Today I'm playing with lights -- and/or the lack of them. There's no limit to what you can do with the software ... the above image wasn't given any post-production work at all. Nada. What you see is just what rendered right out of the Studio 3 program itself.We also made a great discovery t'other day: turns out, 3D Studio Max (which Dave uses), shares one export filter in common with DAZ's import filters. So now, we can create a model in Max, and ship it into DAZ. You have no idea how cool that is.
And this morning's work was a treat: I put together the wraparound paperback cover for Ground Zero -- based on the ebook cover:
Click on the above to see the whole thing at 1000 pixels wide. (Incidentally, the book is doing fantastic business -- it's somewhere around the 50 mark on the Amazon Kindle techno thrillers category list.) The ebook cover was similar but ... different. It obviously doesn't make a shred of sense to have a back cover on an ebook! So I did a bounding box on the "front" and so firth. Paperback covers are a tad bit different, and you have a bit more latitude. If I'd had a lot of time, I'd have done a "widescreen" painting to wraparound the whole cover, but as it was, being thoroughly strapped for time, I did a gradient fill and overlaid the text in white. All that work was done in serif X3, while the artwork had already been done in DAZ.
The DAZ work was a profile shot overlaid against a background which I'd montaged from a nighttime cityscape (it's actually Sydney, not Adelaide) and an astronomy image of the Pleiades. The background montage was done in Micrographx, shipped out to Irfanview to be tweaked and resized, then imported into DAZ as the background. The model, who had been pre-designed (by me) was then merged into the shot and lit, using two spotlights, one a green so pale it was almost white, the other blue. The shot was then rendered and shipped back into Serif X3 to have its logos and graphics added. Mel Keegan was thrilled.
Jade - October 7
