Recently in a close-up renders I noticed that DAZ human models imported into TG are not as good looking and detailed as they would have been in the software they were originally created in. Well, I'm not surprised. Let's face it - Terragen is mostly for outdoors while DAZ is focused on humans.
Having rather mediocre effects in a close-up render made me thinking. I performed a little test where I created a human model and then put it in TG without any textures just to get its location and shadow that it casts. Then I decided I'll just make a render of my model in DAZ and combine the two in the post processing. :)
DAZ is good for one thing that it offers a reliable lighting system which can simulate exactly the same lighting you used in Terragen. It's just that horizontal and angle controls are "mirrored" (so if you have, say, 200 heading and 25 tilt for your TG sun you need to turn it into 160 and -25 in DAZ.)
So I made the two renders, one in DAZ (human only) and one in TG (just the environment.) Since I work on Apple it has a very nice cut-paste option in the image viewer as upon cutting the program automatically detects "transparent" (or alpha channels) areas of the image so I am left with just those pixels that I want to keep. So I just cut the human model and paste it in the area of where my model should be.
The results turned out to be surprisingly good. :) The DAZ-rendered model matched the TG image seamlessly and I ended up with an image featuring human model but at a much higher detail and quality than when it was imported into TG scene as an object. The lighting of the model should have been decreased slightly but it looked credible and realistic all the same.
The only disadvantage is that you gotta have a good eye to make an accurate DAZ render of your model so that it matches the size and position of your "scaffolding" in Terragen. It can be done easily however, especially given the fact that an "empty" DAZ render with an outfitted human model takes just a minute, so you can make as many corrections as you like and not waste too much time. :)
So, I think this is a very good way to increase realism of human figures in your renders. However this process is a good idea just if you have people in broad daylight or with simple lights used in the close-up scene. Also it gets a little tricky if you want a model to be partially hidden beyond a bush or a tree of some sort. You can still do it if you have PS and some free time on your hands.
Maybe you could post some pics showing this...
Yes I will. :) I just wanted to describe the whole process faster so I wrote it from non-TG computer. Just give me some time to do some higher resolution samples and they will appear in image sharing.
Quote from: N-drju on May 22, 2014, 10:43:04 AM
Yes I will. :) I just wanted to describe the whole process faster so I wrote it from non-TG computer. Just give me some time to do some higher resolution samples and they will appear in image sharing.
:)