Chocolate starfish

Hi guys. I hope you are all well.

Things are still going well here for the most part. I got those two animations done, that's five so far. With two more to go that will be seven in total, the most I've done in a single update. I realize it's taking longer to complete too though, perhaps my goals for this update were a bit too much, I don't know. All I can do at this point is keep working.

I had the fans on my 1070ti fail on me this week :(. I believe it's out of warranty, I didn't bother to check, I didn't want the downtime involved in sending it back. I just "fixed" it myself.

Works pretty good. Just need to perhaps get an adapter for the fan connectors so they can run off and be controlled by the GPU itself.

I asked if anyone wanted to know anything specific about daz studio. Someone mentioned lighting. As Iray is a physically based renderer all the principals of lighting things in real life should still apply. There is loads of information already out there for how to light things for photography or movies etc. I myself tend to just use the lights that are in the scene. I guess this would just be considered practical lighting. I might add a few extra lights if characters faces look a bit to dark or I want to add some highlights/shadows, but for the most part I don't.

I could just talk about some of the lighting controls in Daz/Iray though. I can start with mesh lighting.

Mesh lighting is really just geometry in the scene with an emissive surface.

When the emission color is set to black the emission is off. Otherwise the light will be in the color selected. You can also put a texture in here if you want to do something like a TV or computer screen.

Emission temperature is the color temperature of the light. Daylight is about 6500K, Higher is more blue, lower is more red.

Two sided is you want both sides of a surface to emit light.

Emission profile can take files that adjust the direction of the light as it comes off the surface but it's a bit buggy.

Luminance is how much light the surface emits. Higher is brighter. This also accepts a texture map. You can use a grayscale image of the map you use in emission color so any screens are bright and dark where they should be.

Luminance Units is the units the above Luminance is in. The table on this page explains most of them.

And that's about it.

This week's commissioned renders are of Nikki and Karen. This patron wanted to see them share a gift the MC gave them each.

I hope you all enjoy and that's all I have for you this week.

Thank you all as always and take care.