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Clarity's {WIP} Thread


Clarity

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Self indulgant i know but what can you do :D

 

Since my last completed picture over at the Off-Topic Render thread here, i've been mulling over what to attempt next.

 

Walking to work a few days ago, i had the urge to doodle and came up with this

 

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v318/adambn/09092009054.jpg

(Not bad considering i was walking and it was very windy :D)

 

Since completing my work on the bodysuit on the Captain America picture i had been thinking of trying Thor again. After all, I had attempted him before and been somewhat happy with the results.

 

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v318/adambn/Thor.jpg

 

However when i made him, i really wasn't up on creating bumpmaps that i am now and borrowed one from another outfit. Its what created the wave effect on his chest. Another thing that grated on me was the beard. It was a prop that came with it that looked very fake.

 

So i decided to remake it.. with a twist.. We get a lot of people asking how to do things with Daz3d so i've decided to post my journey from initial concept to hopeful completion here

 

The initial idea is to have Thor sitting on a throne like this

 

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ohIzQMqTfas/SoBOJsGANaI/AAAAAAAAAq8/dEruSTfoTw8/s320/Thor+Throne.jpg

 

However before it comes down to posing, i would have to get the costume

 

Next: Costume design

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Wednesday September 9th

 

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v318/adambn/ThorMonarque.jpg

 

Looking at Thor there are a number of things that stand out that i really want to get into my design. Mjolnir (Hammer), the beard and the costume. The hammer, cloak, plates and belt are already props that i have so they dont need as much of my time, but the costume does. There are a number of ways to design his outfit

 

  • Retexture the skin
  • Use clothes that i already have and recolour them
  • Create one using the M4 Bodysuit (Like i did with Captain America)

 

Its an easy decision. The bodysuit.

 

For those that dont know, the M4 Bodysuit looks like this:

 

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v318/adambn/test.jpg

 

The bodymass can be increased easier using the M4 model later on, but before i do that, it needs to be tweeked to look like the above picture. I scoured the internet searching for images to make my life easier and came up with this

 

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v318/adambn/fishscales.jpg

 

Rotate that 180 degrees and we have the chest section. Looking at the picture at the top though and you can see that its not just a design on his chest but more a ruffled look.

 

So with this in mind, i took my internet picture and made it into a bumpmap for the chest of the M4 Bodysuit

 

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v318/adambn/test2.jpghttp://img.photobucket.com/albums/v318/adambn/thor3.jpg

 

To Be Continued...

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Thursday September 10th

 

Does anyone know just how boring patterning is.. Its brain-numbing. Pasting that image into photoshop, moving so it links to the previous and doing it again and again..Once the pasting was completed, the black was selected, moved into its own layer and given a drop shadow (giving it increased depth)

 

Finally, a blue fill layer was put down to give the result shown below:

 

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v318/adambn/thor4.jpg

 

With the suit texturing complete, i loaded in the chest plates and tweeked with the dials until the fitted the morph for M4 like this:

 

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v318/adambn/thor5.jpg

Can you tell what it is yet?

 

I then brought M4 back into play and began looking at the beard. My Thor will be wearing his helmet so i dont need to worry about the hair that much as it will be hidden. For the beard i loaded up M4 Fantasy Beard and reworked the textures as i wasn't happy with the originals, then loaded in Apollo Maximus' blunt cut hair and moved it so it peeked out the bottom of the helmet.

 

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v318/adambn/thor6.jpghttp://img.photobucket.com/albums/v318/adambn/thor7.jpg

 

Then finally. I loaded up the skin texture, and Thor really began to come to life.

 

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v318/adambn/thor8.jpghttp://img.photobucket.com/albums/v318/adambn/thor9.jpg

 

To Be Continued..

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Excellent work clarity, I might be picking your brain now for more help on making textures :D
Texture making isn't as hard as it looks, just time consuming.

