Couldn't resist rendering the warrior from yesterday's art a second time ... I did the white horse in the storm first, and then thought, "Hang on, put the Hyborian dude into the same set, since I just spent an hour building it, and relight it. (The set is constructed from numerous trees, bushes, plants and so forth, and the terrain was done in Bryce and exported as an OBJ, imported into DAZ and given the treatment with every map imaginable. Nice set.) Turned out to be one of my better ideas --
That is a very nice character indeed ... going to pat myself on the back for hand-painting the hair. As I said t'other day, juuust starting to get good at that part. In fact, I'm going to pat myself on that back for this whole thing: it rendered up a treat. The costume, incidentally, is bits and pieces from the "Wood God" costume set, but I changed out all the textures for my own, and added bump and displacement mapping. Check out the rabbit fur on the boots! Neat, if I do say so myself ... also, check out the way the hands rendered here. Now, that's what I've been trying to achieve. That also isn't painting -- that's in the render. Yes!
You might not believe it, but these images are not even raytraces. I did rayrace tests, but switching to rayrace didn't make 0.1% of difference to the shot, and it would have taken about an hour to render (all those plants!) whereas the deep shadow map took about 70 seconds. For the horse, I rendered the shot ENORMOUS, to accommodate getting the mane and tail segments into place: CWRW did the painting, many, many years ago (the Manes and Tails Pack, via Renderosity), but it's actually not such an easy job to wiggle them into place, so you're best off to render big and then resize the image when you're done.
Since I rendered it so huge, I could cut a desktop wallpaper out of it:
This ought to suit most monitors. You're welcome!
It's actually a re-re-reworking of an old idea. I used to have really good ideas many years ago, but not quite the skills to pull them off at the standard one would actually have wanted. For instance:
That's the original idea, and it's not a bad shot at all. The original file data says it was created on February 13, 2013 -- a tad over six years ago. It's a fair picture, and an extremely good idea. But this one -- second from the top, today -- hits all the marks. (You may not even believe it, but the skinmap on the horse in the old render is the same as the one in the new. The quality of the final picture is not about the texture; it's not even about the render engine. It's all in the lighting and post work. Remember, I didn't even bother rayracing today, much less wandering off into LuxRender or something.)
What I'm drooling to get into is this:
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| Hivewire Big Cat |
Soon. First, Dave and I are taking a road trip from March 25 to 27: it's our China Wedding anniversary (actually on the 21st, but he's working), and we haven't been away from home for three years ... Mom was in her last days, then I got sick, and I'm still disabled, but also desperate to get out, so -- our twentieth wedding anniversary is a pretty good excuse, yes? Then, after the trip, there's one or two personal things to take care of (read: dental appointments; you know how expensive they can be). Then ... rebuild computer. Then we can do all kinds of things! Tarzan, anyone?
