Adventures in 3D

A bit of this, a bit of that...

2012-01-27T00:41:00.000-08:00

click to view at large size -- 1000 pixels wide, or more...

Something for everyone today: male nude, action, fantasy, science fiction, space ships, landscapes, Bryce, digital painting, CG art ... the works! This is what I've had going through in the last couple of days.

The top three images are a sort of "pet fascination" of mine. Movie directors these days use a thing called "pre viz," or "pre-visualization" to help them frame up the shot before they waste a million bucks an hour on the set. I would dearly love to work as a pre-viz artist for a movie comany. *sigh* They email me something like stick figure sketches, and I render up "quickies" such as you see here -- they look like frames out of the movie, and they'll tell the director what'll work, and what won't, and why not. These shots took a matter of minutes, and it's a load of fun. Now, how in the world does one go about getting a job doing pre-viz --?! These images have no post work on them at all. Nada. These are just as they rendered up...

Next: a spaceship on approach to a blue-green world. Ship and planet rendered in Bryce, and all else done in Photoshop -- basically, some surface detail on the planet, the starfield, the lens flare. The nebula is a Hubble image that was dropped into the background, blended down, and a mask applied to the ship to make the nebula drop behind it. Neat.

Next: a rather lovely Bryce landscape -- fully photo realistic. At last! This is the first time I've managed to get photo realism, and it's still a leeetle bit of a crap shoot for me. This one was almost easy (almost too easy, in fact), including the Instancing lab, which "paints" plants and flowers onto the ground. The result is actually rather superb, so --

I thought I'd have another go, see if I could do it again. Nope. The Instancing lab started to crash the program over and over. I barely got the foreground set up before I just couldn't keep Bryce up on its feet for long enough to put enough into the shot to make it realistic. So I rendered what I had, and then shipped it into Photoshop and painted the hell out of it. That one there classifies as a digital painting, not a render, and this was what I wound up with after tearing my hair out by the roots...

In fact, I would up on Google, searching on "Bryce crashing when Instancing used," and it turns out ... it does. The publisher actually issued an upgrade about five months ago -- I missed it, because at the time my computer wouldn't run Bryce well enough to make it worth getting into, so I wasn't paying any attention to the website. Now, my mission is to find out of I can get the upgrade. Then maybe (and I know it's a long shot) I can get the Instancing lab to work. If not -- well, there are other ways and means, not as fast, but far more stable.

The last image for today -- the pony in the paddock -- was supposed to be photorealistic too. It's based on a piece cut out of the meadow shot. Easy enough to use it as a backdrop and put the pony into the foreground ... and then, wouldn't you know it? I had every render problem under the sun! I wound up with an image that had "problems." If you saw the actual render, you'd be saying, "Hmmmm." So I shipped it right into Photoshop and converted it to a painting, which also gave me the opportunity to just paint out the problems, and paint in the solutions! Grrr.

Suffice to say, I'm still working on getting the drop on Bryce ... I'll see if I can get the upgrade ... and I'm groaning for a decent render engine! If I won lotto next week, it would be Poser Pro 2012 -- mind you, I'm told it's buggy as an ant farm. Better to wait six months, and get the fixed version, yes? Yes.

Jade, 27 January

The archangel, the mammoth and the gum tree. Say, what?!

2012-01-23T23:39:00.000-08:00

Click to see at large size ... all uploaded at 1000 pixels or bigger...

Here's an eclectic assortment! Fantasy guys, landscape, Bryce, DAZ, Photoshop ... and a mammoth. Yes, a real, genuine mammoth. Have been looking at dinosaurs in the catalogs at DAZ and Renderosity. Now, there's some serious "wow" factor. Not that I have any use for dinosaurs, you understand! The mammoth was on sale at 100% off, so how could I go by --?

The first piece today is essentially the same character as you saw a while ago -- the raven-winged archangel. You must have been wondering when I'd get around to depicting the character in flight! The sky was rendered separately in Bryce, custom designed for this piece, and after the raytrace in DAZ, I shipped it into Photoshop for some painting. Birds, smoke from the chimneys, a light in the window. Also, I "painted down" the building on the right to make it darker, and to hint an sunset colors on the walls. The result is actually lovely -- do check it out at larger size. It was rendered at about 1500 pixels wide, and I've uploaded it here at about 1100 (also compressed. Full size, uncompressed images get a little ... large.)

The landscape is designed to look like South Australia in the summer -- and it really does! But what's neat about this render is the big tree, the "hero" tree in the left of the shot. It's not a bad emulation of one of the big types of gum trees, and I designed, built, that one myself. It took about 15 minutes, maybe 20, and most of that time was learning how to do this stuff in the Bryce tree lab. I'm rather tickled with this tree. The render ...? It was done at 1500 pixels wide, and it took (!) 7.5 hours. I rendered overnight -- set it to go when I took my aching head to bed, and when I got up at 3:30am with a monster headache, it was still going ... and at 6:00am, when I made it back to the computer, full of pills for said headache, it was juuuust finishing up. Patience is a virtue. It was finished off in Photoshop, basically to have some gamma and contrast correction -- and I'm very pleased with this. There's places in this state that look just like this, especially in January, when the heat is relentless.

The last shot is a study in light and shadow and color -- one thing that's interesting is that I exported my gum tree out of Bryce, and it left its trunk behind! I got fantastic foliage and no woodwork ... go figure. So I imported the skeleton of another tree -- a prop I've had for eons which has a great trunk and comparatively poor foliage -- and plopped my foliage on it for the best of both worlds; added an abstract background and set some dramatic lights, purely for effect. For fun.

More soon. Head still aching. Must close eyes now...

Jade, 24 January

SF, fantasy, horses, spaceships, landscapes -- a bit of everything today

2012-01-21T00:33:00.000-08:00

click to see all art at large size: they're compressed, so shouldn't take long to download

I've been busy with art ... time to post the images is a whole 'nother question! So I'm posting them all today, because it could be another couple of days before I can get back on and post more.

The first two images follow on from the spaceport scene you saw in full daylight a few days ago, and there's a story that goes along with this. It's the same character, same spaceplane ... but it's night now. It's hot. And the damn' thing won't start up for love or money. He's working on it, trying to get it fixed, when he hears someone approaching. A guy steps out of the night: "Looks like you need a hand there." But the hero knows there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. Yes, he needs a hand, but what does this tall, handsome stranger want in return...? Naturally, he's a tad bit suspicious, and...

Sure enough, two days later our intrepid hero is flying a dangerous mission over an inhospitable world where the atmosphere would strip your lungs!

The top two pieces were done in DAZ Studio ... and I'm starting to long for a proper render engine. I'd committed to this skinmap (SAV Eros), and discovered way too late that it won't render properly in DAZ. As soon as you turn on raytracing, the whole skin turns into a mosaic, with "join lines" showing everywhere. It was biiiig fun painting them out in Photoshop. I chose to do the work because it was great practice for me -- I'm still trying to wire up my brain to handle a mouse pen well enough to make it worthwhile putting down some serious money to get a proper one. This was a fine exercise.

The horse picture is lovely ... it uses this Bryce landscape render as the background:

This was a separate project, and done in daylight. Turning it into moonlight involved putting a "color cast layer" on it inn Photoshop (using a bucket-filled layer) and jiggling the settings till they were just right. The results are very nice indeed. Check out the grasses and plants in this Bryce picture ...! For the first time ever, I have the chance to use what the call the Instancing Lab. Basically, you create a plant, or grass, whatever, and then you "paint" the object onto the terrain in swatches and bunches. You could grass up a whole hillside with a stroke of the virtual brush. The downside? The render times blow out. This picture was rendered at 1500 pixels wide, and even with the PC I have now (thanks to my husband, may blessings be upon him) it was a 2 hr 36 min render. But worth every minute! A little bit of color and light correction was done in Photoshop later; and when it turned into a nighttime shot to be used with the horse, the moon was painted on using an .abr brush, last of all.

Those are stock trees: the big ones in the middle are the Special Acacia, and while it's true that most Bryce trees don't look so convincing, some do. Speaking of trees...

These coconut palms were created in Bryce by Dave, and exported over to me -- handed to me on a jump drive, and I built this landscape around them. These trees are really cool ... great work from Dave. Check out the clouds drifting in front of the volcanic mountain there ... you might assume they were painted on later in Photoshop. Nope! They were created as objects and plunked right there in midair! You make a primitive shape and apply "materials" to it. Fuzzy, transparent, pale, soft ... result, clouds. In fact, the little pool in the grove in the previous picture was also done as a flat primitive, with a water effect slapped on it. Neat!

The last thing that I want to mention about today's images is the mane on the horse. It's glorious ... it's hand-painted ... but not by me! I'm still at the crayon stage, trying to figure out how to make my hand behave itself and use a mouse pen as easily as it uses a pencil or paintbrush. These manes and tails were painted by a designer called CWRW, and you buy them (via Renderosity) as PSD files filled with layers. You lift out the layer(s) you want, and then use the tools in Photoshop to reshape, skew, resize, flip, color and so forth, to make the pre-painted elements fit your scene. As soon as you're used to Photoshop, it's quite easy, whereas actually painting the manes and tails is a job for someone whose hand will behave itself with a mouse pen just the way mine won't. Kudos to CWRW: marvelous work. In the picture above, the mane was built up from various hanks of hair; I did about 10 layers of them, and I love the result.

Don't give up on me: it might be a couple of days before I can get back with another post, but you just knooow that the artwork is rendering away to itself in the background!

Jade, January 21

Trees, elves, daylight and playing god in the vitual world

2012-01-17T18:22:00.000-08:00

click to see at large size (they're compressed for quick download)

The quest for Bryce 7 Pro daylight appears to have been rewarded! I won't claim that these renders will appear fully photo-realistic on close examination (especially not the second one, featuring the really neat tree in the foreground -- more about that later) ... but at quick glance, your eye is just about fooled, because (hee hee!) that's a pretty good representation of daylight.

What's the trick? Well ... I was hunting through the Atmospheres pane of the Skylab (that really is what it's called), and I saw something called Basic Daylight. Now, everything in the Skylab is a preset ... you can get alien planet skies, midnight storms, storybook mornings, whatever you want, basically ... anything except for real, genuine, normal, ordinary, garden variety daylight. So when I saw something called Basic Daylight, I had to take it for a spin...

Hmm. Not too bad -- at least, it gives you a place to start. What you do is, load up the Basic Daylight sky, and then get real busy: change the sun position (by dragging an icon on a virtual globe), and then ... gird your loins and get into the actual sun/moon controls, and literally "play god" and tell the sun how bright to shine, and what color! Me like. A lot.

And speaking of playing god ... something about "Only Zeus can render a tree" (with all due apologies to Joyce Kilmer; who is no relation to Val. I think). I know, I know, it was make a tree. But, sheesh, you'd need to be zapping lightning bolt around (or maybe your name better be James Cameron!) to render proper trees properly...

This one you see here --? I, me, myself, actually made this tree in a program called Carrara, which is DAZ Studio's bigger, brighter brother. They're up to Carrara 8 Pro now, so they're giving away Carrara 6 -- it was packed on the disk in the back of their promo book, which I bought via Amazon about two years ago. Frankly, I never even bothered to install it on my old computer. It would have been a world of grief. But with the new machine, I loaded it up the other day and Dave, who has some acquaintance with it, showed me around ... showed me the tree lab.

Aha, says I ... I shall play god big time, and make a tree! The upside: the perogram makes it quite easy to get some very good results with tree making. The downside --

Dang. This tree, which looks about 500% more realistic than your average 3D tree, has over 650,000 polygons!! I exported it out of Carrara, got it into Bryce, set it to render (and not even on the top settings, either), and even with a super-fast computer, Bryce was going to take thirty HOURS to render it at a large size. So I rendered the picture at half-size, about 750 pixels wide. That took about three hours, and it's all on account of the polygon count.

Well, shoot. Now you know the reason why 3D trees usually look pretty poor! They're made simple, of necessity, because anything more complex would take the rest of your life to render, or crash the computer, and probably both! Unless your name is James Cameron, and you're rendering on about 50 processors ... or you happen to be Zeus, and you have access to every processor in the known universe.

Not being either one of them, I'll tread carefully when it comes to making trees! But daylight is doable, and I just stumbled into how another part of Bryce's materials lab works. You can sometimes scale your materials to fit the object you're slapping them onto. Not all the time, but sometimes. And that's so handy.

Speaking of daylight ... before anyone asks, the sun rays in today's figure work were not done inside DAZ studio. They were painted on in Photoshop, in post work. In fact, they could have been done in DAZ, but I didn't have time or inclination. To have these render as part of the scene, you'd paint them in Photoshop, save them to a black and white image, and load up that image as an opacity (transparency) map, which would be applied to a primitive, a plane, which you make in DAZ by clicking "create primitive." You'd jiggle the plane into position, so that the rays were in the right place, and render. But there was quite a lot of other post work to be done on these shots anyway, so I thought, why bother?

Here's the detail from the second one:

...and as nice as this is, I knooooow what it would look like, if it were rendered in a proper render engine. I'm drooling over the Firefly engine, which is built right into Poser. Meh. Whimper.

Notice the background in the figure shots?! The view outside the window. Yep, it's the Bryce landscape (or a piece out of it), which you see today, with full daylight over the craggy skyline with the canyons in the background. I just cut a swatch out to fit the render size of the figure shots, and adjusted the gamma and contrast waaaay up to simulate the brightness of "outside" which your eye would expect, when the virtual camera is getting a correct exposure on a figure in the dimness inside. Neat.

The cute little sparrow is a prop I bought from Content Paradise a year or more ago. The costume is the vest from The Hunter, and I wish I could remember what the bottom half of the costume started life as! I changed out every texture and map, and I've totally forgotten what the original prop was, sorry. Likewise with the skinmap. That's one of my own face morphs, and I have 100% forgotten what the skin is. But the hair is the Akaste Hair prop, that much I can recall. (Makes note to self: get brain examined.)

Jade, 18 January

A bit of SF, a winter's day, and the quest for daylight

2012-01-15T21:09:00.000-08:00

click to see at large size -- 1100 pixels wide

Adventures in Bryce ... but the first image up -- the spaceport, or skypark -- was done n DAZ Studio. It's well worth viewing at full size, because its loaded with detail, and that's not a backdrop ... all the buildings and so forth are objects, right there in the shot. Talk about processor power --! It would have been an impossible render with my old machine. Here's a snap out of it -- the character himself. That's one of my faces, wearing the SAV Eros skinmap and the Casual Slick hair by Neftis. The costume is the Forgotten Warrior, by Slide 3D -- but a lot of the textures have been changed. There's three different aircars in this shot -- the Stinger, the Wasp and the Skyrider, all from DAZ. Two out of the three were freebies on the cover CD-Rom, with a recent issue of ImagineFX magazine.

Steadily, slowly, I'm getting happier with the Bryce work I'm doing. At the moment, the experiment is about "how do I get true daylight?" Because the renders I've been getting are fine and dandy, but they're not what you'd call photorealistc, and they don't feature anything remotely like real daylight. Now, sometimes this works to the advantage of the piece -- like The Sword in the Stone, for instance. But I would just love to be able to get true photo realism, true daylight, which are features which programs like Vue and Terragen manage automatically!

I spent a pleasant half hour drooling over David Brinnen's work from about 2006, on his Deviantart gallery, the other night. The work he was doing in Bryce 5.5 was ... amazing. Very, very close to photo realism, in a program that's well and truly obsolete now. So this stiff has to be doable in Bryce 7.0 Pro. Now, how?!

The experiment continues. Brighter lights? More complex shadows? "Volumetric" clouds? Sure. I'll be happy to try anything I can think of! There's a long, long way to go, but -- it's a load of fun.

Jade, 16 January

Fantasy and SF in Bryce and DAZ -- plots, and all!

2012-01-13T20:39:00.000-08:00

click to see at large size -- images are compressed, so they shouldn't take too long to download.

It worked! It worked! Am doing laps of the room without quite touching the floor. The second of these renders is The Sword in the Stone ... it was done in Bryce, and -- heee hee! -- this was the image that was in my mind when I started up the program. Nothing happened by accident -- I know exactly what I did. In other words, I was driving Bryce 7 Pro, it wasn't taking me for a ride. The penny is starting to drop rapidly now, and it's actually a bit thrilling!

The sword is the High Fantasy prop from DAZ, a Viking sword. The big stone is the "Big Brick" from H3D's "Lost" standing set. These were imported into Bryce as OBJ objects, whacked into position, and so forth. Now, I did change out every texture on the sword for Bryce pro textures, and it's well worth having a look at it, at large size (I uploaded this at about 1250 pixels wide, something like that, so you can really see it). The grasses in the foreground are Bryce OBP objects. Loads and loads of them to create some nice, rank grasses before the plane stretches away to the hills at the edge of the heath, and then the mountainous structures lost in the mist, way beyond. The rock was retextured with a digital image of a piece of mossy sandstone, and then when it landed in Bryce I whacked one of Bryce's bump maps onto it and cranked the settings way up.

All the mist was generated in Bryce; the birds were painted on in Photoshop, using Ron's Birds. Now ... if I told you the one render was good enough, that would be a lie. In fact, it took four renders to get every element of the picture "right," and some of them were mutually exclusive. For instance, to get detail into the hilt of the sword, the blade washed out, and to get nice toning on the mountains, the foreground went a bit weird. (I might be doing something wrong in the render settings ... dunno yet. Am still learning, right?) So what I did was, get all four renders into different layers of Photoshop, and systematically erase everything I didn't want, keeping only what I did want, so that all the best bits showed up in the one frame ... flatten the image (drop if to a single layer) and save it, quick!

Is there a story behind this image? Well, half a story. Imagine ... you're taking a vacation somewhere off the beaten track -- the Orkney or Shetland islands. An unseasonable storm comes through and floods the lowlands, there's lots of washaway damage, the landscape gets rearranged a bit. It dries out, and you take a hike and find ... this. The sword in the stone. But here's the rub: it's the Odinsword. Enter the archaeologists, one of whom is a martinet who doesn't believe in anything he can't catalog; the other is a (secret?) pagan, who knows just what she's looking at here. She tries to save the sword from being boxed and shipped off to a museum basement -- it comes to a shouting match in the local pub, which makes it onto Twitter, and someone from the Norway pagan group sees the Tweet. The sword ... goes missing. The police arrive, to accuse the archaeologist of stealing it. And ... so on. What a novel this would make!

The other image, I call The Conjurer ... not a magician, or a sorcerer -- a stage magician. Showman. Or maybe something along the lines of the character of Drake Stone, in The Sorcerer's Apprentice -- he actually is a magician, but he makes a fortune on the stage. (There's also a lovely old book by Paul Gallico, The Man who was Magic, which has the same sort of central character -- he's a real magician, competing with stage magicians (and boy, do they get mad when he can do "tricks" they can't). I read this when I was about 14, and have never forgotten it. Don't have a copy, sad to say. Never owned it, in fact; it was a library book.

There's half a story that goes with this picture too. Try this on for size:

It's way in the future, when civilization has crashed due to climatic change and pollution. Mankind survives in pockets of "grunge resistant" strains of homo sapiens, some of whom have mutated due to the pollution. The physically deformed are hounded, hunted, destroyed. Those whose mutation is not visible can "pass" for human, and get by. This guy, here, can do magic, and he earns his living in a traveling medicine show, as a conjurer ... till someone, somehow, realizes what he is. Then he's captured and dragged off to the laboratory of a bunch of mental giants (genius is their mutation!) who are trying to figure out how the "special" ones work. The lab is in the decayed and crumbling ruins of an old, old city, where survivors camp out in shanties built of the rubble. The last computers are here -- super-computers, since this is long in the future. There are way too many people for the resources, and one of the super-geniuses has been charged with fixing the problem. This is why he's researching the "magic" of the special mutants ... because the alternative is something that was suggested by various SF writers back in the 1960s: people have their consciousness "uploaded" to a whole world inside the massive computer systems; then their bodies can be recycled. They haven't been exterminated, because they now live in a fantastic, perfect world. The only problem is, the system of upload hasn't yet been perfected -- it's not working properly. Test subjects are just dying. So, can magic come to the rescue --? Does our hero make it out of the lab alive? Do people get uploaded -- are they still alive in there? Can they be downloaded into perfect android bodies, that don't need food and water, later --?? Again, what a novel this would make.

Those experiments I mentioned yesterday ... seeing how far the DAZ render engine can be pushed: no joy. I maxed everything out, and the software fell over consistently. Throttled it back to what it would tolerate, and there's no visible difference in the render quality. Meanwhile, I've been looking at the render quality one can get out of Octane, and drooling. Problem: DAZ Studio exports a Collada (.dae) file that it can't even read back into Carrara or Bryce, which are from the same company! So, expecting Octane to open the same file is an improbable fantasy.

So... I looked at Poser Pro 2012. The Firefly render engine. Mmm hmm. Uh huhh. Heading that way. Definitely heading that way. Damn, but the Firefly engine generates some fantastic renders ... and I'll just bet the shaders work properly in Poser, too (which they don't, in DAZ). Now, I also read the reviews, as I always do, and the current version of Pro 2012 is a little bit buggy and crash prone. So -- wait six months, and watch out for a sale!

And now -- back to work. Duty calls, and so forth...

Jade, 14 January

The Wood Goddess ... and having a ball in Bryce

2012-01-12T19:39:00.000-08:00

click to see at full size -- 1000 pixels wide ... but I had the presence of mind to zap these guys with a bit of file compression, so they''ll download faster.

