Observing Sin issue 1 (http://www.renderotica.com/store/sku/51804_Observing-Sin-1) is my first comic produced entirely using DAZ Studio. It took a long time because, about a quarter of the way through, DAZ released the NVidia iRay rendering engine. When I experimented with iRay it was immediately obvious that there were going to be advantages to switching over from 3Delight. It was not even really the photo-realistic ability that convinced me, but more the facility to use hardware GPU rendering and the ease of using HDRI environments.

 

Now that Observing Sin is done (and I really hope that no other project takes as long again!) I decided to review my earliest comic, Strange Investigations #1, to see what would be involved in "remastering" it. It was produced back in October 2013 using Poser and rendered in FireFly at sub-HD resolutions (1024x576).

 

I soon discovered that simply re-rendering at 1920x1080 wasn't going to cut it. There were too many textures used that simply did not stand up to the higher resolution, appearing blocky or smeared. Additionally, I felt that some of the scenes would need to be re-worked to be satisfactory. This is because minor posing errors (surface collisions etc) tend to be less obvious at lower resolutions, but become glaringly prominent at larger frame sizes. And there are some frames which, coming back to them, I would just like to do differently.

 

This led me to doing a proof of concept to see just what would be involved in remastering. My decision to do this in DAZ Studio was driven by a preference for iRay over Reality; for me, the former is just easier to use because of its tight integration with DS. However, changing from Poser to DS does add more extra work.

 

In order to get the material into DAZ Studio it is necessary to import the Poser scenes and then make adjustments, mostly to the surfaces, but also converting to SubD wherever possible to allow the use of render-time subdivision. This won't work on every object, especially those that have a limited number of polygons, but it's always worth a try. I have found that it's especially important to SubD older hair props in order for them to render reasonably in iRay.

 

The end result of this work is a re-done cover image which can be found here in the gallery: http://www.renderotica.com/gallery/shorturl/324478/Strange-Investigations-1-Redux

 

This was about a day's work, so given that there are 120 images in Strange Investigations #1, remastering the entire comic would take quite a while. I haven't yet decided whether to go ahead. I have other projects on the go (Observing Sin 2 and Strange Investigations 7) and that's a sizeable chunk of time to invest. Still, just going through this exercise was a useful learning experience that has left me with a handful of new iRay-ready DAZ Studio assets. It was also a bit of a sentimental journey, going back to the beginning and having some of those "Oh, yeah ... that's how I did that!" moments.


Strange Investigations #1 is here: http://www.renderotica.com/store/sku/40938_DSV4600-s-Strange-Investigations-1