The reason for all the TLC after rendering was complete was that, frankly, I can load about 50% of what I need to load into DAZ Studio 3 to do this scene properly, before my computer gets a terminal case of the herkie-jerkies.
Now, there are ways and means to build up these shots and do the whole thing inside DAZ ... but it takes more time than I have right now. Basically, you'd start from the bottom up with the absolute distance layer, the background to the whole scene. This would be hills or woods and sky -- whatever is in your desired background. Lay this into DAZ as the backdrop, and then import enough trees and shrubs and fallen logs in front of it to create a nice woodland. Render this and import the image is a new backdrop ... stand the character against it, and some bushes around him ... plus all those fiddly little plants around his toes, plus something to "disguise the join" between the real 3D stuff and the background -- which was "real 3D" in the first phase of this. Render that and import it as yet another new backdrop ... and then import the trees and bushes which are between the character's layer and the camera. Render this, and call it done.
The real difficulty is in keeping the lighting and focus in control across the whole project, as well as remembering where everything is, and where the shadows are falling. And in the end you wind up with a scene that can only be viewed from one angle, because as you went along you compressed each layer into 2D and reimported it as a static backdrop for the next layer.
And all this took how long?!
The alternative is to load up the distance backdrop, and then load up as many trees, shrubs and plants as the program will tolerate and still be functional. Set the lights, get your renders, and give them a lot of TLC later, with Photoshop brushes, in GIMP. Why? Because there's nowhere near enough plants and grasses in there to make it look like he's standing or sitting in a bed of sweet herbs, and you'll see clearly where the ground plane meets the backdrop. If you could load in many times more plants, you could disguise everything and do the whole thing in CG. But not with this system! Quad with 4G of Ram and a GeForce 240 video card ... not up to the task, folks, which gives you a whole new perspective on movies like Avatar!
My next project is Episode 7 of the Abraxas series ... tomorrow, I hope. See you then!
Jade, November 15
