Movie poster ... NARC. Happy 3rd Birthday to this blog!

click to see all images at large size;

wallpapers are 1600 pixels wide

NARC: The Movie. Imagine! Jarrat and Stone and company, the brainchildren of Mel Keegan, in blazing color, on the big screen. In 3D. Whoa. Well, it would cost about $150m and take over a thousand designers and artists to make it happen; then, being a movie in which the romantic thread is ga, it would more than more than likely go over like a lead balloon at the mainstream box office ... but we can dream. So here was the idea:

Design the poster, as if NARC were a major motion picture. 

The first thing I did was have a close look at the posters for the Iron Man movies, and from these I took inspiration in the form of the dynamic. Not the design, but the spirit. This made two or three poster designs jump into my imagination, and I deliberately went with the one that is the LEAST like the Iron Man poster designs, so no one was going to be able to say, "Oh, you just copied." I didn't copy nuthin', and I'm very, very pleased with the final result.

The poster was assembled in Photoshop -- at 4800 pixels high, which gave me plenty of wiggle room for painting. The first step was to assemble a set of big, high-rez renders which would be used to compose the whole image. Where to start? Characters!

The four main heroes were rendered separately: 

Jarrat and Stone, Cronin and Ramos, were rendered at 2500 pixels high, which, for a portrait is big ... big enough to make it possible to paint human hair realistically, which I knew I'd have to do for Jarrat and Ramos, both of whom have hair that's luxurious, a little wild. Turned out, even Stone's hair needed some painting. Only Gil Cronin gave me no chore in this area. Thanks, Gil. 

They were raytraced, not rendered in Lux, for a good reason. LuxRender does fantastic justice to skin tones, but it really, really shows up the shortcomings of 3D hair. (The designers need to get on the stick and work out how to do hair that will look good in the top-end render engines.) In Lux, alas, Jarrat and Ramos would have rendered quite poorly on account of their hair, so I'd have had to paint the hair from scratch. Well ... I could do that, but it would have doubled the time spent on the project ... and the truth is, I'm also still getting the feel of my new mouse pen/tablet. I'm not quite ready to paint that much hair from scratch, though I can touch up existing hair for a composite image like the poster. Last reason for raytracing, not rendering in Lux: each of these renders would have been about a day long, and I'd have run out of time. This project was designed as the Third Anniversary Special for this blog, so it was time sensitive ... if I'd thought of it two weeks ago --!!

The next major element to be rendered was actually the planet! Working wholly in DAZ Studio, you're a bit hamstrung by what you can do with primitives -- ie, spheres. DAZ's spheres don't enlarge very well. When they get very big (or you get very close to them), you start to see straight lines around the edges, because these primitives are actually made up is gazillions of planes. So I went into Bryce, made a biiiigggg sphere and exported it as an OBJ. Then, I wanted to paint a diffuse map to make the planet beautifully blue ... I was thinking, Aurora, from Aphelion. To do this, I took a photo of the sky on a blue-sky day with white clouds, and in Photoshop put a heavy motion blur on it. Done -- how easy was that? The picture was saved at 2000 square, applied to the sphere in DAZ Studio, and rendered ... the render was passed back into Photoshop to that the atmospheric haze on the edge of the planet could be painted in. Save this ... pass it back into DAZ Studio and use it as a backdrop. Now --

Time to work on the ship! I know, I know ... this is not the NARC-Athena as described in the books. To built that, I need to be working in a 3D modeling program. They have learning curves like the north face of the Eiger ... in the last few years, I've either been working flat out, or sick, or (frequently) both, so I haven't had the time or the braincells to learn a new program and actually build the NARC-Athena. So --

This is actually something called the Allied Fleets Frigate, which costs about $30 from Renderosity. It's a lovely model, and you can do a lot with it. Here, I've fractionally changed the dynamic by stretching it in one axis ... and I've changed 100% of the textures on it, to get a whole new look. It was then lit from two angles. One -- the sun angle, to match the light falling on the planet (several glaring spotlights, far outside the frame), and two -- blue light reflected up off the planet. 

The ship was rendered at 3000 pixels square, and then shipped into Photoshop to have the engine flares added, and the red beacon lights marking high points on the hull, for aircraft avoidance. These were done with .abr brushes -- specifically, Ron's Bokeh Lights.

One element remained to be rendered. Yep -- the NARC riot armor...

Now, as I was saying a moment ago, I never did climb the learning curve to master a 3D modeling program and build the NARC armor as it's described in the books. But I was able to cobble together something very like the armor -- certainly good enough to do the trick, till I can make the real thing! What you see here is jigsaw puzzled together from two different body suits; two suits of SF style armor; a "survival" suit; and an SF style costume for M4. With he exception of the helmet, I'd just about defy the folks who designed the originals to tell the bits and pieces apart...

