Yaoi prince ... or prisoner? Gorgeous Yaoi elf, at any rate -- and a lot more...

Here's a neat Yaoi fantasy -- or mystery! -- for you: prisoner or prince? Captive or king? Dressed (and I use that term loosely) like this, he could be either. He could be the heir to the throne, heart-sore and weary because the love of his life, also the general of his armies, just sailed to war, and he's being compelled to marry someone he never even met, in the interests of duty and the bloodine. Or he could be the prince who was captured on the battlefield and just became the plaything of the victors in that conflict. You call it!

These are very complex and very nice renders, but they're quite what I was after. Here's the detail from the leader shot:

...and you can see the level of detail that went into this! very map of every description, every lightning trick (right up to the multiple dim colored lights technique I've been talking about lately) is employed; and then the image was split into several layers of different colors in Photoshop and re-composited. This one, the leader shot, is the best in terms of the "response" I've been able to coax out of the render engine ...

Have a look at the other two, full size. They're pretty good ... but the nuance and luminosity and so forth that you're dying to achieve ... nope. Nothing would make the skintones come to life. Now, it could be a trick of this particular skinmap, and before I throw up my hands and admit defeat, I'm going to set up a similar scene, change to another skinmap and try again. Don't get me wrong ... these are very, very nice images! Yet I'm a bit bummed that the skintones continue to look flat and dull, no matter what I did with them.

Let me think a while, and give this another shot. In fact, a couple of ideas just occurred to me even as I type this, so I have at least two experiments to run before I admit defeat. In the meantime...

Smuggler's Cove ... done in Bryce 7 Pro, using IBL lighting and the skydone and additional lights. Nice.

...and some 3D doodling. Another render of the gunfighter; and the cute guys you saw the other day, and a "nebula rise over an alien ocean," which you might assume was done in Bryce, but in fact the whole thing was done n DAZ Studio, using primitives and mapping. The fog on the skyline was the only thing added in later, in Photoshop.

Now, I have to run -- literally! As I sign out, I'll be grabbing my bag and heading out the door...

Jade, February 29 (yep, it's a leap year)

More cute guys, starships and Photoshop recomposition

click to see all images at large size, 1000+ pixels...

As promised ... there's a lot more to upload! And a couple of the images here today are the product of a new line of experimentation. Yesterday, I mentioned an idea mooted by a guy on one of the forums I've been looking at for info on how one can squeeze the most out of the 3DLight render engine (which is integral to DAZ Studio), or else get Poser to play nice. Or both. Preferably both. His suggestion was, to get more response out of an image ... if it had five lights, why not render it five times and do a recomposition of all five images, adjusting them to get the most out of them? I thought, what a good idea.

So, the first of the images, today, was done this way. I didn't render the image five times .. rather, I shipped it into five layers in a Photoshop project and made a dark one, a light one, a red one, a blue one, a green one ... and then played around with the merge/blend modes and the transparencies on each image, until  certain luminosity started to come up. The kind of luminosity you see in much more complex renders than can be managed by the DAZ render engine, which can't do the sub-surface scattering, for on thing.

So I went back into one of yesterday's renders, and reprocessed the whole thing. Well, well! Compare these -- and you'll have to see them at large size to appreciate the "response" which has come up in the skintones:

This, just done today (click to see it at close to 1:1 size. And this...

...which is the original, as posted yesterday -- no recomposition. 

Well, well. I'm not saying it's something you'd do all the time, because it's an extra fiddle which takes about 20 minutes. This provides an alternative to setting 16 dim colored lights, as I did on the Rhapsody in Green render yesterday ... that also is a fiddle, and it takes the same amount of time. 16 lights, 16 shadows, to properly light just one character. Ye gods, I'm trying to imaging raytracing that with a slower computer. I know, I know, I'm spoiled rotten with the Mighty Thor, may blessings be upon it.

I spent a while playing around, trying to find some way to make DAZ Studio generate a Collada file that can be read by anything at all, including its own sister programs, Carrara and Bryce. No joy. All I get is error messages galore. The Collada files I'm making don't seem to be compatible with anything. And Carrara is supposed to be able to open a DAZ file (on the .daz file tag), but all I get there is an error message too, so ... scratch that plan. Hmmm. Next: bite the bullet and install Poser Pro 2010 to my boot drive --

Speaking of which, in an attempt to get around the problem of not being able to get the Michael  and Victoria base models into Poser when it's running off a drive which isn't the boot drive, I spent a few minutes at Content Paradise, which is the model store of the company which issues Poser, SmithMicro. And  was absolutely bloody dumbfounded. Not in a good way. I was looking for FIGURES to plug into Poser, to get around the absence of M4 and V4....

