Watching old artwork "pop!" in Photoshop. Nice!

The Barbarian was rendered original in Lux (which doesn't even exist anymore); the drowned city, the house by the sea, and the spacecraft were done in Bryce 7 Pro (!); Mr. Lace Shirt and the grieving warrior are raytraces. I've just spent a fascinating hour or so, running them through Photoshop. Nice! It's amazing to see the old work "pop" when it's given the proper treatment, which is why I keep posting selections of the old stuff. Second Life. The truth is, 12 and 14 years ago, I didn't do justice to the old renders. Many of them -- ten years old and more now -- are still delicious images even today. 

Having said all that, my fingers are itching to start Studio again, and get back into rendering. I haven't done this in waaaay over two years, and I'm trusting to "muscle memory" to get me going again, because I'm racking my brains for the details, and, um, it's been so long, I'm hazy, lol.

I did need to generate some book covers a few weeks ago, and I had intended to do a lot of the work in DAZ and Iray, but the way things worked out, time-wise, I ended up doing the whole thing in Photoshop. The author was delighted with the result, and now it's over to the publisher to decide which of these (if any) will jacket the book when it's published in a year or two...

See? I can still do this, lol, I haven't forgotten how! I just have gone somewhat hazy on the finer points of working with Iray, and figuring out how to get Studio to raytrace ... because I really, really, want to PAINT. Here's the thing of it: start out with a raytrace, and you can paint to your heart's content and end up with something beautiful. Start with an Iray render, and you really can't: it's like painting over a photo, and when you add digital painting to a photo, it looks soooo fake. You don't get "hybrid art," you get a bit of a mess, actually. So ... I want to paint, which means I need to be raytracing.

Luckily, the raytrace texture sets have been supplied for the props I've bought in the last six or so years, with the exception of the Iray shaders, which are (duh) Iray specific. But the thing is, I used to make my own texture sets (call them shaders) for the raytrace engine, and it was a lot of fun. So -- yes. It's just a question of getting the time away from a blizzard of work. I'm working on it.

More soon. I have some news, which I'm not yet at liberty to share, but it should be fine to share it next week. Hope to be back here sooner than that, because I'm aching to get back to art.

Home from the Sea ... and Jade's back, too!

I'm actually alive, though there'll be folks out there -- possibly following this blog! -- who'd be prepared to swear I must have been carted off, feet first. Well, life has been a bear lately, but I did survive, and I'm juuust starting to get back to work, with this piece: a mixed media seascape called Home from the Sea, because it was done as the cover for Mel Keegan's new book.

Home from the Sea is a historical, and a romance, and a thriller, and a mystery and a sea story, all rolled into one. It's a cousin of Jamaica Inn and even Treasure Island. I can promise you a fantastic new read -- not much under 100,000 words, so this one is a major novel, which it'll be DreamCraft's pleasure to release at the end of May, 2013.

UPDATE -- actually, at the end of June 2013 ... Real Life intervened and things went ballistic, but HOME FROM THE SEA is launching today, and as part of the promotion, here I am updating this post! If you'd like to know more about the novel, click here, but to save you a click, here's the blurb:

It’s six years since Jim Fairley came west to manage The Raven, a sailors’ tavern on the English coast near Exmouth. For Jim, the inn is a combination of haven and prison, his home and his livelihood. But lately he’s worried he’ll never get out of there -- never see the world, meet the kind of characters, enjoy the sort of adventures he hears of in tales told by the sailors and smugglers who drink at The Raven -- because Jim has been lame for almost half his life, following an accident where he almost died. The last thing he could have imagined was that adventure -- mystery, romance and danger -- would walk right up to his own door, seize him by the collar and haul him into a maelstrom of intrigue and peril. In the fair weather between two storms which hit the coast just days apart in April, 1769, a wandering balladeer strolls up to the tavern, looking for his old shipmate. But old Charlie Chegwidden passed away years before, leaving handsome young Toby Trelane in deep trouble. As he and Jim swiftly become involved, Toby’s trouble becomes Jim’s.  An eight year old mystery explodes like a storm over the inn. Before Jim learns all the shocking secrets Toby Trelane has hidden for years, there’ll be deception and fear, struggle and blood, in a tense Gothic tale which spans the globe without ever leaving The Raven. For Jim and Toby, life will never be the same.

