3D art and drama merge ... the plot thickens!

Pushing the envelope to see how far you can take
the Deep Shadow Map --

-- because I can't raytrace. Nope. 
Not for love or money... well, not if I don't want
Studio to crash to the desktop! So...

the 

3D art crosses the line into fiction, storytelling ... a scene is playing out here, and the characters we saw a few days ago in two separate scenes have rendezvoused, probably to do a job ... and by the looks of this, it's a conspiracy!

You remember these:

(Click on the images to go to the original posts and see the full series of renders...)

The plot just thickened ... and I do believe there's a little righteous treason and a lot of drama unfolding. You know, I'd like to see this movie!

The biggest challenge in today's renders was the costuming. There seems to be a problem with the Tex texture for the duster coat worn by the tall dark warrior. When you move the coat to pose the character, the texture doesn't resize and reshape properly around the right arm and shoulder. This meant a bit of post production work, to paint it in. No big deal, it's not as if it's hard or time consuming to do this.

Another interesting thing is ... the shirt and pants worn by the young dancer-assassin who was practising the martial arts in the woods earlier: they're the same pants and shirt from the M4 Cowboy costume set, but you'd hardly know it. The shirt has become light, silky, flimsy, loose. You do this by deleting the fabric texture map, and then changing the opacity and color, and using the "morphs" supplied with the costume to make it bigger, looser. Same with the pants -- delete the map as supplied, then change the color and surface characteristics, so that the pants look a lot like moleskin (which has nothing to do with moles ... it's something like satin or velveteen or something like that -- not quite sure what it is, but it's fabric, not leather).

The lighting setup was fun (not). I just couldn't get it right for some reason and spent about half an hour changing colors and brightness and ... so on. I got it in the end, though. Phew!

For the first time, I'm showing the top of the wall, so you're obviously at the corner of an outside wall, with the woods all around. The wall is still the upright part of the Backdrops Made Easy prop set, but it needed a "cap" ... so I used the "top beam" construction member from a set of columns I got a week or two ago. The columns are for building Greek and Roman temples, that kind of thing, but I remembered the top beam, and it made the perfect top for this wall.

The finishing touch is the earring on the young dancer-assassin. It's from the Destiny Jewels props. I've used a couple of pieces from this set before; Amadeus is wearing the necklace, and the golden yaoi beauty from last month is wearing the headpiece, re-positioned as a collar. That turned out to be a very versatile set of props!

Jade, 8 February

***Posted by MK, because I have no viable connection to the www today.