Renderotica

Yeah, I sorta figured you for a vet but I've seen people who joined in 2015 and don't even know the basics. Probably shoulda looked you up, sorry about that. I am also disabled, so I guess we're samies LOL.

I asked for G8 Roasty script conversion; crossing my fingers that he gets time to get back to something old. I had assumed the Cover-up was a condom, but after looking it up I see it's a foreskin add-on that is supposed to alleviate the nightmare of foreskin positioning (at least for me LOL). Without the script conversions, anything with mats like this are so much of a pain you end up spending so much time trying to get it to work that it's not worth the trouble imo. Which is sad, bc I've seen plenty of scripts on RenderHub I thought would be cool but only work in Daz 4.

You are 100% right about using it in Daz 6; don't bother. I've tried with GP and Diktator before their conversions, and it was a nightmare. I was never satisfied with what it looked like in the end, as there were always seams. One thing you might try is using the 3D Delight version in Daz 4. I don't know how 3D Delight works; I got into this after it was introduced and Iray and PBR were on the scene, but seeing as Daz 4 was built to handle 3Delight, it might lessen the load on your PC. Then save the Mats and hope it turns out alright when converted to Iray or PBR in Daz 6??

Anyway you look at it, a product should make your life easier, not harder. It seems now that anytime you are considering purchasing something, you should check that it is Daz 6 compatible. I assume they reworked the script system as better architecture than the hodgepodge they built over the life of Daz 4 (not to mention you get to buy lots of scripts all over again). I also bought a PC with a 5000 series specifically to run Daz, only to find out that they couldn't figure out how to make it work in Daz 4. There is a certain irony in a 3D graphics team not being able to keep pace with a product that was announced months before release.

I really not an expert by any means, just sorta throwing stuff out there I can think of. I hope the script comes out soon, but I have a feeling he has a huge workload just to compete with AI and these script conversions are taking a backseat to that. Good luck to you; it's good to know there are still artists that render rather than using AI to generate thousands of images and picking the best ones ;-)

Originally Posted by: PhantasyMaster99

Good luck to you; it's good to know there are still artists that render rather than using AI to generate thousands of images and picking the best ones ;-)

Don't know about 'artist'. Always classed myself as a 'storyteller', who used to use just the medium of words. Now I'm trying to tell stories by rendering sequences of images, with some narration and the dialogue in accompanying text.

The thing with the AI image making is ...

Last year I got involved cooperating with someone else who was making AI images that incorporated elements I liked. I made suggestions, did some testing, then started something where I'd take a bunch of his images and find some I could take as being a sequence (turning a blind eye to inconsistencies of background and character detail) and would then puzzle out connections so I'd then provide a narrative connecting them. which ended up leading me to dig out the HDD with my DS library on it to render an image for him to use as a prompt for something where he'd been commissioned to do some of his AI images, but just couldn't get the AI to understand the position her wanted the characters in. Which led me to find I could, now - despite my disability, and side effects of the medications I have to take - manage to blunder my way through doing some rendering, which I'd previously pretty much had to give up.

But working with him led me to realize two things about the AI image making that meant I would NOT get into it myself. The first was that it takes a lot of trial and error, changing, tweaking prompts to get what's wanted. Now, my medications have two particular relevant side effects - brain fog, and a completely trashed memory, both long term and moment to moment. I simply can't learn by trial and error because I keep forgetting what I'm doing, what i was then going to do next, and especially what I just did and therefore what I've tried and what i should learn and try changing.

The other thing is that there are limits as to how many details you can put into a prompt - too many details and it starts just ignoring some of them. Which is fine for making single images, but not so good for making a sequence telling a story where one needs consistency in e.g the background. If I wanted to do a single image of my character in an underground car park, I just have to say 'in an underground car park' to the AI and it fills it in - great. In DS, after picking which of a number of different models of underground car parks I have suits the action best, I load it but then have to go through populating it with cars from the car models I have, which is a pain. But for an action sequence in the car park, whole bunch of pictures, once I've set up the car park in DS it stays, consistent, as the background as the characters move around. Whereas with an AI, even if I manage to get it to draw the characters consistently (which it probably won't) performing the actual actions I want (which ti probably won't, and the details matter to me, especially e.g. in a fight sequence), the car park they're in is likely to keep changing.

