Just a grab bag of images today, hinting at what I'm experimenting with. The new models you see here have been stashed on the harddrive for about four months! No time to play with them -- still no time, really, but in the interests if mental health I like to take a break now and then and play with some art!
The organic starship is a model called Ankah -- and if I could remember where I got it from, I'd be delighted to tell you. I even Googled it, and came up with zip. All I halfway remember is that it's from a designer in Germany, and it was a freebie from ... somewhere. But, where?! If you know, please drop me a line and I'll come back to this post and ad some info.
The model is a fascinating shape -- kind of like a manta ray, or an undersea creature. I changed the textures and played with textures, displacement maps, reflection maps, lights. Sooo nice. It reminds me a bit of the starship on Farscape -- Moya. I loooved that show, so different, even if it did get a bit "dark and drear" at times. Just as often, it was hilariously funny, so it all balanced out in the end.
The top image is enigmatic, isn't it? I wanted something that sparked your imagination, made you stop and think. Bridge over a canal, looks like Venice (the set is Ponte Maggiore, from DAZ), with a swank limousine (from Vanishing Point) and a pair of those high heeled shoes that ordinary human beings can't walk in ... abandoned on the pavers. Ooooh, doesn't your brain start to spin stories? Your imagination tries to explain what it's seeing!
Then, zoom in on the bottom of the steps beside the bridge, switch the lights for sunset, change the sky for a Bryce sky in deep sunset colors, and sit Victoria 4.2 on the bottom steps, wearing a costume I got yonks ago, and forgot I'd bought it! It's Strings Lingerie -- I did all new textures, so if you don't recognize the costume, don't worry. These days, I very rarely use the textures as supplied with the 3D models. One way you can get absolutely unique art is to re-texture everything.
That's it for today -- no special theme or project, just the fruits of some experiments I wanted to run. Report on the post-brain-surgery performance of the computer. Very Big Grin. It's been turned on for DAYS, running ten programs back to back, driven as hard as ever and rendering anything I can throw at it. It cannot go online, because I pulled the doohickey out of the thingamajig on the end of the cable, so it can't talk to the wireless network that runs the rest of the computers, and it's as happy as a clam. No viruses, no malware or spyware -- and nooooo Windows updates! No Service Pack nuthin'. Yes!!!!
Seriously, guys, I could be onto something here. Before you chuck out that damned expensive computer that had all the top-end power for your art, games, dtp, whatever, but has lately gotten slower and wilder and nastier and won't quit crashing, flashing the Blue Screen of Death at you ... restore it to factory specs and resect the modem -- do a modemectomy. Then get a cheap laptop to surf the www. I bought this 15" Dell Inspiron in a sale for about $450 -- all it does is emails, surfing, YouTube, Google, that sort of thing. So you can keep your top-end art/games system, albeit it insulated from the online stuff that made it go wrong, and you'll pay a fraction of the price of replacing it, to get a very basic laptop on sale. It works!
Jade, 9 May
EDIT: In 2019 I'm coming back to digital art after a hiatus ... being disabled (temporarily, I hope, but I'm not certain, so...) I have plenty of time for art and a suite of programs to work with that I didn't have before. The art is consequently better than it's ever been, even though I now need to upgrade my hardware yet again. Meandering through the old archives, sometimes I stumble over an old render that was a good idea but could -- now -- be done much better, so I'm pulling them out and redoing them, with this result:
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| The 2019 raytrace, and... |
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| The 2023 Photoshop repaint of the original 2011 raytrace. I leave it to you to decide which you like the best! |
