A French cafe, a mystery at Ponte Maggiore ... too many islands, but great clouds!

This was very nearly "the render that didn't happen" ... I knew that eventually I'd come up with a render that just could -- not -- be done. Or, not with my software and hardware! This seems to be it, because what you see here was composited from three layered images, when the original configuration stalled at 42% ... forever.

Initially, I had two buildings across the street, hit by spotlights; two walls to make a corner of a little French cafe; a transparent plane with bump map and reflection values set, to be the window glass; table and chair; bottle, glasses and plate, with transparency mapping on bottle and glasses; a Michael 4 (same dude as Amadeus, but with a honey matte on the Akaste hair); there was a lovely transparency map on the shirt too. It will render as a deep shadow map image, but as soon as you turn on raytracing, no joy. Soooo...

I took out everything but the buildings in the background, set lights and camera and rendered that, then re-imported the image as a backdrop and deleted the buildings. It still wouldn't render the remainder, so I did the bottle, glasses and food separately ... then did the table, chair and character against the backdrop -- with the window glass in place and reflecting ... and just pasted the bottle and glasses in!

Even then, it was an hour to raytrace the character, his hair, and the reflection in the glass, at which point I was so sick of this process, when the render turned out to be pretty awful, I almost chucked it in the bin. Sigh. Into Photoshop, and paint. And paint. And paint. And of course now I'm glad I did, because the nett result is rather good -- you just wouldn't believe how much painting it took to save it!

Harrumph. Anyway, this cafe scene came out of ideas spinning off a render I did yesterday that gave me phenomenal problems,  but was fixable inside the render:

The problem with the car was that it looked like a huge slab of plastic. The human eye expects to see reflections in highly-polished Duco, and there was nothing because, of course, the 3D stage is not the real world: there is nothing to be reflected. Soooo, I went in and used a photo of some buildings on the foreshore as a reflection map. Now the car looked like a bloody mirror. So I went back in and added a displacement map to make it look like there are the usual million tiny imperfections in the surface, which got rid of the mirror effect. Put in the sky image as the reflection map for the windows ... and so on, and on, and on. Aarrggh. In the end, it came out right, but ye gods--!! Admittedly, it is a very complex render, with a vast set.

And it got me thinking: there's a story in here! Someone went to meet a friend at the bridge on the canal, but all they found was a pair of women's fashion shoes, abandoned. Shook up, our hero goes to a nearby cafe to make a call, wait for a detective to arrive, and have a fortifying glass or two. Et voile. Thereby hangs a tale.

More misadventures than adventures in Terragen in the last day or two: island creation is giving me strife (or a challenge):

Safe to say, I'm not doing it right yet. There has to be a way, and I have a few ideas. It's not as simple as making very tall islands in a common "hightfield terrain," then flooding it: too many islands!!! And it's not as simple as making a "power fractal" terrain, slapping some heavy detailing on it to erode it or whatever ... again, you don't get one island, you get a thousand. I don't want a thousand. I want ONE. Tomorrow, I'll see if I can make a credible island in Bryce, export it as an OBJ (this much, I can do), then import it into Terragen (it should do this), and (the bold experiment) see if I can have Terragen apply its surface shaders to the OBJ island/terrain/mountain structure, to work up the color and texture. I don't know if Terragen will do this, but it ought to, and it's worth a shot! If not, well, back to the drawing board!

But this came out reasonably well:

Same project as the "better" island scene, with the camera flown up to about 10,000 meters and tilted to look down on the clouds ... then, the sun repositioned for noon-ish, and evening. That's not too bad at all -- and I'm pleased to report, I'm doing this on my own, without chickening out and running back to the tutorials! Getting there. Slowly.

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

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

Never chuck out your old project files!

(Click on these to see them at 1:1 size)

Gay heroes in science fiction. That has to mean NARC -- Jarrat and Stone. And behind the scenes I've been working off and on for months now, creating the art for the new NARC website, which will be launching soon ... around the time these novels go to Kindle, to celebrate the twentieth anniversary for Jarrat and Stone. Twenty years?! Yep. And of course the first novel, the cult classic Death's Head,is actually much older. The first version was written in 1986! It went through two more versions to reach the one which was published by GMP about 20 years ago, and the version which is current, now, is the complete and unabridged edition, waaay longer than the cut version which appeared in paperback all those years ago.