The main picture today is called The Wood Goddess ... do you remember the Spirit of Winter I uploaded for Christmas -- the one with the ice wings? I guess this would be the female equivalent. In fact, it's the antlers from the Wood God costume (they're actually attached to a goshalmighty hood, but you can easily make the hood go transparent and leave the antlers behind), and the Yaana skinmap, and the Celestial Hair. The element I like least about this image is the hair, because no matter how you render it, it looks plasticky, and the only thing you can do is paint over it in Photoshop later. I didn't have a whole lot of time to paint on this, but I did enough, I think, to "get away with this"... here's the detail shot:

The thing I like most about the shot is the way the snow came out -- that was done with a terrain created in Bryce and imported into DAZ Studio 3 as an OBJ, and then mapped to hell and back. The backdrop works well ... a digital shot which was adjusted into night colors, then had the moon zapped on with an .abr brush and the stars hand painted ... which was just the start of the fun. There are about 12 layers of additions and effects in Photoshop, to get the image to look like this. The original render was ... glaringly bright and "plastic." You wouldn't have been impressed. The final result? Me like. Muchly.

The second image is a Bryce project, which represents an experiment: this is the first time I ever imported an OBJ and used a real 3D model in a Bryce shot, rather than using Bryce's own trees. Remember the other day, I was grumbling about Bryce's trees not looking very realistic? These little spruce trees are the Rhodi-Design props, which I think I got from Content Paradise (which is SmithMicro's store). There are also some fantastic new trees appearing on the market now -- so I can't have been the only one grumbling about the ticky-tacky appearance of so many 3 trees! These are on my wishlist at DAZ:

I'm having a ball with Bryce, now that I have the processor power to run it properly. Today's landscape, I call "Craggy Skyline" ... ooooh, I wish I could tell you that was one of my textures on the terrain (the ground), but it would be a horrible fib. It's one of David Brinnen's materials, which were shipped as Pro Materials with Bryce 7 Pro. This is such a complex material, it took only a tiny bit of post work in Photoshop to make it pass muster at any size. But I did configure that sky myself ... and the next thing I'm going to experiment with is what they call "volumetrics," which is a way to make devastatingly realistic cloouds...

It's just possible I started to learn Bryce backwards. You actually can figure out a lot if you play with abstracts first ... shapes and colors and textures. Like this:

Well ... I guess I probably did what everyone else does: jump in headfirst and start with landscapes! In fact, playing with mapping and so forth first would make it easier to learn the tricks. The problem is, it's nowhere near as interesting -- and who starts up Bryce with the idea of doodling with abstract shapes?! You want misty mountains and fjords and stormy skies, and all that good stuff. You tend to make a huge mess for the longest time, and then eventually the penny starts to drop.

There's an image rendering in the background right now, which I hope to show you tomorrow. Even on my new system, it's going to be a looooooong render, but it should be worth it. The original render settings called for a "maximum ray depth" of 12 ... which would have resulted in a 15 hour render! Hmmm. Revert to the defaults, and it comes back to a 2-3 hour render. I can live with that. And when it's done, I have another experiment to run --

Get into the advanced render settings in DAZ, and see how far the render engine can be driven. The default settings are low, and I never had the ability to go past these. In the last few days, Dave and I have been looking at every render engine from Lux to Reality to Octane ... but the problem is compatibility. Getting DAZ to shake hands properly with anything is a major issue. As much as I love DAZ Studio, I'm facing the very real possibility (probability) of being compelled to change up to one of the more industry standard programs, in order to get access to the render engines. If you're interested, have a look at Luxology, which is a cool grand. Don't even think about AutoDesk's Maya ... it's five grand. Oomph.

Will let you know how the experiments work out ...!

Jade, 13 January (yep, it's a Friday)

A grab bag of digital goodies

2012-01-10T21:17:00.000-08:00

A grab bag of pieces today ... what I've been fiddling with in the last couple of days -- and it's an eclectic mix. A bit of everything. I've uploaded these at large size, so folks who are curious can see details -- but you might need to be patient with the downloads. They're a little large, and could take a few moments.

There's a portrait of the barbarian you saw the other day -- I'm quite pleased with this face, and in the render I uploaded before, you don't really see it. Then ... an experiment in reflections, transparencies and surface textures. Exotic science fiction, complete with the next-to-naked female and the robot, which are two prerequisites -- but the real gist of it is about the surfaces! A lot is going on in the picture; it's definitely one frame out of a large story, but search me what the story is. Anyone...?

Then, Bryce landscapes ... misty mountains, trees and all ... and the second one is a re-visitation of the one I was playing with a few days ago. I went back into it, and put in cliff walls, with weathered rock formations. A... ha. I think. I do believe a couple of pennies have just dropped. Bryce is starting to make a tiny little bit of sense -- in other words, when good things happen, they're not 100% accidental. Maybe only 80%! Theres so much to learn.

Then -- simple shots, but so effective. A couple of models I knew I'd bought about five months ago, and couldn't find for love or money; they showed up while I was looking for something else. The space sphere is the key model in these last two images. It's the spherical environment in which the spaceship and space observatory are positioned. The ships are inside your actual, genuine sphere, so you can point the camera virtually anywhere. What you see here are pre-set textures -- those backgrounds. My next challenge is to paint my own textures for the sphere, and go fly around in it. The last picture of all is shot from inside the cockpit of the Vanguard spacecaft model, on approach to the space observatory...

Loads of fun, and all down to the processor power I have now. Thanks go, once again, to my husband, for sliding the new PC under the Christmas tree while I wasn't looking!

Jade, 11 January

Adventures in Bryce, and a digital barbarian

2012-01-09T00:07:00.000-08:00

click to see at large size...

This one really is a Bryce landscape! I'm still at the stage where, when something goes very right in Bryce 7 Pro, it's usually purely by accident. Well ... not really. But I've only scratched the surface, and am just starting to get the hang of little bits of it. Bryce is not for the faint hearted. It's, um, complicated. If I have a bone to pick with it, it's that Bryce trees are not very realistic -- nowhere near on a par with the trees you see in Vue renders. To put it simply, the results you get (or can get ... there's a difference) in Vue are so realistic, you can't tell they're digital. Can you squeeze these results out of Bryce? I honestly don't think so -- but Bryce has a charm all its own. It makes art, pictures that fall into that curious "middle zone" where art and photorealism merge. By contrast, Vue was used in Pirates of the Caribbean, and I think Avatar was also one of their collaborative projects. 'Nuff said.

The other piece today is a (!) digital barbarian. Give me a reason why not! That's Michael 4 and the Millennium Horse; Michael is wearing the Samson skinmap, and a face by me. The horse is wearing one of the CWRW Pro Pack skinmaps, and the saddle from the Dragon Lord set. Add a couple of gnarly trees from the Gnarly Old Trees set, and the standing stone from DM's Elven Stone. The problem with the Elven Stone model is that they forgot to ship the textures along with it. It unpacks as so much white plastic, so the first thing I do is slap all my own textures onto it. Then, a bit of terrain to stand on, and another bit in the background -- textures and displacement maps on both ... upwards of 60 test renders, including two raytaced ones, to get it all pretty right; then into Photoshop for loads of painting. (And here's the magic: now I can do 60+ test renders to get it all right -- no more copromises, or flawed shots that have to be called "Finished" because there's just no more time. Gotta love that new PC!)

What's been painted? The horse's mane; the grass; the birds. The sky, though, is a digital image. I keep my eyes open for fantastic skies, and then Dave and I shoot down to the beach or up to the top of the hill, and I'll photograph the sky from every angle, at every zoom. The images show up in a lot of my backgrounds.

I was shopping for odds and sods at DAZ the other day, and got a couple of new items to play with, so I'll be back in a day or two with some stuff you never saw before. (Is it me, or is DAZ getting expensive? I haven't had the chance to rummage around at Renderosity for a long while ... hmmm. Must go back there and check prices.)

Jade, 9 January

A bit of SF today...

2012-01-06T22:24:00.000-08:00

In a bit of an SF mood today ... have been reading a lot of NARC and Hellgate! ... so here's a 3D model I got a couple of months ago and never got around to playing with. A real, genuine aircar, which reminds me of a Tactical "squaddie," as Mel Keegan describes them.

(Tactical was the law enforcement body which replaced the Police when the system kind of skewed itself into extinction in the 22nd Century ... if you know your NARC and Hellgate lore, you'll know about all this. Speaking of which, if you have no bloomin' idea what Jade is rabbiting on about now, click here to find out! Word of caution, first: there's glbt content in these books. They're not "gay books" as such, because the gay content is waaaaay secondary or tertiary to the kind of plots that would have happened if Tom Clancy co-wrote a million-word series with Greg Bear! Which never happened, of course ... they appear to have left it to Mel Keegan to do this, and I have to say, Mel rose to the occasion with a will. And/but in true SF spirit, MK runs the ultimate experiment of doing everything differently in the futuristic setting ... including the romantic aspect. Trust me: it's a heck of a ride!)

Anyway -- sorry about that digressive ramble! -- just a single image from me today, to touch base here. I have a massive headache, halfway to a migraine, and I have to nurse it tenderly, or I'll pay a nasty price...

This piece features the Skyrider aircrar from DAZ , which was one of four freebies given away on the cover CD in ImagineFX magazine a few months ago. I made up a new skinmap for it, because the bright red supplied didn't suit the overall moodiness of this piece, and the alternative "distressed" texture is a kind of bare metal and rust job. Fine and dandy, but on a dirty, snowy night (Christmastime in the city about 100 years from now, in a Blade Runner type future) like this, the bare metal version just vanished into the background...

Speaking of which, the background is not a backdrop. That's the Dystopia City Blocks prop, complete with its skydome ... but I did loads of work with the lights, windows and whatnot. The atmospherics were done in DAZ Studio 3 with planes (primitives) which were fitted up with opacity maps to look like, well, smog! Then the whole thing was rendered and shipped into Photoshop. The windows, beacons, halos around the beacons, and of course the snow, were all digitally painted as overlays, using a variety of brushes including Ron's Magical Snow!

Must go and take care of this headache now. It's juuuust starting to get the bit between its teeth...

Jade, 7 January

Fantasy male nude ... with dragon: The Gatekeeper

2012-01-06T00:06:00.000-08:00

Click to see these at full size ... 1000 pixels high.

The other day I was looking through some fantasy calendars ... actually, the 2011 calendars that have just come down off the walls and and are being consigned to the cupboard. I was thinking to myself, "I need to sit down and do something gloriously complex, filled with textures and -- and --

Dragons. Now, Dave is the one who works with dragons all he time. He loves his dragons. I've been after him to do a guest post on my blog here about them, but so far, no joy. His stuff is very, very different from my work -- refreshingly offbeat, surprisingly "left field," full of potential ... and I wish he'd do more of it.

This critter here isn't actually a dragon at all. The model is called the Dinokonda, and you can do a lot with it. In fact, the original Dinokonda is green, but I wanted him to be red and gold, so ... job #1: get in there and make a whole new skinmap for him. Then change out all the textures on his horns and teeth ... and give him blue eyes.

Next? The hero. Create a dude who looks like he just walked right out of a fantasy calendar! No problem. Then ... paint the backdrops. Import a standing set ... I used DM's Circular Shrine, but even Danie and Maforno, the designers, would have to look twice to recognize this, because every texture is changed, every map, the lot. The shrine has become The Gate, and the Dinokonda is the Gatekeeper -- keeping people out, or keeping them in? Good question! The scenes were raytraced, and then shipped into Photoshop to be heavily overpainted. I'm very pleased with the way these turned out.

Meanwhile, I took an hour or so out and installed DAZ Studio 4, took it for a test drive...

Well, I'm grateful for two things: 1) The Uninstall button. 2) I didn't pay money for this.

To be fair to it, I was very impressed with the Genesis mesh -- this is the new fundamental "substance" underlying the human figures you work with in Studio 4. You can indeed bend and stretch the figure, and his/her joints don't crumple and buckle. However, after I was done posing the Genesis figure, I rotated it to see how it looked from the other side ... it left its eyeballs and teeth floating in space!! It did this twice, on two restarts of the program. I suspect a bug in the works --

And the Genesis mesh is the only thing that Studio 4 does, that's a useful "plus" over Studio 3. The other new features are very subtle -- for instance, a new kind of light, the linear point light. These features are likely quite useful, but --

They're heavily outweighed by the downsides. And there are several. First, there's the interface. The old interface was dead simple, understated, positively professional in its linear appearance. The Studio 4 interface is loud and "in your face." Dave took one look and said "They've cartoonified it." This is pretty accurate. The new interface is pure Tom and Jerry in its huge-icon-driven approach. Gods help the people who're trying to use this on a laptop with a small(ish) screen. The enormous panels full of whopping great icons and cascading graphical menus fill up my 22" monitor! And the only reason my system is handling all this is because it would just about run the space program ... if you've been following this blog at all, you'll know that this new machine was under the Christmas tree a couple of weeks ago, and since then -- well, my art has exploded. My old system would have turned belly-up soon after starting Studio 4.

Suffice to say, I don't have much time for the new interface. I could get used to it, if I were forced to, but it's a visual clutter ... added to which, if you're used to Studio 3, you spend your time hunting high and low for where they've put the tools. Some tools seem to have utterly vanished, and doing things which used to be simple is now a big issue. It's very confusing to one who's used to the old studio ... so much so that you would really have to have a solid reason for climbing this learning curve. (If you come to Studio 4 brand new, never having used the simple old interface, the story will be different, I guess. It's what you're used to!)

Next thing that's problematical: if you're "upgrading" to 3 from 4, it stands to reason that you have a large library of 3D models and resources already installed, yes? I have 23 GIGS of these, ready installed and at my fingertips. Studio 4 cannot seem to get a-hold of them. Any of them. They would have to be reinstalled to suit the new program's directory structure ... in other words, I'd spend days installing models. Urk. Studio 4 would have to be the bees' knees to inspire me to do this.

Next problem: I have a lot of money invested in wigs and costumes for Michael 4 and Victoria 4.2 ... none of them fit the Genesis model, without me dropping another $75 to buy the Genesis Morphs pack, plus the Generation X plugin, which drops the Michael and Victoria morphs right onto Genesis. With them in place everything ought to fit, and the figures should bend and stretch without buckling. But I'm not, at least not right now, in the mood to spend the bucks, because Studio 4 doesn't offer enough incentive to make it a "must have, must do" thing.

One reason to get into it would be if Studio 4 were stuffed full of things that Studio 3 doesn't do ... but the fact is, it's not. Once you get past the Daffy Duck interface, and start dropping down menus, the infrastructure -- what the program does, and how it does it -- is sooooo familiar. All the old functions are there; and precious few new ones, so that you're left with the question: I have to learn this whole Bugs Bunny routine, just to keep on doing what I was doing yesterday, without any problem whatsoever --? Hmmm.

The good news is, Studio 4 installs separately from Studio 3 so that, theoretically, you could run them back to back and make the transition gradually (the way I merged over from Micrografx to Photoshop, without much real pain at all). In practice, it's not such good news. Studio 4 hijacks your file association, and nothing, repeat nothing you can do will change it back. I went through the file association process three times, with three restarts, to be sure of this. Worse yet, shutting down Studio 4 when it has fired itself up without being wanted, makes the program crash. It hangs up and take some time to get out of.

Bottom line: I think the program still has a swarm of bugs; the pluses don't warrant the awful new interface, or the time it would take to reinstall everything, or the money I'd need to spend on the plugins, just to end up right back in the same place ... and it's damned annoying to have your file association irrevocably hijacked.

For myself ... I'm probably going to stick with Studio 3 and wait for Studio 5, which will almost certainly come around in a big circle and fix a lot of the things people didn't like about 4. If it doesn't ... well, obviously, eventually we'll all have to make the change to the new "cartoonified" interface, or else change to another program! Now I understand why people on various forums are saying, "I would become a Poser user before I'll change to Studio 4 ... and I've been a DAZaholic since Version 1.2!"

Well, I'd been curious -- and now the questions have been answered. I do like the Genesis mesh! But that's the only thing I like. The rest is a rather large nuisance, so I hit the "uninstall" about 90 minutes after I'd installed it. Back to Studio 3 -- and loving it.

Jade, 6 January

CG art: Warriors of the Apocalypse

2012-01-04T19:48:00.000-08:00

Here's something new: the armor on the Millennium Horse is a knockout. Then I thought, why not take the Raven character, with the black raven's wings, and put the two together in a Gothic setting -- and have the winged avenger in armor too?

The horse armor is known as the Dragon Lord armor -- why, I have no idea, because it doesn't involve Michael 4 or the Millennium Dragon. But it's a cool name. To get it to look like this, I cranked the bump map settings out to max, and then added a "positive" value of 2. This gets all the ridges and delves and engraving to stand up. Looks marvelous.

The armor on Michael 4 is Powerage's Supreme Armor -- you've actually seen it before, but not in eons. Again, I cranked the bump map settings, and played with the specularity (ie., the glossiness of the surfaces) and the reflectivity.

The set is the Cloisters standing set, from DAZ (both the armor sets are from DAZ, too). You've also seen this, but I think it's been about a year since I used it! Golly, how time flies. The backdrop is a Bryce sky with lightning added in using Photoshop brushes...

The wings on the winged warrior are the Feathered Wings (ditto the market source), and again I did a lot of work on them to bring them up with this effect. I rather like the "mystic avenger" character ... making him anything but European or Caucasian, also adds a dimension.

There's about six lights on the warhorse scene, and about ten lights on the cloister scene ... and both of these renders were raytraced and then heavily painted in Photoshop ... but the painting is so subtle, you're not going to actually see it. I was basically painting with "inks," to bring up the contrast, shine, reflection, etc., in the armor. When you do this, you're using the brushes that lighten and darken parts of the image ... if you pick your airbrush setting just right, and load it up with the right color of ink, you can have it darken the dark tones and leave the light tones alone. Then you can do the reverse. Working across the same area of the canvas multiple times, you can get fantastic effects with this. It's also great practice for me, getting my brain wired up to use a really good mouse pen...

Have been looking at the lately, and drooling. Have you ever visited the Wacom site? Hmmm. Well, the one everyone talks about is Wacom Bamboo -- and this is the one I knew, myself, a couple of weeks ago. However, if you're dead serious about this, you'd be looking at their other range, the Intuos4. They're fantastic. They're expensive. Like I said, am drooling, but I don't know if I can afford the Intuos4! Will more likely stick with the Bamboo range -- and they really are the next generation up from graphics tablets like Genius, Kanvus and Digitizer. Right now I'm using a strange hybrid setup -- Digitizer tablet that has to be 6 years old, and a new Kanvus stylus -- but the Kanvus drivers won't work, for some reason, even with the Kanvus tablet ... so the tablet went back in the box, I pulled out the old Digitizer one, and fell back on the Windows plug-'n-play drivers. Hey presto. Perhaps not the ideal solution, but hey, it works.

The other thing I downloaded from DAZ, when I got the Feathered Wings and the Dragon Lord horse armor was Studio 4 -- free on the day; I understand it's usually fifty bucks or so. Have been dying to get the chance to load this up and play, but (whinge; whine; whimper) there's been work to be done, and there still is! Gimme a few days to get things straightened out, and then I'll be back, and tell you what I think.

Jade, 5 January

CG fantasy and ... check out this 3D water!

2012-01-03T03:06:00.000-08:00

Happily 3D modeling in DAZ and Bryce, and painting in Photoshop ... having a ball doing the things I always imagined, but couldn't do before I opened the box that magically appeared under the Christmas tree. (We don't have a chimney, because we don't have a fireplace. I guess Santa must have teleported in. In fact, a guy of that girth must be teleporting down chimneys. Right?)

Above: the Raven again, and some very cool painting effects. Also very simple. But sometimes the simple things are the ones that work out the best. Now for something that was faaaaar from simple!

You might assume this was done in Bryce:

Bryce landscape. Is it? Nope. Well ... I guess you could say it's a bit of a hybrid, becase that is a Bryce sky I used as the backdrop, and the ground, the "terrain" was created in Bryce, before being exported as an OBJ Object. But the scene was built and rendered in DAZ Studio 3. I've uploaded it at full size, and I urge you to click on it, see the details -- and in particular, the water! But --

I also know that these pleas often fall on deaf ears, so here ... here's a swatch out of the picture, at full size, so you can at the very least see that water:

Yep, all done in DAZ, not Bryce, with just a tiny bit of overpainting in Photoshop (birds in the sky; grasses on the skyline). Any Photoshop painting on the water? Nope. So -- how was it done?

First, I created the "terrain" in Bryce, and exported it as an OBJ. This was imported into DAZ, and it was given a diffuse map -- a huuuuuge picture of grassy ground -- and an immense displacement map to ruck up the surface into loads of teeny tiny detail that looks like grass or groundcover plants. The terrain has mounds and hollows ... so I created a "primitive," a simple plane, which became the surface of the water. This was jiggled into place in the hollows ... I put an image of the surface of a lake on it; and an opacity map which told it to be transparent in wave-shaped patches; and a displacement map that told it to assume the shape of waves; then I told it to be glossy, or shiny, and highly reflective. I set rocks and boulders under the surface, to show through, then went along planting ferns and grasses and shrubs along the water's edge. The lights were a challenge: full daylight, very bright, but starting to get along through afternoon. The weather: fine, with a high haze. Several dozen test renders ... then set it to raytrace. And even with the new computer, it took about an hour and a half. On the old computer? It would have been a complete system crash before I even got the plants into place!

The good news: the new machine is powerful enough to render all that in the background, while I go on and do something else in the foreground:

Hand painted from a digitally-derived sketch ... I was trying to get a watercolor effect, and I'm not a hundred miles away from it. There's so many different ways to do this kind of work -- what I'm trying to do now is to get my brain wired up for freehand work with the mouse pen. Don't want to lay down some serious cash for a good one (Wacom) before the brain can handle it. So right now, I have an old Digitizer pad with a new Kanvus pen, running on the generic, plug-and-play drivers from Windows 7 ... you might not believe it, but it actually works, quite well enough for me to paint up a storm and get the brain wired up for doing this before I head off to Wacom's website and spend some silly money.

