Rainy weather at last ... and I'm home alone, got the place to myself allll evening. 😶 Sooo... more art than usual, lately! Nothing to do but mess about in DAZ Studio, Bryce, Photoshop, and -- well, here you are: The Raven off duty, out of armor! Now, there's a sight for sore eyes. The set is MOg Ruith, from the DAZ store. I haven't worked with it much. It's a bear to light! Also...
That's just about the best I'm going to squeeze out of the old software, as per realistic landscapes without getting into Terragen and adding "populations" of trees and plants ... that comes later, after the computer rebuild, okay? Okay. The hardware I have now won't do it, and the dentist had dibs on my money. All of it. Rats. 😒
The big tree in the background is also the most complex tree I've ever conjured --
For the artists among you, it's an amalgam of FOUR trees, and I used #2 from this pack, from Renderosity -- inexpensive, at US$10 for about six trees. If you have any 3D tree model where you can get hold of the trunk/branches and the foliage, separately, you can load four trees on the same coordinates; then make the trunks and branches of two of them transparent (!), and fiddle the x,y,z values of all four of them to create a dense, complex tree -- far more realistic than one tree alone. This is also a gajillion percent better than any Bryce tree I ever managed to create in the tree workshop in Bryce 7 Pro. This is just a raytrace ... it is, however, a two hour raytrace. You gotta be patient with this. I don't do it so often because ... I'm not that patient!
Also ... a change of pace now. Let's have some science fiction to offset the fantasy and landscape work:
Although, for the life of me, I can't get Bryce 7 Pro to create a realistic earth-like image, it's terrific for alien planets! I did this in about 45 minutes, and gave the somewhat flat render a tweak in good old (free) Irfanview for good measure. And --
This, in DAZ Studio, finished off in Photoshop to add the snow, headlight glare and lens flare. The biggest problem with this one was getting the city to light up properly! That's one of the Dystopia city blocks ... it lights up automatically in Bryce, damnit, as soon as "the sun goes down," but this is just a DAZ raytrace ... didn't want to wrestle with Bryce anymore today. But in the end I did get the city to light up, and it's not bad at all. Looks like Jarrat and Stone are on their way out somewhere ... possibly on Aurora, the city of Thule -- the city from Aphelion, if you remember. The old ground city, not the domes ones in the sky --
-- you remember those! What's rather cool is that I actually built those cities from scratch, in Bryce, for the Aphelion cover art project! That whole thing was done in the one shot, sky, mountains and all, with just a bit of "zap" added in, in Photoshop. (All due credit to Mel Keegan for the inspiration!)
Okay ... time for din-dins, and a movie. And since I have the place to myself, I get to choose!
