Thursday, August 28, 2014

LuxRender

Hey Everyone,

So the Reality/LuxRender plugin for Daz was super cheap, at only $40. I did some background research and thought the low price was worth it, even for just experimenting.

Now that I've had a chance to play around with it I can definitely say that it's a step up from Daz's own render engine, but the difference in render time is huge! A normal high-res image in Daz finishes in ~30 minutes for me. In LuxRender it could take me all night.

However, the major positive is that LuxRender's progress can be saved and picked up again at a later point AND it seems to be a little bit lighter on the CPU load while working. Overall, I'd say that Lux might not be up to the task of rendering entire sets, but it would be nice to go back and do the most popular images from time to time.

I know that Octane renders much quicker but it's price is still a bit outside what I'm willing to spend. Something to work towards in the future.

Until then, here's one of my test renders. Just two lights and only a few minutes of rendering so it's still a bit fuzzy, but check it out anyway:


Sunday, August 24, 2014

Being Productive

So this first set is about 2/3rds done, which is pretty exciting! I'm keeping it relatively simple as I don't want to get in over my head on my first set.

In other news, I've gotten a nice little bump in traffic after a mention on Hibbli3d's site. She's an experienced and very talented artist so I reached out to her for some advice and she was happy to oblige. If you haven't seen her work already, I highly recommend you go check it out!


And of course, I have another image from the set:


Wednesday, August 20, 2014

I'm not dead - and here's a pic to prove it!

Whelp, July got a little busy. Work picked up a lot while we rushed to get a product out the door and after that was finished I took a much-needed vacation. But now I'm finally back.

I've decided that I want to get the Ryiah The Slave series of images turned into a full set. Its going to be the kickoff set that launches a whole bunch of other stories based around Ryiah and the Orc (and his friends). I plan on keeping some sort of coherent story throughout the sets. I'm about halfway through it now so here's another preview image:


Next, I want to start handing out a link banner to other popular artists and start getting some real traffic to the site. I'm sitting at about 1200 views right now and most of that was from posting my first image set on e-hentai and Rule34.

If you are a fellow 3d artist or blogger and would like to have me add your banner, feel free to drop me a line. Here are 3 of mine:
200 x 60



190 x 65