I really am having a blast with art ... and I hope you're enjoying the results! Thanks for visiting, and watch out for a lot more, and some very new things, now that the capability is sitting on the desktop. (Thank you, thank you, once again, to my husband, who knew exactly what to put under the Christmas tree ... and he didn't have to squish down any chimneys to do it!)

Jade, 3 January ... 2012

Fantasy landscapes and raven's wings ... Bryce and Vue

2012-01-01T01:35:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year ... it's January 1 on this side of the dateline, and I continue to relish the opportunity to do anything except work ... time to indulge in art for its own sake! The two pieces above were my inspiration today ... please do click to see them at full size -- especially the winged hunk...

One of the books I got for Christmas was the art book Welcome to my Worlds, featuring the work of Canadian artist Rob Alexander. Somewhere in one of the prefaces is an observation that Alexander's paintings tell stories, and this struck a chord with me. I realized that this is exactly what I've wanted to do with artwork ... tell a story. Or make people's imagination take off when they look at a piece...

The top piece, today, I call The Raven. If it were a book cover (which it isn't ... there's no such book), the novel would be called Evermore, Quoth the Raven, deliberately mis-quoting a line in Edgar Allan Poe's famous work. The thing is, I have absolutely no idea what the story would be ... but I'll just bet your imagination fills with ideas when you see this guy -- especially at full-size. You have to check out the detail in this piece...

Wow. Seriously. That's one of my characters -- in other words, face and body morph by me. He's wearing the Jackson skinmap, the Yannis Rasta Dreadlocks --and something I just got. The Feathered Wings, which I picked up on sale from DAZ just yesterday.

If you view the whole thing at full size, please do notice the buildings in the background. Not a backdrop! This time around, with the new computer, I'm able to actually bring in a whole city's worth of buildings and just ... park them there. I lit the windows of the mansion, which makes for a "human" touch, which counterpoints the other-world, more-than-human nature of the figure. The piece was raytraced (four and a half minutes!!) and then quite heavily painted in Photoshop.

I got some other goodies at DAZ, which I'll be sharing tomorrow, or at least very soon. I'd gone there to download (!) DAZ Studio 4, which is free at this moment (a special offer; usually fifty bucks). Now that I have the super-fast 64-bit system, I can look at Studio 4 ... but I also know that the jury is out on how good it is -- and, in fact, on how useful the Genesis figures actually are. Hmmm. I'll know more about this when I've had the chance to play with it, in coming days and weeks.

The second piece today is a real storybook landscape in Bryce 7 Pro. I wanted something that conveyed the fairytale fantasy genre, and I'm very pleased with this one. This time around, having the render power, I should be able to make sense of Bryce. At last!

But while I was setting off to feel my way through the interface for the first time in, I admit, months, I remembered that a year or more ago I was playing with another program called Vue. At the time, I was picking my way through the top layers of Vue 7, and the computer was struggling with it, which is why I never went much further...

So I wondered, naturally enough, "Hmm, how does Vue run on this new system?"

The answer: like greased lighting, but.

And it's a monumental but. The software will not run properly without being online ... and my new machine has no modem. It is not likely to ever have a modem. It runs 100% in quarantine, away from the Internet, and viruses, and software updates which change the way computers work, and stuff everything up. Well, poop. I mentioned this to Dave, and he was fascinated to go to Cornucopia 3D and see what version of Vue is current now --

They're up to Version 10! He paged through the brochure online, and I have to admit, it's jaw dropping. So he downloaded Vue 10, the free entry level version, onto his machine (which is a quad core with 4Gb of Ram, a powerful video card etc., etc.), and --

Two hours later, he's doing this:

So, right now Dave is playing happily with the entry level Vue 10, learning the interface. And in a few weeks, when he's hopelessly addicted to it, we'll be getting the third level of the program. Level 1 is Pioneer, and it's the freebie; Level 2 is Frontier, and it's $99. Level 3 is Esprit, and it's $199 ... then you add multitudes of modules to make it do amazing things. For one, there's a network rendering engine, which could work out just fine for us, because we have five Windows 7 machines, with 15 processors between them. If Dave can figure out the network rendering, we might be able to do some amazing things.

Speaking of amazing things -- will you look at that top one of his, with the low sun and the lens flare! I mean ... woof. It's going to be fantastic, seeing where he goes with this. And I shall be looking over his shoulder, learning the interface.

Stay tuned!

Jade, January 1, 2012

Happy New Year, 2011!

2011-12-31T03:26:00.000-08:00

If I want to sign something "2011" ... I better hurry! I have a little over two hours, and then I won't be able to sign anything "2011" ever again (unless I make a typo -- and I've done that, as well!) ... so...

Here's what I was dabbling with in the early evening. Bryce 7.0 Pro actually works on my new computer! I can't believe it. It actually works! The mountainscape was done in Bryce and given a tiny little bit of Photoshop enhancement after the fact. The render took about three minutes. The wolf is another story --

I bought this model about a year ago, and -- like the Allied Fleets Destroyer -- I found I couldn't load it properly. It has the wolf body as one model, and the fur as a second model which overlays the first. Sure, I cold load the body. But, the fur? Hundreds of thousands of polygons. Not a chance. But I loaded it up this evening ... and then added trees and grasses (which take a heck of a lot of rendering on their own). Then, having already done the implausible, I asked for the impossible: I set it to raytrace.

This one took about a half hour. The old computer wouldn't even load the wolf's fur, and it would have taken over two hours, maybe three, to raytrace the trees. Whew!

Have uploaded these are 1000 pixels wide, so you can see the details. Please do take a look.

And now ... Happy new Year to all. It's about 10:00pm here, on the other side of the dateline. The fireworks are already going off, I'm listening to them -- and I'm looking at 2012 as a reality. Ye gods and little fishes, as my Irish granny used to say, what happened to 2011?!

See you next year...

Jade, December 31

Playing happily in DAZ and Photoshop

2011-12-29T21:39:00.000-08:00

Click on the wee little image to see this at full size. Please do!!

Playing happily ... deliriously, in fact. Trying to see what the new computer won't do ... and so far, I haven't found a darned thing it doesn't do, lickety-split. This render, above, was done at over 1100 pixels wide, with about 10 lights set, and textures and refractions and ... the works. The old computer would have taken around two hours to render it. This one? Seven minutes. So I was able to do more than two dozen test renders, to figure out what was right, what was wrong, and fix it all up before getting into Photoshop and doing the overpainting...

Speaking of Photoshop and painting: I reckon I've learned more since Boxing Day than I learned in the last four or five months. Seriously. The old computer was like this: click to load up an .abr brush set, and then pick up a book to kill the time it took the set to load. Uh huh. Now? Hee hee hee!

Check this out -- in fact, check it out at full size, and see the details. This one was deliberately rendered flat in DAZ, and then shipped into Photoshop to go through a ten-layer process, which brings it up like a digital painting -- something like gauche or acrylic, or a mix of both (which is something I used to like doing in the wild, woolly and far off days when I painted with (urk) a paintbrush). Here it is...

And that's not all. I tried my hand at painting the texture map for a gas giant like Jupiter:

The planet is a sphere generated in Bryce 7.0 Pro and exported, then imported into DAZ to be fixed up with its hand-painted texture, and lit. It took about as long to do as this description is taking to write. So, nothing daunted, I decided to stretch the frame into Cinemascope and add a spacecraft on approach to this giant world...

One of the enormous plus factors of the new machine is that I can now get BIG renders. I used to be rendering in a keyhole, in order to get something under an hour or two, and to get through a complex raytrace without the computer falling on its face (or butt. Whichever). But now ... well, here's an outtake from today's leading shot -- just in case you didn't click on it to see it at large size, and enjoy the details. You have got to see this:

Since the render is BIG, the details don't get compressed into less space than the average carbon atom. Look at the texture in his hands and ... so on! This is one of my faces and body morphs (in other words, I designed the face and body...) but he's wearing the Falcon skinmap and the Akasta hair, and the pale green eyes from the Eyes Have It pack of eye textures.

Is there a story behind this image? If you like. And you decide which scenario you like the best. Is this the warrior after a long, hard day at the wars, who's inviting the courtesan or the body slave to come play? Or is this the courtesan or the body slave, who's been waiting at home for the warrior to get his butt back from the wars, and come play? That, I leave up to you!

There's a downside to all this, though. Have been sitting in front of the new machine (known as Thor on the home network, until I'm juuuuust starting to forget what my legs are for. I feel my backside going flat and square. And I'm starting to really, really neglect the work that's piling up around me, demanding to be done. Well, it's the holidays -- I'm taking time off, right? But I have to get back to work in a couple of days. Rats.

Jade, 30 December (yikes, one day left of 2011!)

It's a lot like having a Tardis of ones's own!

2011-12-28T22:28:00.000-08:00

(Click to see these at full size, about 1000 pixels wide)

I guess there were two reasons I neglected this blog for a lot of 2012 -- and they were both interconnected. Anyone who's been glancing at the text of these posts knows how my life went ballistic and spare time flew away like a swarm of bugs. That was the basic reason for me not being able to post -- but it's a lot more complex. Having maybe half an hour going spare, over coffee, in which to do some artwork is one thing ... having a computer that can do something significant in half an hour is something else!

The truth is, in 30 minutes on a struggling computer, you can only get very "ordinary" art. Very average. And as you get more skilled at this stuff, the results you can achieve in such a short time start to get disappointing. So, in the end, you might waffle on with a piece of art and then actually abandon it, because what you were able to do was never going to match what was in your imagination, and then time ran out, and you have to race back to work...

But here's the thing of it: change one parameter there, and the whole picture changes. Umm ... change the computer! The classic fantasy painting in today's post, is a good example. It started life as a complex render filled with textures and reflections and displacement thingies and mapping whatsits. Render time? Just over two minutes. Then, into Photoshop to go through a process involving about eight layers of stuff to come up with this:

... the eye is utterly, completely fooled. You can see how it was painted for cripesakes! You can see how the paint was laid on the illustration board, you can see how a hog bristle brush slapped the texture onto the columns, and which way the brush strokes are going, in the skintones. You can see the last faint trace of the outline sketch, juuuuust showing through the paint, from where the original drawing was transferred to the board. Right?

Wrong. Sorry. The whole thing, from render to Photoshop composit, took about 45 minutes flat. It's all a trick of texture and overlay values. I wish I could tell you it took 40 hours to paint, but that would be a BFF (Big Fat Fib).

The other render for today is a "frame from the motion picture" type piece of true 3D creation. A few days ago, my computer would have strangled, choked, and hung up, if I asked it to render this. Three trees, vines, grasses, textures on everything, opacity maps, reflections on this, refractions on that, maps everywhere ... half a dozen lights, and then (ulp!) raytacing. If the old machine had somehow managed to render this, it would have taken around three hours to finish up. Render time on this one? Eleven minutes.

There is no substitute for processer power! Here's another spin on the movie-frame piece ... this one hasn't been processed to look like a painting, but I've played with the hues and saturation, to get an "illustration" quality rather than something that's actually pretty close to photographic:

Long story short ... what can be done, now, in a rather short space of time, is very significant indeed. Bottom line ... I won't be neglecting this blog quite so much! And the images that have been locked up inside my imagination, trying to batter their way out and not succeeding, will start to see light of day!

Jade, 29 December (rapidly running out of 2011)

Six impossible things ... and it's not even breakfast time yet!

2011-12-27T20:33:00.000-08:00

Further adventures in the realm of what was utterly impossible a few days ago! The new computer (known to the local area network as Thor), is just amazing. (Click on the small images to see them at 1000 x 800, in whatever axis.)

In the first picture, topmost for today ... the big ship is the Allied Fleets Destroyer, which you can get from Renderosity for around $30. I bought it about a year ago, and discovered to my chagrin, I couldn't load it into DAZ. It had too many polygons for my old computer to handle it! I could render it in Bryce, but anyone who knows Bryce's interface knows how [chain of deleted expletives] difficult it is to work with textures and maps in Bryce. It was a good thing that the designer had included a "lite" version of the model for the benefit of folks whose hardware didn't make the cut ... and this is what I've been working with -- the lite version, in which a lot was stripped and a lot more was simplified...

So today I decided to load up the Destroyer ... the full version ... and see what happened.

It loaded in seconds. It was also the second spacecraft I'd loaded into the frame. I tricked it out with a new set of textures I just acquired (they were actually free content included on the disk with ImagineFX a few months ago; actually, a set of metal surfaces ... and they look perfect on this big ship). I set up numerous lights and did a render ... fast! Then I set the shadows ... almost as fast. Then I raytraced the whole thing --

The raytraced render took 10 seconds. And this is a model that the old machine wouldn't even load! Then I shipped the finished render into Photoshop and completed the shot with light effects ... not the window lights, or cabin lights, though. In the proper version of the Destroyer, these load with the model. Wow!

The second render shows the results of me playing around with bump and displacement maps on the skin of the model. Sure, there's lots of displacement mapping on the shirt too, but on this one, there's also displacement mapping on his skin. You'd have to see it full size to get the details ... you can literally see the prints in the palms of his hands. It's true that I could have gotten this performance out of the old computer -- but. The truth is that a render took so long that by the time I had the lights set up properly and everything juuuust right, there was never going to be time to start over, messing about with bump maps on the skin! It took about 30 test renders to get this one right; however, at about 10 seconds per render, or less, it was no problem. So it's dawning on me that from here on, I can pay attention to all those little details that used to get overlooked when I was simply out of time.

Am I happy? I'm thanking my husband again here ... massively, vastly, hugely.

Jade, December 28 (Proclamation Day in SA)

It was under the Christmas tree, and I'm still astonished!

2011-12-27T00:10:00.000-08:00

Can't remember the last time I was so completely gobsmacked. It was under the Christmas tree. And I didn't even suspect it till I was halfway through ripping the wrapping paper off the box, and then it was the weight that tipped me off ... it has FOUR massively powerful processors that are threaded to produce a virtual eight-core, or octocore, or whatever they're calling it. It has TWO terabytes, of internal storage, additional to the boot drive. It has 8Gb of ram, which I can blow out to 33Gb, if I need to. It has a 22-spin dual layer DVD burner...

Omigod. It's screamingly fast, when doing the work that used to make my previous computer have a hernia (supposing it would even try to do these jobs -- which sometimes it wouldn't). It's rendering in less than one tenth of the time -- which gives me the opportunity to finish pieces that would have been abandoned before.

Take the first of today's uploads: lighting it was a nightmare. I could. not. light. it. I don't know what was going on, but nothing I did was getting results I liked ... I went through better than 60 test renders to figure a way through the labyrinth. Now, on the old computer, each test render would have taken maybe 8-10 minutes. In other words, the piece would have been abandoned, because there wasn't enough time to find the answer! On this computer? Oomph. Each render took less than a minute. The lights still drove me nuts -- I still set up, and dumped, four different suites of custom lighting, before I got it working. But it was doable!

Incidentally, click to see these at full size ... check out that floor. I made the texture, and the displacement map, myself, on the fly. Look at those floorboards! The orb was handpainted in Photoshop...

Then, look at the detailing on the Palenque Ruins render. That one is raytraced at biiiig size, with the bump mapping turned up sky high, and trees and grass and and shadows, the works. Very little was done to this in Photoshop after the fact. Just a few extra grasses and some birds in the sky. The rest is all right there in the 3D work. Render time on the old machine would have been about 3 hours. On this machine? 11.5 minutes.

I want to thank my husband huuuugely, massively, copiously, for this. I honestly, seriously, didn't have any clue what was going on till the wrapping paper was halfway off the box, and I felt the weight. There's something about the weight of a CPU that tells you what it is, even before the box is open. (This one was a custom build, by the techs at IT Warehouse, who were told the work I'm doing. I call it Thor. The previous one was Ajax. The one before was Achilles. The laptop is Pandora. The previous laptop was Hera ... whimsical, I know).

Thank you, thank you!!!!

So now I'm getting excited about all the things I've never been able to even attempt in 3D. Stuff like smog and smoke and fire, done right there in the render engine, rather than being painted in later ... things like huge renders, 2000 pixels wide, which allow for massive amounts of detail, and atmospherics. Things like scenes that are stuffed full of objects and characters...

In the immortal words of the dude who gave Batman the biggest run for his money he ever had, "Here ... we ... go!"

Jade, 27 December

2011-12-23T16:49:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas -- or Happy Yuletide -- to all. I hope the 2011 holiday season is one of the best ever for everyone, and that 2012 will be a wonderful year ... or at the very least, a peaceful one.

Jade ... on Christmas Eve

Shadow and Flame ... at last!

2011-12-21T21:34:00.000-08:00

A source of huge pleasure just dropped into my lap: at last (at last!!) the chance to paint the cover for Mel Keegan's new one, Shadow and Flame. I've been waiting to get the final draft of this one for about four months (or six...) and it dropped into my email box this morning. I "saw" the cover instantly, and the art just fell together. This took about two hours flat, including the underpainting, overpainting, creating the textures for the costumes, organizing the lights, raytracing, the whole lot. When it works, it works. Inspiration, and all that.

Here's the cover complete with the text objects:

Click on either of these to see them at full size -- I've uploaded them at 600x900, so you can see the details, because it's actually well worth a look. The whole thing was painted "bottom up." I started with a firm idea of the colors I wanted to see in the finished thing: I wanted an indigo night sky that was still light on the horizon, but with the stars out. So you set up your Photoshop canvas at the right size ... select the two colors, and do the graduated fill. Then paint the stars in a new layer. Then paint the tents in another layer, complete with flags. Then add the fire, with flames and smoke. Flatten the image, save it, import it into DAZ Studio as a backdrop to the characters. Here it is:

The caravanserai doesn't have to be very detailed, because you're only going to see a hint of it in the background -- but it does add to the overall texture of the work. The sky is the important bit, because it's going to be seen clearly...

The final posing, lighting and texture work was raytraced (took about a half hour), and then the result was shipped back into Photoshop to have the dents and buckles in the 3D models painted out. (My kingdom for the ability to work with the Genesis model...) Then a new layer was added, and the overpainting was done to add highlights and features to the sky and the foot of the frame. Then this was exported into Serif Page Plus to have the text objects added.

Oh -- answering a question I fielded a little while ago. Someone said, "I've looked everywhere, and I can't find the tools in Photoshop Elements to get those text effects." Well (sorry), this is because the work you see here wasn't done in Photoshop Elements 9. I have no doubt that if one paid $700 or some over the top price for the full-on version of Photoshop, the tools would be there! However, who can afford that? The text objects I do are always done in Serif Page Plus ... and I'm still on version X3, which does everything I need plus about 300% more than I need! X5 is the current version, and if/when I ever need to upgrade, I'll upgrade. Can't say I'm in any hurry, as I have far more tools than I could ever use in X3.

The title of the book you see here was done by setting up the font, adding boldface, adding an outline, setting a color fill for the font, then another color for the outline; then setting an outer bevel on the whole thing, before configuring 3x 3D lights with ambient, specular and diffuse values, and jiggling the position of the lights to get just the right effect. Took about ten minutes to get it juuuuust right.

Incidentally, the book will be out in January, when we have a small raft of new titles going into distribution (One of them is The Road of Birds, which you might have seen in yesterday's post). We don't want to release anything at this time of the year, because the way new books go cascading through the vendors' pages (places like Kindle and All Romance eBooks), blink and you'll miss them ... and at this point in the year, most people are not even looking, much less not blinking! January 10 is our target date to have a number of new titles out.

This one was a lot of fun ... and I'll be back, with a Christmas card -- as soon as I figure out what in the world to paint this year!

Jade, 22 December

Eureka! This was the CG horseman I wanted...

2011-12-20T17:19:00.000-08:00

The other day I sat down at the computer, needing a horseman and a mountain range, for a new book cover, and although I got a rather nice piece of artwork (see it here), I didn't get even close to what I'd wanted. So I gave it another shot yesterday, and ... eureka. This is what I wanted at the time. Not that I minded getting the other piece of art along the way, mind you! Please do click on this and see it at full size, 600x900. It's a very nice piece.

In fact, I was playing with the other piece in Photoshop, looking at ways to turn a render into a digital sketch...

I wish I could give you a quick and easy cookbook method for doing this, but in fact this effect was created using stacked layers -- about seven of them, all set to different values. Two of them use the "find edge" filter; one of them is a texture effect; one is a color cast; one is a "nose" layer; and so on, and on. The top layer has some zaps with various Photoshop brushes and a couple more filter effects added. You really need to see it at full size to be able to appreciate what the Photoshop "sketch" looks like. The end result looks like a pen and ink-wash drawing that someone labored about four hours to produce! Well ... it took about a half hour in Photoshop, working backwards from the DAZ studio render you saw the other day.

Cheating? Yup. Will that stop me doing more of this work? Nope. Because I don't have the time to do this stuff physically, and yet -- and this is interesting -- often the client will want a drawing or painting, not a 3D render. It's critically important to be able to deliver what the client wants, yet said client might only be able to pay $25. Who's able to work four hours to create a sketch, to earn $25? You'd starve to death! However, it's Photoshop to the rescue...

If you're wondering what the book is, for which the "eureka" shot was produced:

Not a gay book (makes a change, doesn't it?) but the start of a mainstream list that we'll be developing in 2012 and onwards, working with a couple of new-ish writers. This one is a fantasy story (duh), and it was begging for a gorgeous cover. So here it is.

That's Michael 4 riding the Millennium Horse, which is wearing the Western tack (though I changed out every single texture). Michael is wearing the SAV Atlas skinmap and face morph. The costume is made up of the Lockwood shirt, the Journeyer Scout pants, the Leon boots and the M4 cloak; the only original texture used is the shirt, which I really like. The rest of the textures were switched out for a great Leather Textures pack I got from Renderosity. In the background: Merlin's pine, Rhodi's spruce, a couple of boulders and ferns from DM's various fantasy sets (all available at Renderosity; incidentally, Michael 4, the horse and the costumes are avalable from the DAZ store), and a couple of bricks and some grasses from the H3D Lost set. The background is a digital painting over a snapshot of the Remarkables, in New Zealand. The birds in the sky are done with Ron's Birds, an .abr brush set you can get from DAZ. The ground and the low hill in the middle distance were done with little bits of terrain made in Bryce 7 Pro and exported as OBJ models, and then imported into DAZ. These had displacement and diffuse maps added to make them look like, uh, ground. Result: nice!

I must start blogging again! I've neglected this blog of necessity for about the last six months. In that time, we've had a death in the family, my health has been ridiculously poor, we've published several books, I've done better than a dozen private art commissions, kept our business operating ... and there hasn't been time to sit down and think, let alone do art for myself, for fun, for it's own sake, for the blog's sake!! I'd started to forget how very much I used to enjoy just DOING IT for the sake of doing it. Ars gratia artis. Pardon the Latin.

I do believe that 2012 is going to be a very different kind of year, and I'm looking forward to having more time for my stuff ... so you can expect to see a lot more from me. Soon. The images I have whirling around my head ...! They need to find an exit route, and they can only come out through my fingertips at the keyboard.

Oh -- you remember the Abraxas project?? I've promised myself, I will WRITE the story, just as a narrative. I might not have the time to do hundreds and hundreds of panels plus text work, but I'm sure I can find more than enough time to just write the story. It was about to go in some amazing directions, and I'm actually looking forward to this. Again, in belongs to 2012, and it's going to be fun!

Will be back before Christmas. With a card.

Jade, 21 December (The Solstice of Summer)

The Serendipitous (CG) Horseman

2011-12-17T21:34:00.000-08:00

I was trying to come up with the inspiration for the cover of a fantasy story we're about to publish, and though the cover art I'd been hoping for didn't magically appear before my mind's eye, this one did. We'll just call it "Horseman," and leave it at that.

The character is SAV's Atlas; the costume is the Euros kirtle, plus the strapping from the shirt, over the Journeyer Scout pants and boots, and that's the Spartacos hair, also by SAV. I used Merlin's pine tree in the background, and a couple of Greek columns for depth. The Millennium Horse is wearing one of the CWRW textures, and the Western horse tack ... but I changed out all the leather textures, the saddle pad and so on. The background is hand painted in Photoshop using a variety of brushes: Mystikel's clouds, Ron's birds, Hawksmont's moon, Designfera's trees ... and the mist in the foreground was painted in with Ron's Smoke and Steam. I have about six lights set up on this, with the object of creating moonlight. I really like the effect.

You can tell this one was intended as a book cover, but since it's a long way from the art I was originally looking for, it's not going to wind up on one, unless someone is struck by the inspiration to write a piece to accompany this! It's nice, though, so what the hey ... here it is.

Jade, December 18, 2011 (Golly, is it Christmas next weekend?!)

2011-12-01T23:24:00.000-08:00

Yes ... book cover art. Umm ... gay book cover art, in fact. I've been busy prepping a new work which is launching this coming weekend (meaning, tomorrow, downunder -- the dateline thing). One of the things I really like about working with writers is that they can whisper to me who was the inspiration for their characters, and this gives me half a chance of coming up with something that's at least in the ballpark when I design the cover.

I remember, about fourteen years ago, a new edition of Mel Keegan's Fortunes of War came out, and the reprint publisher put on a cover in which one of the two rather punkish looking young men had an eyepatch. The story came to me at second or third hand, that at least some readers were waiting, right through the story, for the scene when the hero, Dermot Channon, lost his eye! Never happened, people. Nope. That cover had nada to do with the book.

Since then, it's been pretty important to me to at least try to get into the ballpark. Sometimes a writer whispers to me, "Well, actually, I was thinking about Brad Pitt when I wrote this..." Or it'll be, "It was Tom Selleck on my mind when I was doing this story..."

Hey, where is it written that movie stars shall not be used by writers as inspiration? And even if it was written, that's a rule I would love to see them try to enforce!

Right now, you might be wondering what the heck this book is, so --

There you go. It's a good read, if you like your romance hot enough to scorch your wee little fingers as you hang onto your Kindle or your Nook for dear life!

This one was done in three layers: the sky, clouds, moon, wolf and general backgrounding into the bottom of the shot were all done in one piece, and most of it was hand-painted. The wolf was borrowed from a photo, and extensively (and I mean extensively!) worked. This was then imported into DAZ Studio as a backdrop, and the characters were designed, dressed, posed, and stood in front of it. Raytraced ... shipped back out into Photoshop to be overpainted and enhanced. Then the whole composition was shipped into Serif to have the text objects added. Done!

Next job: finish painting the covers for the NARC series. These five books are hanging over my head like a flock of albatrosses -- I've been trying to get them rejacketed and reformated for six months! Been busy. (Now, there's an understatement!)

Jade, 2 December

An event more rare than an Ent Moot

2011-11-21T22:57:00.001-08:00

The River Onkaparinga, known locally (and unceremoniously) as the Onk. It's a pretty sight right now.

Pine cones of some sort. These are a type that are probably native to Australian, but I couldn't tell you what kind. Well, not without researching them.

I love the colors of the wetlands. The reds and greens, side by side -- it's what artists call "immediate contrast." Very striking, visually.

He (or is it a she?) is a white faced heron. They're peope-shy ... this was taken on extreme zoom, and one second later s/he headed out fast away from the humans.

The gorgeous reds and golds of gum tree trunks. These trees shed their bark, not their leaves. We do most things backwards downunder...

Reedbeds are very photogenic -- but what doesn't photograph is the squadrons of swallows which were dive-bombing the whole area. Some kind of bug must have just hatched, because about a thousand swallows were pigging out on the wing.

Something happened today that hasn't happened in an age...

I had the chance to take a day off. And I took it. In fact, I grabbed it with both hands and ran away! Seriously ... Dave and I headed about fifteen minutes south of here and took a looooong hike in the wetlands where the Onkaparinga River flows out at Noarlunga. Yes, those are real names ... don't believe me? Google them! So I thought I would touch base with everyone today with some photographs rather than artwork. From the wetlands hike, we progressed to the Rimini Cafe at Hallett Cove, and if any of you were following Dave on twitpic, you'd have seen our late-late lunch. Still full. (Urp.) Need nap.

In fact, here are some more images, while I go and take one. A nap, that is! Day off, and all that. (Make the most of it, Jade ... who knows when it'll happen again?!)

Jade, November 22

Still showing a little green along the riverbank. Enjoy it -- in a couple of weeks it'll all be the color of mown hay...

A boardwalk takes out right out into the middle of the wetlands. Today, we were in the heart of that squadron of swallows. Wish I could have captured them in stills. I did get some nice video...

Scotch thistle -- up to four feet high in this neck of the woods -- they're lethal!

The river itself. And yes, there's water in it! There are times when it's not much more than briny silt, but we've had a drop of rain lately.

Reed beds ... this should be a lake, but it's pretty much empty, even though it's not yet actually summer...

Strangler vines on the trees bearing the little cones you see elsewhere in this post. The flowers are gorgous, like mornng glory, but the vines are tree killers.

Starship crash in Photoshop

2011-11-19T00:02:00.000-08:00

Click to see at full size, 1700 pixels wide
See -- I'm doing the artwork, honest! It's posting that's the problem ... speaking of which, is anyone else having trouble with Blogger lately? Half the tools have vanished in Opera. A few of them show up again in IE, but it crashes all the time. I just installed Chrome in a wild attempt to get back some functionality. Still trying to figure out if it's going to cure the problems.

So, here's a piece I've been working on, in bits, for a long time (as in, months). The figure in the foreground was the work of about three minutes flat. The background, now ... well, that was mostly painted in Photoshop. The only 3D model is the giant spaceship. The ground is just a plane that I deformed with displacement mapping, and colored up with a diffuse map. The hillocks, or dunes, whatever you want to call them, are bits of terrain generated eons ago in Bryce and shipped in here as OBJs. The base render is just ... flat. There's nothing there but the ship and the ground. The sky was hand-painted first and stripped in as a backdrop ... then the render was shipped out into Photoshop, and I've been painting on it since about September! It's built of hundreds and hundreds of details all painted in by hand in about 20 layers. Takes a looooong time.

If you're interested, I've uploaded it a full size -- over 1700 pixels wide. I compressed it a bit to make it a manageable size. It's about 350K, which is not too bad. Looks like a wallpaper? Now, there's a thought! Enjoy.

In fact, I've been asked many times to do wallpapers, and I swear to gods, this is on the agenda. Give me 36 hours in a day and 10 days in a week, and I'll be in business!

Jade, 19 November

Touching base...

2011-11-16T00:05:00.000-08:00

You're asking yourself if Jade gave it away and doesn't do art anymore, right? Not true! I do. really, I do. And if Real Life (and work) would ever just get out of my face, I'd be delighted to post here, all those "digital doodles" that were, and are, my hobby. Everything I've been doing lately has been for work, and while there's been oceans of it, you wouldn't have any interest in seeing it!

Bear with me. Be back soon, I hope. Life has GOT to "come good" and give me back some free time soon...

Jade, November 16

Hellgate: Flashpoint ... check this out!

2011-11-06T21:59:00.000-08:00

UPDATE: November 18, and HELLGATE:Flashpoint is out! If you've been waiting for this (your Mel Keegan fix, or your Hellgate fix), here's where you want to be:

http://www.dream-craft.com/melkeegan/flashpoint_dc.html

In fact, I didn't fall off the face of the Earth ... it's just been the month from hell, highlighted by a death in the family, after which the rest of October and the first week of November passed by like a blur. Work piled up, and I was sick myself, but there's nothing new in that ... long story short: it's been rough. But I'm back, not only working properly again, but also doing artwork.

As you can see, we're packaging HELLGATE #5: Flashpoint at this time. I just finished the cover art -- and if you're sharp-eyed you'll see that there's still a line of question marks where the ISBN ought to be. We're still waiting for the package of ISBNs we bought to become available. In the next 24 hours, they should activate, and we can go ahead with the new Mel Keegan novel as well as this one, which is a gay American historical (for which, read "Western," if you prefer) ...

You can see, I have been busy after all ... just not posting! I hope to remedy this in the days to come. There's still a great stack of 3D toys I bought back around a month ago, which haven't even been unpacked yet -- things just went haywire.

So, what's the deal with HELLGATE: Flashpoint? It's the fifth of the HELLGATE novels, leaving one book to go to finish out the series. This book is long. It's huge. It's the size of two of the ordinary-length HELLGATE books, at 250,000 words. Why? A year or so ago, Mel Keegan made the decision to take the fifth and sixth of the originally-planned seven books, and roll them into one. This actually saves readers a nice bit of money -- six books to buy, instead of five. Also, the two books would have been noticeably shorter than the usual HELLGATE volume, so, rather than have two skinny issues right in the middle, it looked like a much better idea to have a whopping great "thick" in there! Therefore, HELLGATE is now six books, not seven ... and here you have #5, plus what used to be "#6 of 7," both under the one cover and on one title. One more to go, early in 2012 -- the title is Event Horizon -- and HELLGATE is done! MK promises that the next NARC book is already being plotted, and with the slightest bit of luck, that one should be along in 2012 as well.

Jade, 7 November

Very chic ... but would YOU go to war in this?!

2011-10-11T22:54:00.000-07:00

Back earlier than expected ... because I have a job that I just can't get my head around, which means I can't get into it till tomorrow at earliest, so I have a bit of spare time. So ...

The other day I mentioned that I'd picked up a copy of ImagineFX Magazine, and these mags -- which are a stupendous price, something like $22 per copy in the stores here -- have CDs of materials and goodies in the back. Here's the magazine:

...and it is an absolutely amazing mag, I just can't afford to buy it! The one on the right is the issue I got for my birthday last year, and the one on the left, I got off eBay in a sale for $10, which is half price!

And occasionally, the content packed on the CD is really interesting. In the issue with the closeup shot of the Arabian swordsman, the big freebie was a DAZ Studio 3 model, The Sentinel, by the designer, VAL. Well, I just had to load this up and play with it, didn't I?

Ummm ... very chic. Very chic indeed. But I put the question to you: would YOU go to war dressed in this? One is inclined to say, "Daaaaarlink, du vill dezerve everytink du getz, and du vill get plenty." Of course, that might be the plan (I might have been watching too many episodes of Up Pompeii lately...)

Hey, this is a fantasy, right? This is a 14 year old boy fantasy, the kind of thing that would have Harold Green drooling all over his plaid shirt and shorting out that video mixing console he wears slung like an acoustic guitar. So --

If we're going to have a fantasy, let's have the proper fantasy, right? Here goes -- let's put some flesh on the poor woman's skinny bones, a big mop of windblown blond hair, and let's pretend those scrawny arms can lift a big piece of sharp steel by magic (presumably the same alchemy by which the rest of her anatomy gets to look like this!) ...

Seriously, this is Victoria 4.2 wearing the Jenna skinmap and face morph, but the body morph -- especially of the Amazon princess right here -- are by me. The costume is VAL Sentinel. The short hair is the Uranus hair, the long blond locks are the Nana hair. The texture on the boots is a brocade I made myself. The "shirt" (ouch!) and the skirt (double ouch!) started life looking like wisps of silk. I made them into "lace chain mail" (give the poor woman half a chance!) with the use of opacity and displacement mapping, and some nice reflectivity. The wall in the background is from the Castle Creator prop set; the candle-stand is from The Mage's Study. The battleaxe is from the Fae Weapons set. You can get most of these at Renderosity, and if you don't find them there, they'll be at DAZ.I have four or five lights on this and two shadows set ... they're not raytraced (takes too long on this computer).

And the last place in the world (sorry, Harold) where you'd see a cossie like this would be on a battlefield, or on the ramparts of a castle.

Damn! That would be cold around the kilt.

Jade, 12 October

The colors of spring -- shades of blue, shades of green

2011-10-11T00:40:00.001-07:00

Touching base here, with photographs rather than artwork ... hey, photography is an art too! I'll be back soon with some interesting art, but something happened that hasn't happened in ages: had the chance to take a break in the day, and take lunch to the national park. Which made me think, "upload some photographs, share the colors of spring."

What you can't tell from these pictures is that it's NOT WARM yet. To put it another way, it's COLD! And it shouldn't be. In the middle of October, it's supposed to be about 90 degrees. In fact, it's chilly enough to be wearing a sweater ... and in the national park, which is in the hills, it was cold enough to be wearing a thermal shirt under the sweater!

However, it's so nice to see the whole place green this late in the year, so I'm bot about to complain. Much.

These images are from two shoots: Labor Day at Glenelg (downunder, that's the first Sunday in October), and today, at Belair National Park. Here's a few more, before I sign out for today. Back soon with a new fantasy costume that looks like it must be glued onto Victoria 4. And it's supposed to be battle armor. Ye gods. It was a freebie with a issue of ImagineFX Magazine, so I;m not going to look no gifthorse in no part of its anatomy, you understand --!

Yep, it's safe to say that spring is here. I just wish it would warm up a little bit!

Jade, 11 October

Conan who --? In fact, SAV's "Atlas" for M4 and Genesis

2011-10-09T22:15:00.000-07:00

Call this a product review ... in which case, it's a 5-star review. I'm not just impressed, I'm very, very impressed. Studio Art Vartanian have outdone themselves with this one. It's a skinmap and face/body morph to fit Michael 4 and the new Genesis mesh. The Genesis part had me a bit worried. I've been passing on skinmaps that say they're for Genesis for months now, because I was never sure if I'd be able to use it in the old fashioned Michael 4, in DAZ Studio 3 ... and as I've said here before, I can't run DAZ Studio 4. I have a powerful but older system which is 32-bit, and I've heard bad, bad things about trying to run Studio 4 on 32-bit systems. I won't be able to afford a new system for a year or so, which puts the new DAZ studio well and truly on the back burner -- and the Genesis mesh with it!

(In case you're puzzled: Genesis is a new 3D mesh technology; the base figure is packaged inside of Studio 4 -- you don't but it separately. But every single thing you want to do with it is an add-on, or a plug-in.)

But I was at Renderosity the day before yesterday, shopping for the props to finish off a commission piece, and there was this barbarian ... one look, and I was hooked. He was also on special, under ten bucks! I figured it had to be worth the risk, to find out of I could get the skinmap to work in the old DAZ, with the old figure. If it didn't work, I was out the price of a can of coffee. No biggie.

And the answer it, it does work!

The big challenge was in getting the files into the proper folders, the proper file hierarchy (or directory structure, as we used to call it back in the old DOS days. Yes, I'm afraid I'm that old), but the designer had given fair warning of this. As you know (or might), the old file hierarchy was:

users/documents/DAZ/Studio/content/runtime/...

...and after that, you copied anything you wanted to use in DAZ into Geometries, Morphs, Libraries, Textures, what have you. Tricky the first few times you did it, but soon enough, you can do it in your sleep. No probs.

With Studio 4, DAZ, in their infinite wisdom, have upended everything, changed the entire thing, so that none of the old installers will run (!), and from here on, when a third party designer like SAV wants to make something easily available for DAZ 3 and 4 (much less for M4 and Genesis), well, they're up against a bear of a challenge.

In the past, we bought a simple ZIP archive, inside which was a Runtime folder, and inside that, folders for Geometries, Libraries, Textures, and so forth. You just copy/pasted over the files and boom! You were in business. Now? That won't work. A designer would have to quite literally package the product twice, in two extremely different folder hierarchies, to make it plain-sailing for newbies... but that's not going to work either, because of the sheer size of the high-rez texture maps in a top-class skinmap. You physically cannot package that much content twice, so newbies are going to be stranded, doing some serius head-scratching.

Not being a newbie, I managed to get it figured out (as witness, the renders above), but ... gosh, thanks, DAZ. Newbies really needed this. I mean, the marketplace is now absolutely flooded to the eyeballs with easy-unpack products structured around the obsolete file hierarchy! Imagine a newbie coming along right about now ... downloads Studio 4 because it's the bang up-to-date prog, and the price is right (FREE), and then s/he is trying to shop at Renderosity, because it turns out that's where about 80% of the great content is hiding...! Total confusion.

So I'm making rude faces at DAZ for this, at the same time as giving a whopping five stars and a double thumbs-up to SAV for the Atlas character.

He's flawless. Literally. There are three face options (normal; wilder; and battle-face), and two body options (normal and battle -- ie, spattered with blood). The resolution is superb. The eyeballs are great -- in two colors and two iris sizes. In particular, I like the hands, which are battered enough to look ultra-realistic, and very, very high-rez. One runs out of superlatives.

This is the best SAV skinmap yet -- I've reviewed SAV-Eros and also Yannis in the last few months, too. In the above renders, Atlas (Conan, by any other name) is wearing SAV's Spartacos hair, set to black, and the Euros costume with elements turned off. The set is H3D's Lost Path, with some additional props added in from the Elven Shed set by DM, and the Fae Weaponry fantasy broadsword. The Greek column is from an old, old prop set from the DAZ marketplace ... is it called Eras Columns? Something like that.

The backdrop was specially painted for the occasion...

...in Photoshop, using about 8 layers and numerous brushes by Ron, Mystical, DesignFera, Hawksmont and FrozenStar. Ron's brushes are available at DAZ, the rest can be found at very inexpensive prices at Renderosity. For the background, I started with a deep purple bucket fill, in another layer, painted in a black zone to represent the hillside, added the silhouettes of trees; then foreground trees in another layer, with layers of mist in a layer between them ... then the moon was added in a layer right on top of the purple, then an orange haze in a layer on top of the moon, and the clouds over the lot. Dot in a few stars, and then flatten the whole image and save it to a JPG, to be shipped into DAZ as a backdrop. Done. Simple when you know how. If you're in any doubts, I did a post a short while ago -- creating a watercolor from scratch. The basic technique is absolutely the same: http://3d-adventures.blogspot.com/2011/09/paint-watercolor-landscape-from-scratch.html

The finished renders are so clean, they didn't even need any post work -- you're seeing them just as they finished off in DAZ ... they're not even raytraced, just the trust old deep shadow map on a couple of the lights.

SAV Atlas: five stars, highly recommended, and don't be put off by the fact it'll also work with Genesis. So long as you know your file hierarchy in Studio 3, you can get it figured out in a few minutes, and then you're cooking.

The other thing I've been working on is rejacketing the NARC books ... we're getting there slowly but surely. Just ... slowly! Here's the new cover for EQUINOX:

Nice? Nice.

And if you're wondering what in the world the new Genesis mesh is all about, see this:

And sure, it's a fantastic new technology. But even though the basic program is a free download, you have to spend about $200 on plugins and so forth, to make it compatible with your existing content (when you've spent thousands of bucks on said content, there's no way you could afford to go back and start over with it!), and even then -- the old 32-bit systems, like mine, misbehave badly when running it. I'll need a brand, spanking new system before I can run Studio 4, which means ... oh, Christmas 2012! So till then, I'll be sticking with Studio 3, and watching from the sidelines as Genesis matures. It's still brand new, and probably has a bug or three! It'll be interesting watching it mature ... they might even be up to Studio 5 before I get the chance to upgrade!

Jade, October 10

You have 8,855 pixels ... what will you do with them?

2011-10-05T23:38:00.000-07:00

Your mission, should you choose to accept it (like you have a choice!) is to sell your product. Your #1 marketplace is Kindle. And that means the challenge comes down to this:

You have 8,855 pixels to make your statement, grab your potential customer's attention and get them to load your page. That number of pixels is the area of an image that is 115 high and 77 wide ... on-screen, it's about the size of a postage stamp, yet this is the area you have to work with, and your mission is to bait a visual hook with a tempting, appetizing visual worm, chuck it in the water and see if you get any nibbles.