--so endeth the update. Back to the original post now:

(The other publishing news is that it was a load of fun to spend an afternoon with MK, talking Hellgate, sharing mental images and visions ... several pieces of art were inspired among my "leetle gray cells" right there ... more about this as we go along -- I'll be rendering and painting, starting tomorrow!)

But this piece, above ... a dark, moody, evocative seascape in Bryce, DAZ Studio and Photoshop ... is one I'm rather proud of for its own sake, and I thought I'd reverse-engineer it, take it to pieces here, for the folks who're doing as I did, and teaching themselves how to do this kind of work. Here goes:

Step One is to have a clear idea in your head of what you're trying to create. With this organized, you can go into Bryce 7 Pro, or similar, and create the terrain:

With the terrain created, using the "make terrain" and "edit" tools in your program, you then select "export as OBJ" ... and with this done, you can ship the 3D model landscape you just made right into DAZ Studio.

Now, you can do the whole thing in Bryce, if you like ... but it's sooo much easier to control what's going on in DAZ, or Poser, if you're a Poser person. Fact: when you know how to drive DAZ Studio Pro to its dizzy limits, there's not a whole lot of difference between DAZ and Poser; Poser does have the edge on it, where you come to render very, very sophisticated effects involving skin tones, glass, water, metallics etc. ... and that's where the DAZ user ships the render out to LuxRender instead. 

So, for the sake of this discussion, let's say you need or want to get the project finished today, not some time next week, so you're going to render it in old fashioned DAZ Studio! So --

Import the OBJ you made in Bryce right into DAZ Studio. Size it, flip it around, rotate it, till it's where you want it. (Save your work often. It's infuriating to have a crash with 100 changes and tweaks invested since the last save.) Now, adjust the diffuse and displacement mapping to get the land the way you want it. A diffuse map is essentially a picture of the ground, which is stretched over the 3D model of the same bit of ground. It makes gray virtual-plastic look like grass, sand, mud, whatever. A displacement map is a black and white image applied to the same 3D model, where the black and white parts of the image tell the program how to pull up or punch down the model, which effectively displaces (or deforms) it, to give it form, texture ... realism.

The next thing to add is the water: click on Create Primitive, and choose Plane. Resize it till its huge, and move it up and down till you get a shoreline you like, or can at least live and work with! Now you'll want to add a diffuse map and a displacement map to this plane, to make it look like the ocean. I used a digital image of the sea I shot from the Noarlunga Jetty in 2008 for the diffuse map. For the displacement map, I actually hijacked a reflection map from another project and just used it a displacement map to make the plane pull up into a kind of ground swell. The image was originally painted to give a chrome surface a believable luster without taking hours to render, back in the days when I was on a sloooow machine. You used to get up to all these tricks to save render time. 

Okay, so now I had my ground and my sea. The next thing I wanted to do was get the building placed. For The Raven tavern, as created by Mel Keegan for the story, I used Merlin's Medieval Tavern ... at 4% of its physical size, so it becomes a toy building on a diorama. (You can get Merlin's Tavern from Renderosity for about $29; it's fantastic ... it's a full standing set -- walk inside, go upstairs, walk into the bedrooms, check out the stables, 'round the back. Amazing. I bought this a couple of years ago.)

So, with the tavern in place it was time to set the sky:

Yes, the bottom of this image is flat white... with good reason!