(If you don't know what it the world is going on here, but suspect you're missing something fantastic, just click here, and go to the "books" page, and check out the NARC series. And yeah, I know the website is long overdue for updating, folks! It's one more thing on my list of things to do -- the problem is, the list is five miles long. We're looking after four writers at this time, and there's a lot more work in it than you imagine!)

Anyway --

You might actually recognize the core of these renders, today. I did a version of this hangar scene a long, long time ago, back in the days when I was still learning how to control the lights, the camera. This blog has been a record of my progress from the simplest shots to some which are, lately, among the most complex shots people are doing with this software. (I'm not talking about the artists who are doing the vast landscapes, here. Those are done in things like Terragen 2, and Vue ... and this computer won't run the programs. I know this for sure -- I got into Vue last year and discovered that it's a heartbreaker unless you have a system which is the next level up form this puppy. Hmmmm ... maybe next year!)

But I guess he moral of this story really is, "Never chuck out your old project files!!" Because I was able to go right back into the original file for this one, open it up, and go to Take Two on it --

This might give you a chuckle. The file info on the original project file is (!) Christmas Eve, 2009. Whoot! In fact, here's the original post ... notice, it's dated December 23. This is because I'm on t'other side of the dateline from the US/Canada. In Australia, we're a day ahead of you, so my posts are always dated the day after what Blogger thinks.

The original render is darned nice:



...but it was a long, delicate job, because the background was a digital painting, not a 3D model, and the shadows were hand painted etc., etc.

Coming back to it today -- which is something I've wanted to do for months, and never had the chance -- I was able to load up the Starcarrier set, and then set the lights and have the software do the whole lot. Soooooo ... having made it a real 3D scene, I could then drive the camera around and stage the whole thing, show you a whole series of renders as if these were stills from the NARC movie.

This while scene is lit with just three spotlights, and there is no post work, none at all. These are the raw renders, just as they cooked.

Which makes me salivate to open up some more of the old, old renders and have another crack at them, using sets and props an costumes I didn't have at the time -- not to mention a year's worth of extra skills!

Jade, 1 April (See what I mean about that that dateline thang? Not to mention that half the time I have to recruit a friend with a faster connection to make the post for me, because in this area the internet is spotty, sometimes not even there at al...)

***Posted by MK: my connection is intermittent, too slow for this. Seriously, guys, I've got dialup speeds. How are you expected to do anything these days, at 1990 dialup speeds?!!!

The 3D stage ... lights, camera --!

Today I'm actually playing with camera angles. The lights were only set up once, and most of the really clever effects, like the smoke and candle glow, were done in GIMP afterwards. DAZ Studio 3 will do atmospherics, but this computer won't! Go into Bryce and try turning on the "volumetric" stuff, and you better start looking for the black box. After the crash, that is!

This is the same set as the Wizard's study -- you saw it just the other day ... and this is the same character as the Musketeer who was dodging Cardinal Richelieu to have a dirty weekend in the creepy old castle. I took out the props and furniture, then mered the scene with the Musketeer, and from then on it's all about piloting the camera around, and finishing the shots of with GIMP brush effects.

The eyelights were hand-painted ... nice!

I would loooove to be on a movie set and doing this stuff. Can't you tell?! Or is that my megalomaniac streak showing? I mean, I'm not saying that movie directors are given to the odd big of megalomania, but...

Jade, 30 March

Digital twilight, book covers, and a hair raising tale...

I have a somewhat hair-raising experience to relate ... this is a good one, well worth telling! You might recall me mentioning a few days ago that I'd just ordered up a new graphics tablet -- and it arrived today. It's a Kanvus, and a pretty thing -- which sorta-kinda works. The pen is great but the tablet part is only functional over half the drawing area. This could be something to do with the configuration, and I'll mess about with that tomorrow, see if I can get it working properly. This wasn't the hair raising bit, because --

Something made me try the new pen, with the new drivers installed, with the OLD tablet which didn't work under Vista, and you'll never believe this. It works! Ooooold tablet, new pen, new drivers, very close to perfect combination. Could be better when working in GIMP with the huge .abr brushes, but hey, I'm not complaining, because it actually is working. But --

Before I installed the tablet drivers, I had Opera installed on the computer here. I use Opera quite a lot, because when you get on some sites that are powered by certain persnickety java engines, IE starts to jack around so badly, it's a major headache, and Firefox doesn't -- yet -- shake hands properly with a lot of the top-end java-heavy sites. Opera is the perfect standby. So I had Opera v11 installed, and ...

