ZBrushCentral

NPR composite

A bunch of NPR filter renders composited, at rather low resolution.

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Finally finished this Snow Queen pic:

Started from this:

DAZ Studio Zbrush & KeyShot 7 bridge.

Does anyone know how to detach an attachment? My thread thumbnail (my 75x75 avatar) is showing up as my main image, and there’s no option to remove it in the edit menu.

I just took care of it for you. The reason it wasn’t showing up as an icon anymore was because it wasn’t representative of the post.

To remove attachments in the future, you just edit the thread and go to Advanced. There you can click the “Upload Image or Attachment” button, which brings up the image manager. There you can delete the desired image before saving out.

Thank you, aurick. Should I not have 2 different artworks in a thread not labeled as a sketchbook?

If you want, I can rename the thread as your sketchbook. It’s not required.

Thanks aurick, I guess it’s fine since all this involves NPR composites and my Zbrush modeling is too constrained to be thought of as sketching. Something I’ve been working on these past few weeks - lotsa NPR compositing.


Not only compositing layers of NPRs, but BG and foreground elements separately on account of the universal camera going all autocrop whenever approaching the wall and ground and trying to get any sort of wider angle perspective. A lot of guesswork on matching camera angles between fore & background.


After 2 more weeks of work and using KeyShot and Marmoset Toolbag for matching background rendering, this is pretty much the finished product. More in-depth at ArtStation - https://www.artstation.com/artwork/8lPyv6

A bit more modeling and fiddling with the NPRs to get them to affect the background HDRi sphere. Much compositing, and curious to try posting on redesigned site…

I finally tired of using free HDRi backgrounds and figured out how to make my own, which I will cover at length in a new thread. They are only 360 degree spherical maps, not true HDRi, but I only wanted them for background images - not lighting; there’s nothing stopping anybody from making them HDRi in post, though. This is an old model I made for a Threadless contest, or rather a Genesis male I modified after posing in DAZ Studio. A composite of 6 NPR renders that I have modified to also affect the background 2D in help integrate the model into the overall composition…hopefully. The background is:
Unreal VR room 01 by Cyril Limoges Athiel
which was rendered using a spherical IRAY camera in DAZ Studio with an environment of LA_Downtown_Afternoon_Fishing_3K.hdr free from this site:
sIBL Archive
and inserted as the background under the Lighting tab in Zbrush.
I ended up doing this because the universal camera in ZB goes all autocrop if you try to get any extreme wide angles with a big mesh (like, say, an environment) and attempts to use the 2D backdrop function just crashes ZB (support replicated it, so it’s got a fix ticket in) but 360 backgrounds are fine up to 8K, mebbe higher.
So if you render a 2:1 4K (4096x2048 minimum for clarity, but since we’re doing this for NPR renders, photorealism is not the goal) in DAZ studio using an IRAY camera set to spherical, it might take between 1 & 2 hours per render. I would suggest putting the lens settings in the name of each spherical render to help setting the camera in ZB, which I failed to do here, leading to a slight but noticeable scale mismatch. You could say I’ve been using DAZ Studio since it was called Poser 2, so I have a decent catalog of environments to use for this (although lighting the older ones using IRAY is it’s own special problem) but it imports a lot of formats - this one was .dae - so it’s great if you are, like me, a fan of Stonemason.
Just be warned that camera placement really matters when rendering the spherical background, if the camera’s near the ground, pointed upward - that’s pretty much what you’re stuck with, despite having 360 degrees to play around in. If you are having trouble with the background not being visible except when you render, switch from ‘preview’ to ‘best’ under render, wait until it finishes scanning out the screen in ‘best’, then switch back to ‘preview’ - it should now be always visible in real time.
Here’s a small sampling of 360 backgrounds I rendered using this method, the tiny jpegs are there as the tiffs won’t show preview thumbnails:
CWR63’s 360 background renders
I will be very surprised if anyone finds this of use, but I’m happy to give back whatever I can to this great user community.

I decided to re-composite some models I made in 4R7, and learned compositing on with 4R8 renders. Using the new virtual camera and NPRs of ZB19: the 4R8 composites:



The Zbrush 2019 composites:

These 2 are remakes of an old project, what if the 2012 movie had come out in 1968. The first image in this thread is from this poster.
This is a standard movie poster format, combining a new rendering of Iron-Man with older renderings behind.


This was to fit the SDCC Souvenir Book format, all in-camera newly rendered scene.

Another composite of NPR styles: