Okay ... not new art -- I ran out of time, and I do want to touch base here today because the computer is about to get pulled apart and go to the shop. So I've delved back into the ancient archives and rebalanced a few of the very best from many years go. Top: Colorado Smith. Look at the shadow on the wall behind him!! I think anyone in the world would recognize that shadow, LOL ... the shadow is actually more important than the figure! Bottom: this is a Vue image in the background and a DAZ render in the foreground. I should do this kind of thing now, using the Terragen atmospheres I'm learning now...
Top: Stormweaver ... the background started life as a photograph and went through multiple processes to become artwork, which was used as a backdrop. The trick is to set up the lighting on foreground and background match. Bottom: Barbarian Princess. Always loved the reflections in that floor. The trick to getting them wavy is to apply a "wavy" bump map to the super-reflective surface -- almost any bump map designed for water is perfect...
Top: Elven Lover. Middle: Guard Duty. Bottom: Storm Light ... which was one of the first shots I was able to wrangle, in 2010, where I could pull sophisticated tricks, like transparencies on the fabric. Guard Duty was a long, long, long render as I recall. By 2012, most techniques were in place; the only things left to nut out were depth of field, special lighting, that kind of thing.
This, above, as I remember, was an experiment ... I'd just gotten GIMP and some brushes, and was happily painting my own backdrops. The hair is Spartacos and the skinmap is Atlas ... those, I would recognize anywhere, even after eight years! Ouch. Has it been that long?!
And some science fiction to round this out...
Three out of four of these, above, were done for book covers! The chromium "Fembot" was for a novel published by a company than ain't even there anymore ... the cyborg was a work-up design for the character that ended on the cover of More Than Human, and the space cities -- yep, you recognize those from Scorpio. Book covers are always a challenge.
The rainy-night-in-the-city scene is interesting: that's a photographic backdrop that's reflecting in the wet 3D ground ... which isn't actually possible, is it? Okay, here's the trick: create a plane (primitive), slap on the photo as a diffuse map and sit the plane right behind the figure. Add a ground plane and make it as reflective as a mirror ... yep, the background plane with its photographic diffuse map will reflect. Neat trick, and sooo useful. You're welcome.
Anyway: tomorrow the desktop gets taken to pieces and goes into the workshop. I spent this afternoon backing everything up, and ... it's time. I hope to get it back, blazingly fast, on Friday or Saturday. Then we'll get the new DAZ Studio, the new Reality, and we'll tale a look at Genesis... 😵
