Later that same day...

click to see at full size...

This is actually the same character you saw a couple of days ago -- but blond. And it looks like the plot is thickening here. It's a mystery ... it's all about that dagger. Is it the murder weapon? Has some rite of alchemy been worked on it, which makes it find targets on its own? You remember that dagger from The Shadow --? 

Basically, I was very pleased with the character design on this figure, and I wanted to use it again, do something more with this guy. These pieces are quite complex, with a couple of dozen lights and masses of textures on everything. the props are a wild mixture of items from DM's sets (find them at Renderosity) and the brazier is from the Mage's Study (also Renderosity), and the big urn is from The Old Patio (I could be wrong, but I think this one came from DAZ).

The costume is the kirtle from The Wood God (from DAZ), with textures changed --

So here's the question. Do you prefer blond or brunette on this dude...

...and I'm having a hard time choosing. He looks a little bit more "sinister" as a brunette. You can see a guardian and protector there, when he's blond, but the dark one -- ooooh, yeah, he's trouble. 

I'll see if I can get back tomorrow with another post, before we vanish the next day. Roadtrip!

Jade, March 21

Romance in hyperspace. Like one needs a reason...!

click to see all images at large size... 

As promised, I'm back with more art to share, and ... yes!! I found the original files for the character of Tonio Teniko. Here's the original Tonio:

And here's what DAZ Studio saved as the .dsb file (the character preset, which you merge onto the basic Michael 4 doll):

Well ... looks are actually a bit deceiving, because changing the hairstyle a little bit in today's renders, and changing the expression, certainly makes Tonio look a lot closer to the character you saw yesterday, so ... maybe the .dsb file was right after all. Maybe what I was remembering is a trick of the hairstyle and expression and lighting? Could be. One thing's for sure: Johnny Depp knows all these tricks, and this is sixty percent of his craft. The magic of the actor. Compare Jack Sparrow with Barnabas Collins with -- ye gods, have you seen the first look at Tonto? Remind yourself, it's all the same face under that make-up, the wigs, and the bird he's wearing on his head in The Lone Ranger.

Soooo ... when I found Tonio Teniko, I couldn't resist setting up a couple of renders with Tonio and the object of his utter fixation, Richard Vaurien. Then, I couldn't resist playing with Richard's hair. The original toupee was the Mon Chevalier wig, which doesn't actually let you "pull" it into long styles so well, and -- if you know your Hellgate, you'll know Richard has a mane of  red hair.  So I switched the hairstyle for the Aether Hair, which actually looks pretty magnificent on Richard.

The only downside to this was, I realized both Richard and Tonio were now wearing the same basic hairstyle. So next, it was a question of reorganizing the hair on Tonio -- hence, the difference between the former appearance of the character, and today's renders. It's the wig. Ask Johnny Depp!

I love the Richard Vaurien face. This one was such a challenge, so rewarding. Richard is not a young kid, and bringing the extra years, the maturity, to the face was very rewarding. Note to self: do more with this character.

Well ... having posed Tonio and Richard, how could I resist bringing in the new version of Neil Travers to pose with Richard? Fair's fair -- Neil was the one Richard spent all those years waiting for, only to lose out at the last minute, when Neil met the love of his life aboard the Intrepid, Curtis Marin. (You know Hellgate, right? You know what all this is about, yes? Cool. If not, check this out!) The difference in Neil Travers is the skinmap. I tried a new skinmap on him in February, because I've never been really happy with previous skinmaps I've tried on Neil. This one is "Bart" by H3D, and it does seem to work nicely on him:

The only thing I might see if I can change is the eyebrows. They look a little bit "pencilled on," and I might get in there and see if I can paint something that looks a tad bit more natural. This skinmap was designed to fit on a Brad Pitt clone (see this post), and these brows were probably designed to dovetail with the character from Interview with the Vampire. That's the only reservation I have about this skinmap on Neil Travers. That experiment comes next. Soon as I have the time, right? Right.

As promised, here's the bookcover I've been wanting to share for a couple of weeks:

And here is is without the text objects overlaid...

The book is a fantastic read, and due out in April. I'll tell you a bit more about it closer to the launch date, but ... yes, the character you see here is the big beauty you saw a few weeks ago -- and that link will also take you to the post were I débuted the spacecraft and ringed planet art, which were done in Bryce.

More soon -- there's a good deal more to share before Dave and I vamoose on that road trip I mentioned yesterday.

Jade, March 20

CG Storyboards: haggling over the price

click to see all images at close to 1:1 size

CG storyboards ... I love this sort of thins. If a picture is worth a thousand words, half a dozen or so images in serial order have to be worth a whole chapter. So here's the scene:

It's twilight on a warm evening after a hot day, and something's brewing. The new kid on the block gets an invite to come up to the old shrine and see the boss. What is it, a tryst in the planning? Or an expedition he's hiring for? A job that has to be done? Or a seduction scene in the making? 

You call it ... it could be any of these things. How about a mix of them all? Yes, there's a job, and yes, it's going to take several people to get through it, and yes, there's a bit of seduction going on here, on several levels. Wanna come up and see my etchings ...?! 

