Blender Progress #1

Hello,

As I told you guys in an earlier post, I had to drop Octane because of it's buggy nature and the fact that it will never get fixed.  And I also said that Octane was just a stepping stone to Blender. 

I dedicate 1-3 hours a day to learning Blender and I assume many would think:

 "Hey, you have some Daz experience.. This should help a lot!"   

No, it doesn't. 

Daz teaches you nothing about materials, etc.  The only thing I can take from Daz to Blender is my lighting & posing knowledge.

The biggest obstacle is converting all the characters and environments to Blender.  And you have to do it all yourself.  

There is no button that does it for you. (Yes, there is a plugin but the shaders that come with it are unusable if you want high quality.)

This means you have to create skin shaders for your characters with the node system.  Here is an example picture of a shader in a Node system. 

This is a shader just for the Subsurface Scattering (How light traverses through skin)

I think you get the idea of what nodes are. (Or probably not because I didn't understand it either by just looking at it.)

This is obviously way above the normal Daz knowledge and I was extremely confused when I started with all this stuff. 

I have been learning Blender on a serious note for around 4 weeks now and from now on I will keep you guys informed about my progress. 

The games won't be made in Blender until Season 2 and this gives me enough time to learn and bring everything to a new level. Let me show you a first test render of "Dana"

She is the first character I converted and she is far away from perfect but her shaders etc. will improve over time. (Learning by doing.) 

(Drag into a new tab for a better look) 

A very important factor for me is how good a render engine can handle dark scenes. So the first test render was in a very dark environment.

(These are not her real boobs from the game.. Just in case anyone thinks I just spoilered Dana's tiddys.)

 I am using the Cycles render engine.  

- Ocean

(: