Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Bryce, Gimp and DAZ 3D working in concert: Stormlight

Bryce sky ... foreground composed in DAZ Studio 3. I call this piece "Stormlight," and it's fully intended as a set for a gorgeous guy and/or gal to stand in (they can take turns) but I'm so out of time today, it just isn't funny, so ... today the set, tomorrow the models! Bear with me, folks. It's a combo of domestic stuff and a lot of work.

So, the scene above was done in layers. First, a Bryce sky:

Then, get the Bryce sky into GIMP and paint the heck out of it:
The painting was done with a set of brushes called "Cloudy," from something called "Jenna's Sanity Brushes," which you can get at this link: http://scully7491.deviantart.com/ ... [2024 NOTE: the link is still live, it doesn't return a 404 error, but this user is no longer active on the platform, and I couldn't find any reference to the brushes, or where to use them] ... they're very interesting brushes, with good results, if you know just what you're doing -- and it's a lot of fun learning this stuff.

So that got the background done, and it was the background that set the tone for the whole image. Now you needed to load up the props:

Concrete slabs from the DM Instances pack ... load 'em twice, stack them and skew them to look like an old wall -- you'll easily figure it out;

Concrete slab -- singular -- from the same pack. Scale it up to about 250% and stand it on end to look a lot like a megalith;

Four shrubs from the PNature shrub pack (they're Poser models but they work brilliantly in DAZ ... get these from Renderosity;

The climbing plant from DM The Gate, for the ivy. Put the plant put at 0% opacity, then scale and rotate the ivy to look like it's growing on and through the old rocks;

The violet bunch, from the Vintage Darlings prop set. Place it on the wall at a nice angle ... this tells you that there's a human very close, because only a human would have picked a bunch of violets and put them down for a minute (probably to grab an umbrella).

Then the fun starts: it took 8 lights to get this effect ... blue, purple, gray, green, peach and white lights. And fiddling the lights into position is something you just have to learn! You can get fantastic results though, if you just start fiddling somewhere and have a bit of patience.

Join me tomorrow when some gorgeous models are going to wander into this set...

Jade, April 28