I'd forgotten how much I like this character: Guardian of the city, probably about as old as Duncan McLeod, nooowhere near human! Archangel, alien, faer -- your call. I never actually did decide his backstory, just that he's been the guardian of this particular city as long as anyone can remember, and he recruits new blood, trains them to eventually take his place.
Now ... guarding the city against what?! That's the smart question! Hmm. Let me think about that. Just a raytrace ... I do intend to get back into LuxRender very soon, but this ain't it ... just me being clever with the old, old render engine built into DAZ Studio ten years ago. Yes, it's very limited, I know. But you can squeeze a lot out of it, if you also fall back on Photoshop for post work. Yep, there's a lot of painting in this.
Now ... guarding the city against what?! That's the smart question! Hmm. Let me think about that. Just a raytrace ... I do intend to get back into LuxRender very soon, but this ain't it ... just me being clever with the old, old render engine built into DAZ Studio ten years ago. Yes, it's very limited, I know. But you can squeeze a lot out of it, if you also fall back on Photoshop for post work. Yep, there's a lot of painting in this.
Project 25 in Terragen is the most complex "terrain" I've done yet: a "power fractal" with a kind of landform pattern called "Vodonoi billows" applied, and almost every trick I know to date. There's one or two more than I could have added, but they wouldn't work in this picture, so ... nice:
On the downside, I ran the little experiment and added a wee patch of plain grass to the simplest render imaginable. Uh huh. What would have been a 20 second preview turned into a two and a half minute preview, because of a few strands of semi-invisible grass. Nope. I think we'll leave the grass and trees and plants alone on this little computer! Let me learn everything I can about terrains, shaders, atmospheres, water, clouds, then we'll move on into vegetation after I get the desktop upgrades. That's the only thing that makes sense. Sooo...
On into Bryce 7 Pro for a science fiction scene:
No way in the world can I get Bryce to give me anything vaguely like a realistic earthly scene, but it's pretty darned good at conjuring alien worlds, and weird, weird skies ... and it's dead easy to chuck a spacecraft into Bryce. The only thing is, for some reason they leave their textures behind. You have to re-do all the textures inside of Bryce. [rolls eyes] Anyway, the result is very nice, so ... what the hey? This turned out well, with the mirror-like skins on the fighter ships reflecting the pink dawn light. I call it Dawn Patrol.
I'll leave you with a detail -- eye candy -- shot from the character study, and promise to come back to this character very soon. He really is a knockout:
