The Raven out of armor ... SF, fantasy, a landscape, the works.

Rainy weather at last ... and I'm home alone, got the place to myself allll evening. 😶 Sooo... more art than usual, lately! Nothing to do but mess about in DAZ Studio, Bryce, Photoshop, and -- well, here you are: The Raven off duty, out of armor! Now, there's a sight for sore eyes. The set is MOg Ruith, from the DAZ store. I haven't worked with it much. It's a bear to light! Also...

That's just about the best I'm going to squeeze out of the old software, as per realistic landscapes without getting into Terragen and adding "populations" of trees and plants ... that comes later, after the computer rebuild, okay? Okay. The hardware I have now won't do it, and the dentist had dibs on my money. All of it. Rats. 😒

The big tree in the background is also the most complex tree I've ever conjured --

For the artists among you, it's an amalgam of FOUR trees, and I used #2 from this pack, from Renderosity -- inexpensive, at US$10 for about six trees. If you have any 3D tree model where you can get hold of the trunk/branches and the foliage, separately, you can load four trees on the same coordinates; then make the trunks and branches of two of them transparent (!), and fiddle the x,y,z values of all four of them to create a dense, complex tree -- far more realistic than one tree alone. This is also a gajillion percent better than any Bryce tree I ever managed to create in the tree workshop in Bryce 7 Pro. This is just a raytrace ... it is, however, a two hour raytrace. You gotta be patient with this. I don't do it so often because ... I'm not that patient!

Also ... a change of pace now. Let's have some science fiction to offset the fantasy and landscape work:

Although, for the life of me, I can't get Bryce 7 Pro to create a realistic earth-like image, it's terrific for alien planets! I did this in about 45 minutes, and gave the somewhat flat render a tweak in good old (free) Irfanview for good measure. And --

This, in DAZ Studio, finished off in Photoshop to add the snow, headlight glare and lens flare. The biggest problem with this one was getting the city to light up properly! That's one of the Dystopia city blocks ... it lights up automatically in Bryce, damnit, as soon as "the sun goes down," but this is just a DAZ raytrace ... didn't want to wrestle with Bryce anymore today. But in the end I did get the city to light up, and it's not bad at all. Looks like Jarrat and Stone are on their way out somewhere ... possibly on Aurora, the city of Thule -- the city from Aphelion, if you remember. The old ground city, not the domes ones in the sky --

-- you remember those! What's rather cool is that I actually built those cities from scratch, in Bryce, for the Aphelion cover art project! That whole thing was done in the one shot, sky, mountains and all, with just a bit of "zap" added in, in Photoshop. (All due credit to Mel Keegan for the inspiration!)

Okay ... time for din-dins, and a movie. And since I have the place to myself, I get to choose!

Playing happily in Photoshop (and this is Post #699, so...)

click to see all images at large size...

Playing happily in Photoshop, as the post title says ... indulging a fascination for lens flare, and for flirting with layers, and experimenting to see what colors will do, how they'll fluoresce, when effects are piled up, one on top of another. And sometimes it's pretty amazing what happens. The effect that comes up in the legs of the costume is metallic:

The costume is just a pair of pants ... I think it's the Lockwood pants, actually. But the textures and patterns, everything you're seeing here, was done with mapping, so the end product isn't even vaguely like the 3D model as unpacked after purchase! This is where a lot of the fun happens, with this kind of art,

The fun actually goes back one or two stages previous to the character being added in. The background was rendered separately:

This was done as a displacement map whacked onto a primitive (plane), and then a diffuse map (marble) added, and a bump map too (rocky texture), plus some gloss and reflection. The result looks like a piece of weathered copper or brass, which is already pretty neat. I shipped it into Photoshop and did this:

...which was done by duplicating the layer, "walking it" into different colors, in fact, gold-greens, and then applying a merge/blend to the second layer. The effect is pretty amazing. I like the ad hoc nature of this kind of work. You're never sure how it's going to turn out till it's "cooked," and it can be quite exciting to see things come to life.

So the next step was to add the character. You've actually seen this guy before: do you remember Li and Lung, the dragon? I told the bare bones of a story, a loooong time ago. This is the same character, sans dragon, and in a fantasy setting with longer hair, katana and whatnot. And what's happened here is that Li has fallen through the old real-world adventure into a fantasy realm one layer above or below or beyond reality. You figure, he has to fight his way out to get back to the real world and finish out the original story! The original story was about Jimmy Li and Shao Lung, who's a "lucky dragon," and a bunch of antique/relic smugglers. Shao Lung wants to get home to Sichuan. It was all about antiques and smuggling, the police and young love as Jimmy Li meets lovely Fang Mei Ling, but now ... figure out how to add in the fantasy sequence ... have Jimmy and Mei fall through into a realm of magic and mystery ... and that's not just a cute story, it's an awesome story. Shades of Big Trouble in Little China, but with a real, life dragon.

