Touching base with pretty things

Touching base in April with images -- not specifically art, but straddling that line where photography and art merge, one into the other. Why? Because my big PC (which handles the 3D art programs) is staggering, and if I try for a long render, it'll croak! Also, it's permanently offline with an uncooperative modem. And I can't get a new system till Christmas! So 3D adventures will just have to wait ... but I do want to touch base at least once a month, keep this blog juuust ticking over, and say hi to everyone, especially when we're all locked down so tight, I know a lot of people are increasingly bored out of their collective gourd! So...

The big news for me personally is that I took the plunge and bought a new camera in February. The bummer deal (and that is putting it mildly) for the whole world is that by the end of March the pandemic was hitting everyone, everywhere; and as a result, I can't take the new camera anywhere until about September! To set your mind at rest --

Dave, Mike and I are in the safest place in the world, in South Australia. This state is starting to see days with zero new cases reported ... SA was able, via stringent measures and public cooperation, to hold the number of cases reported locally to very low numbers (in a state of 1.7m people, most of whom live in the metropolitan area, only 433 people have tested positive by the time we start to see our "zero days." Never more than twenty people, maximum, were hospitalized at one time, and I believe the most people at one time in ICU was six, (possibly seven). There have been four  -- yes, just 4 -- fatalities in this state, but my information is that each them was literally too sick to be rescued after contracting the virus overseas, most often on a cruise ship. One's heart goes out to the families of those four grandparents who, tragically, came home to die ... at the same time, one applauds SA, where -- at least to this point -- no one actually who fell sick here has perished, because medical care is top-notch, free, and fast. At this time, I'm extremely proud to be a South Aussie.

So, where are we at this moment? In lockdown, yes; in self imposed exile ... not taking the new camera anywhere -- being good and "staying home." But in the few expeditions where I had the opportunity to field test it, I was impressed: Leica lens elements, 20.3MP, 1,005mm zoom, far better "register" than any of the Fuji cameras, which all gave very harsh images. I'm loving my Lumix TX90 and -- well, roll on September, when the lockdown lifts and we can go places! We'll be visiting Mount Gambier, Clare Valley ... lots of places. Having said that, at this moment we're all well, and working hard. I'm writing. I've sold four short stories to SF and fantasy magazines, and am working on a second novel. Am also looking forward to the end of the year, and that new desktop PC with the "oomph" to run the demanding imaging programs, but till then...

...well, till then I'll touch base now and then, either with photos or art, even if the art is reposted ... or perhaps a review of an artist, or art book? However it works out, Christmas will be upon us before you know it. Someone said not to long ago, "Once you get past Easter, the rest of the year goes like a shot." Uh huh. Easter was last weekend, and I spent the four-day "break" (a misnomer, because when you're in lockdown there's nothing to take a break from; and Dave had shifts right through Easter) transferring hundreds of Gigs of data to and fro between drives. Now I have access to every digital shot I've ever taken, back to the first 1MP Kodak camera we ever had, in something like 2001. So with every image at my fingertips...

--suffice to say, there's no shortage of images to share! And there is a line where art and photography blur, one into the other. I like to think that I'm riding that line a lot of the time. And yes, this year, like a kid, I'm waiting for Christmas! There will be a post called "Happy New Computer" at some point! Then I'll spend a few days getting everything installed, and we'll get back to 3D art. The wonderful world of Iray. Till then -- have some more photographic eye candy here.

See you in May! (Or perhaps sooner, if some of the art ideas in my imagination that don't involve long renders bear fruit...)

Alien pyramids, and a delicious enemy

Our neighborhood Goa'ould again ... nicely done by Iray. Still playing Stargate, because I ran the experiment, put the Pyrago alien pyramids into Iray to see how they render:

That's a sky I rendered in Terragen a while ago -- back in June, in fact. The sky is what makes this picture --

-- and it's the perfect backdrop for the old set. I only imported one of the elements, the pyramid itself, to test it out, because it's something of a pain wriggling the whole thing into Iray. Studio 4.11 won't let you install this stuff (or, if it will, I ain't found the way yet, and I've tried everything I can think of), so you have to import the OBJs directly ... then spend the next hour configuring them before you can start to play around with the lights. Not quick. But the end result is pretty darned impressive. So, tomorrow I'll play with the Palladio set, which is ancient Greek.

I'll leave you with this:

 
I'm kind of waiting for his eyes to glow. Shall pat myself on the back for this one: nice character!

Anyway -- tomorrow, Palladio, and another of the Xurge costumes I bought last week. Let's install this one into Studio 3 (soooo easy to install things into Studio 3, one of the reasons I love it)...

