Sorry to vanish on you for a couple of days ... loads of things going on behind the scenes, most of which were semi-insane, and none of which turned into anything that made sense. As the weekend draws to a close, I find myself scratching my head and wondering, "What happened?" Added to which, "I want my weekend back, dammitall!"
But since I'm not likely to get my weekend back -- here's a tasty piece of art. This one was the challenge from hell...
I could NOT ray trace it! All I can get is about 84% and then crash to the desktop. It took me several goes to get it to render with shadows turned on!
I need a faster computer.
Check. Right. Duh. Next year?
It's Victoria, wearing the Daryl hair set to carrot red, and the cape from the Shadow Storm costume. That's just the boring old bikini from the V4 Basic Wear clothing pack that you download as freebies when you get DAZ ... amazing what changing the textures and slapping on a couple of opacity maps will do, innit?! Then, add the plantpots from the Sarina's Patio set, and the Columns from another DM set (I forget which, sorry) -- and the foreground is the Circular Shrine, also by DM. But then I changed out all the textures for various grains and shades of marbles ... made the plantpots gloss-enamel,polished the floor with reflections, and added a displacement map to it...
The render only takes 10 minutes with the Deep Shadow Mapping. The raytracing takes about 65 minutes to get to 84%, then -- crrrraaaassssshhhh!!! Not much I can do about that. So --
Then the piece was shipped out into Micrografx and GIMP to be overpainted. I made it a little more contrasty, added a couple of shadows that don't render too accurately in the not-raytraced render, added the glow off the lights and a bit of flare. Added in the eyelights, which you can't even see in the small version Blogger pastes to the page ... last thing, I painted the hairline to look more like hair and less like a "straight line fit" where a wig goes on.
So -- just one render today, because it's taken me two days to get it to render at all! And fear not: I'll put one of the many Michael 4 characters into this same scene, same situation, and we'll see what he looks like in this treatment. Why should Victoria have all the fun?!
Good thing it was a warm night, hunh?
Jade, April 10