So, you're probably wondering how much of this piece is the original render, and how much is the painting. Here's a half-size peek at the raw render:

...which is nice, but flat as the proverbial bikkie. It all happens in Photoshop -- which is where I played happily for about an  hour, and had a lot of fun with lens flare. I painted his face, hair and eyes, highlights and shadows on everything, and then got to work with the aforementioned lens flare. You really have to know where to STOP with lens flare, because what you can get away with in a photo, you'll be criticized for, in a painting. For example, check these out:

Those, I photographed just this morning, in the backyard, under the Blue Pacifica where the bees are going ballistic. (Got some very good bee pictures, too, which was actually the reason I was out there. Then I saw the lens flare through the branches, and lost interest in bees for a while!)

So, this is actually Post #699, and as I mentioned a while ago, I've been trying to figure out what to do for Post #700. Inspiration struck, and I'm just trying to get it together now. The two paintings are done and I'm working on the text. Give me a few days and, as the saying goes, I'll be back. Ye gods ... what will I do when Post 1,000 comes around ...?!

Jade, September 10

Let there be light! LightDome, Lux, and a whole lot more

click to see all images at large size...

These two renders are both Lux renders ... and boy, can't you tell? You know that's Jarrat and Stone, and you know they're the fantastic figments of Mel Keegan's incredible imagination., but there's a photogaphic quality to these images that makes your eye want to believe you're looking at real guys, maybe actors on a movie set -- and the closer you get to the image (or, the bigger it gets), the stronger the illusion becomes -- and even this detail shot,below, is not the full-size image -- click on the pic above to see it  big...

In fact, I rendered this shot twice, once in DAZ, using the LightDome Pro II lighting sets and "sky sphere," which is a giant shell surrounding the whole scene, with the sky texture/image pasted on the inside of it; and then again in Lux...

Now, if you didn't have Lux, or just didn't want to mount the learning curve for a top-end render engine -- which, admittedly, is like trying to run up a wet slide, backwards -- then I would have to strongly and seriously recommend LightDome Pro. It's actually fantastic, and only falls short when you come to compare the results with something like Lux, which has the potential (if I can just get the details figured out) to generate the kind of results you see coming out of major studios. Take a look -- give this a click:

Left: a raytrace using LughtDome Pro II with 186 lights set automatically by the plug-in! Right: the Lux render with just one light which represents the sun. The raytrace fook 4 hours. The Lux rendender took 10.5 hours. Both of them needed a lot of post-work to redo, or unto, a number of anomalies, or "artifacts" which showed up in the renders -- and the little glitches were different in both pictures. The results are very different indeed. The photographic quality of the Lux render has a high wow factor, but you don't notice it so much till you get to the fine details, like human faces. If you just stepped back and looked at the whole shot, as rendered in LightDome with 186 raytraced skylights...

...as you can see, the integrity of the shot is already very, very high. And LightDome Pro costs just a few bucks, will run on an average computer, and renders in less than half the time, with a learning curve that can be climbed in about ten minutes flat. So --

Do I recommend LightDome? You bet! I'll be using it a lot, because a Lux render is something you set up before dinner, and you get your picture, for better or worse, in the morning. Sometimes you come back in the morning and find something that the piece can't be saved, no matter how clever you are in Photoshop, because the settings were wrong, but you wouldn't have seen them for four or five hours ... by which time you were sound asleep! 

Also, Lux will not render the actual dome prop -- the giant sphere that encompasses the scene. The first time I set up this scene, I just imported it exactly as it had been rendered in DAZ, but with all the LightDome lights turned OFF and replaced with a single sun light, as Lux likes for its exteriors. Clicked "go," and came back in several hours to see what was going on. Gibberish. Turned OFF the skydome and went again, with the alpha channel set for the background.

The other thing Lux won't do is render a backdrop -- which is an image pasted in like wallpaper behind the shot, to become the sky or background. So you're always fiddling around with cycloramas, if you want the sky to be part of the image, or you're fiddling about with the alpha channel in Photoshop, to replace the black pixels with a background ... which doesn't work out so well, if your image has a lot of black pixels that are not in the background. You can waffle on for half an  hour trying to get the background set properly. If you have the time and tenacity, the results are very, very rewarding, but sometimes you just don't have the time. In which case, SkyDome is going to be a marvelous alternative. 

