DAZ Michael 4: gunfighter

Gunfighter on the frontier, in a post-apocalyptic scenario, "after the comet" ... book cover. This one gave me so much trouble, I almost dumped the whole project and started over with a new approach. The background was easy. It started life as a b&w photo of a town on a snowy road -- no problem there: colorize it; mute the colors; drop it into a soft Gaussian blur, according to the current trend. Then the fun part...

Pose Michael 4 ... no real problem, except the bloody gun prop refused to "parent" to the hand, (which means to stick in place and go wherever the hand goes, like part of the costume); so every time I repositioned the guy, and gun wandered off on its own and had to be moved independently.

The costume was no problem ... in theory. But I wanted to render this in LuxRender, to get a really top-notch result --

You guessed. What else? For reasons unknown, LuxRender wouldn't have a bar of the surface textures on the jacket and pants. They looked awful, even though the skintones and hair on the model looked pretty good. So here was the situation: raytracing was doing a horrible job on the skin tones, and LuxRender was doing a thoroughly nasty job on the fabrics. I blew off hours, trying to get Lux to play ball, but it never did. Soooo...

How to salvage all the work that had been done up to that point, and not wind up with a wasted Sunday afternoon???

Photoshop to the rescue ... well, Photoshop plus about two more hours' painting time What you see here has three layers: 1) the colorized, muted, blurred-out photo as the background; 2) the head and hair rendered in LuxRender; 3) the costume and prop raytraced. Then, the whole lot was painted together with every kind of Photoshop effect I know to make this work. I think I might even have invented a couple.

Ack. That was a hard job. The end result is worth it -- nice picture, makes a great book cover. But I wouldn't do this over again, even though I actually learned a thing or two. Some jobs are just too much aggravation. There must be an easier way to do this one -- though, if there is, I still can't see it. Anyway: job done here, and ... I'm going to do a nice, soothing fantasy next time -- something luxurious, and luscious, and drool-worthy. Work can wait.

The classic "muscly torso" -- art for its own sake. And for a book cover.

Playing in LuxRender and Photoshop today ... and it's actual work. Whoo! Doesn't get any better than that. As you can probably tell from the dimensions of the image (67:100), it's a book cover. What's more, it's a book cover in current design trends.

It's astonishing, when you look at a few hundred book cover (as they show up on the book club sites, Amazon, whatever) and you start seeing trends.  Not every cover on every book follows the trend; but a hell of a lot of them do, and the majority of books falling into the "big seller" range seem to adhere more or less to the set criteria. So -- what the hell?

So, what you have here is a heavily over-painted rainforest image (it's far more than 50% Photoshop painting, as it stands right now), and then the LuxRender of one of my Michael 4 designs; and then some more painting on top. The LuxRender layer is so photographic, I'm thrilled to bits with this. Can't wait to set something up tomorrow and see it go again! This is fun.

You have actually seen this Michael 4 character before. I designed him a couple of years ago, and you saw him back in January, 2015:

That one had hand-painted hair, he's what you could call "scruffy-adorable," and looked a few years younger. I actually prefer the model with a few years on him. In fact --

One of the projects I've promised myself I will get down to, soon, is ... Harrison Shapiro. You know Harrison Shapiro? The General who actually managed to catch the whole lot of them, from Rick Vaurien right through to Mark Sherratt, Curtis Marin, Neil Travers -- the whole lot. If you don't have the foggiest notion what I'm talking about ... hehehe, you don't know what you've been missing. But you can catch up. Anyway -- those of you who do know what Jade is babbling about today will know that Harrison Shapiro is a doll, one of a kind. I've modeled Travers and Marin, Mark, Mick Vidal, Barb Jazinsky, engineer Tully Ingersol, mercenary Sergei van Donne, the hitman, Ramon, and even the little twerp, Tonio Teniko. But I need to model Harrison Shapiro and his other half, Jon Kim, and also Robert Chandra Liang.)

This is fun. Have been looking some more at the Michael 6 model (Genesis 3), and they're up to Victoria 7 now ... and the first rumors are circulating regarding DAZ Studio 5. Ahem. The latest version of Studio is 4.9, which means Studio 5 can't be more than a year or so away. If I just hang on, I might be able to leapfrog right over Studio 4 altogether and re-enter at Studio 5. Also, recently something called Luxus has come out: a plugin for DAZ Studio which places the icon for LuxRender right there on your Render menu inside Studio. Hmmm. This is starting to get interesting.

