...yeah it was an interesting experience downloading & installing all the individual components. It would be nice if when you specified your platform/OS that was all you saw on the DL page. Caught myself loading Mac versions several times.

What gets me about SP3 is that she also has the best "everyday" wear of any of the models like the Central Park and Dressed for Success series. I wish they'd revise & bundle these for V4.2. Almost too much glamour and fantasy stuff out there & not enough plain ol' "regular" clothes.

Yeah,and SP has Celeste Clothes. I wish they'd resize that one for V4.

...very nice. I like the ally. Would be cool if the scene were partially lit by the fire spirit itself. Maybe a wide angle Spot from above with a yellow orange gel and no cast shadows?

Ok. I reposted the image. I changed the angle of the background so I can get the shadows on the floor and the Fire Spirit is illuminating most of the scene with Torch Light (Uber Spot Light Plugin). I also remembered to put the Fire Spirit's hair on this time.

Shaman Banishing Fire Spirit with Beast Spirit Ally

...oh yeah. Perfect. Now the scene comes alive.

Added to my DA faves.

Trying to upload My V4/V3 experiment "Lady Grande" as well as a little surprise I started working on, however seems I keep getting a DA "System Maintenance" screen.

[Edit]

OK finally was able to upload.

Lady Grande V4 - V3

A Captive Audience (WIP)

You can choose to only see PC versions on your download page - I have that option set for me.

Cool... there is a texture for the Floater Bot that makes the lights turn on. It's down in the Studio folder. The thermos next to the Technomancer is a nice touch.

What hairstyle does Lady Grande have?

Here is my new project. First step for me is just getting everyone's sign off on their character... Wow.. This runs my RAM usages over 1.6g when fully loaded in Daz Studio. I definitely need more RAM. Bet it took 15 minutes just to load as well... I can just imagine if I put them in a full scene with objects as opposed to a static background..

...I did use the MAT file but for some reason the centerline still grays out. Don't know why because I've seen another Daz image that used the Floater Bot and everything comes through clearly. I'm wondering if it isn't a video card issue. I used the base Floater Bot image labelled "P6"

Oh, and as to the "thermos", that is actually a freebie file for Aiko 3 which is a bottle of soap bubbles & wand (cant see the wand very well against the white background). Unfortunately I am unable to pull in the texture MAT for the label which should have loaded fine. My original intent was to have her blowing bubbles at the bots. As my first Blender exercise I made a simple soap bubble object, now I have to figure out how to save it properly so I can pull it into D|S. I am going to set her in the Backstreets once I work up the lighting.

...and Leela isn't exactly a TM. For one, the Rhapsody in Shadow campaign she was in as an NPC took place before the crash of 64. She was a concept for a very special type of "sensitive" I was working with. Her ability to communicate with fully autonomous and "intelligent" tech is due in part to a now old piece of 'ware she has known as a Transducer which translated thoughts into transmittable signals (this was how she usually triggered her demolitions). With her heightened empathic ability she was also able to transmit emotions as well which could be read and interpreted by Simsense hardware. This was the centrepiece of the RiS plotline.

The hairstyle for Lady Grande is a Freebie titled "Long Hair." which is for V3. I got it while perusing Renderosity, though I think it may not be one featured on their freebies page. Often times RR links to other download pages and when that happens I look about while I'm there.

Good looking crew. What hair style does the guy on the right have?

My Fire Spirit image takes 15 minutes to load and over 20 minutes to render, and there are only 3 lights in the set up, and only one casts shadows. I think the particle effects for the flame take a lot of resources.

...pretty nice team pic. Yeah, I'd hate to imagine the render time with scenery and more lights.

The render of my "On the Prowl" took about 38 min with only six light sources (the lights in the bollards are MATs). And I thought that took too long. Been on the Daz Nuts & Bolts forum where some people mention of render times in the multiples of hours to upwards of a full day. Lights are not the only things that slow the process, hair is another big one because of the transparencies involved to give it depth. For the Tracey Elf head shot (using the highly detailed Shigi Hair) with no background it took nearly 20 min just to render the hair alone. Meanwhile each of the Leela pics (which used the Ashley Hair) took about only about 12 - 15 min. I've yet to even attempt Rendering anything in Bryce.

yeah I was talking about rendering to my fiance last night, shes a graphic designer and she said that the 3d people where she used to work referred to it as "Render Wander" when they would start something then get up and go do things while they were waiting for it to finish.