For the sky, I used a widescreen shot I took of the lowering, heavy, rain-filled skies down on the Limestone Coast in 2012 ... Dave and I took a roadrip -- if you've been following this blog for long enough, you might even remember the pictures from The 12 Apostles, Mount Gambier's Blue Lake, Tantanoola Caverns, and so on. One of the stops we made as at Bool Lagoon, which is a waterbird sanctuary. On the day we visited, it was about to bucket down, with the kind of sideways rain that cuts you to the bone. I got some pretty fantastic images of the sky -- I stash things like this, because I know I'll eventually be using them. A good tip is -- always have a camera on you, because you never know what's going to happen right in front of you!

Having chosen your sky image, the next thing you need to do is adjust its horizon line, so the horizon in the pic you're going to import into DAZ Studio as a background is in the right place. If you just import the image, DAZ will stretch it to fit your stage size ... worse yet, what should be the horizon will be on the bottom of the frame. It's going to look incredibly weird. The solution is to open the skyscape in something like Irfanview and just change the canvas size (not the image size!!), by setting the bottom margin to whatever height (in pixels) you need to bump the horizon line into the right place. Irfanview is the program I always recommend. It's amazingly powerful, with a tiny download and footprint size; and it's still free.

So, now you have the land, sea, sky, and the tavern. So far, so good. I imported some boulders and shrubs at the water's edge to give it some more detail, and that was basically all the 3D elements in place. There are exactly two lights on this scene. One is a distant light; the other is a point light. The point light is orange on its way to being yellow, and is creating the lamplight spilling out from inside the building. The distant light is supplying the sullen, angry daylight Placing the light, you need to look hard at your backdrop and see where the light is coming from in the sky image. This will tell you where the distant (sun) light ought to be positioned, and which way it needs to be pointing. Also, experiment with brightness and color for the sunlight. I used a blue-gray color for stormy daylight, and not a lot of strength in the light. Turn on shadows, and ... render. Here we go:

That's the raw render -- no painting on it yet, but it's already pretty moody and effective. As a general rule, the better you can get the render, the more you'll have to work with when it comes to painting -- which also tells you, you need to render BIG, to give yourself the wiggle room to get in and paint small details. This one was rendered at 3600 pixels wide; and I rendered it "landscape" rather than "portrait," because we have every intention of producing a paperback of Home from the Sea, and you can clearly see the wraparound cover here!

I didn't bother raytracing this, much less sending it to LuxRender, because the painting was always going to be dark, murky. A LuxRender, especially at this size, would have taken a long time and wouldn't have added much, if anything, to the work. This one was the simplest possible deep shadow map render, before the image was shipped right into Photoshop to be painted.

And there was a lot of painting to be done. I used Ron's Fog (from the DAZ Marketplace) on the skyline and around the cottage; I used a brush from a pack of Grunge brushes by Mystikel to build up the ground around the tavern; then, several brushes from the Waves pack (Renderosity) created the water effects -- I don't remember the designer of this pack, but a quick search at Renderosity will turn it up. The birds were from a pack of Waterbirds brushes (same story ... if I could remember the designer, I'd be delighted to give a credit -- if anyone recognizes them, let me know, and I'll put a plug in right here). The chimney smoke is a brush from Ron's Smoke (DAZ Marketplace again). I also painted in reeds and rank grasses around the waterline and the tavern. 

Incidentally, the waves you see here are not just clicked into place with the .abr brushes; they were built in layers to get this effect, and the last layer of all was a color cast over the top (see below). You have a very finite collection of .abr brushes, and you need to create a wide range of waves from them, so you need to get clever. Prektiss, prektiss, prektiss, is the only answer: do it till you can ... and like any kid playing with clay, have fun making a mess for a while! It's well worth figuring this part out:

Then, the biggest difference to the overall piece was made by placing a "cast" into the bottom of the shot, and also into the top. I overpainted a sea green layer into the foot of the work, and adjusted the blend and transparency of the layer ... this is dark, dark sea green, on Overlay, at 31%, to bring the waves up into super realism. In the top of the shot, I have two "cast" layers -- a crimson one and a green one, both pushed and pulled with blend/transparency tweaks, to get this absolutely surreal effect, which makes it look as if the tavern is at the eye of a storm. 