As you can see from the cover above, the NARC books ... at last! A long, long last! ... are being rejacketed, and they're on their way to Kindle. And it's a measure of the power of Amazon Kindle, at least as far as writers like Mel Keegan are concerned, that without Kindle editions available in MK's store, the NARC books have, over the space of the last couple of years, gone from being his #1 money spinner to way under-performing on the Keegan list. Kindle is that important. (Sure, other writers do better at places like All Romance Ebooks; but Mel Keegan doesn't write pure romance, and ARE is not the place for him. Kindle, however, has been the best thing that ever happened for Mel!)

So, as I've been working on getting the text all unformatted and reformatted for the Kindle editions, I've had my thinking can on, and have been pondering how to rejacket the NARC books for Kindle; and a major part of the question has always been, "How do I make classic science fiction covers look good at the size of postage stamps?

It ain't easy. It took three pairs of eyeballs and about four hours to get the design right, and my Serif desktop looked like this, below, even after I was done in DAZ Studio and Photoshop:

The process was one of trial and error. Basically, you chose the cover elements you needed and re-re-rearranged them, and re-re-resized them, till they looked good at 300 pixels high (as needed by OmniLit, which is All Romance Ebooks's more general retail partner), and at 150 pixels, which is the biggest size that's useful on routine webpages, and finally at 115 pixels high, which is how they're going to be showing up at Kindle.

Oof. The picture elements are -- well, the characters, obviously. Jarrat and Stone. A gunship, the cityscape, the riot armor, a spacescape, the NARC logo rendered in Mad Max style chrome, and a lot of flare and glare off all that shiny metal. Plus the title of the individual book (in this case it's the first of the series, Death's Head), and by golly, did we forget something? Oh yeah ... the writer's credit. Ahem.

And this, at left is what it's all about. The net result at 115 pixels high ... because as the potential customer scans down the list of books pulled up by searches such as "gay science fiction" or "adult techno SF" or "techno thriller" or what have you, s/he is going to see a series of postage stamps. So your postage stamp had better be a doozie, because you have one shot to try to grab attention and at least make the customer load the page.

At the same time as issuing the novels via Kindle, we're also repackaging them in the epub format, and in the next week or so Dave will hopefully be reviewing three of the best ebook reader apps, which suit the new Android tablets. In fact, we just got one in order to test various formats before releasing ebooks in this and that visual style. The iPad is way too expensive, but the Android tablets are astonishingly cheap, and from what we've learned lately, they're literally flooding into public hands. These inexpensive little devices, along with the burgeoning Android app marketplace, are in the process of giving a terrific boost to the very serious business of ebooks. I'm very impressed. More about that later!

One cover down, four to go, to get the NARC series rejacketed. Then, the only books to repackage for the Mel Keegan list are the HELLGATE novels. Speaking of which, #5, Hellgate: Flashpoint, is a matter of weeks away. With any luck at all, it'll be in your hands by the end of October!

Jade, October 6

Grunge meets glam

2011-10-04T00:30:00.000-07:00

Grunge meets glam ... or is it glam meets grunge? At any rate, the location for the shoot was a back alleyway -- one can imagine trash bins just out of shot, and a puzzled looking tomcat looking on! And the costume (and there ain't much of it) revolves around a pair of boots. Fortunately they gave the poor soul a windbreaker when the breeze came up and suddenly you couldn't see him for the goosebumps.

I'm happily playing mix and match here, just taking a break between jobs. That's Michael 4, of course, wearing the Jackson skinmap and the GA Matthias face, and the SAV-Eros short hair set to dark brown. The boots are the Slide 3D Boots which go with an SF costume called "The Forgotten Hero," which you haven't seen yet -- because I haven't even had the time to unpack it! The backdrop is just a plane on which is pasted a very nice brick wall texture from a set called -- oddly enough -- Brick Walls.

There isn't a lick of post work on any of these renders. They're just as they come -- and a couple of them demonstrate the uncanny power of negative space. You're halfway expecting something to drop into the shot, or walk into it ... and the character's eye line tells you he's looking at something or someone. Something is going on just out of shot.

Well ... you and I know it's just the lighting person fiddling with the big silver reflectors while they try to work out if there's any coffee left in the thermos an any cookies left in the bag in the back of the car, the peppermint ones with the real chocolate chips.

But it's fun making up stories. And I can just imagine what's going through the minds of a few of you ... and why not?

Any reason for this project? Not really. Just playing with an idea -- boots. As soon as I get the chance, I'll stage a couple of SF shoots to show off the Forgotten Hero costume, and then there's a prop set I just got, shields and arrows and what have you, so I'd like to do a fantasy with a twist.

Jade, October 4

CG storyboards

2011-09-29T01:07:00.000-07:00

Long time, no post ... I know! September turned to be the equal of August, in terms of workload, and it's blurred by. Last time I remember looking at the calendar, it was about the 10th, and since then I have no idea what happened...

Well, I do know a couple of things. The Rugby Union World Cup is being played in New Zealand. Dave and I love the sport, so we're watching the games which are telecast (and there's not enough of them; some of the good ones have been bypassed), and in the last week we've organized ourselves an Android tablet, which Dave will enjoy playing with, and which I'll use to test some new "interactive ebook" ideas I've come up with lately.

I might ... mind you, might ... be about to spring something brilliant on you. Stay tuned. If this works out, it will be something new, and something rather special, but I'm the first one to admit that it's a bit early in the project to be sharing too many details. All I need is the time to properly develop this, and the first step is to test out the workability of the format. Hence, the Android tablet. It's a neat little thing, looks like every other tablet you ever saw, including the new color Kindle device (which isn't on sale in Australia, so shopping for one of those isn't even an option). The first thing we need to do is get the aps sorted out -- specifically, the aps to read PDF and epub. It's going to be interesting.

What's the deal with today's renders? Drama. No particular reason. I just felt like working with an athletic young man with a sword. (Let me rephrase that...) Anybody out there remember Duncan McLeod? Note to self: I need to tack down Highlander on dvd. Today's renders are a lot like storyboards, those images used to help a director thrash out the framework of a movie scene, so that he has something to work with when the cast and crew gathers on the set. An artist sweats blood on the concepts, and then the director uses them as inspiration, chucks out the artist's work entirely and obeys his muse, which commands him to do something entirely different.

Here's Michael 4 wearing a face and body morph designed by me, and the Neftis Classic Slick Hair set to red, and Billy T's M4 Real Jeans, and the GA Matthias skinmap. The sword is Merlin's Katana; the set is a great "closed set," the DreamHome Basement, and I have two spotlights and two distant lights on it. No particular messing about with textures and whatnot ... this is just everything "as it comes," to feed the drama...

Here's the scenario: he got a phone call to come to this place, this time, to pick up a package, and when he got there -- well, they're waiting for him, and he kicks himself because he suspected it was a trap all along. Now he'll need to bluff his way out, and it that doesn't work ... it's a very good thing he's a highly-skilled swordsman.

Vignette drama to go. Or is it the prolog to something big? Hmmm...

Jade, 29 September

Post 600 -- would you believe it?

2011-09-22T22:46:00.001-07:00

For Post 600 it had to be something special. Something with the richness of high fantasy, and great beauty, and so forth -- and a piece that took some considerable time, and skill. This one seems to fit the bill. It has an almost classical feel, reminding you of the paintings which were produced in the late nineteenth century, illustrating the collections of Irish mythology which were being compiled at the time, before the stories were lost forever. I'm thinking of the work of Lady Gregory, obviously.

Here's the same piece, recut as a bookcover:

And because we're having a birthday of sorts here ... I have an ebook for you...

MEL KEEGAN: Ballads and Verse, illustrated by Jade. Poet and artist collaborated on a work of beauty, an amalgam of verse and art. Part of the book was released before, for Christmas 2004 ... parts of it have never been seen before. It's a big download! Because of the weight of artwork, the file size is about 12MB -- and we can't compress it any further, guys, because the artwork suffers too mjuch. But it'll be well worth the download. All the verse from the 2004 issue is included, plus the sonnet from The Swordsman and the two long ballads, The Voice of the South Wind, and On the Full Moon of September (always leave 'em chuckling). Here are a couple of screencaptures:

If you can be patient while 12MB comes down to you ... click here to download and -- enjoy!

In the meantime, this guy is well worth a look at full size:

Happy post 600!

Jade, 23 September

New leathers on a favorite old character

2011-09-20T01:04:00.000-07:00

Here's a priceless opportunity to play with one of my favorite characters -- a face and body morph of my own, which I call Leon. If you've been following this blog for any length of time, you surely recognize him! Actually, I was experimenting with a new set of textures ... bought myself a few items on sale at Renderosity this morning, so had some renders processing through in the background while I worked on a paying job in the foreground.

So I persuaded Leon to put on Sickle Yield's Rogue Armory Pants and strut his stuff while I changed the textures over and over. It's the FS Leather 2 pack -- a couple of dozen very different leather textures, high rez and seamless, so they apply very nicely indeed.

The pants prop proves to be problematical when the figure moves into anything remotely like an extreme poses. These are some more poses from the Amazing Bodies set (plus one or two from elsewhere, and some fine tuning along the way). The more extreme the pose, the more the .OBJ tends to warp out of any kind of surface which will accept a texture, so you have to be very careful how you use the prop, and whatever textures. (It also has no morph to create a contour in the crotch ... one wishes it did. A somewhat heroic he-man like this ought to have at least a suggestion of the clan jewels! Yeah, yeah, I could achieve the same effect with the deformer tools, but it's too fiddly to do the job quickly, and I never have time to mess about.)

In fact, in the top picture, to get around the .OBJ warping problem I had to hand-paint the render to get the somewhat poor render characteristics ... but, having said that, zapping on a few strokes in Photoshop and calling it post work, is so easy, it's not really worth a grumble! And yes, I know that the warping is a problem of "conforming" costumes, whereas you can work with "dynamic" costumes and escape the issue ... but I haven't yet shelled out a ton of money for either DAZ Studio 4 Pro/Advanced, or Poser, with its Cloth Room, so the dynamic costuming options are out of reach right now. Eventually, I'll shell out the money -- but a MUCH more powerful computer comes first. I've heard that unless you're running DAZ Studio 4 on a 64 Bit System, it's the proverbial rough trot -- and of course to get into the new Genesis figures, Studio 4 is where it starts and ends. I do intend to come back and post about the new Genesis figures. I know alllll about 'em. I just don't have the hardware to run 'em.

By the time I was done experimenting with the leathers I was on a tea break -- so I took the opportunity to paint up a couple of these to nice effect with the candle glow and some smoke. And the signature piece was fully painted with some zaps and swirls and so forth, and the moon in the sky. Nice.

That's DAZ's Michael 4 wearing my Leon face and body morph, plus the M4 High Rez skinmap and the Midnight Prince hair, set to auburn. The costume is, as I said, Sickle Yield's Rogue Armory pants; the coat is the duster from the M4 Cowboy costume set. All the leather textures are drawn from the FS Leather 2 pack. The set is DM's Kerrick's Throne, with only the building and lamps loaded. The sky was a render I did in Bryce a loooong time ago (never throw anything away), and the trees are several iterations of Merlin's Silver Birch, from the Merlin's Trees pack. The brushes are Ron's Smoke, and Ron's Steam and Smoke.

Next post is #600, and it'll be something special!

Jade, September 20

Paint a watercolor landscape ... from scratch.

2011-09-16T22:27:00.000-07:00

Challenge: paint a watercolor landscape ... and do it from scratch, without falling back on a photograph. This is quite a good exercise, if you're learning how to make Photoshop play tunes, because it takes you all over the map in terms of tools. And the good news is, it's dead easy.

The easiest part of the lot is where you're ready to tell Photoshop to apply the filter and make the artwork look like a watercolor, right at the end. That's just a mouse click, really. But you have to have something ready to be converted, and unless you're going to grab a photo and run it through the machinery (which might be convenient, but it ain't clever, and you really do have to ask, "Yes, but is it art?"), well, you'll have to slap the art together first. Right.

And that's where it gets interesting. Before you hit the button to apply the watercolor filter, you want to end up with something like this:

So the next intelligent question is, where the [expletive deleted] do you start?

The first thing to get your head around is working bottom-up, not top down. Imagine your landscape, and ask, "What's the most distant thing in the picture?" The answer is always going to be, the sky. So heres where you start. Set the canvas size in Photoshop ... big enough to work in comfortably, with some elbow room. I used 1500x850 at 100dpi, but you could use something much bigger -- or smaller, if you're on a tablet-size screen.

Pick a color to represent the sky. Bucket fill the canvas, and call this Layer One. Change your ink/paint color to white or pale blue, and load up an .abr brush set of clouds. Plunk at least one or two clouds into the frame, right there on the sky, to give yourself some sensation of it being the sky, otherwise it could just as easily be a big blue product label! You should be looking at something like this now:

And that's Layer One ... the bottom layer, the most distant thing from your eyes.

Now, create a new layer, and be sure you're painting in this one, because you're going to change your paint/ink color to something like a light brown, choose a small brush, set the "softness" to about 80, and actual hand-draw the outline of a hillside, and fill in underneath it with block color. You'll need 90% opacity on the brush, and just ... paint the skyline and full under it.

Then you can choose a darker shade of the same color and swoosh in areas which represent the darker shadows of depressions, little gullies, in the hillside. Then pick a dark green, and load of an .abr brush set of trees, and "stamp" the silhouettes of trees into the distant hillside:

Now, keep in mind, this is ART here, you're not trying to be photo-realistic. That's a completely different technique, which takes about fifty times longer! This project is on its way to being a watercolor painting done from scratch, it's not trying to be a photograph.

And now that you have a hillside and some trees in place, you can go back to the bottom layer and work up the sky with some more clouds, to give it a really nice texture and feel:

And you think to yourself, that's not too bad.

Notice that in the real world, things faaaaar from the camera tend to get pale with distance, because of the sheer volume of air between you and them. This is the simplest example of "atmospherics." It's why massive mountains look blue or purple. Things tend to start to fade into the sky when they're very, very far away. Our hillsides are not so far away -- they're big in the shot, and you can still make out the details (individual trees), so you know these hills are not the size of the Himalayas! But the principle still holds good, and you can get a lot of mileage out of a simple little trick: make background objects in a landscape paler than mid- and foreground objects, and you automatically get the illusion of distance.

Which means it's time to add some mid-ground objects. So make a new layer, choose a darker green and draw in the line of a closer hillside. Fill the body of the hill in, in the dark green, then choose a lighter green and swoosh in the areas of this hillside which would represent the little knolls and crests on the hillside. They're paler because they stand up and catch the sun.

Then you can choose whichever kind of trees suit your landscape, and start to "stamp in" the trees. Use two or three shades of green for these trees -- darker and lighter; and experiment with what looks most striking -- light over dark, dark over light, or dark over light over dark, and so on. Remember, this is ART, you're not trying to be photo-realistic...

Keep going with this stage till you have something which looks "done" ... and this is where your own artist's eye will have to guide you. It's easy to overdo this part of the process and wind up with a murky mess. If this happens, delete the layer, create a new one and go again. You can also use .abr brushes to add a hint of grasses into the nearer hill.

One of the important things to get your head around in artwork is that you shouldn't try to paint every blade of grass, or every leaf on the tree, or every strand of hair on someone's head. To begin with, it's physically impossible to do this; then, it gives a poor result if you try. The same goes for this kind of digital work ... hint at the grasses, don't try to paint the whole thing in.

When you're happy with your mid-ground, it's time to look at the foreground. Close up, you can add overhanging trees, grasses, little plants that pop into frame. The closer things are, the more clearly we can see them. If you notice, trees in the background are not much more than blobs suggesting trees, but right up close you can actually see leaves and individual grass stems. This is what you need to try to achieve in a painting.

Paint your foreground into a new layer...

This is what the single layer will actually look like. Objects floating in space, not making much sense till you view all layers together. (Actually, I've whacked a couple of extra trees into the background on this same layer. They should have been on a lower layer, in fact, but I was hurrying to finish the piece off, because South Africa vs. Fiji, in the Rugby Union World Cup, was coming on TV in about five minutes' time, so ... ahem! I simply forgot to change layers when I added the extra trees to the background. However, you can get away with the occasional small booboo like this, because when you view the whole project all of a piece, it doesn't make any difference at all.)

The last thing I did was to add some birds in the middle of the shot ... why the middle? Because they help to draw the viewer's eye into the picture, and with the lines of the overhanging trees, you're "guiding the eye" into the painting an keeping it there...

And the only thing you need to do now is to go into your Filters menu, and apply the "Watecolor" effect. You need to apply it as little as the settings will allow, with the maximum brush detail you can get, and the effect is...

...nice. Done! Sign that one and call the project complete.

This one is different from the painting I uploaded the other day...

...because the previous one, above, started life as an incredibly simple Bryce render which was used as the bottom layer for a painting. The effect is a lot more realistic than the watercolor, but realism ain't always the result you're looking for. And it's neat to start completely from scratch and work from a blank screen, like a blank sheet of art paper. Ye gods, does anybody remember art paper...?

This painting used Mystikel's Cloud Pack, Designfera's Trees and Forests, Ron's Birds -- and I wish I could tell you what the grass brushes were, but I've gone blank. Am having a senior moment.

Jade, 17 September

Big story in a small space ... without words.

2011-09-16T00:30:00.000-07:00

If a picture is worth a thousand words, this lot must be worth a whole novella. I don't think I need to add a syllable about the plot unfolding here, so ... add flesh to these bones yourself, right? It's the old, old story, told about a thousand times before, but never quite like this!

I think the last time I saw this story, it was a damsel on a pirate ship, and she ended up First Mate of the vessel, and then shoved the Skipper overboard when no one was looking and remarked on how rough the sea was that day.

What you have here is the "camera one" sequence. You're seeing one character, from one POV, while the scene plays out. There would also be a "camera two" on the characters with whom this young spacer is negotiating, while at gunpoint, and a wide camera on the whole group. These are virtually storyboards for a steamy little science fiction drama played out on a highly detailed, closed set.

And the tale turns out well for the spacer. Get held up and ripped off by space pirates, and, uh, "negotiate" your way out of it, and wind up as a pirate spacer yourself ... with an earring, no less, and the freedom of the ship. Neat. Now, there's a story for you.

One wonders if the skipper of this pirate crew will get shoved out of an airlock when no one's looking, and our young spacer remarks on how unreliable the airlocks on this ship can be at this time of year...

This is DAZ Michael 4 wearing the SAV-Eros skinmap, face morph and Sav-Eros short hair. The costume is Utilitize, lashed up with the SH Hadcore addon textures. The set is Sector 15 by Stonemason. The poses are all adapted from the Amazing Bodies set. The earring is from the Gypsy Hair prop, actually designed for V4, but as with most props, you can make anything fit anyone.

And I just noticed, it's the Equinox of Spring in a few days ... what happened to 2011? It's winding up to summer already, and I've been so busy this year, I've hardly noticed it passing by! Waaaah! I want it back! Not much chance of that, though, so we'll just look forward to 2012, firm in the faith that the Mayan calendar cycles to zero and (duh) resets itself, and starts over. Let's face it -- calendars usually do.

Jade, 16 September

CG hybrid art in Bryce and Photoshop

2011-09-15T01:37:00.000-07:00

Touching base again with something pretty -- to let everyone know I'm still alive, basically. At least, I think I'm still alive. I was, the last time I looked in a mirror and an weird-looking, stressed-out face looked back at me. Life is being obnoxious, with a capital ob. Stuff is happening, and it just won't let up for long enough to let me get my life back together so --

Here is a real, genuine digital painting. The "canvas" was rendered in Bryce, and is simple to the point of looking like it as knocked up in plasticine. This "bottom layer" was shipped into Photoshop and ... painted. Then painted some more. Then finished off with some more painting. Looks like an island on Olympic Peninsula -- it's also uploaded at a good size, if you'd like to see it large.

I've been asked if I'll talk a little bit about how to do this work, and -- sure. It's not terribly difficult, but it's also not "intuitive" as such. It's a lot less clever than a whole lot of artists would like you to think it is, but on the other hand, your own artist's eye is very important, and you do need a few basic techniques that are basic to any kind of art, even crayons and pencils! The good news is, the techniques are also simple.

The other thing I've been asked is, would I render some of my best stuff as wallpapers ... and again, you bet. In fact, I've been asked this several times, so what I'll do, once a week, is go back through some of the old posts, take some of the best, render them up into wallpapers in the most popular or common sizes, and do a post in which a number of links are embedded. You can then download the wallpapers direct from a folder at DreamCraft, which is our own domain, so you know where they came from, and that they're "clean" of any nasty passengers, like viruses.

This is post #596, and ... what in the world am I going to put together, to mark #600?! You might recall, I went through this same searching when I was rolling up to #500. I've glimpsed a couple of ideas in my mind's eye, and I need to get my finger out and work them up, before we get there!

More soon.

Jade, September 15

Touching base with a barbarian. Let me rephrase that --

2011-09-11T23:14:00.000-07:00

Touching base here, and "on the run" as usual ... but this one is well worth a look. CG art -- half 3D and half digital painting. What's painted? The whole backdrop was painted for this piece specifically, and shipped into DAZ. The character and props were posed, lit and rendered, then the finished render was shipped into Photoshop and a lot of painting was done on many parts of it.

Still trying to come up with something awesome for Post #600, which comes up in just five posts' time! I think I glimpse something in the mind's eye that might be up to the challenge ... fantasy art, gorgeous hunk, that kind of thing.

So what's involved in today's piece? That's DAZ's Michael 4 wearing the Yannis Rasta dreadlocks and the Jerome skinmap by Tosca, and a bit of the costume called The Hunter. He's wielding Merlin's Katana, and those are some pieces from a set called The Lost Path by H3D in the background. Lots of painting on everything, after the render ... plus Ron's Birds, and Ron's smoke. Result: very nice indeed! (You can get all these items from Renderosity, including the skinmap, incidentally.)