Content Paradise is stuffed to busting with figures. 95% female. There are about four male characters, all for M4 (which rather defeats the object!), and this tiny handful of male characters are either ugly or weird. 

Now, what do you make of that?! Like I said ... dumbfounded. So it's M4 or bust, and I'll install Poser to my boot drive and keep my fingers crossed!

The SF shot -- second from top -- was done in Bryce. The starship is one of a pack of .OBP file format spaceships I got a little while ago, and the ringed planet --? Made that myself. The shot is lit with one light and a "cheat light" to create some fill-in and beat the too-dense shadows, to get an attractive image; the render was done at large size, and the subtle starfield hand-painted in Photoshop. This becomes the starship Gilgamesh ... and I used this on the book cover I just painted, for More Than Human. More about this shortly.

More odds and ends of CG doodling:

Here, I'm playing with lights and textures, basically looking at the interplay of the bounced light off ONE light source that's waaaaay out there and cranked to huge brightness. Actually, to get this much light from a single "source" that's a zillion miles away, I created three or four distant lights on the same coordinates. They're pretending to be the same light, but to get this much illumination, it took several of them. The experiment? I'm trying to get a realistic area of shade on an otherwise brightly sunny day. Like, a backstreet in the shadows at ten in the morning. And I reckon it worked.

And I think I can get back to you inside of February, because this is a leap year. Handy, that.

Jade, February 27

Romance and fantasy ... render blues and experiments galore

click to see all images at large size,1000+ pixels

First, a huge "thank you" to the folks who have supported the relaunch of the NARC series this month. I guess the piece above will strike a chord ... I call it Rhapsody in Green, and if you know your Deaths Head, you'll know where this one came from! I've wanted to do something like this for ages, but it's a bit more complex than I had the time for, because the emerald green Jarrat with the wings wasn't done with lights, or with Photoshop twiddling. I got in there and created a whole new skinmap for the fantasy image that came right out of Stone's vivid imagination. (Interested? I've pasted in the links in the right-side column ... just scroll down, you'll find them. Five liveried book jackets.)

...and in the past few days I've been working up the characters for a new project ... basically, it's a cover I have to paint, and the truth is, I had no idea, none whatsoever, of what was going to be on it. When in doubt, I doodle in 3D, and as a rule something nice comes out of it. This time, something very nice indeed happened along. What you have here is young Jason Erickson, and Dirk Vanderhoven, of the starship Gilgamesh, which is arriving back at the domed space city in orbit in the Saturn system, and blundering into so much trouble, you'll have to read the book to find out what happens next! I'll keep you posted, let you know when the book comes out ... More Than Human, and due next month.

Last thing for today, a neat Bryce landscape:

I actually called this "Hillside at sunset," but looking at it as its pasted to the page here, it ought to be called Hillside at Dawn ... those are not sunset colors, but they do look like dawn. I guess we're looking east right here.

There's loads and loads more to upload ... I've been so busy on the laptop in the last few days, I've just kept hitting the button to keep the desktop pushing renders along. The laptop, you ask? Why the laptop? Because that's the one with the internet connection. The desktop, known locally as Thor, doesn't have a modem, and ain't going to be getting one. There's a mile and a half of complete security in knowing that the machine is utterly immune to updates and viruses.

Speaking of updates: I ran the Collada experiment, to see if I could get a DAZ character or scene into Poser, and the answer is, "You can, and you can't." You can export a figure as a Collada file, but when Poser imports it, it leaves behind every single preset. Meaning, I export Leon or Jarrat or Stone, and Poser imports the Michael 4 doll boy, standing in the zero pose, the T-pose. And he's not reposable, because a Collada object isn't rigged with morph points, or targets. So I tried exporting a character as an OBJ ... sure, you can do this, and Poser imports it just fine -- face and body morphs, costumes (no rigging, obviously) ... and not one single texture on it anywhere. Plain white plastic. Now, you'd have to go in and put about 200 maps back into place just to get to the point of being able to call one figure done. It would take hours. Not going to happen.

So, next, I looked at the realities of getting the Michael 4 base figure to load in Poser --

It won't, if Poser is running on anything except the boot drive. My Poser Pro 2010 is running on my internal 2TB harddrive, not the boot drive, because I don't have 20GB to spare there for Poser and a tonne of content. Big, big programs are on the boot drive, and it's about 66% full. Time to start conserving swap disk space. (You can run the M4 installer, but it bongs at you with error messages every time it doesn't read a filepath starting in a C.)

So I'm out of luck there too. Next? Will have to install the program itself on my boot drive .. not, repeat NOT the content. Just the base figures, so they'll load up. Then, when I want to do a render in Poser I'll load up the costumes and props I want to use ... render them up, and then remove all the transient content to keep my boot drive viable! This is the next step, and we'll see how this works.