Then I installed the new graphics tablet drivers, the end of which process requires a reboot. Fair enough. By that time this computer was getting "tired RAM" in any case, so it was time for a restart. So I hit the button to reboot, went for tea, and when I came back it was up and running. And Opera had been utterly, completely, totally uninstalled. There wasn't a trace of it anywhere on the system.

Say -- what? Or if you want it in modern parlance, WTF?!

Obviously, you just go back to opera.com and run the installer again, but I mean --! Installing the drivers for a new USB device, right off the company's CD-Rom, uninstalls some of your existing software?!

Of course, I took inventory, made sure nothing else had vanished. No problem, just Opera. And I think I'll be shaking my head over that one for some time to come.

Today was a blizzard of work after which I rewarded myself with twenty minutes of art time. There was no opportunity to put a figure into the above set, but it was lovely playing with the lights. The front-lit shots look a little plasticky; I need to get into DAZ and figure out some of the virtual camera controls, which are nothing like the controls on a real camera, incidentally. You need to forget everything you ever thought you knew about cameras, and work this out from scratch. I can do that.

But when I turned the camera around and did a couple of renders in the other direction, which put the columns into silhouette ... ah. Now, set up a light to reflect in the polished floor. Then take the render into GIMP and add the moon and some birds. Nice.

The set is Temple of the Shadows, which I got from either Renderosity or Content Paradise in a sale a long time ago. I actually forgot I had this, and stumbled over it this morning while looking for something else! I like this a lot, and I'll be back on this set, with a figure or figures.

The other project for today was a new cover for the old Mel Keegan thriller, Storm Tide. That's a fantastic book, but we put a generic cover on it ... nice cover, but generic nonetheless, and I think it's the cover that's killing the book. So we're going to repackage it:

...and that's worth a closer look at the art, where you can see the lovely process effect on the background, as well as the delicate shadows on the male nude in the foreground. Okay, so we went from generic cover to male nude. Let's see what happens now!
Jade, 28 February

***Posted by MK: my connection is intermittent, farrr too slow for this.

Return to Tortuga ... adventures with the 3D camera

Two pirates meet in the street, in the Port of Tortuga, circa 1700 ... a few years before Jack Sparrow's time, I do believe, but nothing would have changed by the time Jack arrived. I don't suppose the would even have changed the muck on the walls! It's just the costumes here that tip you off to the earlier year. These guys are doing something like the Men in Tights routine, and by the time Jack Sparrow happens along, the dress code has changes. Not that Johnny Depp wouldn't look a treat in tights --!

If I'm rambling, please forgive. I haven't posted in a few days ... been sick. And before I got even halfway well, work had piled up and I had to find a way to cope, which wasn't easy. Something had to go o the back burner, and blogging was it.

This is what I was doing when I fell face down, and this post is actually about camera positions. It was only the other day when I noticed that a couple of the buildings in the Port of Tortuga set have actual balconies, and you can get the characters and the camera up there.

This is terrific when you're working with two or more characters, because the range of shots you can set up is virtually unlimited. Driving (and flying) the camera around creates all its own challenges, one of which is setting up the lights. You really are the movie director, in this kind of shoot. You can really imagine setting up the shot and having the actors stand on their big chalk X-marks ... then shifting the camera and resetting the lights for the next take. Loads of fun.

Sorry about the long delay in this post. Believe it or not, this is Post 349! The big three-five-oh comes up with the next one. I really want to do something special for that one, but I have to confess, my mind is a blank. Got to thing of something!

And if you're interested in the difference between the raw renders right out of Studio, and the enhanced versions -- this is worth a look:

Jade, 2 September

***Posted by MK: my connection is intermittent, too slow for this. Seriously, guys, I've got dialup speeds. How are you expected to do anything these days, at 1990 dialup speeds?!!!

Beauty at the bottom of my garden!

When I was a kid, they still used to tell stories of hobs and boggarts and wee folk -- every area had its local species, and a lot of them still lived in the areas where humans were starting to build subdivisions ... with the result that the old saying about "faeries at the bottom of the garden" had to be true at least some of the time ... not because the fairies moved to live behind your henhouse, but because Uncle George built the damn' henhouse right on top of the site where people had been seeing wee folk for about a thousand years before City Hall decided to subdivide the woodland.

So the legends of "faeries at the bottom of the garden" arose. Of course, these days the stories are utterly pooh-poohed, and rightly so, because there are no faerie at the bottom of anyone's garden. Which makes sense when you think about it. What life form in its right collective mind would want to stick around where you dump your dead lawnmowers, and those leftover rolls of linoleum, and the old paint cans? Let's face it, there's so much toxic waste at the bottom of the garden, somebody as small as the wee folk would keel over dead, and no amount of clapping would bring 'em back. Of course they moved out. They're short, not dumb.

