Saturday, November 7, 2009

Two guys for the price of one...!

So I sez to him, "Okay, so I go stamp on Jabba's tail. But what do I get out of it?" And he sez to me, "You get to keep your head on your shoulders, kiddo ... what, you want more?" And I look him up and down in his fancy-smantzy green jacket that cost a fortune, same as this suite at the High Five is costin' him an arm and a leg, and I sez, "Yeah, maybe I do."

And I guess this constitutes Episode Five! It's a bit of a thrill to see to see how you can get the characters to interact. In fact, you can probably track this "story" back to Episode Zero: http://3d-adventures.blogspot.com/2009/10/got-new-toys-today.html -- I called that render "In the Land of Fire," and at the time our gunfighter was blond. If I was going to seriously pursue this as a story, I'd go back to the project which was rendered as "Land of Fire," and I'd adjust the character. (I did actually change the model too. Land of Fire was a different face as well as being blond:

And this is one of the Very Best things about the DAZ work ... you can mix and match everything, save the characters, change the backgrounds, and literally put together a story in pictures. Gunfighter arrives insystem, meets a contact who tells him, "You gotta get up to the spaceport." Next thing you know, you're rendering Leather clad hunk makes dangerous rendezvous at spaceport ... then you're into interior shots. Have a look at the last few days.

I'm actually getting the itch to tell a story here. Anyway ... it's all a blast. I can't recommend the DAZ studio highly enough. You do also need a good eye for backgrounds -- either creating them or photographing them, unless you want to get into the 3D "environments." These are absolutely incredible, but they do tend to be a bit expensive. You could drop a couple of hundred bucks to get the sets and a couple of props, to tell a scene. Which is chicken feed, when you remember how much work was put in by the designers, to MAKE the sets and props.

However, me being on a budget, I'm doing it mostly with photographics, and am going to try my hand at making models in Hexagon ... when the disk gets here. The mail is infuriatingly slow.

Oh yes ... and both the characters in the top scene are Michael 4 "takes," as designed by me. Like I said -- two guys for the price of one. And you gotta like that.

Jade, 8 November