...and we'll see what we shall see! I have one or two M4 characters who would wear this...!

More "strange allies," the sun sets in Terragen, and ... waiting some more

The "strange allies" concept I've been pursuing for the last couple of days is so appealing, I couldn't resist this! I thought, "What if the two images -- the angel with the little demon, and the fantasy hero archetype withthe troll (or whatever he is), were images from the same story. So it stands to reason that the The Big Green Guy and the little demon would be pals. The works deliciously!

And, playing in Terragen...

This sky is a beaut, which made me wonder what it'd be like at sundown. So I took the camera right a little way, and up a bit, panned left and tilted down ...

...then dropped the sun close to the horizon behind that same cloudscape. Whoo! Gotta admit, I am loving Terragen! Next things is working with trees and plants. In fact, I have the Xfrog store bookmarked, and here's why:

This, above, is a catalog sample image featuring their Autumn Library. Now, the library pack costs US$100, which is about A$150 right now, so it is not cheap, but ... but ... you have to salivate! Terragen is sooo rewarding to work with. At least let me get just a few trees and see what can be done, right? (Although, I think you actually have to pay the hundred bucks and get a library, because one plant is about fifty bucks, and for the hundred you get twenty, which works out at five bucks each. How odd.) Anyway, Terragen also imports OBJ files, and I do have some quite nice OBJ plants and trees (which you've seen many times in DAZ and Bryce pictures). Must see what Terragen can do with them!

There was supposed to be another major image today: the angel and the fantasy archetype (duh ... the last pairing of the Strange Allies group), but I blew off way over two hours trying to get an FTP client configured. Ended up on tech support with the domain wrangler for an hour to get it straightened out. But it's working now ... I just lost a lot of time, so the last in this set of images is going to have to wait for a day or two. It won't be tomorrow: it's my day out! Yay.

And I am still waiting for any word back from Tech Support at DAZ. Yes, I know, they work nine to five, Mon to Fri ... but it's also as if you can only have one round of contact with the Help Desk per turnaround, which means you get 2-3 lines of dialog with your support person per week. It's going to take a looong time to get this sorted, which is why I've just gone back to good old Studio 3, which may not have the bells and whistles, but it never skips a beat. Does as it's told first time, every time.

Anyway, we'll see what next week will bring!

Red dwarf homeworld, Terragen atmospheres, gorgeous gay heroes and Photoshop brushes. Yes!!

Yep ... Jarrat and Stone ... and this picture is chock full of experiments. You might not believe it, but even now, after how many thousands of images, almost every picture I render and/or paint is still an experiment! I'll yack a bit more about that in a second, but for those of you who can't open the image at bigger scale (small phones, for a start), here's a closer look at our heroes:

(Credit where it's due: all kudos to Mel Keegan for creating Jarrat and Stone and the NARC universe, without which these gorgeous gay SF heroes would not exist, on these pages or anywhere else.)

Okay --

One thing I do love is "old fashioned SF" where writers like Poul Anderson (my absolute favorite of the Old Brigade ... he created Nicholas van Rijn and David Falkayn, for a start!) would not only spin great yarns but also build alien environments designed on solid science. Keegan is on my mind again lately, not merely because I'm up to Scorpio this time through (!), but also because he's writing again (!!!😁!!!), and he describes the current project as "At last, a 'Golden Age' romp without the 'warts' ... gay heroes and up-to-date tech." It's going to be great. Seriously. And what Mel is doing here really is as if someone like Poul Anderson or maybe Brian Stableford just decided to write a full-on gay adventure/love story on a fabulous alien world. Yeah ... wow. Which got my own imagination to working, and I found myself daydreaming about a fertile planet circling a red dwarf star (meaning a smaller and dimmer and cooler star than our own sun). So --

Into Bryce 7 Pro, and let's model it. The sun is small and dim and cool, so a warm, fertile world has to orbit close to it, right? So the angular size of it in the sky is somewhat larger than our sun appears; this planet sits in the "sweet spot" where the world is just warm enough to be fertile ... the cool sun looks yellow, not white, when you look right at it, and the red end of the spectrum puts a bloody wash over the sky and everything else. Makes for a very nice picture, too.

All of which got me interested in atmosphere, so --

Terragen sky: late afternoon, and ...

...right on sunset; and...

After sunset, when the sky is bronze and dimming rapidly, and the world is becoming dark, you expect the stars in a few more minutes. Nice.

