Tuesday, February 19, 2019

Fantasy hunk, SF, landscapes, spaceships -- the works!


Was browsing through the big Icon art book -- the Art of Frank Frazetta -- which put me in the mood to do a "sword and sorcery" style barbarian. This one is a beaut, somewhere between Frazetta and Boris in style, worked in DAZ (just a raytrace; I haven't yet gotten back to LuxRender) and Photoshop (a lot of painting). Very happy with this ... and will come back to the barbarian in days and renders to come. The skin map is superb: Atlas, by SAV, for good old Michael 4. Most of the hair is hand painted, and .. mmm, very happy with the result. Do see it at full size: I uploaded it at 2000 pixels high, so -- enjoy.

Also: more Adventures in Terragen! Been busy in the last couple of days, but didn't upload yesterday due to having a Very Major Migraine in the late afternoon. Right now, am juuust beginning to really drive Terragen, not get taken for a tide by it. For instance...

I wanted an upland meadow, something like the "Heidi" landscape:


Yep, got it! Then, a real, genuine lake in the hills:


No problem! Then, something like the high mountains of Central Asia:



Yep, can do. Then, the sun rising over the Takla Makan region:


Oh, yes, this is doable. Cloudscapes to order? Here we go:


I've worked through two of the tutorials and am off on my own, playing with everything to see what it does. It's huge fun! And Terragen does in minutes what Bryce won't do in weeks. 😁

Okay, so Bryce does have it's uses, though...

Bryce 7 Pro: Exoplanet system
I did this in Bryce, in a few minutes, and painted the starfields in Krita, which has this fantastic "star field" brush. That came out well, so, inspired to stop trying to make Bryce make earthlike landscapes, I went for a thoroughly alien world:


I call that one "Night Patrol," and ... yeah, okay, Bryce has its uses. But making fantastic, realilstic landscapes on planet Earth isn't one of them! A handful of people can make it do that ... heaven alone knows how. Beats me. And very few software forms beat me. Anyway, we have the best of all worlds now. I'm heading into "fractal procedural terrains" with Terragen tomorrow. Oooh, ah!