Photoshop magic enchants some beloved old raytraces. Check this out!

Work continues apace on the this blog, which has needed a facelift for a very, very long time. I'm also tackling the challenge of The Lost Songs, which has been in limbo for about as long as the conclusion o the Game of Thrones book series! And if I do say so myself, I've got a raft of better reasons for letting the story slide into limbo than George R.R. Martin has! Read the backstory behind what happened to The Lost Songs, and why -- and what's coming next for this project -- right here. 

And to prove it, let me show you these:

Leon Greatsword: 2023 repaint...

Leon and Iphigenia: the 2023 re

These are the 2023/24 repaints of the old images from 2012. Wow. What a difference. This is purely Photoshop magic; nothing has been re-rendered, but everything can be repainted -- and, of course, the illustrations for the remainder of this story will come into the world looking like this. In fact, it's worth taking a look at the old and the new, side by side. The one that needed the least work was the Lux Render; the old raytraces, however, dated from a time when I could barely turn on shadows without making the computer crash! Ah, those were the days...

So ... bear with me while I get this project into shape, and then ... let's have this finished, as outlined in the post I referred you back to above!

In other news ... work continues on the photo blog, travel blog and so forth. And also on the art galley site. I'll reiterate: if there is anything on the old site you want to keep, grab it now, because when it's gone, it's gone. 

Guy candy, science fiction and a landscape ... loving my Huion pen tablet!

 

In the style of Boris ... and it worked!

Illustration for an SF tale: link below

There's little to say in this post! The guy candy ... well, I don't know his name, but he's a male model from the US, and I believe he's Cherokee. I saw a very small, very poor reproduction of a photo -- it had been mangled by whoever put it together, almost overwhelming the model. So I stripped it back to the original photo and turned him into a pure digital painting. Whoever he is, the need to be painted is shouting out of the photo. I wanted something in the style of Boris, and if you see this piece at full size, I think I succeeded here. 

The SF piece was done as a an illustration to accompany a "super-drabble." Too long to be called a drabble proper, because at 165 words it's 65 words too wordacious to be a drabble, but it's also waaaay too short to call it flash. Dunno what to call it, but ... if I said I could tell you a coherent SF story in 165 words, over 30 extremely short lines -- as illustrated by this painting -- and give you a chuckle at the same time, would you read it? Why not? If you would, give this a click, and enjoy. 

The landscape ... latest in an ongoing series of paintings in which I guess I'm teaching myself how to do this. So much to learn! But it's the biggest fun I know at the moment. Gives me a reason to get creative after the housework is done, rather than just picking up my knitting and nodding off to sleep! Am I getting old at last?!

Touching base here, with some SF fantasy, and a cool storyline

My apologies for vanishing on you for a few days ... as per my last blogging, I'm working my way through the process of having pleurisy, and it's faaaar from fun.

So I'm just posting a set of images I did a little while ago, while working up some ideas. They're very quick, and based around a theme...

Edit: Nope. The images were remote linked from another site, and they have ... gone. I don't even have them anymore. So I'm replacing them with filler art from "some years later" -- trying to FIND the missing images on some HDD somewhere. But till then ... oh, well. 

About 1000 years from now, hyperspace travel depends on a special kind of people who can see, or feel, or sense, the currents of subspace. These people are priceless because they can take ships through the void, planet to planet or galaxy to galaxy. There's not many of them, so they're highly prized -- and they don't occur naturally. You find someone who has the potential to swim in hyperspace, and you "modify" them for the job. The modifieds are incredibly rare, and precious ... and in typical fashion, there's an illegal traffic in them. There's a whole wing of the Space Corps dedicated to finding them, liberating them and stamping out the trade, but in fact it gets busted from the inside by a number of the "navigators" who discover that they can reach further than hyperspace; in fact, they can reach into the incredible cybernetic systems that run everything in the year 3000. It takes a network of seven of these "navigators" to bring down the cartel that traffics in people like them...

"My gods," you're saying, "that's brilliant!" Well, it's certainly a new spin on a bunch of old ideas, but I'm not going to tell you it's my idea! It's based on THREE previous ideas, all welded together and given a new spin. If you're into Doctor Who, think back to Warrior's Gate, the story about the Time Sensitives who piloted ships through the timestreams, and there was an illegal traffic in them. (It was a Tom Baker story, and I think it might have been in the last season he did, just prior to turning into Peter Davison.) Then, think back to Wing Commander, which featured a subspecies of human who could navigate hyperspace in their heads. Uh huh. Then think back to the book, Dune, in which the navigators were "modified," or somehow mutated by ingesting spice, which let them pilot starships.