The trick was to dump every single surface map off every single bit, so the whole suit turned into featureless white plastic, and then start again, and build it back up so everything matched. Obviously, I made everything black, glossy and reflective. I made everything very smooth, and used a reflection map -- something I don't normally do -- to get uniform, consistent reflections, across the whole suit. I used the map because (duh!) I rendered the suit alone, and there's nothing else standing in the frame for those surfaces to reflect. Then ... lights. I did red, blue and gold lights to pick out the armor in dramatic colors; then this was rendered at 3000 pixels high.

In the books, the armor is made of kevlex-titanium alloy. The pieces are "smart" ... you put them on piece by piece starting with the boots, and they "smart seal" around your joints. It's incredibly heavy, but when you put the shoulder pack on, which contains the power source, the anti-gravity turns on, and you can set the apparent mass of the whole suit anywhere you want it ... say, 250 kilos, to hold you down while an explosion goes through, or 20kg, to allow you to literally jump over a house. Soooo cool. The biggest difference you see between this armor and the "hardsuits" as described in the books is the helmet. This is not the NARC helmet.  But it's a heck of a nice helmet, and it'll do! (In fact, it's one of the two helmet designs that come packed with the Sedition Soldier for M4 kit.)

Now all the pieces were assembled, and it was time to start putting them together. The first thing I did was use a lot of compressed, low-rez cut-outs to get a "sketch" going ... basically, to make sure the design I had in mind was actually going to work. And it did. So, now I imported each of the high-rez elements into a new Photoshop project that was created at 4800 pixels high. Cut out each of the picture elements, and start painting on them...

Each of the characters was painted -- skin tones, eyelashes, hair, shadows. This was where I really, really got to play with my early-birthday-present. The Wacom Bamboo mouse/tablet is a dream. This was also a great project for me to start getting in some serious practise with it ... it's very much like drawing with a fine pen, and I love the way it "shakes hands" with Photoshop. 

Usually, you'll hear me saying, "start at the bottom and work up," when you're building a complex piece of art, but it turns out that there are times when you'll paint the bottom layer last -- and this was one of them. I'd bucket-filled the base layer to flat black, to let me work on the individual elements; then, with them all done, it was time to fill in the background with dramatic stuff, to make the image consistently interesting across the whole frame:

...this layer was painted right there, under the major elements, so there was no guesswork about where something ought to be, or how bright, or what color. To do this, you're painting on a 4800 high canvas, with your brush size set to 2500 pixels. It's huge ... and I am soooo glad that I got some extra RAM a few weeks ago. I'm working on 16GB of RAM now (with four processors threaded to work as eight). The lag time in the painting process, from brush stroke to "done," was usually unnoticeable; only big blending strokes, using the smudge tool, had a visible, measurable lag. No problem. Slower computers will show a longer lab, but her, just be patient. This background was done in five layers: black underlay; blue "flux" effect; red "flux" effect; bright white starfields; flat blue matte overlay adjusted to juuuuust the right merge mode and opacity to give you this result. The flux effects and starfields are .abr brushes -- find them at Renderosity.

The logos were done in Serif Page Plus ... I'm still using X3, though I believe X5 is out. I'll upgrade when the newer versions do something that I can't do, and need to do. These logos were done in Bolts SF font at something like 100 point. In Serif, I did the big logo green, with gold highlights added with several 3D lights, matted on a black rectangle. Copy to clipboard; paste right into Photoshop. Get rid of black rectangle ... duplicate layer. Make a drop shadow by modifying the lower of the two (adjust lightness to black, apply heavy Gaussian blur), and jog the top layer up and right a bit. Lastly, I "walked the color" of the logo through every shade in the spectrum to find out what worked best. It was going to be green, gold or red, and it turns out, red works best.

The final effects were done in Photoshop: lens flare; a shimmer dancing off the movie logo; major lens flare falling right over the logo; and a diffuse black border under the logo but on top of everything else. Done!

WALLPAPERS

These crops from the final image are 1600 pixels wide. They'll suit almost all monitors. I have them set on a 22" flatscreen and a 15" laptop, and they look ... amazing. Enjoy!

