Saturday, October 23, 2010

3D SF -- characters, and an atmospheric world...


In the second segment of the new Hellgate novel (which is probably going to get a title-change to Flashpoint, though it will also probably keep the old title, "The Silence of Knives" as a subtitle ... there, that's more information than you needed!) there's a scene on a mining colony faaaar on the wrong side of the frontier, in the wilds of Freespace. This was very much on my mind when I started paying with a new toy I just got on sale (the space ship here ... Powerage's Power Lifter), and I couldn't resist going ahead and setting up the rest of this shot, with all the atmospherics. More about this later ... you're thinking, "it had to be done in Bryce! Nope. Done in DAZ Studio 3 in 2010, repainted in Photoshop in 2024).

Then...





You have got to recognize this woman! Very French, very chic ... she's an order of magnitude more intelligent than you are, and don't you forget it! She was running a project to develop a biocyber brain implant for agents in the field which was highly controversial, because the telemetry transmissions from these "chips" can be tracked, and they get agents killed.

Yep, you got it: Yvette McKinnen. The computer genius who dug the bugs out of the carrier NARC-Athena, and later on sent the AI spies into the DAC computers.




As I said above, these shots were rendered in DAZ ... but a lot of overpainting happened in Photoshop, years and years later, to spruce them up. I originally posted the DAZ renders, just as the came out of the engine, but, but but ... well ... see for yourself:



Join me tomorrow, and I'll show you how to set up the atmospherics in Studio. Let's take Michael 4 skinny dipping -- two birds with one stone ... a tutorial on how to do this stuff, and some beaut, exotic "ars gratia artis" images!

Jade, 23 October