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FyraNuanser β Jack The Cat (Remastered)
Published: 2019-11-09 16:44:48 +0000 UTC; Views: 4674; Favourites: 55; Downloads: 30
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It's been about seven and a half years since I posted my first Jack The Cat render. It's here:
A lot has happened in 3D graphics since then so I thought I would open that old file and see how it would look today. I haven't changed too much, the figure is still the original Genesis and the morphs, hair, clothing and background are all the same, but with some re-texturing and with Iray shaders. I did tilt the camera slightly to get a better look at his face.
He looks as if he must have been in his teens thenβhe's in his 20s now, so it kind of adds up.
You can see both of these and others of the older Jack in the Jack The Cat gallery.
DAZ Studio 4.12 and Iray with some slight fixes to the eyes in Photoshop.
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Comments: 18
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Interesting idea, of Jack at different ages. Glad you gave him his own gallery, DAZ Master! My best, WWL
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Oh, okay. My characters, at least Missy, her sisters and their cousin Big Pete,Β will be entering their thirties during the 1980s, so they will have to cope with changes in both body and mind. My best, WWL
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It's always so wonderful to see an artist recreate one of their old pieces. The new shading and texturing looks so good! 
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Thanks very much Luka Β I used NGS Anagennesis 2 for the skin: it's a miracle product for pre-Iray figures. The texture is M4, so it's ancient but looks just about as good as anything today. It's nice sometimes to do a close up where you can see the details like the freckles.
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Oh wow! At first I thought you fully remodelled him from scratch but magically managed to recreate the entire scene so precisely with the newer assets! But then "I thought I would open that old file" explained to me better what actually happened. This is a really really interesting experiment, I really love how you dealed with every part of it, the shirt looks just beautiful now and so does the hair. At the same time I really love that you kept the changes very subtle, you didn't modernize the whole scene just by slapping some silly rim-light in the background (something I'd probably do because my lighting habits are a big joke at the moment). It's almost as if nothing changed, at first sight, but once you look closer, you see that every single thing changed a lot!
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Thanks very much Yuni
On the much less technical side, it was quite revealing to me that I have grown Jack up. He looks so chubby-cheeked and boyish in this 
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I found IBL doesn't really work for indoors, like I once experimented with a completely sealed room and apparently you can't use HDRIs for that but then I discovered Iray Section Planes and just attached a few of them to the camera, which turned it into a sort of "clipping camera" that just "hides" everything outside the visible area. It did work, I could again use various HDRIs to light at least the back of my scene but obviously all the clipped walls would cast really weird shadows sometimes. But this approach still works and it's easier and smarter than physically hiding objects in the scene.
I also theoretically thought that emissive surfaces would be a good way to do indoor lights but in practice it's the worst thing to do because they generate a lot of noise, while HDRIs do very little noise, only to get HDRI inside a room is impossible without hacks.
Also with just HDRI alone it's hard to control the shadows in case you want something dramatic
p.s. I'm unable to see why Jack looks older to you in the new version, to me he looks even a bit younger because of the softer features and smoother hair :3 But actually some people do look younger in their 20s than they looked in their teens, I think.
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I actually meant that I have grown Jack up since the first render, but not in this renderβI meant my recent ones. I think it was caused by the transfer from Genesis 1 to 2 which aged him a bit. I can't take him any further as the geometry has changed too much since G2 (I tried a G3 version, and that how Hubert was born! In a way that was perfect for an older brother as they look similar, but not like twins).
I use IBL for all my indoor shots (and yes, including this one: there is in fact just one wall and a floor in this shot). I just strategically remove a wall, or ceiling. I know the lighting isn't necessarily realistic for a room, but I think of it more like a photographic studio or a movie set. The remaining walls (or ceiling if I keep it) still do help the impression, though, that it is inside. It's really the skin that suffers with mesh lights or other kinds of lights. I know other people seem to get decent results, but it just doesn't work for me. I'm also not too fastidious about controlling the light and shadow: I always seem to get something better than I would have designed just by rotating the IBL, or if I want something more gloomy I put objects or planes in the way. Emissive surfaces are really only good for glows or "prop" lights, but not the scene lighting. Even then they tremendously increase render times.
Yes surfaces like mirrors and chrome can give the game away! I usually just desaturate the reflection, as it's often the reflected colours that make it look wrong (like grass and sky in an interior scene). I've edited IBLs, mostly to increase the intensity of the main source of light. Some older IBLs aren't as HDR as they should be (on the other hand, some newer ones are too bright, which can show up geometry artefacts at grazing angles on skin. This is why I have loads of them!
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Well, in the end it's all art and not real life. It's sometimes amazing how much the scenes in movies at the time of filming don't match the final picture that we get to see. I've seen some "in the making" reports and it seems they often build the decoration almost like they do for a play in a theatre, so the room we see and think of as a real place, doesn't actually have any backside, instead there they have all the lighting equipment and cameras. Quite theatrical, just like on the stage you can't build an entire house as the audience won't be able to see through the wall, plus the stage is hit by all kinds of theatrical lights as well, which apparently makes the lighting very "inaccurate" but ask the audience if they care! In the end, everybody likes a pretty picture, otherwise we wouldn't have so many rim lights in all the scenes where they shouldn't possibly exist.
Though I still hope in the future it will be possible to achieve volume-based lighting or something, so instead of the photons originating from an outside source or from the edges of a finite sphere/box, instead they would be pre-sampled for numerous points *inside* a certain volume, sort of answering the question "if there was a solid surface at this point and the light hit it, what RGB intensities and directional vector the light would have just before the collision?" So it's like "light on pause", then hitting render is like hitting the play button and the photons are already inside your room, ready to hit everything.Β But I'm not a particle physicist so maybe this solution is not actually any good for shading. As an artist I'm pretty satisfied with the modern rendering quality anyway!
p.s. It's fun to learn that Hubert, being the older brother, was actually an "offspring" of G2 Jack
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well I worked at one time for a TV production company and living in prime location territory in London, I see many movie and TV productions in progress (a year or two ago I saw one of the streets on my walk home transformed into what I presume was New York, with 60s yellow cabs, and other American cars, and fake snowβthe artifice was quite amazing). Earlier this year a square near where I live was converted to Victorian times, and we even let our office be used as a location for a TV drama. That was an eye-opener, I can tell you (it was a week of hell and we will never do it again).
Yes, there have already been advances in 3D lighting and rendering which have left DAZ Studio in the dust. It's really outdated in a quite number of ways, and I think their implementation of Iray is terrible, to the extent that I am thinking of trying something like Octane, but then it's a consumer model that is aimed at hobbyists, and if the forums are anything to go by, one which seems to be dominated by stereotypical boomers (but perhaps the forums aren't representative of their larger market). I kind of fear for their future to be honest, and it would be great shame if they were to be stuck in a dying market (as Poser is).
Well, I think I have you to thank for the development of the happy accident that is Hubert into the character that he is today, otherwise he might have languished in that one "Have You Met My Brother" render (which got hardly any attention).
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Looks like Octane is free for Blender 2.8 but I wouldn't even know where to start exporting the human skin materials from Iray Uber to Principled BSDF.
I'm very glad I was able to help you somehow with Hubert (I still have a big crush on him and Jack and crossing fingers to see more cute Hubert renders), and you certainly were one of the artists, or maybe even THE artist, who inspired me to get into 3D. I know you told me to stay away from it but I still got into it and had quite a lot of fun
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Thanks very much Gaeryn! He's based on a very old DAZ catboy character that even had furry legs
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