Under Adventure creation, Tools of the trade 

Comments

  1. Aprilia on 03.22.2018

    is that your artwork?
    Who should i contact for business?

  2. admin on 03.22.2018

    Hi,
    Yes, that’s my artwork. at least teh reader is. I’m using various 3rd party props and wearables though. Background is Stonemasons Ruins 1 & 2 I think. clothes are an old set by adh3d and the figure is the ancient Michael 3.

    But that was 6 years ago, technology has come a long way since I made that one.

    You can contact 4eyes on facebook.

    https://www.facebook.com/4EyesRPG/

  3. Siti Nur Amalia on 05.15.2019

    are you a game designer?

  4. admin on 05.23.2019

    Contact Me, but it depends if you are after final renders or 3D objects, the meshes needs to be licensed.

  5. andre on 01.18.2023

    this looks like a game i have played

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