None of these prior projects featured any navigator who was female -- not one. Therefore, none of them had navigators who were nubile young women who looked fantastic swimming nekkid among the stars. But this is where CG art likes to go these days! And here's seven images featuring these remarkable folks who can swim in hyperspace (and who don't look like grizzled prospectors, or look like they're steadily mutating into sandworms!) and also reach into the realm of cybernetics and beat the cartel from the inside. Also, none of the prior projects featured anything like a Space Corps dedicated to stopping the illegal trafficking in these folks, so you'd add in a cross between La Femme Nikita and Space Police ... Roy Dupis in black leather, rescuing a bunch of drop-dead gorgeous super-women in space, in 3000AD.

Oooooh, my goodness. Can we say, "Commercial potential?"

The backgrounds are digital paintings based on Hubble photos which have been heavily worked in several ways. Then the Victoria 4.2 model was posed in freefall. Then the renders were finished with iconic overpainting in GIMP, using .abr brushes, for some interesting effects.

Now ... pills. Rest. Gak.

Jade, June 18

***Posted by MK because the internet is AWOL. Intermittent crap.

A touch of the exotic

Sorry to vanish on you for a couple of days ... loads of things going on behind the scenes, most of which were semi-insane, and none of which turned into anything that made sense. As the weekend draws to a close, I find myself scratching my head and wondering, "What happened?" Added to which, "I want my weekend back, dammitall!"

But since I'm not likely to get my weekend back -- here's a tasty piece of art. This one was the challenge from hell...

I could NOT ray trace it! All I can get is about 84% and then crash to the desktop. It took me several goes to get it to render with shadows turned on!

I need a faster computer.

Check. Right. Duh. Next year?

It's Victoria, wearing the Daryl hair set to carrot red, and the cape from the Shadow Storm costume. That's just the boring old bikini from the V4 Basic Wear clothing pack that you download as freebies when you get DAZ ... amazing what changing the textures and slapping on a couple of opacity maps will do, innit?! Then, add the plantpots from the Sarina's Patio set, and the Columns from another DM set (I forget which, sorry) -- and the foreground is the Circular Shrine, also by DM. But then I changed out all the textures for various grains and shades of marbles ... made the plantpots gloss-enamel,polished the floor with reflections, and added a displacement map to it...



The render only takes 10 minutes with the Deep Shadow Mapping. The raytracing takes about 65 minutes to get to 84%, then -- crrrraaaassssshhhh!!! Not much I can do about that. So --

Then the piece was shipped out into Micrografx and GIMP to be overpainted. I made it a little more contrasty, added a couple of shadows that don't render too accurately in the not-raytraced render, added the glow off the lights and a bit of flare. Added in the eyelights, which you can't even see in the small version Blogger pastes to the page ... last thing, I painted the hairline to look more like hair and less like a "straight line fit" where a wig goes on.

So -- just one render today, because it's taken me two days to get it to render at all! And fear not: I'll put one of the many Michael 4 characters into this same scene, same situation, and we'll see what he looks like in this treatment. Why should Victoria have all the fun?!

Good thing it was a warm night, hunh?

Jade, April 10

Fragments of fantasy

2014 Edit: of the original project, only the thumbnails, and one image, remain. The rest are gone, sorry. But I want to include the post -- it's a neat story. So I'll fill in the blanks with something at least interesting after the text... I don't think I have anything much that's "in the spirit of," but if I think of something in due course, I'll come back and adjust this post.   

"Do you feel that, Iorik?" she asks, turning her face to the wind.

"Feel what, madam?" he asks, wondering why the concubine is on the heath at twilight, when the air smells strangely of the sea.

"There's a storm coming," she says. "Do you not smell it, taste it? It makes me think of my youth, of home, before."

"I feel the wind," he says. "I'm just my lady's guard, not..."

"Not what, Iorik? Say it," she challenges.

But he dare not say it, for the stories about her say she brought with her the magic of the steppes when she was sold into the household of the master. They call her the Stormseer, and Iorik can believe it as he watches her fall to her knees and petition the gods of the sky.

"Hear me," she whispers, "hear my prayer."

"What prayer, madam?" he asks, creeping closer.

But she no longer hears him. She hears only the sky -- the wind and the storm that will surely break across the heath before midnight.

She has always been able to hear, taste, smell the oncoming storm. But can she also summon the storm? Iorik does not know, but he wonders, watching her now, if she can bring the wild storm down on the household into which she was sold -- if she can wreak devastation, and through it win her own liberty, and his.

**************

Just a story fragment -- the rest of the story is out there somewhere, I'm sure. This one comes as a contrast to the weather we're having here, which has been brutal in the last few days. HOT. One of the riverland towns, east of here, recorded 51 degrees Celsius yesterday! That's 124 in the old Fahrenheit scale, and we measure share temperatures, so you can add 35 degrees to that to get the sun temperature. Ouch! Well, we didn't get that hot, but it was 43 for a couple of consecutive days, which is hot enough.