Am starting (and I stress, starting) to get the hang of Lux. I'm seeing (or think I'm seeing) how it actually works, and the program is just beginning to open its doors to reveal its inner mysteries. To get absolutely top-notch renders in Lux, though, takes days per images, rather than the images per day I'm used to achieving. For instance, in the detail shot here...

...you notice that the car's raised canopy didn't render with any, many, or very good reflections. Grrr. If I'd had time, I'd have gone back in, hiked the reflective property, and set it to re-render. Then hours later you come back and see if it's reflective enough, or too much. Adjust again. Rerender. Adjust again ... and so on. Time flies by. I'm sure I'll learn how to set all this up ahead of time ... it's part of the learning curve I likened to trying to run backwards up a wet slide in the rain! (The headlights, lamp glow and lens flare were all painted on in Photoshop -- but Lux will do these things "in camera." I just need to learn how.)

So at the moment -- and I'm the first one to admit this, in the interests of full disclosure! -- there's a lot of Photoshop fixing going on, to "save" renders and get useful pictures, without the re-re-re-rendering which would give me about one great picture a week at this stage in my development. But I'm definitely getting there.

My next project is to concentrate on skin tones in Lux, and get those beautiful, liquid, luminous tones I've been drooling about for eons in the work of various other artists who have a head start of years on me. They've all trodden this path, climbed this hill. Now it's my turn to plod and climb. At the same time, I need to be painting skinmaps, so can get exactly what I need ... for instance, it's very, very difficult to render Jarrat and Stone in the same shot, because the skinmap I'm using for Jarrat is actually too dark. He's tanned, but actually not as dark as he usually shows up, and especially not in the shots where he appears with Stone -- the reason being that the skinmap I'm using for Stoney is quite pale, and pretty accurate for the character, who's a Londoner by birth. If the lights and exposure are set up to favor Jarrat, Stone will wash out to ghostlike qualities; but if the lights and exposure are set up to favor Stone, Jarrat tends to turn bright orange! 

So one of the first things I'll be doing is generating a specific skinmap for Jarrat which is adjusted for tone, pigmentation and detail, and this should make my depiction of Jarrat much more accurate, and it should also make it much easier to depict the two characters in the same shot. Can use this project as the test piece, and learn enough while doing it to be able to paint skinmaps specifically for certain characters. There's a lot to learn -- and it's going to be fun!

Jade, April 25 (Anzac Day downunder)

Playing with a swag of great new toys

click to see all images at large size...

One of the things that puts a major crimp on your artistic license is that you tend to be limited by the skinmap you paste onto your model. Many of them look ... depilated. And it's true, a lot of guys do the hot wax thing. But not all of them -- not all the time. Sometimes, I think it would be soooo nice to be able to depict an actual guy rather than the product of the waxing salon! Uh huh ... so check out the first of today's pics. Call him Francisco. Why? Because he's something like an Italian, or maybe a Spaniard, and I like the name. I designed the face morph, and then slapped on an almost featureless skinmap actually, it's probably the most boring skinmap I've ever seen. And then -- what?

There's a "second skin" bodysuit type of "model" you can get from DAZ. It's been there for years, and I've always known it was there, just never got around to it. (Plenty of square and trianular tuits; just no round ones, you understand.) But last month DAZ was having a sale, and I picked up several new toys, including the Skydeck (parking bay for air cars), and a set of fantasy earrings for Michael 4, which you'll be seeing shortly, and ... Jepes M4 Body Hair.

And it works -- but it's tricky. Verrrrry tricky. Basically, all that body hair is sitting on a skinmap with an alpha channel -- which means the skin itself is transparent. So, when you slap it on the model, Michael 4 vanishes into the ether, leaving his hair behind ... along with his eyeballs and teeth, which looks hilarious, in the way that Chuck Jones cartoons are hilarious. Get over your fits of giggles, boys and girls, and figure out how to do this! 

In fact, if you know anything much about DAZ at all (also Poser, admittedly), you'll know that you can have several models occupying the exact same spacial coordinates. Penny drops with a clanging sound. You load TWO Michael 4 models ... put your boring old skinmap on one of them, and put the hair bodysuit with the transparent skin on the second. Aha! So far so good.