...big houses like Pixar use what are called Render Farms which are nothing more than banks of computers with the most powerful render engines available. Even then they only get a few seconds of finished animation in a given day. As I understand the original Shrek took something like 5 million "render hours" to complete.

hehe, I can show ya time my dolphin test with lighting took a bit of time. Fortunately my quad-core will be coming in this week and I'll have a whole new system to render with.

Until I finish my renderfarm its a bit pricey, and nothing like the big houses have, but it'll be nice to have 20 threads working on rendering once it gets set up.

Hmmmm... Where did you find one of those...

I ran across this on Content paradise Fingerspell
wasn't sure if anyone would want this or not

Cool. Sign language! I have the seed of a character concept for a deaf technomancer, native language is American English Sign. I can work up a model for her before I even do a character sheet. I'm not sure how many points being deaf is worth though. Anyhow, I digress... she'd probably get cyber ears anyhow.

I didn't get anything too exciting done today, but I did do a scene with my shaman and his girfriend slow dancing in a tavern someplace. Not very Shadowrunny, but here it is.

Quiet Moment

Its call Morning Hair. $1.99!! Another $1.99 for textures.


Took 40 minutes just to load the saved project into Daz yesterday and RAM usage was at 1.38g when it loaded. (I had just restarted the PC prior to loading to check min load time and RAM usage). I only have 1g of RAM currently.
*knocks on wood* My computer upgrades are due in today.


Pretty cool. You are definitely spending a lot of time playing with lighting.

Hm... I usually have 2 to 5 minutes rendering times, rarely over 10 minutes. I found that using the "Deep Shadow" mode and using only one light for shadows, the other lights not casting shadows, made it quite faster, even with hair.

Loading times though... once I go above 3 or so models... ugh.

what system specs are you guys running? Did you post these already?

Current system: AMD Athlon64 3000+ (1.81GHz) with 1g RAM, GeForce FX 5200 and two hard drives - RAID 1.
System on order: AMD Phenom 9500 Quad Core (2.2GHz) with 4g of PC2-8500 RAM, ATI FireGL V3400, and two 10,000RPM drives - RAID 1.

Both Windows XP-SP2. Though I'd run Linux on those systems, like my laptop, if Daz supported it.

Currently AMD Athlon XP 3200+ @ 2.2 ghz, 2 gig of ram, GeForce 6600 on graphics and 2 7,200 harddrives (not RAID) running XP SP2
By early next week... Motherboard with the 680i SLI chipset, a Q6600 2.40G quadcore (which can be aircooled OCed to 3Ghz), 4 Gig of RAM (OCed for a 1066 bus); dual 150Gig 10K harddrives in Raid 1, and a GeForce 8800GT OCed; running Vista Ultimate

...now that is nice. Did you use one of the "Couples" pose kits?

I like the sign language morph. I notice CP (like Renderosity) though tends to favour Poser over D|S. O=I know a lot of Poser stuff will work in D|S (unless it has dynamic settings) but I still have trouble figuring out where to unzip the files to and often times end up with a white mask of the item that has no textures (such as the bubble bottle in "Captive Audience")

Caine Hazen,: Nice sounding setup. That is one of the disadvantages of using a notebook in that expandability is more limited. For one, I do not think I can swap out video cards and forget about overclocking for it'll just burn the system out as it is almost impossible to insytall adequate heat dissipation. I have been considering an external HD though.

Now one of the advantages of notebooks that I have noticed is improved environmental ruggedness. I live in the Pacific Northwest in a half cellar flat and dampness is always an issue. Even with a dehumidifier, a tower system seems to have a reduced lifespan than if it were in an above ground room, particularly if adequate ventilation for the processor is important.


...now that just screams Shadworun. During lunch I'll have to jump on the Daz forums and make some product suggestions.

Yes it was a couples pose kit called Everlast for V4 and M3. The background is the floor and a wall from the Tavern set. I got a free pool table I want to put on the side from Poser World. I had to move their arms a little bit to keep their fingers from poking through each other's clothing.
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.
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I'll second the Celeste Clothes for V4 on the DAZ forum tonight.