So I couldn't resist doing something with a big storm, chill winds -- "chance of an evening shower or two around the coastal hills," as the forecast sometimes says down here.

The model is Victoria 4, wearing the Yaana skin map and the Rock Star hair. The costume is the Night Lily coat -- there's supposed to be a dress under it, but, well, let's just replace it with a bikini, and set the textures of everything to something emerald green. The sky is an enlargement of a small piece of sky from a digital shot of a weather front arriving a couple of years ago, and the ground is a bit of terrain made in Bryce and exported as an .OBJ, and imported into DAZ here to serve as the ground. Nice.

Jade, 2 February

Starlight and shadows

Just a little artwork today ... no great discourse on matters artistic or 3D. Am really under the weather again (read: if I were a dog, they'd have shot me already) and not in any condition to do much except turn into a lump under a blanket on the couch. Sorry guys.

Hope to be recovered (or recovering at least) tomorrow, and will be back with more goodies and at least a bit more coherence. Or at least as much coherence as I can usually muster! Am going to hunker down and watch movies tonight. Ack.

Back more with soon. Or something along those lines...

Jade, 17 January

All dressed an and waiting for the bus ... Happy Post 400!

What do you do for Post 400? The words "party, party" leap to mind. Or, a 3D party for the 3D "digitoids" at least. (I didn't coin that phrase -- wish I did! Mel Keegan thought of that one, back in Deep Sky. What a perfect term for digital actors. Digitoids.)

So they're all dressed to kill (or do I mean, undressed to kill?) and it's a warm evening (gazooks, it had better be), so they go out and stand waiting for the bus.

Twenty minutes later, and it still hasn't arrived. She says, ""you know, I think we missed that bus. When's the next one?"


He says, "Next Tuesday. Maybe we should try something a bit more enterprising."

"Like what?"

"Like, maybe you should stand in the road and stick out your thumb."

"Well, why don't you stand in the road, she demands, "and stick your thumb out? Or at least stick something out."

"Listen, Elspeth," he says, getting hot under the collar (which is a good trick, because it barely exists), "you've got more equipment for sticking out than have, so go put it to good use!"

"Phooey, Egbert," she says, sulking. "I'm not about to make an exhibition of myself."

*Well,* he thinks, *there's no answer to that.*

Fortunately the bus arrived in the nick of time before Egbert and Elspeth could resort to bare knuckles, since bare everything else didn't seem to be working.

HAPPY POST 400 !!

And -- 

Here's the full tutorial explaining how to do this stuff with the costumes...!

Jade, 30 October

***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?!!!

Mirror, Mirror ... reflections in a pane of 3D glass

Two birds with one stone today, because time is short and (rats) I'm not well again. Migraine, with a 4:00am kickoff. Oh, joy. Anyway -- reflections in glass ... but window glass, not mirror glass. In other words, you want to be able to see through the glass and yet see yourself reflected in it.

The Room With a View renders last week were really inspiring, but there's no glass in them thar windows. I was more interested in shadows and reflections in the floor, at the time.

Here, it's all about mapping: diffuse, displacement, reflection, opacity. Everything in this scene is drooling color and texture, and the best part is, I did all the textures and maps myself, and designed the model to boot. Sorry guys, you can't buy this character anywhere ... this is Mildred, cousin to Agatha, Winifred and Hortense, my other Victoria 4 characters. I haven't bought a character in almost a year -- it's too much fun to create them, and you can save them as "character presets," and load 'em up next time you need them.

The background, outside, is a Bryce landscape I did a month or so ago. The only props are the window, from DM's Fantasy Visions, and the bikini which actually ships with the free version of DAZ, to get you started, and Neftis's Rock Star hair. Then the fun began. Everything was changed for new textures, down to the lipstick and nail polish.

Then ... glass in the window. See through it, see yourself reflected in it. Nice effect. I wish I had time (and brain cells) to tell how, but that'll have to wait till tomorrow. Migraines don't make for much coherence!

Join me soon ... we're going to see more of Mildred -- a lot more -- on the Exotic blog, when we'll convince the costume to blow away in a sudden gale, or else mysteriously turn transparent. Hey, she's a model, she's used to this stuff. Right?

Jade, 29 October

***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?!!!

Rhapsody in blue: lighting Jesse

I invite you to click on the top shot in this post -- the raytraced one. Woooooh! I don't often raytrace images because even with a fast computer it takes a loooong time. That one render took 38 minutes, before which lighting this scene properly was a challenge even after the "costume" was designed.