By the by, I spent some time doing about 20 test renders using every possible setting and combo of settings in the Render Settings section of DAZ. Result? With the exception of two of the pixel filters (Gaussian and Box, which give blurred renders, as you'd expect), every other render is utterly identical. So, at this point I don't think there's much more I can squeeze out of the 3DLight render engine...

In fact, I was interested/frustrated/piqued enough to spend a half hour on one of the DAZ forums, over tea, and it turns out that I'm far from the only person struggling to get exceptional results from 3DLight. Some folks are rendering their scenes in Vue, using the DAZ models. At this, my radar turned on, because we also have Vue Esprit. Now, would Vue import a DAZ Collada properly, where Poser won't?!

One guy on the forum had a technique I never tried before: say you have five lights on a scene. Render them separately, come up with five images and composite them later. Now, there's an idea. This is a trick I must give a try. Most users on the forum were chewing over the fact that high-quality renders take soooo long; and the render engines from DAZ are some of the slowest. (For instance, days, plural, to render volumetrics in DAZ. That's news to me ... I didn't even know DAZ had the capacity to handle volumetrics! Or are they talking about Bryce? If so -- nuff said. As soon as I turn on volumetrics, the universe implodes.)

Bottom line: everything is about compromise, and nothing's ever going to be perfect.

The experiments continue! For istance ... here, below, is the traditional DAZ render of today's leader art, Rhapsody in Green. There's four lights on this, and it's pretty much what you expect from DAZ. Compare this with the top one ... there are 16 lights on the top one: red, blue, yellow, green, purple, white and (!) black, all in various degrees of brightness, and all with shadows. Compare the luminosity in the skin tones. Sixteen dim colored lights bring you close to what you see in Poser renders. Black light. Hmmm.

Jade, February 26

Now, that's more like it!

click to see all images at large size...

Suffice to say ... it worked. I've been looking for the right skinmap for Neil Travers for a long, long time, and it turns out, my intuition regarding the Bart skinmap -- which you saw yesterday, with the Brad Pitt clone wearing it! -- works very nicely indeed. I did have to do a little bit of painting to tone down some redness in the facemap, but otherwise, it looks very, very "right" on Colonel Travers here. (What's that, you say Colonel Travers? If you're still thinking Captain or Major, you just haven't gotten along to Flashpoint ... and you don't know what you've been missing!)

So I'm going to count this one done and dusted. He's amazingly realistic, especially when the lights are brighter; he got Mel Keegan's stamp of approval about fifteen minutes ago (in fact, Mel is thrilled with this -- "the best best ... lock it, call it good," said MK. So I did), and I look forward very much to posing him with Curtis Marin, Rick Vaurien and Mark Sherrat. I'll probably revisit some of the old renders -- open the projects back up, apply this skinmap, and the slightly repainted face, to the character, and re-render them ... especially as, now, I have the ability to fairly easily raytrace things that were giving my computer a hernia last year!

Speaking of lighting and rendering ... I got into the lighting settings of those David Brinnen scenes I mentioned yesterday (something I can do now, since I got the upgrade on Bryce), and ... aha. He's using something called IBL lighting, which I never did before. IBL stands for Image Based Lighting. It comes down to this: you load up an image of the sky, which the software uses to map the lighting onto your scene. The image you have to use is a special one called an .hdr file. The only software I have that can generate .hdr images is Bryce itself, so I had to render a bright sky, and then load it up to be used as the lighting map in this one:

In fact, this is a re-render of a shot you saw a couple of weeks ago. The original one was heavily, heavily enhanced in Photoshop to be useful at all, and even so, it was blue, with a purple cast, which you couldn't get rid of for love or money. I knew it was all about the lighting, but no way could I do much about it in the render. So I went back into the most problematical render I've done in ages, and loaded up a bright sky as the IBL map...

The result is hugely different, and a generation better. I won't say this is photographic, because it's not, but boy, what a difference it made! And it was easy to make the .hdr file and load it. Now comes the tougher job: figuring out all the fiddly bits. The settings and fine-tunings, to make it work properly But this one is well worth sharing, because if you compare it to the original, you can see the world of difference, and the only thing done differently is the image map used for the lighting.

All weird and wonderful ... and yes, I know, guys, I have a tonne to learn about this. I'm getting there! I still have't had the chance to install DAZ Studio 4 Pro, or run the Collada experiment, to -- hopefully -- get DAZ and Poser Pro 2010 talking to each other. I have high hopes, and I'll let you know how it goes!

Jade, 23 February