Yeah, it's kind of hard to see, but I have an UberSpot light with a torch light mask above Gray's head, just off camera. I hope you can see some of it on the pool table when I put it in.

It's the same light I used in the fire spirit scene, but there I used two of them at 200% luminosity (on at hip level and one at shoulder level inside the front of the Aiko 3 model).


I am running an Intel 6400 2.13 GHz Core Duo with 2 gigs of RAM, and an NVidia GeForce 7300 LE running XP Media Edition SP2 and 300 gig hard drive. I have the Vista upgrade, but decided not to put it on. The poor folks that build my next PC can fool with Vista. I definitely need a new video card.

I'm thinking of buying this model for a heavy duty shoot out scene with my Gunslinger character ==> Low Poly Soldier model. You should be able to put 30 of these guys in a scene and not slow it down very much.

...some pretty nice stuff on that site, alas all seem to be Poser specific.

...for some reason I am beginning to feel like somewhat like a Linux user in a Microsqish world. I have a great application but it seems so much more is made for the other guys and in order for me to get (or even make my own) add ons, I need to pay up to join their camp.

Well this guy works in DAZ. ==> Sam with two Low Poly Soldiers

It even comes with two different uniforms, and the gun morphs. As you can see though, it only comes with one pose. But you can use M3 poses with it. I'm going to try to do some urban and night camo textures for him. And maybe some darker skin.

Update: Here is the urban camo texture I made...

Urban Camo

I also got the Millenium Beard mustache to fit with a few morphs.

...that's pretty cool. I'll have to check into this more tonight.

Looking for some generic soldier types to do a couple of scenes from Leela 's past when she was with the Croatian Resistance. Really would like to do a two part scene I once described where she's innocently handing a soldier a grenade she said she found while playing. in the second frame there is the an explosion at the HQ he's was guarding as she's skating away, giggling.

...she was quite the little terrorist in her early teen years.

Progress report.

Will be finishing up the "Captive Audience" picture and should have it posted this weekend Sunday. A few minor changes in store (like Leela finally getting rollerblades) and setting the surrounding scenery, including sky. Hoping to troubleshoot the issue with the flat gray areas on the bots. Really want this one to look good as I may enter it into this month's Daz gallery.

Started on a new version of the Short One now that I have Aiko 4. Looking pretty good so far, the face is a better match with the drawings (more Japanese looking) and overall proportions look much better. Will be working on her Kabuki makeup texture in Gimp. Was gong to use the Kunoichi clothing set I just downloaded, but for some reason cannot seem to get the fittings for A4 to work When I posted this issue to the Daz forum, I was given the impression by one response that the A4 settings only work with Poser (gah!). So, the hunt is on again for some appropriate attire.

Guess you're not thinking about it anymore... hehehhe



Me too... Just trying to keep from paying $30 for it..


Ok, here is a picture of the team at the club. Started playing with lighting: Team Picture

These sales at Daz are gonna drive me to ruin. I loaded up on another round of stuff today.

I've got one in the works of my shaman casting, then next I will do one of my Native-American Elf Mage with his captive (Blood of the People game).

...me too. Just put another order in myself a few minutes ago. Was thinking of getting the Dreamlight Pro Pack 2 but I already have Bryce which has a lot of lighting effects. It means more work on my part than using presets, but that also means more flexibility. For example I was considering early one of getting the Morphia pack, but now I see I can create everything it has (and more) just using the standard Morph & Morph++ settings.

Figured out how to use the DForms tonight, very useful tool. Now I think I can tackle some of those clothing fit issues that have been giving me headaches..

BTW The Team looks nice with the background. Love the Deco look. Where did you find that one?

Oh, yes. I took the opportunity to get more male attire, and more toys.

I have found StoneMason... This guy's stuff is pretty amazing.... That is his Deco Club ($1.99)

Here is another I did of my Street Shaman, Book. My main goal was to play with lighting and Primitives. I envision this as him being in astral space hovering above a building, looking down as blasts this big bad spirit. (Just happened yesterday in the Atlanta 2070 game)

ugg I am having trouble with things Im trying to load onto figures not showing up. I dont see them in the list either so I know its not a matter of them being shrunk down.

edit; oh have you seent he stuff from Davorama? Pretty cool stuff, especially if you were gonna do Data retrievals or something with cyberdocs.

