It's not supposed to be a big deal. It's a few of the characters at the party in the prologue. Just wanted to submit for an opinion of the render. Do I need to bring the light temperature up? It's a night scene that introduces a few of the core characters in a harem game I'm working on. It's not setting the world on fire, but I wanted to submit it as kind of an every day render to see what you guys thought. It's a little 'who's who' kind of thing as the MC explains things in the prologue/linear portion of the game. Mostly I'm asking about the lighting temp, but fire away with your thoughts.
Opinions on the render?
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yeah it's a bit too orange, but I would've thought it was deliberate for retro-ambience if you hadn't asked. it has a nice sort of 60s polaroid vibe to it. but if you don't have a specific reason then 6500K is always the default. more for outdoors (because blue skye) and less for deliberately brown indoor lighting or a sweltering summer day. (a hot day obviously isn't warm color because blue sky, but it just works better to give the feeling of it being too hot).
what catches my eye more is the lack or spotlights or real lights in general. using only material lights doesn't give you highlights on their skin which makes everything look flat and soft like on a cloudy day or in front of a fireplace. it's sort of like you only had ambient lighting and occlusion maps but no actual lights. good lighting sculpts just as much with shadows as with light. if you look at pro photographer black and white portraits you'll notice a HUGE thing about them is highligts and shadows.
but again, it that's deliberate choice for the look then it's fine. I kinda like it as a bunch of upper class moms like these wouldn't go for anything drastic anyways.
but I would try some 10cm spherical spotlights at top right just to give the skin a hint of highlights.
what catches my eye more is the lack or spotlights or real lights in general. using only material lights doesn't give you highlights on their skin which makes everything look flat and soft like on a cloudy day or in front of a fireplace. it's sort of like you only had ambient lighting and occlusion maps but no actual lights. good lighting sculpts just as much with shadows as with light. if you look at pro photographer black and white portraits you'll notice a HUGE thing about them is highligts and shadows.
but again, it that's deliberate choice for the look then it's fine. I kinda like it as a bunch of upper class moms like these wouldn't go for anything drastic anyways.
but I would try some 10cm spherical spotlights at top right just to give the skin a hint of highlights.
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Hey man thanks for taking the time to give me input. I've noticed that there's are a lot of flat environments that go into these games, or they just go the easy route and use Honey Select and cartoon stuff. But like you said, the Polaroid thing is a good effect to go for if I wanted to make a medley of them like a scrapbook in the prologue.
I bumped up the color temperature to around 5K and I'm trying to learn just a little bit of the spotlights and portrait lighting stuff. It's a challenge as I move to the next phase.
It's funny, because I've used a lot of ghost lights to just create that ambient light so my renders look bright enough on Android. But they're really buggy and obsolete at this point, and they seem to bump up the render times by like an hour. I said 'fuck it' and deleted all the ghost lights and all of the sudden the ceiling lights in the environment showed their actual luminosity, which looked like stepping into the light when you die. Those lights didn't even appear to be on because the presence of ghost lights makes that light invisible in the viewport. Once I dialed it back, I had the same effect and I cut an hour off my render time. So far I've learned how much ghost lights hurt more than they help with Daz. Anyhow, now I'm trying out your suggestion. I'll send another when I get it right.
I bumped up the color temperature to around 5K and I'm trying to learn just a little bit of the spotlights and portrait lighting stuff. It's a challenge as I move to the next phase.
It's funny, because I've used a lot of ghost lights to just create that ambient light so my renders look bright enough on Android. But they're really buggy and obsolete at this point, and they seem to bump up the render times by like an hour. I said 'fuck it' and deleted all the ghost lights and all of the sudden the ceiling lights in the environment showed their actual luminosity, which looked like stepping into the light when you die. Those lights didn't even appear to be on because the presence of ghost lights makes that light invisible in the viewport. Once I dialed it back, I had the same effect and I cut an hour off my render time. So far I've learned how much ghost lights hurt more than they help with Daz. Anyhow, now I'm trying out your suggestion. I'll send another when I get it right.