So that was pretty much the painting finished, and I couldn't resist lashing up the ebook cover, just to see how it'll look:

There you go ... Home from the Sea by Mel Keegan, soon to be available in ebook formats, and not long after that, we'll do a paperback of this one. The text objects, rule and bounding box were made in Serif PagePlus, and I was done. I'll keep you posted on the book, and will tell you where to get it, when it goes live. This is something like Mel's sixth major historical, and I enjoyed it immensely. If you liked things like The Deceivers and Dangerous Moonlight, you'll get a kick out of this one.

Jade, May 13, 2013

Conan takes a vacation ... in LuxRender

(click to see the top image at full size; the two above are 1:1) 

Still getting the hang of LuxRender, and starting to scratch the surface of what it can do, I went back to another picture I was very happy with, last year as a raytrace, and set it up to render again in Lux. Result: fairly stunning, though there were some oddities along the way, like --

I originally had a couple of Austrian pine trees right behind the barbarian here. They show up in DAZ Studio all right, but they're just nor there in Lux, and there's nothing to be done about that. So I replaced them with the young fir trees from Rhodi Design, and also loaded up with grass (also by Rhodi), because I discovered that the grass prop which is problematical in DAZ Studio (and one presumes, therefore, Poser??), is a breeze in Lux. It renders up beautifully.

There where also problems with the skinmap, alas. This is SAV Atlas -- and it's one of the very few characters where I also use the original face morph as well as the skinmap. He's a beauty ... s'why I call this image "Conan Takes a Vacation." And the skinmap looks terrific in a raytrace, but when you come to do the Lux render, you can see "tidemarks" where the patches in which the skinmap is made join together. Obviously, they ought to be seamless, and in Lux, this one ain't. I did a bit of painting, and I also stood some props in front of him to save myself a lot more painting!

Otherwise, it was easy. The render took about 20 hours, and was done at 2000 pixels wide and 1600 high, because I knew I'd have to paint here and there, and I wanted to leave myself space to get in and do it. But what I didn't have to paint was the hair! Miracle of miracles, this is just how it rendered up, and it'll do just fine. I think this is the Akaste hair.

The big tree is the Ultimate Woodland prop (DAZ); and the ferns are from the DM Elven Shed set (Renderosity). The basic sky was done in Lux itself, by changing the values of the "sky light," which is a vastly editable parameter in the Light Groups. But the clouds were done in Photoshop, using the Mystikel Cloud Pack brushes as an overlay.

Next thing I need to work with in Lux is the depth of field ... which I expect is going to be tricky. I'll get some weird and wonderful results before I figure it out. And thing after that will be getting into the Materials editor, and taking control of every little detail. I confess, this image still uses the defaults, and any settings I put on the props in DAZ before sending the scene ti Lux.

Speaking of DAZ (well, any graphical work, I guess), I need a new harddrive. Waaaah! No, it's not busted, it's just full. I'm working with one of the screamingly fast solid state harddrives, and when the system was built for me, the shop kept the price down a bit by using the small boot drive, at just 111GB. Turns out, there's a lot of stuff I use that will only run cleanly off the boot drive ... so the boot drive has consequently filled up in 14 months. I'm scavenging for space now; just managed to get back enough Gigs to keep going for a couple of months while I organize myself one of the new hybrid drives...

A hybrid, you ask? Yep. Seagate came out with some new technology about two years ago. Google the Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid 2.5" SSHD. Uh huh. Speeds are comparable to the SSD (solid state drive), but you can get much higher capacity drives, and at a fraction the cost. In the States, the Momentus retails for as little as $106! Naturally, Australia being Australia, the same thing costs $230 at IT Warehouse, which built my system and will be doing the upgrade, including cloning the original boot drive over.

