Holly Rae Giger

Oh Lordy, where to begin. I came across this character model and was instantly infatuated. She's sexy AF even though she's AI. She's mega-hot even though she's mechanical. I was able to do an external foot sculpt for her that imported beautifully. I even purchased a new bedroom set to film her in. That's where the trouble began.

      Her unique texture pack made her very difficult to light. It didn't help that the bedroom set had horrible coloring that looked nothing like the preview. It also only has 2 walls and all of the lamps in the room which glowed a warm orange in the preview are non-functional. Bullocks!

       After rendering this set I found that the images had a large amount of noise: due to all of the issues described above. Topaz Labs to the rescue, or so I thought. Its much-touted denoiser is actual garbage. It was the one aspect of the otherwise good program that threw me off every time I used it in the past. I searched for many alternatives online today, hence the late post.

     I settled on a free trial for a large, expensive photo editing suite called DXO Photolab. DXO has a dedicated denoiser called DXO Raw 4, but you can only load RAW files into it: the format of choice for photographers. You cannot convert JPEG or PNG to RAW, so it's useless for DAZ Studio. Photolab does have a basic denoiser that works with TIFF files that I can convert my stuff to. I'm very happy with it, but it also has the superior denoiser for RAW files that DXO Raw 4 has.

     The workflow was tedious but I managed to save the renders. There's a neat free program called Neat Image that blows the Topaz denoiser away but wasn't quite as good as Photolab.

     In other news, I've finished rendering all of the cover art and improved Kojika sessions for Suck Session and will be post-processing them tomorrow. I also created new material for that giant work based on input I've received here. You'll be seeing that later tonight.