yeah, the material lights always had problems, but daz really broke them for good in 4.16 or 4.18 version or around that time. and the problems get MUCH worse if you have any transparencies in the scene which give just unpredictable behaviour which can't be fixed. like if you had decals with transparency, like a wound projected on the skin, the transparency just flat out stopped being transparent and you got the square edges of the wound opacity map 100% visible regadless of opacity slider. but when you switch material lights off, boom, transparency works again.
also any lights with render-emitter set to 'off' will be visible behind any transparent materials, but I don't think that's just with material lights.
for a while I tried to work around it all, but in the end I just removed all material lights and replaced them with spherical spotlights or rectangle ones, depending on case. like for light shining in from windows I have a window-size rectangle spotlight right in front of the glass (inside the room), where as before I used to have a similar square plane with material emission turned on in the surface tab. and like you said, the spotlights are even much faster to render now so it's another reason to avoid material lights.
I still have SOME material lights left, but only where they're not supposed to illuminate other surfaces, ie. they're set so dim that they look glowing but it's not enough to light up anything that's not super close.
another thing I've noticed is that dark/night renders are now SUPER fast with spotlights, where as material lights make all low-light scenes take forever.
(I should probably mention I have a 3090rtx, so on a non-rtx gpu what's fast or slow might work differently.)
oh, if you have problems with some individual surface looking blindingly bright, the hacky workarounds I've used are 1) changing the diffuse color of the surface to darker (which can make colors dirtier so has limited use), and 2) adding some translucency to the surface even if it's not IRL supposed to have subsurface scattering, but a little translucency seems to have a tendency of 'sucking in' some of the excess light. you just have to be careful it doesn't begin to look waxy, so also of limited use. often the most 'natural darkening' is acieved by adding a little bit of both.
also make sure your specular, dual lobe specular, glossy layered weight, top coat weight etc are low or zero if you're having brightness problems. I don't think these are modelled correctly on any shaders I've seen and sometimes they just clearly work wrong and your surface is blinding bright no matter what you do.
also check that the shader is set to specular/glossy and not metallic, as often you can't disable brightness from metallic shaders even if you turn everything to zero. they're simply not meant to work without specularity, so if surface is blindingly bright it can't be turned off.
these hacks also become useful as often making skin look right requires LOT of light (precisely because subsurface scattering sucks more light), which makes all other surfaces blindingly bright. if the skin gets too little light, it usually looks lifeless and sick. this is yet another error in how daz treats lights which we just have to live with.
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I can't add anything technical to Woody's spot on analysis but I will encourage you to overcome the initial "shadowphobia" that new 3d artist seem to possess. It's ok to have shadows in an image: this is how real life looks like.
yeah what doorknob said.
that made me render you a small example of how dark you can go, and how shadows are your friend not your enemy. this scene style doesn't really apply to your dinner party scene as it's a moody night scene, but I thought it might be useful to push the boundary of what you might think is 'a lot of shadow'. because otherwise I think the 'new dev shadowphobia' might make you think a tiny added shadow was 'a lot' when it's almost negligible. you can really lean hard on the shadows IF you like, as you can see from old film noir where there's even black shadows right across people's face in a fully lit rooms.
anyway, here's the render. took about 10 seconds because that's how fast low light scenes with spotlights are. (haven't looked at it on any other monitor so it might be even darker than I meant. you're not supposed to be able to tell the black hair from the pale cheek for example, but you are supposed to barely see where black leather ends and skin of her back starts.)
that made me render you a small example of how dark you can go, and how shadows are your friend not your enemy. this scene style doesn't really apply to your dinner party scene as it's a moody night scene, but I thought it might be useful to push the boundary of what you might think is 'a lot of shadow'. because otherwise I think the 'new dev shadowphobia' might make you think a tiny added shadow was 'a lot' when it's almost negligible. you can really lean hard on the shadows IF you like, as you can see from old film noir where there's even black shadows right across people's face in a fully lit rooms.
anyway, here's the render. took about 10 seconds because that's how fast low light scenes with spotlights are. (haven't looked at it on any other monitor so it might be even darker than I meant. you're not supposed to be able to tell the black hair from the pale cheek for example, but you are supposed to barely see where black leather ends and skin of her back starts.)
