Daz Enhancing my 3d Skills

[Deleted member 1529263]

Hello there

I do erotic 3d images in my sparetime just as a hobby. It was all learning by doing since I do not have a related job or something.
But since about a year I feel like im stuck. I just don't get better anymore, my images do not look like I still improve my skills.

Here you can see a few recent NSFW works I created. Can anyone of you, based on those images, tell me what I could improve?

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[Deleted member 1121028]

Some good renders tho.

Postwork. You need to go there, I know lot of people are reluctant but sooner the better, it can really make the difference. Poor choice of asset = Poor render, no matter what. Everything should be chosen with that in mind. Inspire yourself from timeless artists, painter, photograph and so on. What do they try to do? How they compose a scene? How lights/mood are done? Why it's good? Don't trap yourself into doing the same render everytime.

My 2021 cents.

 

[mickydoo]

When you get as good as you can get doing what you are doing, it comes down to the 1 percent's. When I hit a wall with lighting, render settings etc, I looked into shaders, then I looked into bumps, normals, researched what all the other material settings are for. Not one of them made a difference by themselves, as they were all 1 percenters, but doing 5 1 percent things adds up and then you can see the difference.

My 2021 cents as well.

 

[ariyoshi123]

Do not rely on postwork. Improve and rely on your lighting skills.

Try to create mood with lighting, not just light up a scene.

Basic lighting turns a character into a dead 3D model, but lighting with mood can tell a story and make your character alive.

 

[Madmanator99]

Your renders are realy good indeed, and it's maybe time to try something different.

To add to what no__name, mickydoo and ariyoshi123 said, you could start hiding the parts of your model that you really like, they will still be there but in the imagination of the viewer. Either by shadows (hard shadows), or objects, or clothing. I don't put those part out of the frame, thou it's an option, but I prefer to have it in the frame, but hard to see, if not completely hidden.

Also experiment with expressions you don't usually go to, and the same for the camera angles. Also with lighting, your scenes are like many of mine, but then I started to experiment with/use "crazy" lights, and changing the colors, having most of my model hard to see, but still faintly visible, and I leave the rest to the viewers (they usually say we want more! and that is the effect I was looking for).

And last thing I can think of is to start looking into HD morphs for your models, and (if your computer can handle it) use higher subdiv on your models to actually benefit from those morphs (if your computer can handle the memory load), but I can garantee you it will add to that 1% mickydoo was talking about, and maybe not everyone will notice, but You will.

So with everything the others said above, plus these ideas, you should be busy for sometime hopefully Drop some more renders when you have time!

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

Do not rely on postwork. Improve and rely on your lighting skills.

I woulnd't be so assertive, as they are not mutually exclusive and you would be an idiot to limit yourself. Portraiture rely generally on the same different routines (with small variations of it), they're not particulary hard to assimilate once you're confident with the basics :


(should start at ~1h41min)

On another hand, postwork can make a render 'pop' like no lightening routine will ever do and it's a whole new universe to take advantage of. I say that because for a long time I tried to push 'postwork' correction/effect directly within the rendering engine, and I was dead wrong for various reasons.

 

[The M.O.]

Well, your getting into the motivation for the building of in house game engines. The time factor, if not for art then for code.

You have two different types of post-work. One, to fix, and manipulate, specific parts of the image.
The other to to manipulate the image overall.

I'll be doing both. The only reason at all, I'm doing post work of the second variety (the image overall) is I want a distinctive look to my game.

The imagery from Daz is fine. It has just the look I would expect from a great game anyway. Robust, hard work looking visuals with the main focus on gameplay.

Unlike the original poster (as far as I know), my hobby in my teens was doing 'celebrity fakes' ie. taking the celebrity of the day's head and putting it on a porn picture. That was my learning by doing. My advice to the original poster is if you want to somehow help others later with the skills you have accrued through learning by doing, then find a little project on here to help out on. As you would know, you can lose your ability's later when you stop at something. Now, I was frustrated later when I came back to my photo editing program of choice and found I could not get straight back into it. It's not great when your on your own time in all cases. I was photo editing, it can be complex, Daz is very complex and very hands on. So, bottom line. Find a way to give yourself a long term interest in keeping going with the software. No better opportunity than the myriad of projects that people start here.

In the video above, the part were he talks about wanting to highlight a part of her neck with light is great. Now, he just wanted to do that as someone that looks at the form of the body a lot, he was convinced to show that part of the body more was better. I don't know if it was better. However, it made the image look strange. And I'm all about that, some strangeness catching the viewers attention.