I have found several things that just don't load and a few others that won't load unless you have the proper target selected. Also, make sure you are trying to load the object, not a MAT (or texture) for an object. That was the single most frustrating lesson for me.

-----------------------------
Here is one of Dalton & Beth, outside his apartment. Dalton is a social adept who is started with a magic of 1 and is gaining his abilities in game. I actually took him over when his player bailed on the game.

I have found that some objects are parented to the wrong place by default ( especially freebies) and you have to go find them inside your character on the scene tab, un-parent them, move them to the right place and then re-parent them. Hence the incredible disappearing items. My Gunslinger's heart necklace does it almost all the time. Plus it's for V3 not V4 and there chest objects are angeled differently so you need to rotate it up and back a bit.

Here is a good view of it ==> Sam pouting, closeup


Nice. I bought that outfit she's wearing when it was on sale for < $2 too. What is that backdrop? Is it part of the Backstreets set? If so I haven't found that stairway yet.

nice pout
holy cow, I'd almost list that as NSFW lol
what are you using on/for her?

Sam is made up of the following (including parts you can't see in the closeup)

Jessi for V4 head morph, full body texture and makeup texture (Renderosity)
Fearill for V4 body morph
Action Hair (with the red ponytail holder MAT)
Elf ears and Ear shape morphs from V4 Morphs++
My Vest (freebie top, with the dark red texture from WS My Vest Texture Pack 1)
JeanZ for V4 ( belt hidden, button fly)
TreadZ for V4 (leather MAT)
Heart Necklace for V3 by Mirablilis (freebie necklace with the gold MAT)
Shadow Dancer holster
Treasure Hunter pistol

This shot used a Jess for V4 pose and light preset (Most Digital Creations).

Sometimes she wears the long leather coat from Dark Malice, but it is very hard to pose without Sam poking through somewhere.

Stonemason's Quiet Street

My latest: Sam and Jingles dancing on the bar.

Darnit, the FREAK went on sale. I might have to buy him.

...umm, like, Ow? Looks like it was ladies night at the local waterin' hole.

Man I'd love to post a few of my latest creations, but these clothing fit issues I am having are driving me a bit batty. For example the Kunoichi set is advertised to be compatible with both V4.2 and A4 but when I try to fit the Kimono to the A4 model I get a tonne of poke through. I tried everything form the standard morph fits the the DFormers and nothing seems to cure the ills.

When I addressed this to the Daz forum seems that according to several people on, some of the clothing and hair add ons available on the Daz site are configured for Poser instead even though that is not always listed under the Required Products. I then looked back at my last set of downloads and several say "Poser" on them but that only shows up after, my payment is accepted so I have no idea if I am ordering something that is not compatible until after I plunk my money down. So in a sense I feel have purchased products that are pretty much useless to me without shelling out another 250$ for p7 (yesterday's one day 9.95$ deal for P6 was only available to Passport members).

Hence, a bit frustrated right now, considering the investment I have already made.

I have voiced this latest concern on the Daz forums and am awaiting a response.

[pause]

...OK got a reply but still no decent answer. More like so many others have dealt with this so should I, but being on a limited budget myself it is very difficult to lose 20$ or more each order on stuff that won't work because the full requirements are not clearly spelled out up front. I may actually have to take this to Daz admin.

[Edit]

...still not satisfied. I cancelled everything with the "ps" designator from my current order.

Depending on the clothing, you can make part of V4 (or A4 or whatever model) not visible. I did that with Sam's left thigh in my last post, but it is completely covered by the Jeans, so you can do that. Either that or you morph it and it's way bigger than it should be. Can't have a hottie with one Popeye thigh.

You can't do that with say, the chest in a kimono, but if the elbow is poking through, you could make the shoulder invisible.