This is Very High on My Agenda, because I'm seriously running out of room! Have shopped some sales at Renderosity in the last few weeks, got some fantastic new sets and props, and when these are installed, I'm pretty sure I'll be juuuust about maxed out. But, with 500GB on a new hybrid SSHD, I can do all sorts of things ... like, get Poser running on the C: drive, which it demands before it'll install Michael and Victoria ... and then I can also play happily with the Firefly render engine, which admittedly gets fantastic results too. Never been able to do very much with it, because I can't get the figures installed ... and if I do surrender to pure lust and get Vue, I'll definitely need the space. I say "lust" deliberately there. I look at the Vue landscapes, and I just drooooool. Like this, for instance:

The picture credits on these should read: Artur Rosa, and they're borrowed from the E-on site, to show you what I mean about droooooling over the way Vue handles -- not so much the landscapes, as the foliage. Bryce will generate the terrains. It just won't populate them with credible foliage to save its life. You can see from "Conan Takes a Vacation" where my brain is trying to go. Lux is getting me about halfway there, but I honestly don't think the photographic realism you're dying for in the landscape itself will happen outside of Vue --

Though, to be fair, Lux does an incredible job. There are galleries on the LuxRender official site stuffed full of images that I'm still drooling over, and I've promised myself I WILL figure this out. For the moment, though, I'm quite happy with the barbarian's holiday snapshot, and -- well, how good it the figure work, really? As a test, I dropped it into monochrome, to see how convincing it is as a b/w photo, Try this:

...and that's pretty convincing. So... here's the wallpaper version:

...enjoy! It's 1920 wide, and looks a treat on both my monitors, desktop and laptop so it ought to fit most.

Jade, March 3, 2013

Let there be Lux! Chino revisited...

click to see all images at larger size

I've been wanting to get back to LuxRender for weeks now, and this was my chance. The weather has been too hot to do much ... well, much that didn't involve sitting infront of a cooling device! Go far from a cooler, and you walk into heat and humidity. So this was a great time to experiment with Lux, see if I can get back to where I was a loooong time ago.

The first thing I learned when I started it up was that I had forgotten just about everything. So I set off again with simple subjects. A couple of props sitting on a table, with a simple background:

...so far, so good. There's a bit of "burnout" on the skull there, but I'm not too bothered about it, because I know it's a pretty simple fix, messing about in the Reality materials. I did this, and the next two experiments, at small(ish) size for quickness. The bigger the image (not to mention the more complex), the longer it takes to render. This little one, above, was about 40 minutes, and told me enough for me to get a grip. It's actually worth comparing the LuxRender render (!) with the raytrace:

So, if you were wondering why you'd bother getting into Lux, here's your reason! The LuxRender image has a quality very close to a photograph. In fact, when you get very, very good at this, the renders are impossible to tell apart from photos --

For those of you who could really get into this, you need to visit the Lux homepage, and take a look through the galleries of user images. It's www.luxrender.net, and the link to the galleries is at the bottom of the page, not the top. Bear with me while I learn this. There's a LOT to figure out, but I'm getting there...

The next thing was a more complex image -- an exterior, in sunlight. The top image, here, has been Photoshopped a leeetle bit to add clouds into the sky; the second image is just as she comes:

All right! That's nice, that's very nice. Still simple enough that the render took only about 50 minutes, but not to bad at all. So the next thing was to go back to a couple of old projects and re-render them; and I wanted to add a figure. The 3D human figure might not look a hundred times more complex than a whole garden set, but it is. So this one was always going to be more of a challenge both for self and the software:

This one was still rendered small (if you call 1000 pixels wide small. Three computers ago, I considered this a pretty good size to be working at ... because the 'puter would "barf," as Dave so delicately puts it, if I asked much more of it), and it took about 90 minutes to get to a really good render. 

Sooooo, time to get ambitious!