I was concerned that the render time would be a week long ... hair slows it way down ... but it turns out, DAZ treats the hair layer as an ordinary texture map. In fact, the first render did look very flat, almost as if the hair were painted on. So I found my way into the hair layer in the Surfaces tab and played around with the bump and displacement settings --

In fact, I overdrove it a good bit, and had to wind it back again. The result is pretty realistic, up to a very considerable point. The only place where the illusion breaks down is right on the "edge" where you're seeing through the hair to the backgound, or something behind the hairy limb. That's the place where it doesn't look 100% realistic, so --

Hmmm. Didn't I just get a set of skin-painting brushes from Renderosity? And wasn't one of them a body hair brush? Yep. So, the model was rendered with the hair layer, and then painted in Photoshop to add in the final bits of the illusion .. and you really will have to look at this full sized, to see it! I've uploaded it at 1200 pixels high, so you can see the detail. Nice effect!

The second render is another in my Quest For Realistic Daylight adventures. This one just about has it nailed, what with depth of field and shadows and all. I rendered it big, so I could get into the fine details and paint them invisibly ... in fact, there's a lot of overpainting on this. It was done in about 20 layers in Photoshop, based on the original idea/theme:

In this one, above, I ran an experiment with the Depth of Field tools inside DAZ Studio itself. The camera controls are just about the last area of DS that I don't have a death-grip on, and I've promised myself I'll get my head around them. Usually, when you see the DOF-blurred backgrounds in my work, I've pulled the trick in Photoshop. Not so with this one, above. First, I overdrove all the bump mapping in order to make the stone and wood look nicely realistic, then gritted my teeth and dove into the camera controls. 

Well ... I made it work once, but when I tried the same stuff on Take Two (the one where Leon is studying a cloak brooch in the palm of his hand, second from the top today), no joy. So I don't have a full grasp of the system yet. 

I got a bunch of other toys at the same time. One was a lighting set, which I'll use sparingly -- Light Dome Pro. Yes, sure, it does make the job of setting about 30 lights at a time as easy as a click or two, but using these lights in experimental stages the effect I wanted on the Skydeck set just wasn't happening for me. So ... what the hey? I lit this whole thing with spotlights and point lights -- and then painted the hell out of it in Photoshop. Here, get closer to it:

And (gulp) even as I type this, I have this scene rendering in Lux. I've set it to render using the same lighting set as I used in the DAZ render -- all spots and point lights. It's distant lights Lux hates. So in a few hours I'll know if I have a Lux scene here. (Meme: get ram, get ram, get ram get ram...)

You can't tell in the small images Blogger pastes to the page, but it's a dirty night on that Skydeck -- it's raining; you can see the rain in the haloes cast by the lights. This was done with Photoshop brushes, of course...

So, in fact, how much painting goes into this kind of work? Well, actually, a lot ... but you don't see it:

In this one, which I call Absent Friends, the fist thing I did was paint the textures for the fabric and leather, before slapping them on the models, and then rendering it all up. Then, the skin tones are overpainted to get a couple of effects, and a lot of the shadows are hand-painted. Good thing I enjoy painting in Photoshop!

A little while ago someone was asking what brushes I use. The truth is, I have scores of brush sets, and some of them can have scores of individual brushes zipped into the .abr file. In the renders you see here, today, I've used mostly Photoshop's own brushes (default and caligraphy) to paint the shadows and a lot of the lighting effects; then I used the FS Wild Weather brushes for the rain, and Ron's Bokeh Lights for the lens flare effects, and something called Channing Body Hair for the edge work on the Francisco character, and the Gypsy Brows brushes for his eyebrows:

...the effects are very subtle. Believe me, you'd tell in a heartbeat if they weren't there. The skinmap I used on this character is one of those (and there are loads of them) where the eyebrows are so insubstantial, you wish you had an alternative. So I indulged myself in the Brows Brushes by a designed called Gypsy, and experimented to see what results I could get. It's not point-and-click, but you can do some very nice things with these brushes --

One thing I'm about to do is ... I wanna paint my own skinmaps, so I'll get exactly what I need. Having brushes for body hair, brows, and also skin texture details, like pores, really helps with this. 