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I hear you. I'm not shadow phobic, I don't think, so much as preoccupied with getting the ambient light first. I don't mind shadows. I've just had people tell me my early renders are too dark. I think these games are best suited for Android as a platform, and everything I do seems to come out too dark on my phone vs my PC. I feel like I have to do a lot of 'everyday' renders in the game I'm trying to make, but I'm kind of conditioned to look at the cartoon stuff like Price of Suburbia or the HoneySelect stuff where everything is flat, when what I love is photorealistic, barely plausible bodies, great character creation Daz if that makes sense. I can see why devs go with cartoon stuff: Because it's a quick and easy way to render things.
I find this image interesting doing a side by side of my phone vs my PC. I'm logged into this on both atm and looked at the same image on both. On the PC, it's at an acceptable level of brightness; it's dark, but you can see the nuances and it looks cool. On my phone with my screen's brightness turned all the way up, it's so dark as to be barely intelligible. It's becoming apparent that there's a stark difference between PC renders and phone renders. It's like you have to do two renders, or alter the phone one in postwork, with different levels of ambient light to get the same look on each platform.
My phone is a Google Pixel 6. I dunno if you have an Android like a Samsung or something, but I imagine it would look very similar on that device. Check it out if your phone is an Android. Could just be my phone in particular, but there is a huge difference in brightness.
That said, I'm not arguing with anything you're saying. My image was too flat with no shadows. I did a bunch today where I tried to incorporate your input.
Apart from the lighting, I suggest you to change the smiling of one or two of the girls. The first thing, that stung to my eyes is, that they seemingly have all the same expression in their faces, what gives me the feeling of them looking like "connected by an unknown force" and sends the whole images for me into the uncanny valley.
thanks, that's very interesting to hear. I've known for a long time that I need to at some point calibrate my darkness for bad monitors as well, and also that I'll never make an android version for the same reason. I'd really want to go even darker for SOME scenes where you're almost not supposed to see even a silhoutte, but I think that's probably going to be impossible. the difference between bad and good monitors is simply too big. and cellphones always try to save power by being stingy with the brightness.
I'm always a bit bothered by sharp spotlight/pointlight shadow edges like on the bicep of the middle girl so I use the 'sphere' light geometry setting at 10cm height or a rectangle to soften shadow edges a bit, rather than the 'point' setting which gives sharp absolute edges. I mean even a lightbulb has a physical width which softens shadow edges, as does the sun.
but the images look already 'fuller' as the faces and bodies look more round. I'd still add clearer highlights (smaller sphere gives sharp highlights, big sphere gives softer more material-light type highlights), but that's of course more a question of style.
lighting is tricky, and I didn't get much help from reading about it when I was learning (I still am). so much of it really is feeling-based and experience rather that 'you should use three light system'. but it comes with time, and I think your images already have a very nice mood that fits the scene.
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prince of suburbia are drawings not renders thou... much haarder than what you're doing.
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Do you want me to pick apart the good, bad, and the ugly of the renders as a matter of just art or anything else about the characters I might notice?
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Well let's say your renders are great, not good, but great. You know what you are doing. It's the poses first. I call it the butt tuck where a woman flexes to make her butt stick out and give men that come hither look. In general conversation people stand more casual.
I think only one of the women are DD and the rest beyond that. Now if the goal is to have a highly fictionalized world build, great--it works. If you are going for realism not so much. Yet the models look the same with only changes to eyebrows and minor things like that. Near same facial construction, dentistry, and skin tones too similar.
All that has to be said with a grain of salt, because I don't know the context of the game. Seems like an event taking place at night from the lighting. I don't know the reason why they are gathered and maybe giving of body language to entice is the point. Though am sure it's not a meeting of the Hucow Association.
