I’ve been working with a new render engine called Iray. Same DAZ 3D software, but instead of using 3Delight to render it out, I’m using Iray. It uses a physics-based light engine. So the lights and shadows are supposed have a lot more realism to them. It’s pretty tricky stuff, but I think I’m getting the hang of it. My last render came out pretty good, but I wanted to play around some more and see if I could come up with some softer shadows.

I started off with Victoria 7 and added a torus to her neck.



I scaled it to the right size, moved it into position, and used some deformers to get it to conform to her anatomy. I then added the Raven Collar and linked it to the necklace with another small torus. I added some textures to the toruses, played with the lights, and rendered it out.



After a few more tweaks to the lights and a few more renders, I had something that looked pretty darn good. I just love the shadows. The original image is 1600x2000. The skin detail is amazing on Victoria 7. She looks pretty damn real.



Just to add a little more depth and color to her skin, I rendered out another darker version.



I then layered the two images in Pixelmator and set the layer blending to Hard Light and then pulled it down to 20%.



It's kind of sexy. The primary focus is the raven necklace, but it leaves you wishing this image was a slightly different aspect ratio.