So, if you're trying to follow in these tracks, you'll need Michael 4 (duh), and some kind of skinmap that gets you into the ballpark; the eyes are one of the photographic eyeball sets, The Eyes Have It. The hair is the Jepes M4 Body Hair "prop" ... you'll work it out. The brows are done with the brushes I was just mentioning, like the hair along the edges of the limbs and so forth. The toupee is an old favorite, Mon Chevalier by Neftis, set to a lovely dark golden brown, and with the morphs tweaked ad infinitum. That's my own face and body morph though ... you're on your own there, guys. In the Absent Friends image, that's also a character of my own (Leon), wearing the Midnight Prince hair and Michael 4's own High Rez skinmap, but with another bump map applied to it to enhance the details. The location is comprised of two of DM's sets -- The Gate and Gadomar. Gadmoar is the building in the background. The sky is a photograph of my own, just a backdrop, nothing too clever. The sword and knife are from the High Fantasy prop set; the bottle and cup are from DM's Anardhouse, but I changed all the textures. The costume is actually the Euros set (top, kirtle, pants, boots), though you could be forgiven for not recognizing it: bits turned on and off, all textures changed. The harness straps in particular are neat: that's a liquid chocolate diffuse map (!) and a huge bump map made from a swatch of rhinoceros hide! All the props, sets and brushes, you can get from DAZ and Renderosity. The character morphs are my own, and I did some work with my own texture and bump maps here and there...

Now, I wonder how that render is going in Lux? Time to gird the loins, and go find out!

Jade, April 23

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

Yaoi fantasy: the gypsy shaman

Do you see a Yaoi image, a Yaoi character? It easily could be ... but I've been reading The Swordsman, which is another of my all-time favorite Mel Keegan books, and I had this flash of imagination or inspiration, or maybe both. Janos, the gypsy shaman who turns out to be Sebastian's half-brother, and the love of Luc Redmayne's life. This one, I couldn't resist! I used a small chunk out of an image from the Internet for the background: cropped it out, flipped it horizontally, recolored it a little, and blurred it out to make a good background ... then the fun with lens flare began, because I wanted to add something to the pictures that made it look like Janos was working that gypsy magic of his.

All the 3D work was done in DAZ. This project game me a great opportunity to work with the Midnight Price hair again -- the same style I used yesterday on one of the Renaissance vampires, but that was set to white-blond, and this is set to ebony.

Also, this hairstyle is great because it gives you the ability to swing the loose front strands way forward -- which means the character can duck his head and the hair appears to obey the laws of gravity. This is such a cool hairstyle -- it looks just as good on Victoria, believe it or not. I popped it on the female model to see how it would look. It fits perfectly, first-time out, and looks great.

So, with the 3D work done and finished, and the images rendered, I opened two out of three of them in Micrographx Picture Publisher 10 to have the lens flare added ... makes it look like Janos is spinning magic out of the air. Nice!

2024 Edit: Micrographx was bought out by Adobe (ie., Photoshop) and shelved. Abandoned. It was that good. In the 1990s, it was doing what Photoshop would later do; it was so powerful, Adobe didn't want to handle the competition. Soooo ... bought and abandoned. Unfortunately, many of the tools in Micrographx Picture Publisher were so great, in 1998, that by 2020, Photoshop still hasn't replicated them. Sure, you can do lens flare in PS. I do it all the time. But MPP's lens flare was soooo much better, sooo long ago. Since MPP was bought, Adobe cannily never issued a 64-bit version, and when the old 32-bit systems went over the horizon into dodo country, Picture Publisher was gone forever. Rats. Sigh.   

Then the images were opened in Serif X3 to have the borders and signature added, and I was happy to call it good at that point.

The other interesting thing about this series of renders is that I showed the light source -- the torch, on the left side of the shot. This is a nice prop from the Dungeon Lighting kit ... but you have to be careful what you do with such props, and every time you show the light source in the picture, because the light on the model has to match! People won't be fooled if you get this wrong. So, notice how there's a yellow-gold light set up to shine on Janos's right arm, or elbow, and there's a blue light set up on the other side, to suggest dim, cold ambient light, which looks right, when you see from the background, they're in the catacombs under the Citadel.

The Swordsman is one of my all-time favorite books. I'd love to design the other characters too ... Seb and Jack and Luc. (If you're interested, it's a Mel Keegan novel, which means it has glbt content, but it's not hot -- 

Yes, you could give this one to a coming-out mid-teen ... it's a great fantasy story where the love interest just isn't hetero, that's all. I painted the cover for the paperback a few years ago. The story was captivating then, and it's still a blast.)

Jade, 17 January

***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?!!!

Christmas came early again: new toys again!

DAZ 3D was having a sale, and I couldn't resist saving about thirty bucks, even if you had to spent thirty bucks to save the same amount. It's a hell of a good deal, and you wind up with some fantastic stuff. I got a couple of spacecraft (!) and a bunch of props. (You should see my Wish List at DAZ...! Then again, maybe not.)