 

You will find yourself with multiple copies of the texture as Daz wont update a JPEG when you've already used it. I have Thor1-9.JPEG's all with slight adjustments to tiling, colour and position

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Friday September 11th

 

When im not ready to render my pictures, i usually remove the skin texture and some of the bumpmapping to speed up test renders on poses. I realised early on that the seated position wasn't going to cut it, due to the fact that his chest armour and belt would cut into his body

 

So the majority of my time was spent posing, and test rendering to see how things would look. Eventually i settled on this:

 

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v318/adambn/thor12.jpg

 

One of the other things i did was work on the hammer a bit. The textures that came with it were a little flat, so i scoured Google Images to find some cracked concrete pictures, adjusted them in Photoshop so that they could be used as a bumpmap to give the look of a few cracks on the well used weapon.

 

Having the skin textures off makes Thor look a little like one of those plastic figures that you paint up (Warhammer 40K, Warmachine, etc) So i decided to make him into one for a laugh:

 

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v318/adambn/thor13.jpg

 

In this version you can see the cracks a bit clearer, however to see it better, see below:

 

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v318/adambn/thorhammernobump.jpghttp://img.photobucket.com/albums/v318/adambn/thorhammerbump.jpg

No bumpmapping Vs bumpmapping

 

With that done, things were almost complete. Thor was textured and posed. Just had lighting and background to go.

 

To Be Continued...

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Texture making isn't as hard as it looks, just time consuming.

 

Seconded. The results are great and allow your renders to have a uniqueness that's sorely lacking from renders that are made purely from textures that come packed with items bought/downloaded. The process of doing it however... well the most challenging aspect for anyone with an average understanding of using photoshop/whatever is to avoid the overwhleming dullness from tweaking, saving, draft rendering, tweaking again, saving, rendering, etc. Sometimes I find myself getting the smudge brush down to a single pixel and to cover flaws and link portions together. Not fun.

 

As you've shown though Clarity, it pays off and the work you've put in here has done handsomely. I must confess, my texture work is pretty sloppy these days, mainly due to rushing it for TEW-related renders, but then there's little point in making them flawless when the detail is mainly lost in a 100x100 frame.

 

Are you planning to give the chains the same treatment? Because if I'm going to be nitpicky, the texturing on the torso makes them look all the more plastic in comparison.

 

All round though, really impressive work. I look foward to seeing more as well as enjoying the 'how I did it' style posts. *thumbs up*

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Thanks.. Im planning on using this thread for all my WIP's that im doing,

 

Im also thinking of re-rendering upon completion to make him into a figurine.

 

As for chains.. Its gonna be hard to do but im gonna try add a little texture to them. Reason being is there is no texture file and i would need to create one

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I would like to ask for more BUMP tutorial when you have a second.
Bumpmaps are a pain. Essentially its a copy of the texture that your using but desaturated and edited.

 

Quick and easy way to make a bump map. Get your texture

 

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v318/adambn/Thor4-1.jpg

 

Then adjust your levels until the dark areas on the chest are black and the rest is white. Heres the current bumpmap for Thor to compare

 

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v318/adambn/Thor_Bump2.jpg

 

Which when added together gives you this

 

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v318/adambn/thor4.jpg

 

If you look at the last two, dark areas are pushed inwards and lighter areas are left giving a bumpy look. Then you have to change settings to increase or decrease the bump.

 

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v318/adambn/Untitled-1-2.jpg

 

Under the strength tab, you can load the bumpmap, and then play with the positive value to get a setting you like.

 

And thats about it. Its mainly trial and error

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Are you planning to give the chains the same treatment? Because if I'm going to be nitpicky, the texturing on the torso makes them look all the more plastic in comparison.
I spent hours on this tonight with not much luck. With no texture file of its own, i struggled to find where it was picking its colour up from. I even created a 300x300 square filled with colours and numbers in the hopes of catching part of it in the chains with no luck.

 

Good news is that i finally finished it at 4am this morning

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Saturday September 12th

 

5 Days after starting the design, its finally finished up. Admittingly it got completed at almost 5am (wasn't happy and tweeked it a little) but it still counts.