Sorry to be a bit brief today -- work is piled up on me as usual. But I have some more new 3D toys to play with, and I'll be back very soon with some goodies which will include a couple of male nudes I've been thinking about for at least a week now. Not that one obsesses about these things, you understand, but when a great idea for a digital painting gets into the back of your mind, it's hard to shake. Uh huh.

Also, I've been asked to talk a little bit about the new Genesis figure -- explain that the heck is going on with this ... lots of people are quite confused, and so was I at first. So this is what I'll be talking about tomorrow, and with a bit of luck it'll make sense, or more sense!

Jade, 12 September

New skinmap on an old morph ... what a difference!

2011-09-09T01:19:00.000-07:00

In the last week I've been prepping the NARC books to go to Kindle, iBooks, B&N and so forth, and the urge to render Jarrat and Stone again was too much to resist. Here's a few of the most striking renders ... from which episode? None in particular; these are "generic," I guess -- they could be from any of the books. Right now I'm working on Aphelion, which is going through a kid of baptism of fire, being rescued from obsolete software, a process which involves fixing pagination across the entire document, due to a great deal of weirdness which gets in when you take a file that was written in one program, published in another, then opened in a third, and copy/pasted into a fourth! I guess this is one of the alligators you wrestle when you're breathing new life into books that haven't really been available in years, and technology has marched on.

So, yes, the NARC series is on its way to Kindle, iBooks, Barnes & Noble and so forth. You'll be able to curl up with Jarrat and Stone on your iPad, or iPhone, or whatever's your fancy. And part of the process is that I need to rejacket the whole series. Meaning, I need to redesign the "look" for five books. I have a few ideas, and am oscillating between two of them. Stay tuned.

Meanwhile...

I was doing a job for a client a few weeks ago, and was asked to change the skinmap on a Victoria 4.2 character whose face morphs had been created to specifications, and I warned ahead of time, "Changing the skinmap is going to change the face more than you think." It was difficult to describe how, or why, but the results speak for themselves...

How does changing the skinmap affect the underlying face morph? Well, see for yourself how the face changes...

Here's Neil Travers, from Hellgate, in two versions. On the left, he's wearing the Lee skinmap, which is an "elite" skinmap from DAZ. On the right, he's wearing the SAV-Eros skinmap, and the difference is amazing. The SAV-Eros version of Travers gives a much more realistic appearance, all in all. I bounced these test renders off Mel Keegan, wondering which he'd prefer --

It's not often I go blank when confronted by an observation or suggestion. Mel looked and looked and said, "I like them both a bit ... can you blend them?"

Ummm ... that's a very good question, to which I think the answer is actually no. If anyone out there knows some trick to get a blend of skinmaps, please tell me. I think what I'll do is play around with the lights a little to perhaps drop out some of the gold tones ... you're accustomed to seeing the character looking paler, which is just as Travers is described.

By the by, this is post #594 ... post #600 is coming up soon, and I'd love to do something gorgeous to mark it. Now -- what?!

Jade, 9 September

Anyone for a stroll in downtown Mos Eisley --?

2011-09-06T20:14:00.000-07:00

Just letting you know that if you're looking for the gloriously exotic male nudes, you need to be on the other blog today. In fact, I posted them last evening, but didn't have the opportunity to post here too and let everyone know they were online. So, uh, better late than never, and with all due arm-waving and MALE NUDITY WARNINGS, here's the link ... enjoy!

In all seriousness, that's a gorgeous skinmap (SAV-Eros), and it fits a few of my chatacters beautifully. I'm thinking, I might switch Neil Travers over to this skinmap and see what happens. He's currently wearing the Elite Lee skinmap, which is very good, but I've always had a couple of reservations about it, and I have a real feelng SAV-Eros might be just what I was wanting. This skinmap comes with a very, very good bump map, which you can dial up or down at whim, or as per need. One wishes other skinmaps came with better bump maps -- it's the one map which, in skins, is often overlooked, and and undercooked bump map can make poor ol' Michael 4 look like plastic.

I believe the SAV-Eros bump maps are either mostly or entirely hand painted, and what can I say? Fantastic work, guys! Call this a "model review," if you like -- see here for the post where you see the skinmap at work, or (!) if you don't mind the occasional artistic male nude, click over to the exotic blog and get the whole picture!

Here are some nice renders of that new set I've been talking about in the last couple of days ... they were supposed to be posted yesterday, but (surprise!) I ran right out of time. The set is D'Square, which is from Renderosity, and it's a very, very nice set -- absolutely excellent value at the price, too. It has an almost exotic flavor about it ... it makes me think of "downtown Mos Eisley," the better part of town where the scum and villainy don't hang out! In fact, you can imagine the Millennium Falcon in the sky, departing the Tattooine system with its tail feathers on fire and the local contingent of the Imperial Fleet wondering where it went!

You know, I think I'll try the SAV-Eros skinmap on Neil Travers, and see what happens. This afternoon. See you tomorrow, with the results!

Jade, 7 September

Michael 4 tries on his new skinmap

2011-09-05T01:27:00.000-07:00

Having fun playing with my old mate, Michael 4 ... who just got a new skinmap, new hair, costume, the works. I've been shopping sales at DAZ and Renderosity even while I haven't had a chance of doing art to upload. Now I'm getting a half hour here and here to break the new stuff out of storage and play with it.

The new skinmap is SAV-Eros, from Studio Art Vartanian. It's billed as "could be vampire, could be human," and here's the original face and body morph, as supplied by the designer:

It's a very good face indeed -- angular and harsh, and you'll see a lot more of it. But after I rendered the whole SAV-Eros character a couple of times to get a handle on it, I wanted to see how the skinmap would suit my own characters, so I dropped it onto the morph I call Ron. The result is very nice indeed -- that's the top two images. You've actually seen this morph once before ... a looong time ago. I like this combo of morph and skinmap a lot, so you'll definitely see him again!

This is also the SAV-Eros hair, which is a great new style. This is the "long" version of it; the model ships with a short version too, and I'll be looking at that next. (I also bout another hairdo, Sissy LeBeau, which fits Michael 4 and Victoria 4.2, too. We'll have a look at that one in the coming week.

The costume is the Sickle Yield Rogue Armory pants once again; this is another of the textures which are supplied with the model, and I'm about to change to my own textures next, see how far we can go with this garment.

And I'm also playing with a couple more of the stock poses from the Amazing Bodies collection, which is one of the very best pose sets I've ever come across. As I said -- having fun playing with a bunch of the new stuff I shopped for during August.

I'd like to render this character as an exotic male nude -- the kind of thing that would be uploaded to the other blog. In fact, if time permits, I'll do this tomorrow. Also today, I had a chance to load up a new set, D'Square, which is a challenge to render, and very rewarding if you can get it to come out right! Still need to do a bit of post work on those renders, so you won't see them before tomorrow. Sooooo tired! Have been cleaning house on top of working, and even though it's only early evening, I'm propping my eyelids open and yawning! Methinks it'll be an early night tonight ... then look out for either of both of these characters to appear nude tomorrow!

Jade, September 5

CG art project: merging two projects in DAZ Studio, the CG-archangel meets dishy student

2011-09-02T01:54:00.000-07:00

(All pieces are uploaded at full size -- click to see the details)

As promised, the archangel meets the archaeologist ... in a full-on CG art piece done in three programs and worked by merging two projects in DAZ Studio. The story so far: this ruin in the wilderness has been buried for 5000 years, and a recent storm just washed it out of the ground. An archaeological team is all over it in an instant, and they don't know what trouble they're getting into, because this ruin was buried for a reason, and was supposed to stay buried forever. Whatever is here is so dangerous, an archangel was assigned to guard it, and he's still here.

Enter the aforementioned archangel, and our somewhat dishy archeology student is bowled over. Understatement.

So, how do you go about putting together a project like this? It's not actually as hard as you might think. Assuming you have scenes that are already in a good state of preparation, you're more than halfway home.

I was using The Winged Avenger, and then the Spirit of Place scene. Check out each one, if you haven't seen them in development in the last week or so. Then the storyline that's been evolving in my imagination called for them to be blended together, and the plan was to hit "merge" in the DAZ Studio file menu...

Here's how you'd go about doing this. You have two full scenes. You need to decide which scene is the primary one -- in other words, the other scene is going to be added to it. In the primary scene, keep all the sets and props and so forth, but in the other scene, which is going to be imported, delete everything that you don't want to come in on the import/merge command:

So, strip the scene down to the basics you want to bring in, and save it under a new file name. Open up the primary scene ... notice the x,y,z coordinates of where your "hero" figures are standing. This will give you some orientation, when you click "merge," and you'll have an idea of where everything is.

The merge command is hiding under the FILE menu. Choose a file to merge, and click it ... two files become one, and now you'll be grateful that you stripped the incoming scene, because if you leave extraneous stuff in there, the result can be a huge chaos. Resave the compilation -- under a new filename, in case something goes wrong.

Now you can set a new backdrop, and reposition the characters:

This is the halfway-finished render. What's "wrong" is that there's a big "dead" area in the right bottom corner. It's perfect for matting text over, but in a painting it's just ... empty. In this one, the sky is a Bryce render I did a long time ago, which was recolored for this occasion ... and this gave me the inspiration for how to fill in the blank, wasted area.

Time to get this render into Photoshop and do some painting. I wanted light beams and lens flare in the area where the dawn spills over into the shadows of the shrine. Then I wanted fire and smoke from the burner, and also birds in the morning sky.

For all this, I used Mystikel's light beams and then Ron's flames, Ron's Steam and Smoke, and Ron's Birds. Yes, I like Ron's brushes! Why? All Photoshop brushes are not created equal. There are great ones and there are dog-rough ones. A lot of brushes are too-low resolution, and "pixelie," meaning they were made from images scanned from books or magazines, and they're just not so good. Ron's brushes are very, very good indeed. They're not cheap, but they're among the best I've found. Other absolutely top notch brush designers are Mystikel and Designfera -- I have loads of their brushes, and use them all the time. You can buy Ron's brushes at DAZ, and yoou can find Mystikel and Designfera at Renderosity.

So here you have a piece that was done in three programs (Bryce, DAZ Studio, Photoshop Elements 9) and used two separate DAZ projects, merged into one. Neat!

Jade, 2 September

Michael 4, the new pants, new poses, and all

2011-09-01T00:03:00.000-07:00

Still on the "Spirit of Place" theme -- because I rather like this! -- here's our young hero again. The archeology student who's out there in the field, studying a fantastic ruin which just appeared out of the landscape after an amazing storm caused four-meter surges which scoured out a valley that's been silted up for, well, forever. The ruin is seeing the light of day for the first time in 5000 years, right? Right. And there's something so weird about it...

Remember, this is the same ruin you saw in the Winged Avenger post, a little while ago --- remember this:

...and this guy is still around. He's been the sentinel in charge of making sure this ruin was buried, and stayed buried forever ... and if it hadn't been for global warming and climate change, it probably would have. But now it's out in the free air again, and what's more, humans are already here. They're measuring and photographing, taking samples, and generally getting themselves into danger they know nothing about.

Time for our archangel to appear on the scene? Mmmm, that's what I thought, too! So join me tomorrow, when he arrives.

In the meantime, this is actually a study of Michael 's new costume. The pants are a great prop. They're the Sickle Yield Rogue Armory pants, which you can get fro Renderosity and they're both easy to work with, and they render up a treat. They have a variety of textures in the package with the pants model itself, and more morphs than you can shake a stick at. This costume is from the same designer who did the sweats you saw quite a while back, in a Male Glamor Photography exercise:

(Click here to see the rest of this series ... they're, uh, nice!)

And I just got another one of Sickle Yield's M4 costumes: a neat pair of jeans that (at last, somebody did this!) have the morphs supplied for "half on, half off," or "state of undress," that kind of thing. I haven't even had the chance to install this yet, but it's on the agenda for the next few days, so stay with me.

The other item I'm test-driving today is a great new set of poses for M4. It's called Amazing Bodies (also from Renderosity), and the title is accurate. These are tremendous poses, and trouble free. Usually, no matter how good they look on the thumbnails, there's a problem somewhere when you apply a pose, but this pack is one of only a few pose packs that I've found to be "viceless." I'll show you some more of them tomorrow --

Tomorrow, the winged avenger, the archangel guardian of this ruin, is going to join the archeology student, and this promises to be interesting. If you're into this kind of work, the easiest way to achieve this effect is to merge two scenes into one. If you're feeling your way through DAZ, join me tomorrow, and I'll tell all.

And because I knooooow some of you (most of you) are wondering:

Yes, this pose looks beautiful when you click "off" on the costume and leave a glorious CG male nude behind!

That's Michael 4 wearing the Raphael skinmap, but not the Raphael face. That's the Rock Star hair by Neftis Salon (from DAZ), and the set is DM's The Shrine (from Renderosoty). The claw-footed incense burner is from another of DM's sets (Fantasy Visions??). The sky backdrop is a recolorization of the stormy sky I did in Bryce to use as a backdrop for the Steampunk Clock renders back in June. The last time you saw it, it was purple.

And now the brain is busy with images of the scene where the archangel meets the archaeologist! This is going to be interesting...

Jade, 1 September (other side of the dateline, of course)

CG art ... spirit of place

2011-08-31T00:30:00.001-07:00

It's a safe bet you didn't expect to see me again before September, but I'm sneaking in with a matter of hours to spare, at least on this side of the dateline. August was a very, very hard month for me, on many fronts -- work and health being the two big issues. But I'm verrrrry close to out of that particular wood, and am dying to get back to some artwork.

As I said in my previous post, I've been shopping for all kinds of items while things went berserk. Hairdos, costumes, skinmaps, sets, props, brushes, all manner of goodies...

I had expected to be able to render a new set today, but when I unpacked it I discovered that it was short of a baker's dozen of its textures. Ten diffuse maps and some bump maps were missing, so it literally refuses to render and look decent. I've dropped a line to the designer, and with any luck I'll get the missing files through soon, and then you'll see something very interesting.

In the meantime -- here's Michael 4 wearing his new shirt, new pants, new boots! The pants are great, and tomorrow I'll be showing off some renders which will display them to their best. Today's renders are now "quick" as such, but "abbreviated." I wanted to do at least half a dozen, but time ran out. I'll write the post about the new togs tomorrow -- tell you what they are, where they're from, where to get 'em.

So I call this theme "spirit of place," and if you have a look at The Winged Avenger, which I uploaded a couple of weeks ago -- it's the same set, but here's where it gets interesting. It's 5000 years later. The winged avenger ... archangel, perhaps? Dragonslayer, maybe? Then along come a pair of archeology students who are also a little bit "fey," as they call it -- they have the gift of the second sight. They can feel the "spirit of place" of this ancient location.

And there's something going on here.

Now, I'm not saying it'll be the end of the world as we know it, but --

That archangel isn't far away, and he's hanging around for a reason! Most humans would never be aware of him (and his quarry), but these two are part Irish, part gypsy, and they're psychic. The avenger shows his beautiful face, and they'll see him.

Anyone for a threesome?!

More soon...

Jade, August 31

Gay book cover art again ... soooo pretty, this one!

2011-08-28T00:03:00.000-07:00

Somebody said the other day, "There used to be this great digital artist, went by the pen name -- or would it be 'brush name?' -- of Jade. Whatever happened to her?"

And someone else said, "I don't know ... she vanished. I think she might have died. Well, either that or she gave up the painting and got a goat farm in New Zealand, and she lives halfway up a mountainside right now, catching up on her sleep."

Hmmm. Chance, as the British say, would be a fine thing! No such luck, fellow travelers. August has simply been a blizzard of work, added to which, I haven't been well a lot of the time! Art? Yep, there's been TONS of it. All of the commercial variety, nothing creative ... nothing worth uploading, till this piece, which I did the other day.

A while ago I created a new character, using the Jerome skinmap and the Yannis Rasta dreadlocks, and I'd just gotten done rendering him when I thought, "I know who you are!" I hadn't set out to create Rogan Dahl from The Lords of Harbendane, but that's pretty much what happened accidentally. In the last month, I've been repackaging numerous books from our list, and it was just too great a temptation ... I had to do a new cover for Harbendane while I was there.

This is the third cover this book has had, and it's definitely the best. Here it is with its text objects pasted up:

Now, that's pretty! Gay books need quite delicate cover art, because it's entirely possible Aunt Maud might be looking, and we don't want to give her a seizure. But on the other hand the art needs to be representational of the content of the story. Harbendane is a love story as well as a huge epic fantasy taking place in the northern valleys, and the bleaker lands not far south of the arctic circle. I think this piece does the job nicely.

These are two Michael 4s, obviously. Yannis Rastra Dreads and Jerome skinmap on Rogan (face and body morphs my me) while Tristan is wearing the Aether hair and the Mario skinmap. Rogan is wearing the Lockwood pants and the AS Narkilir shirt (all textures changed), and Tristan is wearing the Lockwood shirt and the Cold Life pants (all textures changed). In the background is a digital painting I did a couple of years ago for the original cover. The sky, mountains and foreground are literally cut out of three different photos, and painted together. This was done looooong before I had Photoshop, so the work was done in Micrografx. The foreground comprises the Rodi Design baby fir trees (from Content Paradise), and a bit of overpainting in Photoshop using Ron's Magical Snow brushes (from DAZ). Then the whole shebang was color saturated for extra impact, and shipped into Serif X3 for the text objects to be added.

So sorry to have been absent for eons! I'm almost at the end of the avalanche of work, and in the last couple of weeks I've bought loads of 3D models ... new skinmaps, hair, sets, props, Photoshop brushes ... that I haven't even unpacked yet. I'm dying to get to the end of the overwork, so I can get back to some art -- art for its own same. Ars gratia artis, pardon the Latin.

So, like the man said in the movie, I'll be back! Soon.

Jade, August 28

The Winged Avenger ... and the comic story I promised last week!

2011-08-16T01:58:00.000-07:00

I'm, uh, back, to quote Sam. I didn't actually die sometime during the last week, though there were times when I seriously considered seeking out high places and jumping off. Work. Gak.

Anyway, somehow I survived, and here I am! Just one image today, for reasons of time -- and also, this one is as much painting as render. It actually took just as long to paint this as to set up the 3D work. I call it "Avenging Angel." Those are the Icarus Wings, and the sun staff from the Sun Edge set, and DM's circular shrine, and odds and ends of props. That's Michael 4 wearing a face and body morphs designed by me, plus various bits from Powerage's Supreme Armor, and the loincloth from The Wood God, with all the textures changed. Neat! (I uploaded it at full 1:1 size in case you want to see the details...)

If you have a long memory, you might recall that I promised a story to accompany the CG comic art pieces from my last post -- about a week ago! (Ye gods, where did the week go?) Asian guy, katana, evocative textures and smoke and lighting. A story had popped into my mind, and those images evolved from it. And here it is:

The story is a tale of magic, madness, science fiction and fantasy (and if I had the time, good golly, I'd write this one). The character you saw in the art in the last post is a ronin, in a world gone askew, about 15 years from now. His name is Chen. He was the first human being born in the 21st century, and he grew up "off the grid," under the radar ... the child of a woman who was the last of a great warrior house, and who died defending him from shadowy enemies when he was still just 14 years old.

Alone on the street at that age, he survived on his wits and the skills learned from his mother ... and he's different. Maybe the male line of this family have always been different, or maybe it was because he grew up in a place where radiation levels were insanely high due to the laboratory experiments of the old scientist, Roban who was his mother's only friend through the years when those shadowy enemies were hunting for Chen.

Now, the scientist is very, very old -- and is he insane? His experiments into starship engines have mutated him physically as well as changing his brain, how it works, how he thinks -- he never had proper funding or oversight; his research has always been done in the basement of a great deserted skyscraper which is said to be haunted -- in fact, it's not haunted, but strange specters do appear there as a result of the dimensional forces at work in the experiments. But the shadows hunting Chan are still there, and there's no more Roban can do to protect Chen, save to give him a device which was developed out of the experimentation...

But Roban warns Chen never to use it unless his very life is in jeopardy, because the results can not be fully predicted, and it can't be tested without using it. Chen is skeptical, but he takes the device when he leaves the lab, and sets out on his superbike to leave the city -- find somewhere else where he can be safe, live some semblance of a normal life. He's known for years, he should get out and stay out, but he's lived all his life here. Only the three big fights he's had, and survived, in the last five days, have convinced him to go. His enemies are getting closer -- and he doesn't even know why they're hunting him.

He doesn't get far. The shadows are right behind him, and they hunt like a wolfpack. They corner him on a bridge, and the fight is terrible ... he holds them off but there are too many, and when he finds himself out in the girders, a hundred meters over the stormy river waters, Chen realizes his only chance of any kind of survival is to use the device.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is where the fun really starts...!

Told you it was a comic -- but what a comic. Basically, what you have here is a whopping great prologue. The device has to cause mayhem, the shadows are never far away, Chen is hunted, someone helps him, he meets another ronin warrior, there's a love story on the side ... Roban's work turns out to be less madness than genius ... starship/dimensional engine? Whoa.

I need to see if I can hammer out the rest of this story, don't I?!

Jade, 16 August

CG comic art concepts ... oooooh, now that's interesting!

2011-08-07T02:11:00.000-07:00

Long time, no post here ... sorry! Work didn't just go ballistic, it went mega-supernova, and that, on a weekend! It's going to be 2-3 days before I have time to even think about art for me, and posting here for the pleasure of posting here, but --

I do want to get these pieces posted. You see, I had an idea for a graphic novel ... as usual, I had a flash of a story concept, I saw a blaze of artwork, graphics, characterization. Not that I'm likely to have time to do the art, write/illustrate the graphic novel, y'understand! So I did some concept art featuring the character who popped into my mind, and I'd hoped to have the opportunity, today, to tell you the framework of the story...

Alas, that part of it will have to wait till next time! Actually, it's quite a good story, so join me tomorrow (or maybe the next day), and I'll, uh, tell you a story!

Jade, 7 August

Alien skies and barbarian horsemen...