I pulled up the old file for the leader image for The Legend of Chino Vollias, and worked with that. First step: delete all the lights. ALL of them. Second step: import a Reality mesh light, and render it small, so I could check to see it was working, and working properly, before I set it to render full size. Because rendered at 2500 pixels high, it was a 24 hour render. I left it going overnight, stopped it this morning, when it got to 1500 "samples per pixel." (I've learned many things -- one of them is, the smaller the image, the more samples per pixel they need to look good. The render, right above, was 2000 S/p, as Lux terms it. The big one which leads off this post, was only 1500 S/p, and looks extremely good. I kept an eye on it between 1200 and 1500, and not much was resolving after the 1200 point. So -- time to call it good and start painting.

There's a lot of Photoshop post work on this, I admit. Lux didn't render the whole thing looking like this ... but it could have. It will yield a raw render that looks like this, if you have almost unlimited time to fiddle with the lights and materials. Right now, I don't have that kind of time, so -- Photoshop to the rescue.

So -- how good is LuxRender?! I'm just getting my feet re-wet with this, and there's so much to learn. It's going to be fun!

Jade, February 26, 2013

Michael 4 tries on a new skin and face. Meet Garret

click to see all images at larger size

Test driving a new skinmap and face/body morph is always fun. This is a new skinmap called Mitchell, which you can find through the Renderosity marketplace.  It's from a designer called SAV, or Studio Art Vartanian, and it's another in SAV's line of northern European skins -- highly detailed, with a lovely texture, and a grand contrast to all those swarthy skinmaps in my library. The skinmap is very, very pale, though; it's a bear to light this in full daylight conditions and not have him come up just plain "pasty" in a raytrace. For instance, I'm only about 80% satisfied with the daylight render, above ... before I say any more, let me see how he renders in Lux. Fair go, here: this skinmap was developed for the Firefly engine in Poser, and a DAZ Studio raytrace will absolutely not to justice to it! (Note: this is no reflection on the designer. DAZ Studio users know well ahead of time that to get tip-top results, you ship the work to Reality-LuxRender ... and I'll do this just as soon as I have the chance! Poser users have the Firefly engine built in. LuxRender is actually superior, but the downside is that renders are overnight jobs even on a super-fast system. Ten and fifteen hour renders are commonplace, to get the absolute best results.)

However, in low light conditions, such as the first two renders today, the raytrace was quite adequate to get me into Photoshop for (here's where the fun begins!) painting, post work, with my Wacom Bamboo, which I have come to adore. For me, I gotta tell you, the post work is the big fun. Like this... 

Check out the glasses and the highlights and shadows on the chair's seat, and under the chair. All hand painted. The part I like most is the glass in the spectacles, reflecting the sky above and the chair below. It's so effective, and so easy. And... 

Big fun, adding the shadows and highlights, and bringing the lamp glow alive, and fetching up the light on objects. When you're used to viewing the Photoshop-retouched images, you wouldn't believe how flat the raw renders look. One of my projects is to do a video for YouTube, which fades (blends, morphs) from the finished version into the raw version and back into the finished version, to really show what I mean.

Next thing I'll be doing, though, is rendering the Mitchell skinmap in Lux to see how it performs with a real, proper render engine. But I'm very happy with the face I created to suit this skinmap:

This, above, is Face Designed by Jade, and it was developed because ... well, the Mitchell face morph, supplied along with the skinmap, doesn't appeal to me so much. It's all right, but it's not as "natural" a face as I prefer. Doctor Mike was looking over my shoulder as I test-drove the original face morph and rendered these, below:

I asked him for his opinion, and he said, to his eye the original Mitchell face morph is very "Nineteenth Century," like a marble or bronze, circa French Revolution. It's a good face, but it's stylized rather than having that sense of reality that I prefer. See my face at large size:

That's what I was aiming for, and I'm thrilled with this face. So realistic. I also put a few years on him, you notice. The Michael 4 "doll," just as he loads up, is very immature, just a little more than a boy. Some stories and art need the very young character; some don't. My characters tend to be a bit older, because I do like a mature guy. 

