I spent the last week pulling my hair out due to oddities in the eye reflections of what was supposed to be a simple render. Literally. Pulling my hair out. The problem was this....
I liked the image. Well, I liked it enough to try to figure out why I had those overwhelming eye reflections in it. Really, this version isn't so bad. I didn't save the ones that had so many fireflies that you couldn't even see the color of her eyes. I tried several different light set ups and the best I could come up with was this...
No eye reflections at all. Completely dead eyes. I tried using different eye textures, I played with shader settings, I moved lights around, and....no improvement. I searched online for someone, anyone, with the same issue. I watched every tutorial on Youtube, I haunted the DAZ 3D forums but the solutions for others having the problem did not work for me.
Finally, I put together everything I learned in one last, desperate render and got this....
Now, I am happy. It may not be the best render I've ever done but I am proud of it because I learned a lot from it, and, if I can't be proud of that then I might as well not be proud of anything. So, kudos to me. In case I forget later, I changed the shader on the corneas, tears and pupils to Water - Thin. I also put the translucency weight of the pupils to 1 and the translucency color to a mid gray. I'm not sure that would work in every circumstance but it's a starting point.
Also, I tried different lighting situations to see how it would do. Here is one of those...
I just love dramatic lighting with lots of shadows but the spotlight here softened her expression a bit and I kind of like her defiant, unapologetic glare so I'm keeping the image above this one as the final.
Part of the reason for this blog is to get me to bust out of my shell somewhat. It's easy at the moment because I think I'm the only one reading these posts. It's been a little too easy so I uploaded a few images to my gallery at DAZ 3D. I know, it's no big deal. People do that everyday without a second thought but it took some effort for me. I'm patting myself on the back for taking that step.
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