The background is a bit cropped out of a Bryce render I did a loooong time ago. The set is the same as you saw in The Gatekeeper, a few months ago. The costumes are Sickle Yield's Rogue Armory pants on the younger guy, and the Sweatpants from the same designer on the big dude -- but with every texture changed, and layers of the built up to get this effect. These are booth characters designed by yours truly.

The younger character is the file I have saved as "Tonio," and I'm pretty sure I did an oopsie a long, long time ago. I've been trying to track down the character preset for Tonio Teniko, from Hellgate. This ain't it, but this is the one I have, labelled "Tonio." Hmmm. Looks more like the Vampire Amadeus. Where did the preset for Teniko go? Did it not save properly? Now I'll be on a hunt for the character, and I am so hoping I didn't delete something by mistake! The hair -- the young guy is wearing Neftis's Rock Star hair, and the big guy is wearing Neftis's Mario's Hair. 

There's almost no post work on these -- really, just the firelight and candle in the hanging lamp. The rest of this is all "just as she comes," in the raytraced renders. And here, again, you're looking at the sheer magic of having a veryveryvery fast system. I was able to set the lights and do seven sequential shots for a scene, with multiple raytraces of each one ... and get the whole lot done in about two hours, which is the amount of time I had to indulge myself in art.

And I know, I know, it's been weeks since I uploaded anything! I've been buried under blizzards of work, and have only just dug myself out. I'll be able to upload more this week, and then I'll vanish on you again next weekend, when Dave and I are heading out of town. Roadtrip. We're praying for good weather.

Join me tomorrow, and I'll share the bookcover I did a little while ago -- a project called More Than Human, which comes out next month!

Jade, March 19

CG art: beauty in a garden. Also on a battlement.

click to see all images at 1000+ pixels...

At last, after trying since Boxing Day, I found an image I can't render! Well, I can render it, but I can't rayrace it. well, I can raytrace it, but it would take about 50 hours, which is an unrealistic amount of time, which is the same thing as not being able to render it. Take the figure out of the piece and concentrate on the garden. Yep, this is the one. Set it to raytrace with all that dappled sunshine, come back an hour later and it says 2%, or something along those lines. No can do. So this one is actually done with the old deep shadow map (as DAZ calls it; in Poser it's the shadow depth map or something ... same thing.)

It's a gorgeous little scene, complete with flowers, grasses, bushes, trees, textures on everything, and afternoon sunlight. I'd love to see what raytracing would do for it, but ... on 8 virtual cores (4 physical, threaded to work as 8) and 8GB of RAM, it ain't going to happen. Must get more memory. I wonder what 16 gigs would do for this? My motherboard will go up to, I think, 32 gigs Hmmm. Certainly, Dave needs to get more memory, very very soon. The work he's doing n Vue is amazing, and the program keeps telling him that it's waaay overloading his available resources.

So...

These three were dead easy, quick renders. What's the difference? No plants, no trees. Foliage (and hair, and fur) are where the loooong renders come in. This one? No sweat. The most creative thing about this little setup is the costume. It's actually the Witch Hazel top and the skirts and sashes from the Lilith Bikini, but I've been in there and replaced every texture. I put on a photo of a tablecloth -- a kind of damask fabric, on as the diffuse map (the one you actually see as an image slapped onto the object). I used the same image, dropped to grayscale and sharpened, as a bump map; and then I used a photo of a lace curtain, in grayscale, sharpened, as both the opacity map and the displacement map. The effect is very complex and attractive. 

Bet she's freezing up on that battlement. Oh, well. One suffers for one's art. 

I forget what the skinmap is (Jenna??), but this one is just the default, as it loads up, and it has some very nice response. I did try working with refraction and multiple colored lights on this one, but it made nooooo difference. So the only bit of post work you're seeing here is on the last of the three. The battlement is part of an enormous standing prop, and really only meant to be seen from a distance. However, if you overdrive all the bump maps to crinkle up the stone, you can get it to look pretty good ... the only thing you have to paint in, after the render, is the irregular edge of the stonework. If you care to notice, in the first two renders, the battlement in closeup has the appearance of a perfect box, no weathering, no coarseness in the stone -- all just perfect sharp edges --

Bet you were too busy looking at the young lady's charms to even notice, right? However, if you can drag your eyes away for long enough, notice the edge of the stone in the last render. Aha! It's been painted up to look like natural, coarse, weathered stone.

And speaking of working with skinmaps to get the most out of a somewhat reluctant render engine ... I ran the last project through a series of experiments that brought two of them up like this:

On the third one, nothing I did made any shred of difference, but on these, playing around with the refraction (as clearly distinct from reflection), got a lot more response out of the render. Check this out, at 1:1 size:

...and that's close to the luminosity I was after. The weird thing is, when you change the refraction on ONE  object in your scene (in this case, the human figure, obviously), the lighting changes right across the whole scene. It's the oddest thing you ever saw. Change the refraction on him, and the background goes dark, even though the lights stayed the same. I have less than no clue why this happens, so these shots were recomposited in Photoshop to use the original backgrounds and the re-refractioned figure (and yes, I know there's no such word).

Really, really nice results ... but it took a looooong time. Will have to save these extra-complex renders for projects that are sobbing and begging for them.

Jade, March 3