I’ve been polishing my webinar over the last couple of weeks and I have to say I’m super excited. I’m kind of thinking that titling it as “Mastering the Fundamentals” might have been a bit of an under statement… I have a tendency to get “carried away” and this webinar is definitely not the exception.
In my mind the objective of this course has always been to empower Daz Studio users to “know what tools are available, have a basic understanding of how to use them, and have the confidence to play with some features you didn’t know existed or were convoluted.”
With that being said, I don’t believe that I’m the best lighting and rendering artist out there, I definitely need more practice… But, one of my characteristic strengths is being able to wrap my head around complex topics, like say for example…physics. I also have strong organizational skills. So, it is my intention with this course to stay with original goal which I stated earlier.
Working towards that objective I now know that I should have broken the course into two parts, one to focus on lighting, the other to focus on rendering. Since I already gave my word that by purchasing one ticket for the complete course you would learn x,y,z, at this point breaking the course into two parts isn’t an option.
Working with my producer form Digital Art Live we decided to add a supplemental prerecorded video to touch on the basic basics that a lot of average Daz Studio users probably already know, but new users would find helpful, to save as much time as possible for the meat of the course.
Now that I’ve written an essay on some of what’s been going with this course, I’m really excited to announce that I will discussing an additional topic during this webinar, Render Canvases!
As part of the “know what tools are available” objective for my course, I decided it wouldn’t be complete without some dedicated discussion on render canvases. To be honest, I always assumed Render Canvases were something they’re not and always had in the back of my mind, “one of these days I should figure them out.” Well, with the goal to be thorough with this course it gave me that final push to “figure them out.” And, I have to say, “I’m super excited about Render Canvases!”
That is why even though this course was already on the long side, it was worth it to me to make the necessary changes I already talked about above to be able to include Render Canvases in my webinar.
Render canvases allow you to render the influence of each light in your scene to separate layers and then using a simple photo editing program (or if you want to get fancy you can use a dedicated compositing program like Nuke or After Effects) you can adjust each of their light intensities separately without having to re-render! This is a game changer for me, I really can’t say how excited I am about them, LOL.
I will be demonstrating how to use them effectively, how to trouble shoot common problems associated with them, and finally, how to use the individual layers within an image editing program like Adobe Photoshop. In fact, for my demonstration I will be using Photoshop, but I know there are a lot of other less expensive image editing programs that you can use to achieve the same results.
Anyway, I’m super excited about this announcement, sorry for the lengthy write up I just couldn’t resist telling someone…
I hope to see you on my webinar! 🙂
Get tickets over at Digital Art Live!
Until the next time…
Total Rendering Time: Around 1 hour 30 minutes, I forgot to write it down again…
Software used for scene compilation: Daz Studio 4.9.
Rendered with NVIDIA Iray.
