The fantasy prince -- again; also studies in 3D lighting

Still playing with the Matthias skinmap from DAZ ... and having a lot of fun. These renders are loaded up with textures and rich with color. Green, gold and purple are three colors that just "sing" together. I love that combination.

So here's the Matthias skin map again, and I'm very impressed. It renders well in low light and bright light, and also in closeup. It also has a nice bump map, to bring up the skin textures in extreme closeup, so you don't wind up with something that looks plastic.

Here's the promo for the model:

...and if you're looking for an excellent skin map, this is it. The bod, you can re-re-re-design yourself, so long as you have the Morphs++, and you'll need those anyway, if you intend to load up the Matthias body morph. (On the body morph, the "Big Arnie" effect is fairly extreme, with a body shape a lot like Conan in the second of the two movies -- which is fine and dandy, till you start to set poses, and you find that the arms are conflicting with the blown-out lats etc., and you have to re-re-repose everything. So what I did was to go into the Morphs++ and just 'dial down the size of the body! As soon as you take him back down to something more normal, you're fine with your poses. Vertict: five out of five stars!

Also used in this scene: the floor from DM's Around the Lair; the claw burner from DM's The Shrine; Val's Folding Screen (with a complete switch-out of textures and displacement maps at this end), plus one of Val's fantasy shields (same deal with the textures and displacement maps). Michael 4 is the base model (duh!) and he's wearing the Spartacos hair set to mahogany and the armbands from The Hunter, and the Stylin' jeans (though you'd never recognize them with the silk-screened texture on them).

Lighting? There's about 10 lights set, but I did this whole thing with point lights, not a distant light anywhere, because I wanted to make it look like the whole thing is lit by candles and lamps. If had two functional hands and more time, I'd have shipped the renders into Gimp to have smoke from the incense burner added in! But I'm sloooooow today, because I'm typing and working one handed. I carved a chunk out of my index finger with the bread knife yesterday, and today's it's splinted, and it, uh, um, hurts. Status: healing. Requirement: patience.

Jade, 11 June

UPDATE:

...a loooong time later (ten months!) I went back to one of these images and repainted it. When these renders were done I didn't have the computer power to raytrace anything. Ten months later, my work is a lot richer, more exciting, with a lot more processor power under it. However, this one here was not re-rendered, "just" repainted as a digital painting. It's well worth seeing this new piece at full size. Click here to go to the new post, where you can download it at 1000 pixels high ... and check out this one, while you're there:

Jade, 11 April ... the next year

The Princeling ... very nice skinmap, this!

The warrior ... young, vulnerable, courageous, beautiful. There's something rather Johnny Depp about this face -- and it's not one of mine! Today I'm taking the Matthias skin map and face for a test drive. I treated myself to a download last night!

I've kept it pretty simple out of necessity ... Calamity Jade decided to carve into her finger with the bread knife. Blood everywhere! PAIN!!!! Now my finger is splinted, and using the keyboard is a bit of a challenge. So I kept this series of renders to more or less simple manipulations of the Matthias character ... Stylin' jeans with a texture of mine applied. Merlin's Celtic jewelry (made to fit Victoria, but you can easily get it to fit Michael). And swags of props, all with textures.

And the result is a really nice, exotic Yaoi princeling. I'm going to enjoy playing with the Matthias skin map ... but for today I have to give me finger some healing time, so --

Join me tomorrow for more of this -- 

Jade, 11 June

Exotic fantasy art ... new blog launching (defunct: scroll down)

2024 Edit: the original images have ... gone. They can't be recovered, so -- if the post title says "exotic fantasy," then let me fill in the blank spaces with images that fit the description!

Textures -- bump maps, displacement maps, materials -- here's where digital art gets to be the biggest fun. Adding layers and layers of texture to an image so it goes from 'nice' to drop-dead gorgeous. Start with Michael 4 (DAZ Studio 3's base model), add a pair of jeans and a pukka shell necklace. A bridge. Two bushes and two trees. Four lights with deep shadow maps set...

And the results will be nice. This is what I had time to do the last time I worked with this shoot. Then, uploading them yesterday I thought to myself, hmmm ... this needs more.

A few years ago I bought my partner a 3D Art magazine for his birthday -- at $18, a magazine makes a good pressie. He didn't have much use for it at the time. But there was a CD-Rom taped to the cover... I opened it the other day out of curiosity, and found a whole folder or textures. And boy, did I have fun with this!

The jeans, above, are wearing one of my own textures, but the bridge and the lanterns have been re textured with stones and mosses from the texture set I stumbled over on an old disk; and I also set displacement maps for them, to make the whole shebang look old and worn and weathered. Then adjusted all the lights. Result: wow.

One more thing to blog about today: I finished the cover for the new Keegan novel just yesterday. Here it is:

What's it all about? The simplest thing is for me to just link to the book's page on Mel Keegan's website -- so consider it linked!

In the next couple of days we'll be launching the book, and if you like gay SF, this one is a must-see. The book is great; I just packaged it a couple of days ago, and as soon as the ISBN thing falls into place ... we publish. It's being published to our own pages first; it'll take about two weeks to make it into the Amazon paperback "engine." It goes to Sony, Apple iBooks, Barnes & Noble and Smashwords as an ebook before the end of June; it goes to Kindle and a couple of other venues in July. Whew!

2024 edit: the book was rejacketed in 2019, with a new cover, which I think works better:

So if a great (LGBT) SF romp is your cup of tea, stay tuned here!

That's all from me for today. You can see what I've been doing for the last few days ... like the man said in the movie, "I need a vacation."

Jade, 10 June

DAZ's two main base models -- and fantasy unlimited

Michael 4 and Victoria 4.2, as promised ... together in a fantasy scene --

And it's just images today, guys. I'm seriously out of time! Work and life have gone off the scale of whatever it is they use to measure ballistics! I'll be back tomorrow with time to write, but for now, please enjoy these renders ...

Jade, 8 June