 

After posing, i looked upon getting the background setup. My original plan of the throne had long been thrown out (due to armour clipping issues), so i crawled through my library of props to see what what look good.

 

I eventually settled onto Aery_Souls Gothic Prison prop and a blue tinted light setting.

 

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v318/adambn/thor15.jpg

 

However under inspection, i could see a number of things that i didn't like including the low resolution beard texture (which really suffered when viewed very close up), the slight poke through on the belt, his right boot being slightly too big at the back and a little bit of clipping near his right bicep.

 

I sat there for a while and adjusted these as best i could, when i thought of a better approach... shadows.

 

I then loaded up part of Tirade's Extrordinary Lights set and tweeked it a little to get it nice and dark. But i didn't want to hide everything. His Helmet and armour was given a slight ambient glow to make it shine a bit, as well as his hammer.

 

When i rendered that, it gave me the look i wanted, however you couldnt see his face at all. So i created a small ambient glow in his eyes to get the final piece below

 

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v318/adambn/thored.jpg

 

It was then saved and i went to bed.. It was 5am after all. I did quickly throw it up on my gallery at Renderosity though :)

 

So thats it. From concept to completion. Hope people that went in here took something away with them as i really enjoyed working on this. However this isn't the end of this thread. When i start up my next project, i will be posting the progress again in here.

 

Thanks...

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  • 4 weeks later...

For my next project, im gonna do something different.

 

Im gonna do something for someone in the GDS community. Im gonna make them a Banner & Logo for TEW08.

 

There are a couple of conditions involved.

 

  • It wont contain actual worker images/real life promotion names or logos
  • Its completed in my time. Pushing for it to be completed and you lose out
  • The completed project is free to be used in diaries and private games. Mod use belongs to me and whoever gets the completed request.

So thats the deal. If your interested, then let me know on here. Once i can gage who is interested, then i will pick a lucky person. I dont need to know what you would like done until i have enough potential pickees

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Not trying to enter the contest, I just thought I would say something I thought I already said about the Thor Image above (and might find usefull in other image's as well).

 

You can use a reflection map for your metal parts, silver or gold. You should already have some of them in your Daz Library somewhere. They ussually look like square pics of grey or yellow (silver or gold), multishaded, almost squigly in appearance. It makes it look like they are shining (instead of dull).

 

You get an effect like below, on WW's Bodice. You can adjust the effect as well. I would tell you exactly where and how, but I have no idea how it is done in Daz yet. Still have not been brave enough to learn Daz.

 

http://i93.photobucket.com/albums/l49/djthefunkychris/WW4.jpg

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For my next project, im gonna do something different.

 

Im gonna do something for someone in the GDS community. Im gonna make them a Banner & Logo for TEW08.

 

There are a couple of conditions involved.

 

  • It wont contain actual worker images/real life promotion names or logos
  • Its completed in my time. Pushing for it to be completed and you lose out
  • The completed project is free to be used in diaries and private games. Mod use belongs to me and whoever gets the completed request.

So thats the deal. If your interested, then let me know on here. Once i can gage who is interested, then i will pick a lucky person. I dont need to know what you would like done until i have enough potential pickees

 

QAW, Cornellverse :D

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For my next project, im gonna do something different.

 

Im gonna do something for someone in the GDS community. Im gonna make them a Banner & Logo for TEW08.

 

There are a couple of conditions involved.

 

  • It wont contain actual worker images/real life promotion names or logos
  • Its completed in my time. Pushing for it to be completed and you lose out
  • The completed project is free to be used in diaries and private games. Mod use belongs to me and whoever gets the completed request.

So thats the deal. If your interested, then let me know on here. Once i can gage who is interested, then i will pick a lucky person. I dont need to know what you would like done until i have enough potential pickees

 

I would like in on this contest as well! My promotion's name is Big Sky Wrestling.

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