Somewhere in Prague

- Interesting!

;) nice job;) but the girls are little bit eagly ;)

- Thanks ladies. You know I am glad to read your statement tbahles. I do agree that my ladies are not as pretty as I had hoped they would be. A few compromises were made with the modeling and the texturing so as to not crash the system with these 4 characters at one time. I know well thet Blend Transparency and IBL lighting are an extremely slow render combination. Hair naturally is always blend tranparency and that combined with Premium AA True Ambience at 144 rays per pixel, I realized it would take 3 days to render the scene with hair even at high priority. Without hair the scene was completed in less than 8 hours. Hard to turn down the temptation for a speedy render. So I cheated the real hair and used a morph in Daz Studio that allows you to fake hair with a 2d texture. I think alot of the beauty of the faces is distorted by the head morphing, as I added the head morphs last of all. In hind sight I need to figure out some way to render hair at resonable speeds, the head distortion is simply not good enough and has a negative impact on the face. I have rendered the scene three different ways. Once with Pro Render only, once with IBL only and the one we see here with both lighting methods combined. Pro Render only took only about 20 minutes. IBL only took about the same amount of time. The two together took over 7 hours. Big jump as IBL amd premium AA are always a slow combination. I will present them together at the Daz3d forum later today. I think also I should have cheated the lighting and added a dim radial in between their faces to allow us to see their eyes much better, as eyes are the windows to the soul and very important.

- It is always challenging to get the HDRI background and the 3D objects to blend right. The ladies and gentlemen look cut out and glued onto the otherwise blurred backdrop. I'm not referring to hair. Look at it and you see it yourself. The HDRI as backdrop is difficult to get right in Bryce. The sky is burned out, the street in the shadow of the houses a bit dark, but could be right, too. In this "dark" corridor, you cannot expect to get a lot of ambient light from the facades. The light on the people looks natural as far as intensity is concerned. If this were a photograph, it woukd be difficult to make it better. You've choosen a difficult HDRI to make your point. It ought to be more open to the sides. An HDRI from a place would probably prove better than one in a "street canyon". That said, I thank you for your unabatted committment to TA and HDRI. We can all learn a lot by what you show to us.

- Great points Horo. The characters are so well lit they almost pop out of the screen. They almost seem extra special. Working in an hdri background in Bryce scenes is very tricky. I am finding that using an hdri background works best when working on miniatures. I do not think I will be able to generate very many renders lit this way, but as I try to gain more experience I think the scenes should get better and better. Just to play devil's advocate, last night after I posted the examples on the Daz thread I tested using an hdri that was less contrasted, with a more even distibution of brightness. The result is very much like above minus the obvious color bleed especially from the red dress. More to come.

; ) but i like their legs ; ) don't worry my freind