With this project, I'm marking the third birthday of this blog! I uploaded Post #1 on September 25, 2009, which was about five weeks after I started up DAZ Studio 3 for the first time. For post work, I used Micrographx Picture Publisher until I upgraded to Windows 7 and a 64 bit system, which won't run MPP. Three years later, I still Use DAZ Studio 3, (because I -- can -- not -- stand Studio 4), plus LuxRender; plus Photoshop Elements, plus Bryce 7 Pro, plus Serif Page Plus X3. I do have Poser Pro 2010, but don't use it ... too cumbersome, and the Firefly Render Engine doesn't produce work which is one bit superior to LuxRender. I also have Cararra, in which I'll one day -- I swear! -- do the 3D modeling part. All I need is time and health. (On the desk next door, Dave has Vue Esprite with a load of plugins, and he's doing marvellous work. I need to learn that. One day...)

So  it's Happy Third Anniversary!

Next: Abraxas, in a couple of days.

Jade, September 25 ... 2012

The Legend of Chino Vollias (happy Post 700!)

click to see all artwork at large size

In the taverns along the Anderlay Road you can find some of the best beer in the East, brewed right there in the cellars under the house. It’s stronger than wine, and a lot easier to drink then the rum and brandy brought down by the keg from the northern ports, so it’s easy – too easy! – to lose your wits while the fire crackles and the minstrels play bawdy songs that come in with the kegs of spirits.

As evening wears on the minstrels retire to wet their throats and the storytellers start to mingle. For the price of a soft bed and breakfast in the morning, they’ll spin you the most amazing tales, and the best of them are said to be true.

Now, I don’t know how many travelers would believe the stories to be true, but the Anderlay Road is rich with legends, and legends have to start somewhere, with some fragment of truth. Who knows?

Twice a year, I travel the great road from Dulhanna in the far west to Megadir in the east. I’m Bartali – Raston Bartali, dealer in spices and rugs, rare wines and even rarer jewels, manager of fair courtesans, trader in ancient maps to lost cities and new navigator’s charts drawn from the finest observations of the heavens.

Twice a year, business takes me from Dulhanna to Megadir and back, while my two wives and five daughters enjoy the cool of spring and fall at home; and in my travels, I’ve heard every tale the storytellers know, from one end of the Anderlay Road to the other. Some, I’ve heard many times, because I have my favorites and will gladly pay a gifted storyteller to weave it again for me.

One of these is the Legend of Chino Vollias … and of all the stories told on the great road, this is the one I wish most were true.

Three hundred years ago, Chino Vollias was born in the village of Lydris, on the craggy coast of Anderlay, where the great chalk cliffs are being eaten away by the hungry sea. His mother ran fishing boats and his father was a mercenary soldier in the service of Duke Ohmar the Elder; so what was more natural than that young Chino would grow up as a sailor and swordsman who feared neither the ocean storm nor the steel of the barbarians who snapped around the heels of the Dukedom.

By the time he was twenty-five, Chino was known as a great athlete, an adventurer, a lover, as unbeatable in a brawl as in a drinking contest. He had made several fortunes in battle and lost them to the cards or to capricious lovers, but Chino was untroubled. He was the best swordhand in all of Anderlay, and one of the best sailors. Another fortune would always be coming his way before long.

After one grand adventure, he held onto his wealth for long enough to buy a trading ship, which he sailed to the port of Lydris, where the vessel was re-rigged, repanted and renamed as the Carmelita – named after his one great love, the only woman he could not have.

Carmelita was the wife of Duke Ohmar; the third, youngest wife, young enough to be Ohmar’s daughter. She came from Harrandal, across the mountains in the east when she was seveneen years old to fulfil the contract of a marriage arranged by her father. In return, Duke Ohmar agreed to furnigh a whole regiment for the defense of Harrandal, which was much poorer than Anderlay, and ill fitted to defend itself against the brigands and pirates who rampaged along its shores in those days.

So Carmelita was honor bound to stand by the contract and remain faithful to the Duke of aAnderlay, for the sake of her father and her homeland – though she gave her heart to Chino in the road out of Harrandal, long before the wedding.

It was Chino who commanded the cohort of cavalry which fetched her west to Castle Mauvais, the ancestral home of Ohmar’s family. Handsome young Chino and the beautiful Camelita spent two weeks on the high road, and love bloomed like a wild rose; but it was a tragic love that left Chino bruised-hearted and, mayhap, a little wild. Four days out from the Aderlay border, he almost gave his life to protect the party in a despeate fight against brigands, and Carmelita bound his wounds with strips of the silk she was bringing with her, for her wedding gown…

Two months later, healed and strong, he wore the ducal livery and stood at attention in the great temple of Ghiris, when Ohmar exchanged vows with Carmelita. Chino swore never to love again, and I think he meant every word, for indeed he never wed, nor settled with any woman. He had as many mad flirtations with lovesome male courtesans from Shehend and Elyssan as with the magnificent women who plied the mercenary trade alongside him, but he gave his heart to none.