...unfortunately it is part of the chest, back and shoulders that all poke through even though I use "fit to" Aiko 4. so making any of these areas invisible would horribly disfigure the character. Also since the Kimono is short, slimming down the one thigh that pokes through would look rather odd and changing the leg angle would screw up the figure's balance. I am just a bit miffed that the selling point was it's supposed to fit A4. The fact it doesn't I also find odd because it is after all a Japanese not western style to begin with.

Not all the clothing has all the morphs wwe're using.. I've had a hell of a time with the MilleniumBeard and my orc I'm working. Holy helss does it take a bit of creative work (and morph targets) to really get it all worked out.

However I'm hoping to actually complete renders this coming week without reboots!! Of course my CPU is in Lexington tonight, so my hope is Tuesday I'll be getting it.. cause the rest of my parts here are getting lonely

...I've now spent a total of nearly 25 hrs on the A4 version of the Short One most of which was messing around trying to get the Kunoichi Kimono to fit and still she has nothing to wear. I even tried to go back to the Ashley pants and V4 Sports Bra (like I used in the first draft) but Now the V4 top doesn't fit (because she is Aiko based no doubt) and I feel I am running into diminishing returns here.

All of the morphs I used in her figure correspond to the standard V4 morphs of the clothing but when I use the PBMs instead, they distort things out of proportion. so either the straps of the Bra are floating above her shoulders or buried into her collarbone and shoulder blades. I also get an odd crease in the front even when I select both the chest and abdomen morph bones. I feel there must be a patch or plug-in I need but am not aware of.

The beard is a lot easer to morph if you unparent it, position and morph it, and then parent it back to the figure's head.

That is probably the biggest pain. That and the fact that the clothing magnets are designed for Poser and don't seem to work in Daz Studio.

Wow... That's a lot for one model. I will admit that there is some poke through off camera on some of my renders, but I don't think have over half a dozen on any render (not including load times).

My latest is not Shadowrun (blasphemy!!!), it's probably straight fantasy, but I wanted to shwo off some of the models I haven't used yet, like the Cyclorama, and Jepes ElementZ. This inludes the free DAZ Centaur model and freebie texture from Renderosity.
Fae Princess and centaur companion

And here is more Shadowrun:
Sam waiting to ambush patrol

...both of those are very nice, love the name Stealth 101 for the Sam pic. Also, no shame from me on posting a fantasy pic here. Heck before the acronym "RPG" (which to me still means Rocket Propelled Grenade) was used it was "FRP" - Fantasy Role Play.

Ahh... I recognise that background in the Stealth 101 worked late last night with putting Leela and the three Floater Bots into Backstreets. Need a prop to set her on though since for the time being she's sitting in the middle of the street. Downloaded a Freebie of a crate I thought would work (.rar file) but I need to design and apply some textures before I can use it. Right now it's night (for her - used the Backtreets at Night light set) as I need to dive more into Bryce to develop realistic daytime light. Started working with designing sky presets and have a really nice one I want to use and now it's on to developing the light dome. Unfortunately it will be a little longer before I can post even another draft copy of Captive Audience as Backstreets is so rich with detail I am unable to render it until I get my memory upgrade (going to 2.5G). with only 512M my system pretty much came to a screeching halt. Just rotating around the figure took nearly 15 min as it would only "move" in small increments dus to all the detail refreshing that needed to be performed. Took over 30 min for D|S to even start the actual render process so I aborted as it was going on 02:00.

Damn I like those low poly soldiers, I'll just have to save my hard earned Zlotys up to get them.

I cannot even imagine trying to render with only 512mg of RAM... Ugghhhh.. My pity, my friend.

Since we're posting Fantasy as well. Here is "Showdown at Midnight"

...very nice, I like the lighting.

As to waiting on renders, I just start one up & go off to do other things for a while. For any render proofs, I always turn shadows off, that helps a bit. Wish I could upgrade the video card as well but as I understand, that is one of the downsides of using a notebook vs. a tower. The "environmental ruggedness" (as I mentioned earlier), portability, and wireless capability are decent enough trade-offs though.

If I had a tower I would also be chained to paying a ransom to some evil comm corp like T-Mumble or Bombast (and paying even more for it because I don't want their phone or cable telly services bundled in). That free Wi-Fi net Portland was setting up turned out to be a huge bust, even Dial-up had faster throughput and a more reliable signal.