What I see are three MILFs, if that is what you wanted me to see great because it works.
Well, there is a reason for the similarities. They're the same creator and similar skins. I shaped the blonde's face with the sliders, partially with elements of the redhead. The rest are out of the box. They almost look related, huh?
(And no, I'm not working on a fauxcest game.) The MC is going to boink each of them eventually. Yeah it's fictionalized bodies with some realistic elements. (I like the Daz aesthetic more than HS and cartoons, but I'm tired of video games that have too much body realism with the females while the dude has a foot and a half long dick.)
It's a party scene. The MC is approaching them with his wife. The similarities between the models are deliberate. The redhead is a family friend, the brunette is her daughter, and the blonde is the redhead's sister. The daughter is oddly overdressed because she's wanting to catch the MC's eye and get him to think of her differently. Her character is inspired by Audrey from Twin Peaks, how she kinda pursues Agent Cooper, if that rings a bell. She's in her early 20s, but I guess the photo gives off the impression she's a milf.
It's part of the prologue. The MC is kind of a Boy Scout, straight-laced type who only has eyes for his wife at this point (until he finds out she's cheating on him and goes buck wild). He's oblivious to the fact that a lot of women think he's fine.
I'm doing a lot of photos with the women in enticing poses and flirty facial expressions while socializing at the party. The prologue is about drawing the player in, which entails making the player want to fuck the characters, so pretty much every render in the prologue has to show off the women. That's the goal. More everyday renders are a little down the line.
I'm doing it like this because I've passed up a lot of games that didn't sell me on the characters right off the bat.
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___________________________________+++++____________________________________________________________Well, there is a reason for the similarities. They're the same creator and similar skins. I shaped the blonde's face with the sliders, partially with elements of the redhead. The rest are out of the box. They almost look related, huh?
Yeah it's fictionalized bodies with some realistic elements. (I like the Daz aesthetic more than HS and cartoons, but I'm tired of video games that have too much body realism with the females while the dude has a foot and a half long dick.)
It's a party scene. The MC is approaching them with his wife. The similarities between the models are deliberate. The redhead is a family friend, the brunette is her daughter, and the blonde is the redhead's sister. The daughter is oddly overdressed because she's wanting to catch the MC's eye and get him to think of her differently. Her character is inspired by Audrey from Twin Peaks, how she kinda pursues Agent Cooper, if that rings a bell. She's in her early 20s, but I guess the photo gives off the impression she's a milf.
It's part of the prologue. The MC is kind of a Boy Scout, straight-laced type who only has eyes for his wife at this point (until he finds out she's cheating on him and goes buck wild). He's oblivious to the fact that a lot of women think he's fine.
I'm doing a lot of photos with the women in enticing poses and flirty facial expressions while socializing at the party. The prologue is about drawing the player in, which entails making the player want to fuck the characters, so pretty much every render in the prologue has to show off the women. That's the goal. More everyday renders are a little down the line.
I'm doing it like this because I've passed up a lot of games that didn't sell me on the characters right off the bat.
Then you are as I first estimated damn good at your craft because all of it is by design and intent.
I have noticed a lot of other details, like they are drinking Champaigne, different makeup and I love the eyes and the hair styles are really good. I know with rendering it's about the assets and how a creator modifies them. Wish I had the talent for it. The redhead, if I had the talent, I would go with a lighter skin tone or used some freckles (like a lot of the Irish). The blonde looks very Slavic while the brunette looks very Southern French or Italian.
Thank you! Yeah a lighter skin tone would be easy enough. I don't know if I could pull off freckles though. Maybe some geoshell somethingerrather is out there but I've seen a lot of products like skin wetness look pretty bad in renders. There's a lot of bad products for Daz to sift through.
And yeah, I wanted to have them be related but add a little variety to it. My challenge is to have variety in the umpteen women who are gonna be core or side characters. The hardest thing is body diversity for me. I have a hard time making their breasts smaller without screwing up the aesthetics of them. I have some 'go-to' body morphs but they can get a little samey and difficult to change details effectively.