That's the Mitchell hair he's wearing, set to a kind of auburn/red color. The costume is also by SAV, the Sav Hot Men Outfit. For the garden scene, I replaced the textures on the shirt, but the jeans are just as they unpack, right out of the box. These garments have a fantastic set of conforming morphs: they, uh, "undress" the model, allowing for glamor and intimacy, which most conforming garments don't:

Next, I promise with hand on heart, I'll finish and illustrate the next chapter of Abraxas! I got a start, but I've been sick for a few days. Again. Life hasn't been so easy lately. I was asked, how am I going to go about blogging the chapters in future, when the story gets, uh, romantic! I was thinking about putting in the teaser for the chapters containing sensual material, and zipping the whole thing into a PDF and giving a link. That way, people who are only here for the art needn't be bothered; people who like the story but don't want to contend with sensual scenes can also remain unbothered; and those folks who appreciate a bit of Yaoi-style romance can download the PDF and enjoy it for its own sake. So that's the plan.

More soon!

Jade, October 18

Let there be Lux! Ummm ... Photoshop to the rescue

click to see all images at large size

Let there be Lux! As in, LuxRender. It's the first time I've dabbled in Lux in a few months because, frankly, it takes more viable braincells than I've possessed lately. If you know me, you know I haven't been well. If you know me personally, you know why! As they say, "This too shall pass." They just didn't say when! So --

A few days ago I got the hankering to play in Lux, and started it up. First shock: I've forgotten 90% of everything I figured out in the first part of this year. I made some mistakes, and to be honest with you, I still haven't a clue what I did wrong. I wound up reading my old blog posts, looking for clues! But toughing it out bore dividends in the longrun --

Compare the difference between the raytrace and the Lux render:

Oh, yeah. Remember last year, when I used to rabbit on about not being able to get lustrous skin tones out of the 3Delight render engine, which is built into DAZ Studio ... and I even put down the credit card and bought Poser Pro, in search of those skintones, which are doable with Poser's Firefly render engine. (I still have Poser Pro installed, but since it isn't and can't be, installed on my C: drive, I can't do much, if anything with it ... because the human models, Michael and Victoria, refuse to install to Poser if the installation address does not begin C:\ ...) However, I'm glad to say that from what I'm seeing lately, a good Lux render is rather superior to a Firefly render...

The operative word there being "good." And it ain't easy. Lux is a challenge -- and this time around, I swear, I'm going to write it down when I get it worked out! (I could do worse than blog it here, because I can always come back and read my old posts.)

In this render, which I call Leon at Dawn, I had multiple problems, not just the fact I'd forgotten some of the Lux process. I think I set a light wrong, because the image was consistently either red or yellow, and I could never achieve a natural color! This was a fairly easy fix in Photoshop, after the fact. But there was worse:

When you're raytracing, you just don't see mangled, buckled, smashed up mesh. 3D figures are made of gazillions of polygons, forming a mesh for their skin, right? When you push a model too far, through too many deformations, to get an extreme pose, the mesh can buckle. But when you're raytracing, you'll never actually see the base polygons themselves. In Lux Render? Ouch!! I'd set this picture to render overnight; came back 13 hours after it began, and was horrified. (This is why you weren't looking at this picture days ago.)

Now, if I'd overdriven the model by pushing it into poses that had smashed up the mesh, I'd have gone back to scratch and rerendered the whole shebang. But the left arm tells the story: it's just hanging there, relaxed. No reason whatsoever for the mesh to be mangled. And what about the forehead, where the head and the brow components seem to have parted company?! So there wasn't much point in rerendering it.

