Surrender

Hmm

Quite a busy scene.

A few things I noticed :
- right-girl's leg is painfully broken.

- front-left-girl and right-girl are hovering over the grass. i would move the grass up, or move them down, and then paint grass over their feets a little bit ( looking through eve's and adi's gallery will show you some of that

- front-left-girl's ponytail has got way too much hairspray in it, standing out like that..

overall, the image seems washed out for some reason, I think playing with levels and overlaying gray layers over the picture will bring out the color some.

i'll stop there =) Good start though!

The 'hovering' was something I noticed in both pictures. I do like the overall feel of the pictures though.

Thanks. Yeah, I noticed that the girl's leg seemed weird, but that's a Hellsing pose she's in. I just don't know if the pose is bad or if something happened. :) I'll fix it. And my characters always look like they're hovering. I can't fix that to save my life. :) As I've stated before, I have only a few brushes, and the ones I have don't seem to actually do anything when I try them. :)

I'll keep posting as I update. Thanks!

usually ill just lower a cam to ground level and look under them if I dont know if theyre quite touching or not... if you can see them cutting through the floor you know theyre colliding.. if they arent touching the floor, need to lower the figure a bit.

Don't think his problem here is connecting with the ground, but that he's using a background to build on. You need to get yourself either Infinity Cove from RDNA or the Daz Cyclorama dealio so you can have the ground actually there under them and textured to go along with your background. Are you still rendering over your background as well? You need to stop that if you are ;) From the sound of it, you need to overcome whatever is stopping you from doing much in the way of postwork. You seem to want to take your work further, but without getting a good handle on either PS, PSP, or even GIMP, you're going to stagnate.

An example to show ya what Vex was talking about with the grass btw:

Click for bigger one

That was made utilizing Infinity Cove's ground with a grass texture put on it, then grass painted in postwork to add that extra bit. I put it on the background after as well, which allowed me to do the hazy fog both behind her and in front of her. My main advice to you has nothing to do with the 3d aspect, but the part that comes after you've rendered. Get to know all of your tools ;)

So, what exactly is the Cyclorama or Infinite Cove? How is it different or better than normal backgrounds?

theyre floors and backgrounds for use inside daz or poser, cyclorama is sold by daz, think its all PC, and rdna sells the infinite cove, think the base model is a freebie.

IC3- http://www.runtimedna.com/mod/bcs/index.php?ViewProduct=1564&Start=34&TopID=76722
That's the main one I use because you can make the ground have hills, bumps, create a water setting, whatever. I rarely use the backgrounds within Poser tho, simply because I like to tinker around with them in postwork and it's much easier to do that if the background is separate. I use it with other backgrounds as well, making a texture for it from whatever background I've decided to use.


clickie

That's one I did for Veri on our Beam Me Up exchange. Not perfect, but I think the forground blended pretty well with the background using a cutout from the background for the texture on my ground. The IC3 also let me do that lil mound there on the left, which I used to try and further incorporate it into the background. I've barely played with the Cyclorama, mostly because I hate that lil line you invariably get between the back and foreground unless you are very careful with the lights, or mask it with foliage or something.

I honestly can't believe they're selling IC3 for so cheap considering what it can do! Unless I'm terribly missing something--which, knowing me, I probably am missing the actual thing that makes it actually work, which probably costs $60. LOL.

Here is a revised version of "Surrender." Let me know if it's getting better or worse. LOL.

Going in the right direction :) I would say, if you're going to stick with that background, I would make it more of a floor they are standing on rather than ground, or move that background up so it's more ground level. I would also suggest at least a small blur on that background, because right now it's all sharp and jagged, kinda busy, and keeps drawing my eye from the characters which should be the main focus. Definitely looking 100% better tho, just grounding them :)

Cool! I guess that background will have to be worked in Photoshop after all. I hate having to do that in Photoshop, though, because I have to render this stuff so big to make sure I don't lose total value when I size it down, and I know that knowing my luck, I'll never get them to match up in size properly (yes, they should be the same if I render over a black background, but stuff like that never seems to work right with me. :) )

I'll keep working. At least it's not getting worse. LOL.