2011-08-03T02:05:00.000-07:00

Flying through in a heck of a hurry and touching base as I go, here's the barbarian horseman under the ringed planet -- actually, a revamp of an old, old project. I was looking through some ancient renders (September 2009), and thinking, "Hmmm, well, that was a good idea, but it needed more skill to make it work properly.

So here's the revamp! This is actually the reason I started the blog: as a visual diary to chart my wanderings from "golly, I just got the software, and see what I discovered today!" to "hey guys, take a squizz, this isn't half bad --!"

This is a medium easy, medium complex shot. You need Michael 4 and the Millennium Horse, plus the Aether hair set to dark brown on him, and the CWRW Palomino skinmap on the horse. Then, the Horse Tack on the horse, and the Leon tights and boots on the guy. Michael 4 is wearing the GA Matthias skinmap and goatee beard. I brought in an obj of a bit of ground which I made in Bryce a year ago, plus some young fir trees, by Rodi Designs. I slapped a nice rocky texture on the bit of ground, and a lumpy, bumpy displacement map to ruck it all up like real ground... the rest is all painting. I have four lights set, nice and bright with hard shadows, to simulate daylight.

The background started life as a bucket fill in a nice shade of blue. Switch to white and paint in the clouds using Mystikel's Clouds, which is an .abr brush set yo can get from Renderosity. Now, create a new layer and drag it under the clouds ... paint the ringed planet into this layer, in white on a background the same shade of blue as the layer with the clouds. Then -- you guessed. Make the cloud layer go selectively opaque by playing with your merge modes on that layer. Nice effect. That gets the background into shape, and this is used in DAZ Studio as a simple backdrop. After the render you ship the piece back into Photoshop or GIMP and paint in the birds and the grasses in the foot of the shot.

The process is exactly the same as I outlined in the Vulcan tutorial, and the same process was used to derive the Poseidon project. It's really neat when something works easily, and works well.

If I were a white rabbit, I'd have a pocket watch in my hand right now and I'd be tut-tutting about being late! Gotta go, guys, but I hope to be back tomorrow because I have a really cool idea...

Jade, 3 August

CG Art: Vulcan ... and how to do it!

2011-08-01T23:37:00.001-07:00

Thanks to the folks who commented and emailed about the Poseidon image from a couple of days ago -- and here, below, is the long post you guys asked for, telling "how to" ... that is, how to go from an idea to the finished painting you see above.

First comes the idea, and you need to have a "snapshot" in your mind's eye. A lot of people actually start sketching at this point, but it's not necessary if you've "seen" the finished image in your imagination, especially if you reckon you can coordinate all the elements to make this go. If you foresee problems, go ahead and sketch! Otherwise jump right in.

I wanted a backdrop that looked like clouds of smoke and steam in a volcano crater, so I started with stormy sky and sized this to what I wanted. The images of Vulcan and Poseidon are 1200 x 900. You can work at any size you like. Small images don't give you enough wiggle room, and large ones can give your computer a hernia, so -- you only need to work out your comfort zone, and you're home. The sky shot I used for the basic background in this piece was taken a few weeks ago, when a bad weather front was coming in. Cropped out of the bottom of the shot were trees and roofs and a jungle gym!(Always have a camera with you, and always be on the lookout for opportunities to grab skies, seas, textures...)

So use your stormy sky as your first layer. or bottom layer, in your Photoshop or GIMP project. Adjust the contras and brightness -- you want it quite contrasty. Then...

Create another layer and bucket fill in to what is going to be a tone halfway between the shadows and highlights of the background you want to to wind up with. In this case, a gold layer will do just fine, since I'm working between reds and dark browns.

Copy the sky into a third layer and colorize it to a fiery red. This is your top layer...

Now, play with the merge modes on the top and middle layers till it looks great. Only you know the effect that's in your mind's eye, but by playing with the color fades and burns and opacities, you'll create 100 effects, and trust me, you'll know what you want when you see it! Now --

Flatten the image to one layer, and paste to new canvas.

(TIP: Return to old canvas, undo flatten and save the old project as a separate file with all the layers still available. If you do this, you can always return to this stage and rework it if you need to. You're trying to preserve as much of the work as you can at every stage, in case something goes wrong later and you need to go back and paint something again.)

Switch to the NEW canvas to work on from here on. Save OLD project as "Vulcan_0" and save NEW project as "Vulcan_01"

In your new canvas, you have the combo of the stormy sky, the colorized sky and the flat gold layer sandwiched between them. This is the combo create by playing with the merge modes, and then saving the best result as one image.

Create a new layer on top of the combo, and paint in the surface of the pool of molten metal as a strip of "median color" to suit the project. This is gold for molten metal. It's just painted with a 200 pixel square brush set on "normal" at 100% opacity. It doesn't look like a crucible, but it will soon!

Create a third layer and now start painting. Use wave brushes to paint in seething lava in base and medium tones. These are the .abr brush sets you can buy -- waves, splashes, water effects, steam, fog, fire, anything like this would give you useful effects. In this one, I used Elements of Nature - Waves (from Renderosity), and Ron's Splashes and Ron's Hydro Explosion (from DAZ).

Paint in three tones, basically: dark, medium and light. Paint till you don't see much of anything of the original gold layer that represented the surface of the molten metal.

Create as many new layers as you need to control the brushed on affects. You could do one for dark, one for medium and one for the highlights. Or you can combine dark and medium (as I did here), and then do an extra layer for the highlights.

(You can get a lot more mileage out of the .abr brushes in Photoshop than you can in GIMP, because Photoshop allows you to change the angle of the brush ad infinitum. However, Photoshop costs a packet and GIMP is free, so you might prefer to just be clever with the brushes and resources you have at your disposal. I didn't get Photoshop Elements 9 myself till early July, 2011, when GIMP just stopped working for reasons unknown. I would load up a brush, try to paint a stroke with it, and get a crash to the desktop instead. So Dave hunted and kept on hunting till he found PSE9 froma licensed reseller -- for US$60, which is about A$55 right now. I put down the credit card gladly!)

Know when to stop -- your artist's eye will tell you when you've gone far enough! Stop before it turns into a mess, and...

Same as before, flatten this image to one layer and save it. Call it Background.jpg --

Paste this into a new canvas and save the project as as "Vulcan_02.' Make sure you save the _01 version before you flatten the image, so you can go back and re-work as needed in any layer.

Now you have your background finished, so it's time to switch over to working on the figure!

Set the stage size in DAZ Studio (or Poser etc., whatever you use) to the exact same size as your canvas size from the Photoshop of GIMP project...

Import Michael 4. Work with a plain white background for him at this stage, because there's a few things to do before you bring in the background you just painted, and the simpler the on-screen image is right now, the better...

Add skinmap. I'm using the Jackson skinmap.

Design a face or use a third party morph. This face is one of my own face morph designs, which you create using the Morphs++ for Michael 4 package. (Buy this from DAZ, install it, and it pops up automatically. The world of creativity is now at your fingertips!)

Design a body morph or use a third party morph. This one is designed by me -- again, done using the Morphs++ pack.

Save the DAZ (etc.) project often! You have a lot of work invested in this now, and you wouldn't believe the aggravation of losing the whole thing because the PC barfed on a save or a render!!

Add a hairdo to suit your character. This one is the Yannis Rasta dreads set to black, and I've been in there and changed the textures on the coins and ribbons. You do this in the Surfaces pane in DAZ ... sorry, I can't help much with Poser because I've never used it! But in DAZ the Surfaces tab is your best bud. Get to know it, and enjoy the freedom to create like you never knew before...!

Add a costume. This is the Euros overskirt, from Renderosity. Lots of textures are provided with the model, but with the best will in the world (and not a syllable said against the designer) none of them will suit a project like this. I turned them all OFF as soon as the model was imported. The costume automatically "parents" to the Michael 4 figure, and with colors and textures OFF it reverts to a big lump of white plastic. Now --

Configure the costume -- pose it at the very least. You'll need to work with the "fit" and "movement" morphs provided by the model designer, and swing, bend, twist, pull the costume, till it's doing what you want it to do. Right so far, but it's still white plastic! So...

Add a diffuse map, a texture map, an opacity map, diffuse color, gloss color, to the model. This is not the place to talk about how to use these textures ... this tutorial would go on for days! But elsewhere on the blog I've talked at great length about how to do this. Have a look down the list of tutorials -- you'll soon find what you need! Basically, a diffuse map slaps a digital image of something onto a model. Fire or water or sky, or whatever you like. Then, a displacement map is a pure monochrome image that uses dead black and pure white to decide which bits of the model get pushed up or down. This image uses a digital photo of a fire as the diffuse map, and a monochrome image of scarred metal as the displacement map. There's one more map -- the opacity map. This makes parts of the model disappear altogether. For this image, I used a monochrome image of scummy water as the opacity map! The diffuse and ambient colors are set to white, there's a good bit of gloss on the costume, and the gloss color is set to orange. These colors (diffuse, ambient
and specular, meaning, what color something shines when it glosses up) are set separately from the visible texture map, the displacement map and the opacity map. Combined with the maps, they give you infinite creative control. You can turn a model into leather or silk, at whim...

Now you're ready to pose the figure. Go for it! Get every knuckle joint right where you want it. Flare his nostrils, give him a scowl, whatever you like. Render as you go, make sure everything is looking good. Save it!!

Time to set up the lights now.

The lights need to be tuned according to the color(s) in the background, and you also need to be aware of the direction light is falling from in the background. The light direction will tell you which way shadows need to fall to be convincing. Lighting is a whole 'nother subject, but basically it comes down to the brightness of the light, the direction of the light, the color of it, and whether it casts a shadow (and how hard or soft the shadow is). It's impossible for anyone to tell you how to do this!! Like learning to swim or ride a bike, you have to do it till you can. Have fun with the process -- enjoy.

When the lights look great, it's time to import Background.jpg into DAZ Studio as the, uh, background.

Do a test-render, make sure your lights match the artwork ... do a raytraced one, see if raytracing makes a positive difference. Sometimes the raytraced image is a dimension over the deep shadow map -- sometimes not. Your artist's eye will tell you which to use.

Save the best render (and save the whole project. You're heading back into Photoshop or GIMP now, but you could be back in DAZ to make tweaks later, and if you do need to do this, you'll be so glad you saved the project right now).

Import this best render into Photoshop as the new base, or bottom layer...

Make a new layer to paint in/on. Use the color picker to borrow colors from the existing painting -- don't try to guess them. What you're paint in now is going to be ON TOP of the character, and so long as it blends perfectly with what's BENEATH him, it's going to look convincing.

In this stage of the image, I'm painting molten metal, and I'm using an .abr brush set called Ron's Hydro Explosion (available from DAZ). You could do worse than watch some video footage of volcanoes seething, or of molten steel in a foundry crucible. Spent a minute or two on YouTube!

Make a new layer whenever you depart from the current kind of brushwork, and always when you're trying something experimental. It's easy to just delete a layer when something didn't work out.

Paint till you're happy with the result, and then flatten the image and save it as a JPEG, ready to share with your friends. You can go on and do more: you can tweak and push and pull the contrast, brightness, shadows, hues, but if you set up your lights properly in DAZ Studio (or whatever) you shouldn't need to. However, a lot of people find it easier to "get close" in the 3D program and then "fix it" in Photoshop. This one is your call. (You might need to do some painting on the figure to get rid of "buckles" in the 3D body caused by posing Michael 4, but if you pose the figure carefully, this might not happen. Be sensitive to the fact his shoulders and elbows can look really weird in some poses. A bit of painting can really help the realism of the finished work.)

So you'll need...

The idea (!)
a sky picture
.abr brushes for water, waves, splashes etc.
Michael 4
skinmap
hair
costume
diffuse, displacement and opacity maps (make your own!)
your artist's eye, plus your 3D model workshop and either Photoshop or GIMP.

And here's where you need to be when finished:

...this took about an hour, plus the amount of time to write this tutorial, obviously. It might take you longer if you're learning the software and process, but you know how familiarity with the work makes everything faster. Enjoy the process -- in all seriousness, if you really love messing about with art, what's not to enjoy?!

Hope this helps!

Jade, 2 August

The colors of winter ... Aussie style

2011-08-01T00:11:00.000-07:00

It's photography today, guys ... but hey, there's a line where photography becomes an art form, and what's more 3D than the real world?! Seriously, I'm snowed under with work, and if I want to touch base here today (which I do) it has to be photography. Hey, I was a working photographer for eons before I got into the CG art -- ten years ago, I'd have said this was my art form!

All the shots in today's post were captured on a two-hour ramble in Belair National Park, which is one of the most beautiful places in the world. They date from the middle of winter -- looks are deceiving! The stark-nekkid deciduous trees tell the truth of the time ... but at the same time berries are ripe, everything is flowering, birds are nesting. It was a glorious day (and yes, before anyone says anything, I know -- we're spoiled rotten here, climate-wise. Some of us are also smart enough to know it).

So here, have some more -- incidentally, they're uploaded at 1000 pixels wide, and some are so cute, like the candy-pink parrot nesting in the dead tree, and the young koala...

With a bit of luck I'll be back tomorrow with ART ... also I was just asked to go back to the Poseidon Rising project from yesterday and explain at greater length how you get those effects. So what I think I'll do is this: start a similar project, but instead of ripping through it and not even keeping the "underlayers," I'll save each stage and show you what's involved in making it go. Cross fingers, and I might be able to do this tomorrow. If not, the next day...!

Jade 1 August

CG art: Poseidon rising

2011-07-31T00:23:00.000-07:00

At last, I'm back with a post! Just in time, before July expires -- we're a day ahead of you guys in the US and Canada, UK and Europe ... the international dateline and so forth. Huge apologies for not posting in days. I've been so busy, I haven't had time to think, much less post. A lot of it has been about artwork, but not art I'd be posting here. So --

Only one today, because this is your actual, genuine painting, not "just" a 3D render. A 3D render is where you hit "go," and the software does everything, and you come back in a few minutes and say, "Oh, isn't that pretty, let's call it done!" The difference is, this one was painted under, and on top of, the figure.

Start with a sky I photographed back in March 2008. Tweak the color, gamma, contrast ... add a sea-green strip across the bottom to represent the ocean. Then "fog up" the horizon with, uh, fog brushes. Then paint in the ocean with ocean brushes (a lovely set of brushes called Elements of Nature - Ocean Waves, which you can get from Renderosity for about $5 or so. Take a tip: don't use free brushes. It's nice to download things for free, and often free things can be great quality, but "free" brushes tend to come with an awful lot of strings attached, and when you're starting to sell your work, you're going to get tangled up in all that red tape).

So, with the background painted, ship it into DAZ Studio as the background. Import Michael 4 and pose him. Add skinmap (this is JS Alexandre, hairy chest, hairy forearms, beard line and all). Create a new face with the Morphs++ pack. Add a hairdo (this is Danyel by Neftis Salon). Add costume (that's the Euros overskirt with a kind of seasnake pattern, hue and transparency set be me -- they're not part of the model kit, but I can tell you how...).

Now, lights! Set up shadows ... raytrace. Come back in 15 minutes to see the results (just time for a cup of tea). Ship the render into Photoshop for the OVER-painting to start. What's painted over? The waves in the foreround; the splashes; all the water streaming off and exploding off him; the birds. This was done with Ron's Hydroexplosion, Ron's Splashes, and Ron's Birds -- all of which are brush sets you can get from DAZ ... maybe $10 or so per set, I think.

So, what went into this? A digital image of a pretty neat sky, taken in Noarlunga in 2008; three 3D models (guy, hair, skirt); and a heck of a lot of painting ... so much, in fact, I have to call this a painting, not a render. It also took a good hour to do this, maybe a tad longer, so -- just the one image today.

Um ... be back in August!

Jade, 31 July

DAZ Studio 3, Photoshop and Serif Page Plus shake hands

2011-07-26T01:00:00.000-07:00

Best-laid plans went right out of the window today when a job went ballistic on me, in the most fundamental sense of the word! (The term comes down to us from the early days of rocketry. A missile that was under proper guidance was fine and dandy ... when the ground crew lost control of it, gravity took over and said missile began to dance to the tune of the "ballistics," that being the weird science of how bodies behave in motion, under gravity. There -- another bit of useless information for you.)

Long story short, I had a job blow up in my face, and by the time I fought out from under the rubble and wreckage I had 1. a splitting headache, and 2. about one hour to do artwork today, and I'd already committed to doing the cover art for Mel Keegan's White Rose of Night, so -- today it's essentially just one piece, which is actually a book cover.

Here's how it looks with the text objects pasted up:

This one was a challenge -- so many iconic things in the book which could have dominated the cover ... Crusader knights at the charge; a black magician weaving sorcery; castles and Saracens; the deserts of the Middle East. Hmmm. Iconic as those images are, not a one of them is easy to bring to the digital canvas, and in the end I decided to "go iconic."

The background is "derivative," as they call artwork that's sourced from something existing. It's a sketch from a nineteenth century engraving, which was under- over- and every which-way painted, before being used as a backdrop in DAZ Studio 3. The character was posed in front of it with lights and so on, and raytraced. The render was shipped back into Photoshop for more overpainting, with some "noise" added to the image when it was absolutely finished. This was then dropped into Serif for the text objects to be added; then it was exported out of Serif as the final composit image.

The longest part of the process was the raytracing ... all that hair! That there is a twenty minute render. Michael 4 is wearing a face and body designed by me; that's the Samson skinmap and the Spartacos hair set to golden blond. The forearm armor is from Powerage's Supreme Armor, and the loincloth is from The Wood God costume. (If you're sharp eyed, you'll notice you saw the same costume on the archangel in yesterday's post. It gets better: that's the same face and body as the archangel! What I did was, change the hair from the Yannis dreadlocks to the Spartacos hair, and wouldn't you know it, archangel becomes Saxon knight, circa 1190.)

White Rose is equal parts historical, fantasy and erotic romance. In fact, it's the most sizzling-hot thing Mel Keegan ever wrote, and I often wonder what was on MK's mind when he produced this one. I actually asked, the other day, and was answered with blank looks and, "You have got to be kidding me, right? That was 18 years ago, I have no bloody idea what I was thinking at the time!" A...ha. Well, whatever inspired the book must have been hot stuff, because the result is a huge technicolor canvas which, uh, sizzles.

Just got an email from MK, who's thrilled to bits with the art...

Back soon with, hopefully, a bit more coherence!

Jade, July 26

The archangel and the vampire. Say, what now?

2011-07-25T01:23:00.000-07:00

As promised ... Michael 4 wearing the Icarus Wings -- and not much else! Actually, this is a whole new character, and I rather like it. I wanted to create a face that looked like it belonged with the wings -- an archangel, perhaps. Alien, with the potential to be very dangerous, and at the same time delicate and sensitive. It's no mean feat, when you get right down to it!

The skinmap is Samson, but there, everything else changes. The face and body morph were custom designed about an hour ago. The hair is the Yannis Rasta dreads set to blond. The costume is the loin cloth from The Wood God (new texture and displacement mapping) and the shins and forearm pieces from Powerage's Supreme Armor (with all the textures changes, once again). Then, the Icarus Wings -- new textures and displacement mapping. The prop in the background is DM's new one, The Clock, and that's just a backdrop photograph, though it's been heavily enhanced over the original sunset shot...

Want more? Try this:

I went back to the Nocturne project which had been thoroughly stuffed up by the fact DAZ had been telling me it was saving, while at the same time not saving my backups! Has anyone every had the program do this?? I've never seen that bug -- also, it'd be a bit late to go yapping to the company about it, because I still haven't upgraded to DAZ Studio 4! Am still using 3.2, because time hadn't permitted me the luxury of getting the new one, so telling them about bugs in an obsolete version would be a bit silly.

Note to self: get the new version download!

And here's the Nocturne cover all painted up and finished:

Nice. I'm happy with this. It freshens up the cover without losing the original version, which you see here repainted and used as he backdrop. Then the deliciously "tortured" Michael Flynn character was posed in front of it with fascinating lighting, and rendered (raytraced), before the render was shipped back into Photoshop for more overpainting. Reduced to 150 pixels high, it looks great, so I'm very happy with this...

Thanks to all for bearing with me. About four of you are waiting on emails from me! I was sick again over the weekend (understatement), and I'm working very hard on getting a monster stack of documents converted to the epub format. It sounds easy on the face of it, but it takes more time than you'd think. By the time I'm done, I'll have invested about 50 hours in the conversions, and when you remember that I had to winkle the time out of the working week(s) -- well, no wonder it took a few weeks to get it all done. Am just about caught up with myself now, though, so if you're waiting for personal emails from me, I'll be there soon! Thanks to all for your forbearance!

Jade, 25 July

And it said to me, "Error while rendering." Ouch!!

2011-07-23T01:15:00.000-07:00

I guess today proves that necessity is at least the maiden aunt of invention, and that interesting things can come out of the most frustrating circumstances...

Picture, if you will: I'm working along, creating all the elements for the new cover for Nocturne. Working in DAZ with two characters, about two dozen lights with complex settings. I save my work regularly. And then, with about three steps to go before the project is complete, wham! DAZ Studio 3 puts up this innocent little message, "Error while rendering." Program crashes to desktop. So you growl and go back to the saved ones ... or where the saved ones ought to be. Try this one on for size: DAZ was not saving. It was only telling me it was saving.

Ouch! So I wound up with two out of four of the pieces that were supposed to go together to make up the Nocturne art I'd had in mind, both saved as exports along the way; and after the crash I lost not only the poses (which are dead easy to recreate and not much of an issue), but about half an hour's worth of industrial strength fiddling with the lights.

Well, I supposed I could have done the whole thing over, but the truth is, I was way too disgruntled to tackle it, and decided to see what I could do with the pieces that survived instead. Hmmmm ... what I ended up with was a painting, and a damn' nice one. Very, very different from the project I envisioned when I started, but still a very nice painting.