So -- if you ever wondered what Michael 4 looks like, right out of the box, this is more or less the dude:
He arrives with the buzzcut hair and brown eyes, wearing a pair of spandex shorts and with an expression a little more intelligent and tractable than a zombie. What you do next is up to you. I've created more faces than a can remember. Some of my favorites are the Gypsy from yesterday, and the new Jarrat and Stone, and this one, which you'd never believe was the same face as you saw on the God of War.

Michael 4 arrives with a nice skin "map," but you can change this for an infinite variety of others. Albino pale to deep tan, hairy to smooth. Take your pick. You can slap any physique you can imaging onto him, from the most buff to the most emaciated, and anything in between...

Some folks will be wondering if Michael 4 comes fully equipped and functional, with dangly bits. Yes, but you have to install them and configure them separately. I guess this is so that parents can decide how much their kids get to see?? But, uh, yeah, Michael 4's got all the right equipment -- and here's something interesting. When you change from the default skin map to another one, the, uh, equipment changes too.

So, anyway ... there's your Mick, or Mike, fresh out of the box. I added some costume and then got to work with some props. There's a boarding ladder, and a helmet, and -- best of all -- a whole spacecraft. I haven't done much more than unpack this and drool over it, and I'm going to have fun like you can't imaging (maybe you can!) in the next few days.

I can see a whole monster digital novel ... like a massive 3D realistic online web comic ...

This could get exciting. (The image was set up with five or six colored lights, then shipped out into Micrographx to have the lens flare added, then into Serif X3 for the text overlays. The final render of all items together was done at 200dpi, in Serif.)

Jade, 6 December

Riding beneath the ringed planet

And now for something completely different. Lately, I've been playing with fantasy (God of War, Quest for Gold and so on), and SF (Spaceport, Land of Fire and others), and I wanted to mix up the genres, see what happens.

Turns out, you're reminded of something like Firefly ... a space western. Or maybe it's something like John Carter of Mars. I dunno what to call it, but I like it! What I did here was to create an Arabian-Mustang crossbreed (shades of Hidalgo!) with a dappled gray coat, ice blue eyes, black mane and tail ... then add Michael 4, wearing a face designed by me. I added the Mon Chevalier hair -- but I made it white, not blond. And the costume is the belt and pants from the SF clothing set -- see the whole ensemble in the Spaceport render.

To get the background, I took a skyscape, cut out a 600x900 swatch of it ... opened it in Irfanview, turned up the green, turned down the red, to get a lovely exotic coloration. Even so, there ain't no ringed planets in the sky around this neck of the woods! So -- a quick Googler image search turned up a halfway right Hubble image of Saturn. Now ... import both images (sky and planet) into Micrographx Picture Publisher. Import the planet into the sky image ... resize it and skew it 30% counter-clockwise. It's still sitting their on a black mat, of course! What you do is change the "merge mode" till the black background vanishes, then add a feather to the "object" (the planet image) so you don't see the border.

Now ... the image should have been done, but I gotta confess, I still don't know how to set up the lights in DAZ, when you have two BIG models -- guy and horse combined. The default lights are just dark, and when you render the shot, even if the pose and all else are perfect, the shot you get is flat and dim. (I've put in the other renders, and the sky backdrop, so you can see what I mean. Sure, sure, if I knew how to set up the bloody lights, I could have called it done right there! But I don't yet, so ...

I rendered the image, and opened it in Micrographx Picture Publisher 10, and got to work on it in the Light Studio. I changed the lighting model to "omni" and then changed the area of intensity to highlight the rider; tweaked the contrast too; and then went into the Lens Flare Studio to add the, uh, lens flare. And the end result is sheer poetry!

Next thing I have GOT to learn is how to set up the damned lights, so I can generate the whole scene in DAZ. Mind you, doing the post work in Micrographx gives you the chance to get really clever and artistic...

Jade, 19 November

UPDATE: two years later, let's do this project over and see what happens...



On August 3, 2011, I was going through some old posts, and came upon this one. I thought, "That was a great idea, but it needed more skill than I had at the time to make it really go -- and also, more resources.

The original version of the post was done with VERY basic resources. Now, I have a great deal more in terms of 3D models, textures and so on to put into this, and I also have dimensions more skill...

This was the whole point of this blog -- to chart my progress from "close to day one" of starting out in 3D and CG, right through into work that looks like this:



See the new version of the "ringed planet" render here , where you can view it at full-size...

Jade, 3 August 2011