HAPPY HALLOWEEN 2010 ... because brain-eating 3D zombies need love too

Happy Halloween, boys, girls and everything in betwixt! You might need to click on these pictures to see the seven-foot green brain-muncher in the background, and when you do you'll see a kind of story emerging out of the images.

Gorgeous party animal is looking for a street address in a weeeeeird part of town. Comes to the gate that he's sure is the right place. Doesn't see any sighs of (!) life. Is about to leave...

"Whaddaya mean, he's seven feet tall and green and standing right behind me?"

Bloody Nora, he is!

Better get outta here ...

"Well, hellooooooo beautiful! You wanna party down? Come in here, snookums, the party starts in about half an hour, and we're having brains to eat, and bobbing for shrunken heads, and all that good stuff..."

"Actually, no thank you, very much. I'm supposed to be meeting someone and, like, well, you know how it is."

"Okay, but it's your loss, sweet thang. Maybe next year?"

"Maybe. Bye, now."

"Tootles, snooks, come back soon, y'hear?"

So, uh, Happy Halloween from downunder where it's Halloween already!

Jade, 31 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?!!!

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?!!!

Book covers ... and judging ebooks by them

Just a peek at what I'm up to in artwork today -- because I know I'm not going to have time to post something new. This is a "detail" outtake from a cover I'm working on ... processed to make a CG render look like it was painted on oil canvas.

Here's the whole cover painting -- but the canvas effect isn't going to show too well when Blogger is done resizing it:
Wellllll ... it shows a bit, but you don't get the full effect. This is the new cover for The Lords of Harbendane. The book came out a couple of years ago, and it is a fantastic fantasy novel. Why are we putting a new cover on it? You may well ask! Because the existing cover -- gorgeous though it is/was -- appears to be putting sales in jeopardy. We're not 100% sure about this, but there's one sure way to put the theory to the test, and that is to put a new cover on it and see what happens next.

So I took the existing background which was a digital painting done for the first version:
This, I stripped into DAZ Studio 3 as a background image. It's already a major piece of digital work -- the sky, the mountains, the lake and the foreground belong to three different pictures. The mountains are in Alaska. The foreground is in Finland. The sky is a digital airbrush painting ... this was one of the last projects I did prior to getting into full CG work. This was hand-painted in Micrografx, whereas today I'd do it in Bryce.

Next, design the characters, Rogan and Tristan:
Then, crop an area which will make a good ebook cover (paperbacks are going the way of the dodo. They're so expensive to set up, besides anything else. It will cost upwards of $100 to set up a paperback, and -- fact -- very few people are buying them anymore. Ebooks have won the war ... and Kindle has won the ebook contest! So, that the hey. Go with the flow).

Then front cover area was then shipped into GIMP to be painted a little bit in three corners -- just gives the work a better cohesion, since it's been turned from a landscape into a vignette. The GIMP version was then shipped back into Serif to have the canvas texture overlaid. Then these two were combined, and the composit was shipped out into Irfanview to be color corrected.

Then, back into Serif X3 to have the text objects overlaid:
And that's it -- done. Heck of a nice cover for an incredible book (almost mainstream fantasy, this one; the romance is gay, but it's so understated, the love story is part of a tapestry so vastly wider, the Rogan-and-Tris saga is only a small(ish) part of an epic.

Now, let's see if the new cover will inspire readers to give this novel a go. It's actually both tragic and weird that great books can be halfway undone by being jacketed in artwork which might be lovely in its own right, but just doesn't seem to fire the imagination of readers. So here's the experiment: let's see if this one does!

Jade, 15 October