Now, I'm not saying I'll go with this piece of artwork for the actual cover of Nocturne, maybe because the book is the textual equivalent of "Ben Hur Meets Avatar, with Gay Vampires" and it actually deserves to have an amazing technicolor cover! But it's definitely worth a look -- worth uploading.

The other piece -- the male nude with the full moon -- is the cover for Dangerous Moonlight. As the English say, that book has had more covers than I've had hot lunches! This one is a synthesis of them all, and I'm very, very pleased with it. This is definitely going to be on the epub version which goes into circulation in a few days. Nice!

The image of the moon is interesting: it's a picture captured with a long, long lens over the roof of the backyard shed, about five years ago!

And here's what they look like with the text objects pasted up:

And sure, I'll go back to the Nocturne cover and do it over tomorrow, but still -- this version is nice. Luckily, the vision of the "proper" cover is still hovering in my imagination, and I'll beat it into shape tomorrow!

Jade, 23 July

The steampunk clock, the wings, and ... stuff

2011-07-22T01:25:00.000-07:00

Just one image today ... because it's actually three images combined into one...

The sky was generated in Bryce 7 Pro and then overpainted in Photoshop, and this gave us the background. The foreground is a test-drive of two new models I got last week -- DM's new "The Clock," which is a giant steampunk, uh, clock, and also the Icarus Wings from Poisen, which are not new, but were on sale a while ago.

The whole image was rendered in DAZ3D, and then shipped back into Photoshop to be painted in subtle ways ... no big splats and weals of color or tone, but a lot of work in the shadows, burning in colors, that kind of thing. But quite enough painting was done on it after the render for it to constitute a whole new image.

That's Victoria 4.2, wearing the Uranus hair, the Andromeda costume and the Age of Armor boots; I changed out all the textures for blues from the TMP Designs textures, to match the wings.

Does the piece have a theme? Ummm ... I don't know. Does it?! It could be something really deep and meaningful, like "Time is the enemy," or it could be a frame from a "shoot the zombies" game. I'm inclined to think the latter, because I can't help remembering Paul Bettany in Legion. (That movie contrived to be a lot of fun, actually ... weird enough to be a challenge, but with just enough substance to deliver the goods, whereas I was disappointed with Wanted. Now, there was a movie I thought was loaded was potential -- based on the Top Cow comic and starring Angelina Jolie and James McAvoy. I'd seen the trailer at the movies, and hired the DVD thinking, "how could you go wrong this this?" Oh, the director found ways! It turned into a pure bloodbath, and the script? It was originally 22pp pages long, and when told to make it longer, the writer filled 78pp with profanity. Hmmm. "Could have been a lot better" is being kind. And boy, when I wander OT, I sure wander OT, don't I?!)

These wings will look great on Michael 4, too. Hmmm. Come back tomorrow...

Jade, 22 July

Comic art and Photoshop effects

2011-07-21T00:21:00.000-07:00

With work piled up to high to get into a serious art project today -- only a spare hour to be scrounged -- I decided to play in Photoshop on my tea break. For a while now, I've wanted to play with its merge modes, and especially with its ability to work various merge modes across various layers to create artistic effects. This is not something I ever spent much time on, in Micrografx -- not because the tools aren't there in the old software (they are) but because I had no use for this kind of art before.

But with comic and games art becoming so vastly popular today, I've been taking more notice of this area. Today's comics are digitally generated (they also cost a tonne of money! Have you notice the price of comics lately? Phew!) and the art is amazing, even on the small mags. On the big books, the full-on graphic novels like Slaine The Horned God, by Pat Mills, the work is astonishing.

Speaking of Slaine, you have GOT to see this ... see what fans are doing on the desktop these days:

...that's not a major motion picture from Peter Jackson. That's a bunch of fans in Spain spending a year or more bringing the comic book to life as a trailer for a movie that doesn't exist. I know every panel and every word in the three 100pp Slaine books, and this -- is -- it. Am gobsmaked by this -- check out the details here: www.miguelmesas.com Oomph. Would realy love to see this as a movie...

Anyway --!

Sorry for wandering off topic, but mentioning Slaine jogged my memory. It's amazing what fans are doing on the desktop -- and I predict that in the years ahead, some of the best comics and graphic novels are going to be born on the desktop and distributed over the Internet. I've got rather a hankering to be involved in it, as it unfolds, so I thought to myself today, "Hmm, if I only have an hour going spare, let's go play in Photoshop and see what happens.

This sort of thing turns out to be very easy, and the results you can generate are almost limitless -- you might need to see these two at LARGE size to see the effects properly, because they're from quite large images, and the more they're compressed size-wise, the less that arty attributes show through:

Here's a VERY quick cookbook method for how to do this:

Finish your render in DAZ etc., and save as an image. Open this in Photoshop and then select FILTERS > Find edges. Then convert the result to grayscale. Then go ENHANCE > Brightness and Contrast. Crank the contrast to 100%; darken a little if you lose too many fine lines. Then, LAYER > New Layer. Paste the original render into the new layer, and drag this under the line sketch. Now, with the line sketch on top, play with the Merge Modes and opacities till you see something you like. A good place to start is "Overlay" and 100%. When you're happy with the result, flatten the image to a single layer. Now, you can play with the lighting and color to your heart's content till you have something you really like ... save it. When you know your way around Photoshop, the process should take about five minutes, not counting doing the original render, obviously. I did ten in under an hour, and am uploading eight.

Interesting, no?

Jade, 21 July

CG art: The Magician's Pet

2011-07-20T02:01:00.000-07:00

CG art and 3D render shake hands here. It's about half and half render and digital painting ... and I must say, I'm enjoying Photoshop more and more. Am getting used to it incrementally (BIG increments, that is), and at last am growing accustomed to the way it does things --

Halfway through this piece, I gave myself a kick and said, "Learn something new, why don't you?" So I stopped painting on the canvas of the original render, and painted in layers from then on. To you guys who've been using Photoshop for yonks, this is No Big Deal. But I always found GIMP's way of handling layers to be less than friendly, and of course when I wanted to do anything at all I ran home to my old favorite, Micrografx. Wellll ...

This time, I'm going to give myself a pat on the back, because I didn't do anything at all in the old programs. Gave this to myself as an assignment, and did the whole thing in Photoshop!

So what's going on in this painting? That's DAZ's Michael 4 wearing the JM Alexandre skinmap and the Akasta hair set to dark brown, and the Euros overskirt with texture and opacity maps by self. The props are a wild and woolly assortment of props from DM and ADS, most notably The Mage's Study, Fantasy Visions etc. -- you can get them all from Renderosity. Carpet is actually the plain, boring old rug from the Apartment 39 prop set, with a texture and displacement map set my me to make it interesting! It turns from a flat carpet into a battered, beat up old leather carpet. The floor and wall are planes wearing various textures ... marble, tiles and what have you.

Then the fun begins. First, the lights and shadows, which you can play with to get them juuuuust right for the final render in DAZ. Save this, and import it into Photoshop and start, uh, painting! Smoke, candle glows, drips down walls, gleams on things, deep shadows ... yup, all painted. And by the time you're done, when you go back to the original render you're bemused by how plain it is! Much of the painting was done with a terrific brush set I just got -- Mystikel's "Dirt" brushes, which is a huge set of cracks, grunge, splatter and muck brushes, from Renderosity for $8. Money well spent there! I also used Ron's Smoke, and Fog, and Bokeh Lights.

Last thing I did, just before uploading this, was to apply a 3% "uniform noise" filter to the whole shebang. What this does is take a tiny little bit of the tack sharpness off the render, which for some weird reason makes it look richer. Don't ask me why; it just does. Mind you, to see this effect you'll have to view the piece at large size. I uploaded it at 1000 pixels wide, so you can do just that.

So, just one image today, because it's more of a painting than a 3D project, and the only downside to this is, it takes a lot more time to paint a picture than it does to click "render" and then buzz off to the next job and let the render engine do its thing in the background!

Nice, though, innit? I call this one The Magician's Pet. He could be a student learning the magician's art, or he could be a captive, upon whom the spells are practised. He's lost count of the times he's been turned into a newt...

Jade, 20 July

Mister Mystery ... or, CG beefcake gets the artistic treatment

2011-07-18T23:16:00.000-07:00

Mister Mystery? Well, put it like this: here was a physique in search of a face, until I'd given up on it, gone away in a huff, made tea, come back and decided to take another go at him! The physique worked brilliantly, first time, but the face looked like ... a thug. Seriously. Everything I did with him made him look more like a mass murderer, so I'd more than halfway decided to set one light and stand him in the shadows, make the most of the fantastic physique and just not even get into the subject of his face --! In the end, I wound up with something very different and pretty effective. You know, he reminds me of someone. Now, who is it?

The skinmap is JM Chase, with the tattoo option turned on. The hair is the Akasta Hair set to a kind of dark blond. The denims are the pants from the Cold Life costume set. The physique and face ... all mine, like the background abstract, which was paited in Photoshop, like all the arty-overpainting effects. These renders were actually raytraced, and they use ONE light. Just one.

Sorry for being brief again. Just not feeling up to verbosity just get, though I think it's possible I might be starting to show the hint of a suggestion of getting better...!

Back soon with a tad bit more coherence...

Jade, 19 July

Book covers ... gay ones!

2011-07-18T01:07:00.000-07:00

Gay bookcovers again, but in fact if you take the font objects off them, the works themselves are very nice pieces!

And what do they look like, when the text objects are overlaid? Take a squiz:

People often overlook the importance of the text objects, but the fact is, they can be almost artistic in themselves. There's so much you can do with fonts and font effects.

Looking at these pieces makes me go back to a discussion I read online a long time ago. It went along these lines: "If the guy, or guys, have their clothes on and are not actually in a clinch, how do you know it's a gay image?" There's no easy answer to that one, unless the image is also loaded with gay signals ... you know, like the blue kerchief in the right hip pocket, nudge nudge, wink, wink.

Anyway, we're making up all the epub versions of ebooks from way across the years, and it's a great opportunity to indulge in suites of new art, and to touch up some images which were done eons ago.

Sorry for being brief. Must go and lie down for a while, and try to get warm. It's midwinter and coooooold, even when you're not sick. When you're sick to boot, it's a bit dire!

Jade, 18 July

Nude elves ... or elven nudes, if you prefer...

2011-07-17T01:22:00.000-07:00

Wellll, I reckon I'll get away with posting these here, but there's some more that would get me lynched if I posted them to the main blog, so they're going up on the Exotic!

With all due warnings about FULL ON MALE NUDITY, arms waving around and beware all ye who click here, yada yada, here is the link. In all seriousness, send Auntie out for hot chocolate. He he he.

Not much to write about today ... have been sick again, and am about to get worse, so I'll let the images speak for me. Cross fingers, I'll be feeling better in a couple of days, and will be able to write more here. Thanks for bearing with me!

Jade, 17 July

Conan, barbarian babe, seductive hunk -- and compudoodles. Neat.

2011-07-15T01:09:00.000-07:00

(All uploaded at large size -- click to see BIG, so you can see the details...)

Just doodles today ... but clever doodles, combing a bunch of Photoshop effects and something I just discovered. I won't say "something new," because I imagine it's been out for eons, but I stumbled over it the over day, following an ad from from of the Photoshop brush sites. Have you heard of LiveBrush? Take a squizz:

LiveBrush is the ultimate compudoodle program. You basically load up brushes with all kinds of effects and ... well, doodle in glowing colors. These are some very basic patterns created while I was just finding the tools and figuring out how to configure the brushes and so forth.

The program does let you import an image, so you can paint on an old existing picture. This is what I did with the Conan shot (top render in today's post). The original barbarian and horse is an okay image, but it's a bit "stock." Ordinary. So I shipped it into LiveBrush and, well, doodled on it. Exported it again ... shipped it into Photoshop, also shipped in the original image. Played with the merge modes between the layers ... found something that looks grand. Flattened all layers and they played with the textures to go one step further and create process artwork out of it.

Interesting? I thought so. I went on and did another one -- the Barbarian Babe. Same process ... LiveBrush, then into Photoshop, merging two versions of the image, and then adding texture effects. Hmmm. That's not bad.

I didn't use the LiveBrush effects on this:

This is just the DAZ render whacked into Photoshop and merged with a kind of art paper texture, and then there's some kind of filter effect whacked over it ... creates a really classical, fifteenth century kind of look, which I like.

LiveBrush is highly recommended -- get the "pro" one, which is only $10 and loaded with your brush styles etc., and enjoy. Right now, I'm trying to make it import and export existing images without resizing them, but when it comes to designing whole new patterns and textures, it's dead easy and a lot of fun. And I'm sure the answer to the resizing question, concerning existing images, is in there somewhere. The program is loaded with features, and huge fun for ten bucks. The interface is very intuitive and if your computer is reasonably fast, it works extremely well.

Next, I need to get a whole raft of Photoshop brushes loaded up ... I bought them months ago (from DAZ), put them away and forgot about them! How dim is that? Shows you how busy I've been lately...

Jade, July 15

The elven warrior on the misty riverbank -- with the boat

2011-07-13T01:58:00.000-07:00

CG art is so much fun. If there's any reason why any of us keeps on doing it, it's because it's enormous fun. If we get paid for doing it, so much the better -- and I feel very privileged for being paid to do something I'd do as a hobby even if I was never paid a bean.

Here, I'm playing with a lot of new and newish stuff. You've been looking at this costume, in bits and pieces, for the last couple of days. Here it is on a new character, and I want to recommend this one. It's a skinmap from Renderosity called Jackson, and it's a beaut. The head morph is also very, very handsome -- it's going to be one of the few third party head morphs I'll be delighted to use "right out of the box."

The hair is the Neftis Casual Slick Back, which I got last month -- brand new on release, too. And the background -- well, you recognize the background! I cut a piece out of yesterday's misty riverbank with elven boat and blurred it down a little.

More interesting is where it started. About six months ago I did a Bryce landscape specifically to play with a set of new Bryce textures I'd acquired. I posted this eons ago, and then yesterday, when I needed some hills and mountains in the background of the riverbank, I went back to the old render and tweaked it, color-wise, to make it look like it was fading into the distance:

Now, in yesterday's art the boat and near riverbank were the foreground. Today, they've turned into the background. The character, the sword, and some more plants and little trees, have become the foreground. The entire backdrop "layer" is pasted in as a flat image, which made today's pictures render fast.

The Jackson skinmap is superb -- there are no problems with it whatsoever, nothing to work around, nothing to fix. It comes with a variety of beard and eye options. The pointed ears? Wellll, I added those myself, when I realised I wanted to do something deliciously exotic. Who says elves have to be European?! So he's also wearing the Elven Prince circlet and armband.

Working up the Euros chainmail shirt to look very good in extreme closeup meant setting a deep displacement map to ruck the model up into 3D shape, but otherwise the costume is a mix-and-match of textures available in the retail kit.

Once again, the plants are an assortment of herbage. There's a little spruce tree from Rhodi Design, and the sage grasses from the H3D Lost Path set. Very nice to work with -- and these don't tax your computer the way some of the other plants and shrubs do.

The swords -- that's Merlin's Katana, and the Fae Weaponry Greatsword, which I bought well over a year ago. In fact, if you're ever surfing around in the first 100 posts on this blog, I'm sure you'll see it there!

I'd like to pose this character in some really exotic nudes, so watch out for a post on the other blog -- soon.

Jade, July 13

The elven boat on the misty riverbank

2011-07-12T02:26:00.000-07:00

As promised -- the elven boat on the misty riverbank! Actually, this is a strangely hybrid piece of art. The background is an image I did in Bryce 7 about six months ago. The foreground is all done in DAZ Studio 3, and the far riverbank and birds were painted in Photoshop...

But you're asking yourself, how much of the atmospheric effects were painted on with Photoshop brushes, right? Answer: nada. Check this out:

Now, it's true that DAZ Studio 3 ... the free version, which I still use, because my computer, beefed up though it is, will probably do the proverbial face-plant if I try to run the full-on version ... doesn't allow for atmospheric effects, right?

True ... and also not all that true. You don't get effects which are done for you by the program, but you can sure as heck add atmospheric layers yourself. You do this by adding a primitive, a plane, at right angles to the ground, and making it blue or gray or mauve, and putting an opacity map on it. Ta da! Atmospherics ... suddenly the riverbank is misty.

The foreground and the far river bank are land masses that were made in Bryce (eons ago) and exported as OBJs, and then imported into DAZ, scaled and set in place. Add displacement mapping, and then start importing plants. I used the ferns from DM's Elven Shed, plus a couple of DM's trees from Fantasy Visions, and a lot of Merlin's trees, from the, uh, Merlin's Trees set. Also one of Rhodi's spruce trees...

The elven boat is a lovely OBJ I got a few weeks ago. It doesn't install into DAZ; you just import it, TGA textures and all. Very, very nice.

Then -- the water. This is done with two primitive planes. The bottom one (being the river bottom) has a sandstone texture added. The top one, being the surface of the water, has a water texture added (a photo of the sea I took from the end of the jetty a few years ago), plus a displacement map to ruck the surface, plus an opacity map so you can aaaaaalmost see through the water. Add gloss to make it glitter and reflectivity. Done!

Add a set of lights, with shadows... and render. It takes a bit more pushing and pulling to get it all into place, and then -- ship the final render into Photoshop to have the opposite riverbank painted, and the birds. Done!

I'm actually very pleased with the way this turned out. Makes me think, I need to get back into Bryce -- which I haven't opened for ages. Confession: I'm a bit stumped when it comes to organizing the lighting in Bryce, and since renders take so long (hours, plural) before you know whether something worked, it's not as easy to get it "nutted out," as the British say, as you might hope. (Yes, Virginia, I downloaded the 1,300pp manual. Oomph. Sometime when I have the occasional year to spend on a project, I'll get through it!) I would also love to get into Cararra. I have Cararra 5 Pro, which I realize is not about two years out of date, but it's waaaay beyond anything I know, so it's a good place to start. There are also some fantastic landscape generators out there. If you're curious, just go to Google, switch to "Images," and search on "Terragen." See what I mean?! Serious "wow factor" there.

Back tomorrow, guys! I have a few things to do before the telecast of the Tour de France starts, and about 20 minutes to get 'em done in.

Jade, 12 July

Michael 4 struts his stuff in the new costume

2011-07-11T00:49:00.000-07:00

The title tells all ... and you gotta like this! The Euros costume is very nice indeed -- I do like the textures which ship along with it, in particular the fact that you can mix and match every little bit of it, without even kicking in any texture of your own. The morphs on the overskirt allow for the illusion of real movement -- you get the impression that he's really moving, speed and power, through a kata. You know what a kata is. It's ...weellllll, it's hard to describe, if you don't know what it is, so it's over to Jackie Chan to explain in deeds rather than words:

That's the opening credits of Snake and Crane: The Arts of Shaolin, which was made waaaay back when. Jackie was a mere child. But now you know what "kata" means ... kind of practising your martial arts without a partner. Yeah, I know, these vintage Hong Kong punch-up movies are far from Great Cinema, but if you like martial arts, as I do, and you can see past the two-dimensional acting and slapstick drama (!) they're also a heck of a lot of fun in their own way. It also helps if you have a big soft spot for Jackie Chan!

(You want off-topic? We can do off-topic here!)

Anyway --! full marks to the Euros costume. The backdrop is one of Doctor Mike's photos of the Esk Valley, taken a couple of years ago when he was over there at an archaeology conference, which makes sense, him being an archaeologist and all. The hair is Spartakos, which you can get via Renderosity. The set is a huge mixture of props fro DM's Instances, and B9999's concrete fence/post kit. The sword is DM's Kerrick's sword, from the Kerrick's Throne set.

The skinmap Michael 4 is wearing is actually JM Falcon, but I've turned OFF all the raised veins, leaving the skin bronze and smooth. Incidentally, you can always do this, if you find a skinmap too veiny. Go into the surfaces tab, look at the bump or displacement values, and just zero them out. Done.

Next, I'm going to play with some props I got the other day ... elven boats. I thought I'd do them on the bank of a misty river, which will also give me an excuse to play in Photoshop. I'm liking Photoshop a great deal, as I get more familiar with it. There's just one or two things that I wish (ooooh, I wish!) they would do differently. Then again, I imagine most users say the same thing -- we all have out little pet quirks.

Jade, 11 July

New fantasy costume for M4 ... very nice!

2011-07-10T01:52:00.000-07:00

Sunday. Raining. Looking at the drizzle streaming down the window glass. Taking a break from work ... still not finished the job! Celestial gentlemen with long white beards, sitting on clouds, might have the option of resting on the seventh day, but if they were down here they'd have to get their sleeves rolled up and get stuck in. So while taking a break, I grabbed the opportunity to play with one of the items I bought a little while ago -- here, you're seeing part of it.

It's the Euros costume for M4, and it's actually a set of trousers, overskirt and shirt, but since I'm chronically short of time I decided to play with it one piece at a time. Skirt first. It comes with a very nice kind of chainmail texture, plus several other lovely textures ... and I added an opacity map to one of them, to make it over into a kind of loosely hand-woven fabric which wouldn't leave a heck of a lot of the imagination!

Tomorrow, I'll have a look at the shirt and the trousers which go under the overskirt, and play with textures and morphs. Incidentally, the morphs on the Euros overskirt are very good. The only one that beat me was the kneeling one -- couldn't get it to wrap under the leg. I imagine the morphs to do this are actually there, but you'd need a little bit more time than I have today! So I finished that one with a little bit of digital painting --

Which gave me another excuse to play in Photoshop Elements 9 ... hmmm. Well, sure, you can do this bit of airbrushing in PSE9, but the tools are so cumbersome, the process is so long -- again, I ran out of time. Confession: I ran home to Micrografx and did the job in the 37 seconds I actually had left. My kingdom for the time to play -- seriously, just to play with art and software and so on. One day.

Jade, 10 July