But as the Greens and the Tree Huggers get mobilized, some very nice, clean gardens are starting to come back, and hey -- you never know. When's the last time you actually bothered to go out and look? Well, look again...

Ye gods, that wasn't there the last time you looked! The only thing missing is the wings ... so let's do something about that:

Whoops ... darn it all, it looks like you've been spotted. They have sharper senses than humans do, and even better. They can camouflage themselves. Their wings turn silver-green to match the shrubbery, and those ferns Auntie Joyce chucked out last year because she thought they were dead, and they rooted themselves in and started colonizing the whole garden.

They come in all kinds, these faer folk; some of them are downright wicked and some are conniving, treacherous. Walt Disney had no idea. Only one thing you really, really have to watch out for, though...

You must be very, very sure not to fall in love with one of these wee characters ... for a very good reason... This beauty is just about six inches tall. And -- well, maybe it's just me, but I'd have to guess that would wreak havoc with your love life.

Jade, 26 August

***Posted by MK: my connection is intermittent, too slow for this. Seriously, guys, I've got dialup speeds. How are you expected to do anything these days, at 1990 dialup speeds?!!!

DAZ Michael 4 ... poster boy

3D art and digital painting are the perfect medium of expression for book covers -- especially ebooks. More and more these days, publishers need good art delivered fast for a modest price, and if you ask someone to paint you an actual, genuine painting, it's going to take so long, the "modest price" that's payable is all very well, but the artist will die of starvation ... which is what they used to do a century ago, and more!

The fantastic thing about doing the whole thing digitally is that after you've bought the 3D models, you can mix and match them ad infinitum, and the only element holding you down is your own imagination.

Lately, I've been doing a lot of book covers. A lot. And the more you do, the more your imagination seems to get itself into gear. It's an art medium I like a great deal.

In these images, I created only two backgrounds, and then swapped colors around ... you're looking at DAZ Michael 4, wearing a nice skinmap (it might be Chase; I honestly can't remember), and in four of the shots, the Rock Star Hair by Neftis; and he's wearing the M4 Real Jeans. The rest is all lights, poses and camera angles, and you could literally go on forever, re-re-re-posing the model, resetting the lights, playing with colors ... on top of which, you can also change the skinmaps, and you can alter the physique at whim.

Anyway, this is what I've been doing today -- thought I'd share of few of the renders!

Jade, August 25

Welcome back to the Caribbean, me hearties!

Now, let's reset the lights and turn daylight into night:

And here's the set itself, without the character, as the camera backs away through the arched gateway...

Sets, props, costumes, lights, cameras, characters, hair -- the whole 3D works went into this. Here's a list of what was used:

Port of Tortuga set and props;
Michael 4;
Spartacos hair;
Matthias skin map;
Journeyer Scout costume...

Plus about ten lights and loads of camera positions -- I basically drove the camera around, chasing the character, once I had the lights set up.

The set is absolutely fantastic. First, there's a huge assortment of props -- I think it's four different houses, plus a mission with a belltower, several walls and wall segments, a fountain, a well, a cart, a street lamp ... even a gallows, if you wanted to stage an execution!

I'm reminded of the big pirate movie of 1975, The Scarlet Buccaneer, also known as Swashbuckler. You missed it? Boy, did you miss out. Robert Shaw, James Earl Jones, Genevieve Bujold, Peter Boyle, Beau Bridges, Geoffery Holder, Henry Kingi -- with a fantastic musical soundtrack (which I have on LP - yep, plastic!), and the whole thing shot entirely on location on a real ship which is a replica of the Golden Hind. Don't believe a word of this? Well --

Here's the trailer:
http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi3632726297/

--sorry I can't embed that, but it's not available at YouTube (I looked), but imdb.com does have it, and it's the long trailer. Just overlook the hokey 1970s era readover and concentrate on the trailer itself. There you go ... I'm not making it up after all --

Anyway, the set here is the Port of Tortuga set from Renderosity and what I like about it is, it's freeform. You get the buildings and walls and things, and you put your own town together, which is cool beyond describing. Full marks to the designer, also, because s/he managed to bring the props in at a file size which doesn't stress the computer to death.

The other great thing about this set is -- it's not merely Tortuga It's virtually any small town, circa 1750, which means you can do so much with this. Five stars out of five, and then some.

Jade, 3 August