Monday Mornings

Monday mornings aren't fun to begin with. Now imagine waking up on Monday and answering the door only to find a giant lizard eating your newspaper...and then you.

My goal for this scene was to do something in Iray again. The background scene changed 3 or 4 times. The first tries were indoor scenes, but the lights just weren't right. Outdoor lighting is so much easier, especially with Iray.

I have said it before, but I'll say it again (cause I like to complain :p), my graphics card is just too small for any good sized scenes. But if the scene is small, the results are amazing.

For those using Iray and Daz, here are some tips for fast results:

1: Things render faster and with better results if everything in the scene has Iray materials. Select all of your objects, and then all of your surfaces (you do need to do both), and select the 'Iray base' under surface presets -> Shaders -> Iray.

2: Under render settings, change the Dome mode to finite sphere.

3: Iray has this neat feature where it can stop the render after a certain amount of time, measured in seconds. If you set that to zero, the render will not stop. If you want to add more time after clicking render, or if the render hits the time and stops, you can click on a tiny box on the left of the render window and open up a panel of options. You can edit some effects there or increase the render time without needing to cancel your render.

4: The fewer textures, the better. Delete objects that you cannot see in the camera view and replace some textures with Iray presets. The number of textures you can use depends on the size of your graphics card. If you use too many textures, the rendering is done only on the CPU, which will be very, very slow.

Ill start adding more tips and tutorials here in the future. Drool being one of them.