And all this, before Chino Vollias was twenty-three years old! So, little wonder that he named his trading ship Carmelita, and followed every tale of treasure to be found, glory to be won. Over and over, he sailed back to his home port of Lydris with full holds and a hundred new stories for the minstrels and storytellers, who loved him … and they’re still telling those same stories today –

How he fought the Iron Trolls of Gnothica and won the freedom of the fair Tressida; how he cut the head off the Black Gryphon to liberate the city of Selendria; how he found the ancient necropolis of Eldrev and fetched the Carmelita back to port heavy in the water under the weight of treasure that had been buried by greedy, superstitious god-kings of old.

And they tell of his last adventure – which is my favorite tale, heard so often that I can recite it word for word. The storytellers call it ‘The Gates of Petheris,’ and it begins as they all do, with the Carmelita tied up at the wharf in Lydris, the crew a little inebriated at an old sailors’ tavern called The Silver Sword, and Chino himself tangled in the limbs of some lovely young thing who had taken his fancy.

In comes a man with a broken nose and two gold teeth. “Where will I be finding Chino Vollias?” he asks.

“What would you be wanting him for?” asks Toby, the landlord of the Sword, whose back was bent with the ill of the bones, while his eyes and mind were as sharp as those of a general on a battlefield.

“I want him to hire him, his ship and his crew, for a voyage up the coast,:” says the man with the nose and the teeth. “Then I want to retain him and his crew for their expertise in the desert. I have a map that shows the way to Zuralia, but I can’t get there alone!”

The mere whisper of the magical name of Zuralia makes heads turn and ears prick. Everyone knows the name of the city – and its fate. It was a great trading city, long ago, before the Borisk came down out of a sandstorm and settled there. You get a Borisk in your area, you might as well pack your bags and head out, and warn your neighbors to run while they can.

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

Enchanted Forest - Jupiter Creek

click to see all images at larger size

There's a legend out there somewhere about an enchanted forest ...a place that lights up with magic at certain times of the year ... it's "dark magic" on the last day of fall (Halloween, anyone?) and it's "bright magic" on the first day of spring. And you know, I'd have to swear we saw it yesterday ... the first day of spring. The sun shone, we took a spin out to Jupiter Creek on a whim, and couldn't resist a hike, for about an hour, in woodland that was pure magic!

The trees had turned to spun gold, the ground was alive with fairy bells, there was even a ruined castle tower with a "troll hole" ... but the trolls were sleeping peacefully in this magic time. You don't even have to use your imagination to see all this --

These images have been reduced in size, some down to 1000 pixels -- sorry. It was the only way to make the download sizes small enough, at an average of about 300k each, to be practical, because there's a whole swag of them. They were actually shot at 12MP, and there's not a lot of enhancement on them -- no painting and so forth, just a bit of adjustment in the shadows and highlights, because the light levels were difficult. We're just coming out of winter, and by 3:00pm the shadows are already getting long. (These images were also captured during the space of a single hour. Everywhere you looked, there was a new picture. I took hundreds.)

In fact, Jupiter Creek is the site of the old gold mines. All this woodland you see here is secondary growth: the whole area was clear-cut for the mines about 160 years ago. There wasn't a tree left standing when they were done, and as for the native population --? They appear to have beaten a hasty retreat, and who would blame them! It was all mine shafts and "puddles" and chimneys, of which some still exist. The area (about 10 square kilometers, I would guess) is full of chain-link fences and warning signs, telling people about the deep holes and tunnels, and to keep well out --

Because there's trolls down there. Big ones. And Orks. Lots of Orks. They must be paddling around in rubber boots right now, because there's been so much rain lately, the mine shafts are flooded and the main tunnel, through which you can usually walk, is flooded through much of its length. Dave took a flashlight and went in, to see. Too much water to get right through ... but he said there were a couple of trolls, Fred and Bert, playing poker. In fact, in this shot right below, you can see a lake of standing flood water that's deep enough, and has been there long enough, to be full of tadpoles:

click to see all images at larger size

The trail runs 3k in a loop to and from the parking area (which has a picnic table, a bin, and no bathroom. Makes sense, doesn't it?) It's a quite easy walk, so long as you don't mind climbing up a hillside into which "steps" have been made -- and the steps look and feel like they "happened" as tree roots grew there deliberately to make steps into the enchanted forest (see the second from last image).

Thanks to Dave for making this happen. He suggested taking the Millennium Possum (uh ... the van. It was either going to be the Possum Van, as per Red Green, or the Millennium Falcon as per -- well, you  know what. So I said, how about the Millennium Possum?) for a spin before we hit the stores. But, where to? I suggested Jupiter Creek, never thinking that we were going to actually stop there. So glad we did!

Jade, September 2