Photoshop to the rescue. I did a lot of "painting" on this one -- and I put that word in the quote marks because "painting" isn't really the right term. Fixing the figure was a question of cloning swatches of nearby, and perfect, skin, copying them over, pasting them over the damage like patches or bandages, and juuuust blending them in at the edges. I did this in about a dozen places ... right shoulder, left elbow and forearm, forehead, even the torso. Then painted the shadows a little bit, to further fool the eye. The effect is pretty good. You really, really have to know where to look to see the fixes, and even then, you need to squint. I'm happy. 

(This part of the job was very much like photo restoration, where you're mending parts of an image that have been, for instance, stapled through. The techniques are so identical, I'm adding the tag "photo restoration" to this post.)

There was more, though not quite as dire! Thirteen hours of rendering, and I look at how Lux is handling the texture on the column in the background, and say "ugh." (See below) The rayrace was close enough to what I'd wanted for me to say, "sure, I'll go with that." But Lux's version of it, seen at full size, is not very convincing. Did I miss something? Should I have set some displacement or bump mapping?? I don't know, yet (will figure it out), but I did want to save the picture without having to do another overnight render. Sooooo....

There's a technique I've seen done here and there, where you take a raw texture such as the stone you see in the montage above ... you paste it right into a Photoshop layer, and cut, stretch, skew, till it fits and assumes the appearance of what you have in your imagination. I've never done this before -- never had a reason to. But since I saw, a long time ago, a chromium-plated frog that had apparently been done this way, I've wanted to try it. Now, I don't say I could spend 20 hours chrome plating a frog piece by piece for the fun of it, but this fix, here, was dead easy. It was done in two pieces: one for the cap on the column, one for the body; then the shadows and highlights were hand-painted to make it look like there's curvature on the column. It worked, it's effective, and it was surprisingly quick!

The photographic realism Lux Render achieves made me want to push one one step further. This picture uses the character I designed a couple of years ago, and whom I call Leon. This is the first time I've rendered him in Lux, though you've seen him numerous times in raytraces -- notably, in the Abraxas story. But this one is so photographic, it was almost like meeting the real-live human who modeled for the artwork. So I thought, how about the traditional b&w studio photo? Here we go:

Do see this at large size (I've uploaded it at 1200 pixels high), because at that size you'll see the effect that adding film grain contributes. It's quite startlingly realistic. One thing that also works out well in monochrome is that I'd hand-painted the "margins" of the hair, so that you have all those stray wisps that look natural, rather than having something that's "all of a piece," and sits on the head like a hat. The conversion to b&w makes this look very, very real. (I love my Wacom Bamboo!!!)

So, this is DAZ Studio's Michael 4, wearing his High Rez skinmap and the Midnight Prince hair set to auburn  or chestnut, I forget which. Face and body morphs by me. In the background is a column with a nice warm stone texture added, plus two or three lovely little fir tree props (by Rhodi Design ... from Content Paradise, which is the 3D store at Smith Micro). The backdrop is one of my photos a woodland scene, blurred waaaay out and darkened. I have one light set: I named it "sun" and set it low, so it could easily be the rising sun. The scene was set up in DAZ Studio, and rendered in Lux ... then the fun began in Photoshop.

Next, I need to seriously jog my memory regarding Lux! I worked it out six months ago, so I can do it again. And while I'm at it, I need to write the next chapter of Abraxas ... and make a slideshow of the images I captured at the wildlife preserve a week or so ago ... up close and personal with kangaroos, dingos and so on. I don't know how many of you will be interested in wildlife photography, so when I get the show together I'll just include a link. More importantly, Renderosity had a raft of new products showing up in the last week or two, and I indulged myself. Bought a new skinmap, new toupee, jeans, shirt ... and a "graveyard" set that will be perfect for some Halloween type images, in a couple of weeks' time. Have you been with me long enough to remember the Vampire Amadeus and his bratty human sidekick/boyfriend (depending on your preference) ...? They'll be back for Halloween 2012.

More soon!

Jade, October 6