3D digital art article...Written by Todd Dailey

3D digital art article

We are GypsyKiss Photography. We are freelance photographers and now have started doing 3D digital art.
We have been producing 3D rendered digital art for about a year. We had heard about 3D rendering software for years, primarily Poser by Smith-Micro, but could never afford to spend the money for a $500.00 peice of software. We stumbled across Daz Studio and being the cheapskate that I am, couldn't pass up the price. FREE!!!

One of the things I noticed right away when working in Daz is that a lot of my Photography background applies to 3D rendering as well as photography. Composition, lighting and even camera settings can make or break a render. Of course composition is important for any art. This applies to digital renders as well as an oil painting, photography or any other media.
Lighting, I have found, is probably the most critical part of a good render. The cool thing about the lighting in programs like Daz is that it acts just like light in the real world with just a bit more control. I set up lights in my renders to just how I would set up lights for a portrait or boudouir shoot.
The cameras in Daz are a little more complicated to use than the lighting. The good part about the cameras are that they have the ability to use f/stop, focal distance and focal length. With a combination of these settings, a person can imatate selective focus and create a much more dramatic image.
Another thing to consider is content. Daz Studio comes with a pretty good amount of free content. It just isn't enough. The good news, if your looking for something specific, you can probably find what your looking for. The bad news, its going to cost you. More bad news, there may just be too much content to choose from. Take human figure models as an example. There is Victoria for a female base figure and Michael for a male base figure. There are also many generations of these figures with clothes, props, poses and characters that will only work well with a specific generation of figure. There are also the Genisis and Genisis 2 figures.
We started out using Victoria 4 or V4. Mostly because there seems to be more content for this generation figure. What we have discovered recently though is that the Gen2 figure is actually easier to work with. Posing the figure is a lot more natural that the older gens. I also found out that the clothes designed specifically for V4 can easily be morphed to work on the Gen2 figures. I could go on and on but needles to say, there is a lot of content out there and plenty of providers who will glady sell it to you.
One final note on content. I have found that a lot of Poser specific content will work in Daz Studio but there is always some tweaking to be done to get a good render. And not all Poser content will work. Try to experiment to see what results you can get. Custome shaders can make a world of a difference if you can figure out how to use them correctly.

A few things that will help when rendering are first and formost a good beefy computer. We have two computers we use to render with. An iMac and a Windows 7 PC that we had built primarily for rendering and photo editing. I haven't really noticed much difference between the two except that the PC renders a little faster but also has twice the amount of RAM than the Mac. I won't get into recommended specification for a rendering computer except to say that a good video card and a large amount of RAM are very useful things. There is plenty of useful blogs on line that can tell a lot more than I can on the best hardware for rendering. Just google it.
The next peice of advice I have is to have a good eye for detail. I have seen a lot of half ass renders on line where clothes, hair or the model are poking through each other. This can be avoided by paying close attention to your scene. Just about anything that pokes through can be fixed either in the redering software or in post edit. The content used in Daz studio usually have some pretty powerful morphs and clothes can be morphed to fit most models. Anything that can't be morphed to fix poke through can be fixed in a good photo editing software.
This leads to the most imortant part of working with 3D rendering. Patience, patience, patience. If you didn't get that, a person needs to have a lot of patience to work with 3D renders. I have spent days tweeking a scene to get it perfect and then had to wait nearly up to 48 hours for the render to complete. Granted, most renders on average take anywhere from an one to six hours to finish but the more in the scene and the better the quality, the longer the render takes. The patience really comes in though before the actual render. Be patient and take the time to make sure everything is the way you want it in the scene. There is nothing more frustrating than to wait 5 hours for a render to finish just to find out your model is floating above the ground or her hand is inside herself. Render and repeat. When rendering in Daz, there is an option to show the render in a seperate window. This windows shows the image in real time as it renders. Usually any mistakes can be seen early on in a render and can be fixed. Like I said, Render and repeat.

Post processing can also make a huge difference in a rendered image. I will talk a little about the software we use doing digital art. Like I mentioned earlier in this article, I am cheap. Most of the software we use was downloaded for free and is legal. First off there is the Daz Studio itself. A lot cheaper than Poser and most Poser content works with Daz. I also recently found another program that works with different kinds of 3D files that is also free. This program is Blender. I use blender to convert .3ds files to .obj files that will open in Daz. Another great free program out there is GIMP. This is an open source image editing software that works a lot like Photoshop. When I say GIMP is like Photoshop, I mean it works in layers like Photoshop. GIMP can even use Photoshop brushes and there is a ton of free plug-ins called script-fu and pyton that can get similar results as some Photoshop actions.
These are the main free or open source programs we use. Unfortunately, I couldn't get away with just using free software. On the iMac, We use apeture as the main photo editing software and use Nik and Topaz plugins. On the PC, it's Lightroom with the same plug-in suites.


Some useful links:
3D rendering software (free)

Daz 4.6
http://www.daz3d.com/products/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term={DAZ-General}&utm_campaign=Search-US-Branded&utm_content=productspage

Blender
http://www.blender.org/download/


Image editing software

GIMP 2.8

http://www.gimp.org/downloads/

GIMP Plug-in Registry

http://registry.gimp.org/

Daz and Poser Content

free human figure
http://www.antonkisieldesigns.com/~akfiles/htmlpages/ApolloMaximusFree3dhumanfigure.htm
Free and paid content
http://www.daz3d.com/free-3d-models-and-content

http://www.evilinnocence.com/shop/free-stuff.html

http://www.most-digital-creations.com/freestuff.htm

http://www.renderosity.com/

http://www.sharecg.com/

Thank you and hope this can be helpful to new artist out there.
Todd and Candice Dailey

You can vist our websites here
http://www.gypsykissphotography.artistwebsites.com/

http://www.society6.com/gypsykisspotography