A delicious Michael 4 fantasy ... while LuxRender decides to be weird

A delicious fantasy ... two Michael 4's for the price of one, in a marvelously exotic setting: sunshine, blue skies and a fair sailing breeze. I'm quite certain there's a story that goes with this picture. Those two are planning something -- hatching some plot, or hashing out a voyage. One of these days, I'll get around to writing ... and in the meantime:

You've actually seen these characters before, though you might not be able to recall where. This one was the "Hyborian Age Pinup Boy", more blond and less redhead at the time. Today:

Look a little familiar? You might remember this incarnation of the same Michael 4:

In fact, he appeared several times, in variations on the theme of this render. See this post to catch up with all that: Pinup Boy of the Hyborian Age. (That post goes back sixteen months.) Neat!

And the second Michael 4 making a reappearance today --

...If  you're quick, you'll recognize the model I use on the header art right now! You last saw him as "The Forest God," in a post from February, 2013 (!) entitled Piper at the Gates of Dawn, with the ram's horns and all:

The set used today is Temple of the Shadows, from Renderosity. The sky is an image I shot from the hill above the house where we used to live about five years ago. I have one light configured, just a distant light called "sun" ... because this was supposed to be rendered in LuxRender. It would have been glorious, but Lux decided to go utterly haywire today. Something is causing it to leave behind whole sections of the skinmaps, so you get this weird effect:

...now, I know how to fix the "black eyes" problem, which one runs into all the time when taking DAZ Studio humans into LuxRender. But I blew off something like about two hours trying to figure out some way to fix the lack of any skinmap whatsoever on the brow, and at the end of that time I ended up saying words along the lines of "Stuff it, I'll raytrace this and call it good." Which is exactly what did happen.

Now, I know for a fact LuxRender will display this Michael 4 sknmap properly, because I've done it it before. I'll figure it out and rerender this piece, when I have some answers. But it could take a while, because I'm utterly stumped; so we won't fret over this. We'll just go on with other pictures and work on this one in spare time! So ... one light set, and depth of field turned ON; maybe twenty minutes to get the raytrace and then -- into Photoshop for a modicum of painting. Less than you might think, actually. The original render didn't need to much done to brighten it up here and there and fix the occasional glitch.

If you're curious, the hair on the left is the Yannis dreadlocks, and the shorter hair is either Akaste or Aether, which I believe come from the Renderosity marketplace. Both costumes are sufferent parts of the Wood God costume set, which came from the DAZ marketplace a looong time ago. Don't even know if the old models are still available but one hopes

In any event, I'm very pleased with the raytrace. That's a hell of a nice image. [Pats self on back] So we'll worry about the upmarket render later.

Take Two, in LuxRender -- really blurring the line between art and photo

As promised ... here's the LuxRender version of yesterday's Michael 4. And boy, did I have to jog my memory! I started up the Reality bridge and went utterly blank. Blanker than blank. Floundered around for about ten minutes, made some false starts, and then sort of halfway remembered where some of the controls are and what they do!

The two things I did forget: when you set up your lights for LuxRender, you use ONE distant light only, and name it "sun," so Lux knows what to do with it ... and if you want to turn on depth of field, so the background is realistically out of focus, you must select what you want in focus, in DAZ Studio, before invoking Reality. Then Lux automatically pulls focus on that object. In this case, it's focused on Michael 4's face so tightly that you notice the hand closest to the camera is fuzzy. Neat!

For objective comparison purposes, here's a resized crop chopped out of yesterday's raytrace:

Compare yesterday's raytrace...

But which is better? Raytrace or LuxRender? In fact, a case could be made for either one. I'll leave it to you to decide, because each has its merits. For example, the hands definitely look better in Lux, but which face you prefer is down to the individual.

And there's one more thing I often do these days: have a look at the render in good old b&w. You can often get a clear idea of the photographic values of a piece of digital art when you drop out the color:

I feel a visual fantasy coming on. Something good is percolating in the back of my mind, and if it wasn't 10:21 at night I'd be starting up a new project. But I'm propping the eyelids open here, so -- tomorrow. Yawn. I'm off to bed now...