(Does anyone else find Terragen a bit overwhelming? There is so much to learn that, frankly, I've decided on the old KISS rule: Keep It Simple, Stupid. AKA, one thing at a time. I've learned about all I can for now about "heightfield terrains," and "proceedural terrains" continue to baffle me a bit. Atmospheres are the next thing I need to master, then I'll come back to proceedurals, and, when the computer is rebuilt (soon!) I'll see about working with populations: adding forests and so forth. Ack. Soooo much to learn here. But it's fun. It's good for your brain, especially at my age. Put it this way: I ain't gettin' any younger. 😒

Now, going back to the experiments in today's main render! As I began, the picture is full of them, and they work! For a start --

Look at the forearm on the left, and the hands on the right. This is a combo of bump mapping and painted highlights, using a blend mode (thank you, Photoshop), plus a touch of "aging," using the special morph in the Morphs ++ package. That's ... not bad at all. The hint of veins makes this so much more realistic, yet it's subtle. Your eye expects to see this; it doesn't hit you in the face, but it makes the figure that much more "real." Well worth the extra minute or two it takes to switch out the bump maps and do a few test renders to get the settings just right. Then, this, below, was the big experiment...

...and I don't know why I didn't do this a long time ago. It's the hair. Jarrat wears the Mon Chevalier hair from Neftis (via the DAZ marketplace; you can still get it, but it's a bit more expensive than it used to be, from memory). The one thing about this toupee that always annoyed me was that, "fresh out of the box," as it's applied, it looks awfully fake, as if it's ... plastic. Eventually (rolls eyes) I thought, "I wonder what would happen if I overdrive the bump mapping on the hair???" Uh huh. Duh. A bit of overdriven bump mapping, and the hair "pops" into an effect that's far, far more realistic than the results I've been getting across the years. I could kick myself, honestly. 😝

Then, the last thing I did differently on this is...

...I hand-painted Stoney's hair. There's nothing much you can do with the GQ Event Hair when it's set to a shade near to black (as Stone's hair is described in the books). You can't see detail in it, ever. But the shape of it is always 100% identical, in every single render ... which is not really realistic. Nobody's hair stays the same for ten consecutive minutes. So this one is hand-painted, to give Stoney a slightly more tousled look for once!

The brush I'm using for the hair is a (free) download from a very, very talented artist and brush creator at DeviantArt. I want to give a plug to "para-vine," and say thank you, thank you for this brush set, which has been terrific. (For clarification: no, I don't know para-vine personally, but I'd like to shake him by the hand and say thanks for these brushes. Wow.)

That's all from me for today. Back soon -- hopefully tomorrow, because on Wednesday the computer goes into the shop and you won't see new art for a few days while it's upgraded. Whoooo!

Desperado ... also, "the sky is burning," and an exercise in digital compositing

Yep, it's the same model you saw yesterday on the historical romance book cover ... just lit differently and with a bit of painting: the beard line on this skinmap is actcually printed into the map, which means it's flush with the skin ... which a natural beard never is. So I got in there and painted it so that it -- isn't. Duh. I also painted the eyes a little, and the hair a bit, to get more out of it. Gotta say, I really do like this character. I might send this to LuxRender and see what happens. (Sometimes Lux makes a complete muck of a character; sometimes the picture "pops" and you're astonished. Won't know till we try. If Lux doesn't do it well, we'll come back to raytracing (which this is) and just do more along these lines.)

Nice! Call him Antonio, I think ... because he makes me think Desperado. In fact, that's the title of the picture. 😉

Also -- if you were ever in any doubts that photography can also be art...

This is what happened in the sky on Wednesday evening, when Dave and I were on our way home from the mountains. We got back to Tailem Bend, tired and hungry ... decided to stop off at Subway (!) for a bite and a rest because home was still 90 minutes away. Hardly had we walked out of the gas station forecourt when this began to happen! These shots were taken from the aptly named Cliff Street (or is it Cliff Road), right on the river bend.

Speaking of which -- I've posted to the travel blog: Destination: Grampians. Well worth a look. I could tell you I rendered most of those shots in Terragen, but I won't, nudge, wink.

And I was going through more of the old, old files from years ago, and stumbled over a project that was done in something like 2011 or 2012. These were a team effort:

Mike built the physical model (it's a hobby of his ... and he sometimes gets paid to do it. He does real 3D ... in the real three dimensional world we actually live in. He has a modeling blog, World in Miniature...). He took one of the photos from the window of a plane on a flight long ago; I took the sky shot from a hilltop not far from home; and Dave rendered the desert background in Vue. Then the model was photographed from various angles against a plain green background, and combined in Photoshop by me. The result is pretty spectacular, if I say so myself! I'd completely forgotten these pictures were done, but I never throw anything away. The only folders, on the old harddrives, do contain a heck of a lot of dross, but there's also hidden treasure.

More soon!