Tuesday, February 10, 2015

Phororealism in LuxRender ... flights of Bryce fantasy

LuxRender, using one spotlight only ...
and you really can't tell this from a human model.
The overlay effects were painted in Photoshop later,
using various third-party brushes.


Bryce 7 Pro lends itself well to SF and fantasy subjects. One of the
spacecraft (the big one) is an OBJ imported, but the glider-plane is
actually an OBP, or Bryce Object, from a pack I bought from
Renderosity ... oh, a long, long time ago.
Very nice "lines" on this design -- an OBP for Bryce ...
check out the Renderosity catalog for this one. In the background,
that's one of the Dystopia City Blocks imported into Bryce and then
all of the textures switched out for Bryce textures...
A closer look at the water in this little stream, reflecting the sunset sky. Am
very happy with the way this turned out.  
The big spacecaft is an OBJ from Renderosity ... I think it's called
the Allied Fleets Frigate. Very good model -- renders brilliantly
with the Bryce atmospherics. Have used it several times.
DAZ Studio's "cartoon" render setting is a lot of fun
to play with. Am re-rendering some old, old projects
just to see how they turn out as 'toons.
More images from the bottomless stash I've been accumulating for the last year or so, while not having the energy or the braincells to upload so much as a postage stamp!

The swordsman image is a re-render of an old, old project: Fantasy swordsman ... GIMP brushes .. Yaoi romance ... and to save you a click, I'll pull the prehistoric render over here, to show you the diff between what DAZ was doing at the time, and what LuxRender is doing right now:

The old DAZ Studio render, done almost five years ago.
For the new LuxRender image, I used the same file,
same light, same everything.
Now, that's not a bad render at all, and you can certainly recognize the lighting as being identical with the file shipped into LuxRender. But the new render is ... well, so close to photographic, you're sitting there frowning over it, saying, "Is that a render or a human model?!" And that, guys, is the object of this exercise...

Well, it is and it ain't, after all. Because just as often as we want to achieve photorealism, we want to take off on a flight of artistic fantasy. Which is where I went with the second picture. Anybody old enough to remember the artwork of Chris Foss, from the British edition SF paperbacks way back in the 1970s? I used to drool over this art, way back when, and have always wanted to do something like it. Now that Bryce 7 Pro is largely doing as it's told, I'm enjoying the heck out of it!

Oh -- Chris Foss has a marvelous website: http://www.chrisfossart.com ... more than well worth a look, if you're into space art. I still love this work, and have enormous respect for this artist. He's one of several who influenced me over the space of decades.

Lastly, another of DAZ Studio's cartoon renders. Occasionally, I take one of the old, old files (never throw anything away) and push it through Studio on the cartoon settings, just to see what'll happen. Takes about two minutes to get a carrtoon, whereas it takes anything between four and 40 hours to get a LuxRender picture. (Speaking of render times, the atmpspherics on the Bryce 7 Pro image pushed the time on that one out to something like four or five hours.)

More soon. Promise.

Jade, February 11, 2015.