So, to do some storytelling with images, I'm sticking with DS where I am at least nominally in charge of everything and can get exactly what i want, rather than fighting with some AI that keeps randomly changing details that shouldn't be changing.

Originally Posted by: PhantasyMaster99

Whatever the future holds, I'm afraid that rendering still images for money isn't economical; I might be able to churn out 5 decent renders in one day if I rushed through it, while the AI from most paid websites can through a thousand plus in a matter of minutes. If you can develop a loyal following (i.e. people paying for a "brand") its totally different, but direct competition there is no contest.

Good thing I'm not doing it for money, then. I'm just rendering-and-writing a story for me - the sort I'd like to see but never have from someone else. I'm sticking it up at DeviantArt just in case anyone else gets something out of it, shares some of my particular kinks, but I don't actually care whether they do or not. Parts - like the section I'm nearly up to - have to switch to a pay-walled gallery due to DA rules for explicit content, but it's the minimum money possible: $1 for however big that gallery will end up. I'd happily have the whole thing free to everyone, but them's the rulez. I've no interest whatsoever in making money from it.

I have a rather obsessive thing about realism: in my writing, and now in my added rendering. I do LOTS of research about eveyrthng, and obsess over details. Believe it or not, I've got 4 G8Ms set up as the same character, one with a Dicktator attached, one with db xxx's XY, one with XY Extended, and oen with the DAZ Anatomical Eleements attached; and each dick has a Measuremetrics Tailor Tape parented to show the circumferance part way down the shaft, and a Tape Measure set so it's startiing from against the bone of the pubis above the penis and has a measure target parented to the end of the glans so it's reading out the length, as per the measurement methodology of the biggest worldwide sceintific study (which showed the usual quoted assumption that average erect dick length is 6" is an overestimate, presumed to be because the studies that 6" figure was based on all inolved self-reported measurements, and guys tend to exaggerate!). I can therefore see length and girth as I twirl dials, and this character is supposed to be average length (5 1/2 in) but a bit above average girth. Default Dicktator is about 11 1/2 inches, whereas in the real world while there are a very few men with dick's that size, actually 7 in is the 99th percentile.

I've been on the same meds since adding the last one in 2008 (oh, plus one for high blood pressure more recently.)

My main issue is pain, mounting rapidly from its base level while doing ... anything, includng just concentrating, doesn't have to be physical. And when i stop doing whatever's causing the pain to rise and rise and rise, the pain doesn't stop, it justs stops going up. I'm just at a new, much higher base level that lasts for a couple of days, and doing anything else is then cumulative. We went through trying most pain meds back in 2007/8, and, unfortunately, for this pain, most 'pain killers' do absolutely nothing, even things like Diclofenac that are graet with many kinds of really bad pain (bliss when I had soem kidney stones), bu it does nothing for this. Then there are a few I reacted very badly to (Morphine, Tramadol) so can't take (which doesn't bode well for me if I end up dying from cancer the way my father did). So I'm basically on all three pain medications that both do something and I can tolerate and have been since adding the third in 2008. They don't stop the pain at all, just lower the base level a little, and slow the rate the pain goes up while I'm doing things slightly, so I can keep going a little longer before it reaches unbearable screaming level. It leaves me very minimally functional, just about able to look after myself, but that's all. And it's at the price of a number of quite severe side-effects - the really very thick brain fog, the non-functional memory. And the side-effect of chemically completely switching off my sex drive sso I'm not able to be aroused, but that's probably a benefit as it means I don't get frustrated by my inability to have a sex life. And it is a LONG time since the Doctors thought of anything else to try, so I have no prospect of things improving. Mostly i just sit/sprawl floating in the fog with an empty brain and just stare blankly at problems I'd have immediately thought of solutions to back befroe whatever happened in my back in 2007. The fact that I seem to have roused enought to be able to produce renders in DS fro the first time since having to more-or-less give up in 2007 is new and novel. And something to stop my brain completely atrophying. But it does mean I'm just about to start rendering my first sex scene since a short one I did in 2006! And why I'm grappling with these penis figures for the first time (as it were). I've owned them for ages, but not used them until now.