Here's the shot with default lights -- in other words, no lights at all:

The model is displayed in every nuance, but it's not realistic. No shadows, and no nighttime colors. So you set the night colors...



...and lose the integrity of the model. Click on the above, see it close to full-size. I've made notes on it, and you'll also see what I mean about the integrity of the model going down the tubes. It's a long haul to get it back:


...but at last, here you are, and ready for a final render. And this one, below, has such an "ouch!" factor, I thought I'd invest a loooong time in raytracing it.

Compare the raytraced one (top) with the deep shadow map render. The realism of the raytraced shot is astonishing. 

2023 Edit: Trawling through the archives, I happened upon this and decided to repaint it in Photoshop. Result -- nice! Check this out:

Here's the other item I want to show you today:


Way back in March of 2010 I had some major computer problems, and am still discovering data loss. I just found out that a body of artwork going back five years has been lost. I had to do a bunch of new covers to replace old art which doesn't even exist anymore. This is one of them.

Jade, 13 October

***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?!!!

Midnight in the city under the green gas giant...

Jesse Lawrence. What more -- what else?! -- can you say? Actually, there's plenty. He's the prince of Companions ... and the similarity between the Companion and the hustler are so tenuous, they barely exist. Well, they do, but the Companions who entertain in places like Randolph Dorne's mansion in the sky are literally out of this world.

Incidentally, if you think Joss Whedon coined the term "Companion" to mean an incredibly high class, cultured, sophisticated, educated, elegant, dream of a courtesan ... wrong. Joss Whedon and FIREFLY were late by ten years! Mel Keegan coined this term waaay back in 1992, when Jesse Lawrence made his debut in the second of the NARC novels, EQUINOX.

(I'm going to give you the NARC links at the end of this post, because I also have to give a caveat, or disclaimer...)

So ... what is wrong with these pictures? In fact, although the skinsuit looks fantastic on him, Jesse wouldn't be wearing anything at all! The first time Jarrat and Stone met him (at a bar, in the middle of the day in downtown Elysium ... the capital city of the Avalon colony, on a moon with a big green gas giant called Zeus riding in the sky), Jesse was buff naked with his hip-length hair left loose, and a smudge of kohl here and there. All had with him was his wallet, keyring, and a pair of sunglasses. Wooooh! Oh yes, and he had a piece of jewelry that can't even be referenced on this "open" blog...

Well, since full-on nudes are not allowed on this main blog, I opted for a compromise. This is another idea Mel Keegan uses in loads of places in the NARC and Hellgate books, and also in Mindspace -- but I don't think MK was the first one to imagine this, though I could be wrong. (Anyone??)

Smart fabric. The color, texture and opacity of the cloth are programmable. They change according to what you need, or your mood, or what's appropriate to the time, place and company. So, for the purpose of this glamour shoot let's say the shots above were taken early in the evening when there's crowds and kids and old ladies galore all over the place, and Jesse wants to be a bit more discreet, so as not to get mobbed! Then, past midnight, you aim a remote at your skinsuit, and this happens:

The set for this shoot involves a car which is glistening in the city lights, drooling with silver-blue chrome. The lens flare was painted on as post work, in GIMP using Ron's Bokeh brushes (which you can get from DAZ. I use them all the time. Verdict: fantastic). Those are the Dystopia City Blocks in the background, providing the skyline. The sky itself was done in Bryce, and then the gas giant was added:

The trick was to be subtle about the huge planet in the sky. You might want to make it bright, but this would be dead wrong, if the city's buildings are lit up. Reflected light off a planet the size of Zeus would make the city bright as day. So it stands to reason that (!) you're on the dark side of Zeus. The planet will orbit back onto the bright side in a few days, and till then the city has arclights which come on as the light levels fall. Read the novel -- it's all in there. Jesse Lawrence joins the "cast" of these novels, and also appears in both Scorpio and Aphelion. In fact, in Aphelion he has a great part ... grooming Jarrat to go undercover as a Companion. Yikes.

As a parting shot, here's a gunship's eye view of the city of Elysium by night:

I'm playing with the Dystopia City Blocks models. Very good to work with. Will have to put a gunship in the sky right here ... Cronin, Ramos and the Blue Ravens to the rescue of some poor soul!

I'm going to give the links to the NARC novels right here, with this caveat: be aware of GLBT content! Be aware that these are not novels for kids. If you're all growed up an' all, and you like a mind-blowing SF novel that will stretch you about as far as you can go ... and you don't get upset about (or actually relish!) some gay love scenes, then you just hit paydirt. With the caveat given, here's the link: http://www.dream-craft.com/melkeegan/narc.html ... we're in the process, right now, of rebuilding this site into an adventure playground of incredible images. Won't be long now!

Jade, 12 October

***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?!!!