Okay, third update. I changed the camera angle a lot. I like the new angle, though. I think I forgot to update the lighting, but oh well. I can decide on that later. Still no postwork because I have no postwork material. I don't know what to even look for. But let me know if it's better or worse. Oh, I also can't decide on a good hair color for the girl in the cage. =/

okie, in the middle of this linked thread is probably the single best piece of advice anyone has ever given me - and i use it to this day. i've learned a bit since then, so i play with teh settings more, but postwork wise - this was awesome (and again - thanx Adi!!) oh - and this goes back to the washed out look... *grin*

http://theangrycrayon.com/forums/showthread.php?t=7154

this only requires PS - but these tools, played around with are great to know. another option - if you're willing to shell out some dough, over at renderosity you can pick up predone settings like these that create different effects as well. if i'm stuck and nothing i'm doing seems to be working, i'll dup the piece, run it through a bunch of them (not over each other - run it through, back it off, try another) until i start in the direction i want. then i walk back step by step to see what they actually did - kind of like a tutorial! then i can run it again, tweaking each step to get the effect i really want!

as far as brushes are concerned - over at da are a bunch of freebie ones. rather than start with leaves, flowers, whatever spend some time playing with the artsy ones - do them on different layers, with different shades of a color, change the opacity - maybe over a dark background. i found this help me to get a better feel for how brushes could be used and what different settings did to the brushes. try them as part of a portrait piece - like the background is a faux finish...

nuff from me for now!! you're doing a great job! keep it up!!

One thing I've learned about lighting in Poser--for some reason, the worse the lighting looks in the Preview, the better it actually renders. On this one, the lighting actually looked decent in the Preview, which means it sucked when rendered. :)

Another problem I'm starting to have is which size to render at. I'm trying to render at 2500 at 72 DPI, but with a lot of things it can render for 8 hours and never actually finish. It's frustrating! A piece should not take more than 30 minutes to render properly, IMO.

I looked at the link, and I'll try out that advice. I'm also looking at buying some "Actions" from Renderosity to see if that can help me. Wish me luck.

LOL

You're fucking out of your head. if you want your pieces to render in less than 30 minutes, expect them to all look like shit.

"Actions" from renderosity have nothing to do with Poser. they are photoshop post-work tools.

You just need to stop being in such a rush and learn how to use the settings in Poser. This shit takes time to learn ( and render ), and if you're gonna be all half-assed about it, you might as well stop wasting your time, your money, and our time trying to CC shit you couldn't care more about.

I am all for helping an artist grow, but only if they are willing to properly invest time in it.

That's the problem--I'm trying not to be half-assed. I guess I just have far less artistic talent than I really, truly thought. *shrug* Guess I'll stick to writing completely. At least I know I can do that without problems. :) Thanks for your time.

You don't need to go giving up. You just need to realize that the rendering process does take time. Hell you have three V4's in that scene. You're lucky it renders at all to be honest. I think if the two were wearing more than a second skin, you prolly wouldn't get it to render period. If you want to test lights, render without shadows on and smaller just to look. If you like how that looks, then try it small with shadows or even do spot renders in areas where you think shadows should be. Adjust and render small til it looks right, and -then- render big with shadows. That's when you walk away and go do something else and let it go, or head to the 2nd puter if you have one.

You have the vision of what you want your characters in your story to be, so don't give up. Just take baby steps instead of diving into the deep end ;)

I'm not really diving into the deep end. And yes, I know that I have a lot happening in the scene, so I expect it to take awhile--just not ten hours and then it seems to freeze. I just hate that I can't render big and see the end of the picture so I can see if it's actually still rendering or not. I think I need to write to E. Frontier and tell them to address that issue in the next version. :) I'm sure there are a lot of people who would agree with me. :) When the progress bar seems to stick on 95% for a good...ninety minutes, that's when you start to wonder what the heck is going on. What's worse is when it's stuck on 100% and doesn't disappear even after an hour of being complete. :)

Okay, I know just enough about Photoshop to be dangerous. This is what Adiene wrote in another post that FyreGarnett linked to. The instructions are simple yet I know i'm missing important steps.
or if you feel like trying something new do this :
1. Adjust > brightness Contrast > brightness/sat : 60/30
2. Copy layer: name it whatever you want , make sure its blend mode is set on screen, 100% op. // blend ranges : set on gray channel (where do I get the Gray Channel from?)
3. Make a 2nd copy of your FIRST layer not the 2nd , blend mode: soft light// blend ranges: gray channel
4. On you 2d copy: Gaussian blur set at 4
5. Make a new group layer: blend mode normal. (What is the group layer of?)
Adjust > hue/sat > Hue/sat/lightness: Check colorize, Set your hue at 34, sat at 19, lightness -19
6. Merge layers
7. Adjust > sharpness > sharpen (once or twice dont exceed more then twice or you have pixels starting to come in)


So far, from what I was able to get done, the picture is looking better. But the unknown factors are where I'm getting messed up.

You can tell if something takes 30 mins to render compared to 30 hours. Poser isn't fast, its not sweet, humble or forgiving...that's half the fucking fun right there. It is frustrating but your system does dictate how well Poser will respond. There are artists out there with 4 gig of ram with a cpu that can fly to the moon that spend DAYS rendering.

Welcome to poser - she's a mean bitch unless you touch her right.