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

Prince ... or Prisoner? Gorgeous Yaoi elf, at any rate -- and a lot more...

Here's a neat Yaoi fantasy -- or mystery! -- for you: prisoner or prince? Captive or king? Dressed (and I use that term loosely) like this, he could be either. He could be the heir to the throne, heart-sore and weary because the love of his life, also the general of his armies, just sailed to war, and he's being compelled to marry someone he never even met, in the interests of duty and the bloodine. Or he could be the prince who was captured on the battlefield and just became the plaything of the victors in that conflict. You call it!

These are very complex and very nice renders, but they're quite what I was after. Here's the detail from the leader shot:

...and you can see the level of detail that went into this! very map of every description, every lightning trick (right up to the multiple dim colored lights technique I've been talking about lately) is employed; and then the image was split into several layers of different colors in Photoshop and re-composited. This one, the leader shot, is the best in terms of the "response" I've been able to coax out of the render engine ...

Have a look at the other two, full size. They're pretty good ... but the nuance and luminosity and so forth that you're dying to achieve ... nope. Nothing would make the skintones come to life. Now, it could be a trick of this particular skinmap, and before I throw up my hands and admit defeat, I'm going to set up a similar scene, change to another skinmap and try again. Don't get me wrong ... these are very, very nice images! Yet I'm a bit bummed that the skintones continue to look flat and dull, no matter what I did with them.

Let me think a while, and give this another shot. In fact, a couple of ideas just occurred to me even as I type this, so I have at least two experiments to run before I admit defeat. In the meantime...

Smuggler's Cove ... done in Bryce 7 Pro, using IBL lighting and the skydone and additional lights. Nice.

...and some CG doodling. Another render of the gunfighter; and the cute guys you saw the other day, and a "nebula rise over an alien ocean," which you might assume was done in Bryce, but in fact the whole thing was done n DAZ Studio, using primitives and mapping. The fog on the skyline was the only thing added in later, in Photoshop.

Now, I have to run -- literally! As I sign out, I'll be grabbing my bag and heading out the door...

Jade, February 29 (yep, it's a leap year)

More cute guys, starships and Photoshop recomposition

click to see all images at large size, 1000+ pixels...

As promised ... there's a lot more to upload! And a couple of the images here today are the product of a new line of experimentation. Yesterday, I mentioned an idea mooted by a guy on one of the forums I've been looking at for info on how one can squeeze the most out of the 3DLight render engine (which is integral to DAZ Studio), or else get Poser to play nice. Or both. Preferably both. His suggestion was, to get more response out of an image ... if it had five lights, why not render it five times and do a recomposition of all five images, adjusting them to get the most out of them? I thought, what a good idea.

So, the first of the images, today, was done this way. I didn't render the image five times .. rather, I shipped it into five layers in a Photoshop project and made a dark one, a light one, a red one, a blue one, a green one ... and then played around with the merge/blend modes and the transparencies on each image, until  certain luminosity started to come up. The kind of luminosity you see in much more complex renders than can be managed by the DAZ render engine, which can't do the sub-surface scattering, for on thing.

So I went back into one of yesterday's renders, and reprocessed the whole thing. Well, well! Compare these -- and you'll have to see them at large size to appreciate the "response" which has come up in the skintones:

This, just done today (click to see it at close to 1:1 size. And this...

...which is the original, as posted yesterday -- no recomposition. 

Well, well. I'm not saying it's something you'd do all the time, because it's an extra fiddle which takes about 20 minutes. This provides an alternative to setting 16 dim colored lights, as I did on the Rhapsody in Green render yesterday ... that also is a fiddle, and it takes the same amount of time. 16 lights, 16 shadows, to properly light just one character. Ye gods, I'm trying to imaging raytracing that with a slower computer. I know, I know, I'm spoiled rotten with the Mighty Thor, may blessings be upon it.

I spent a while playing around, trying to find some way to make DAZ Studio generate a Collada file that can be read by anything at all, including its own sister programs, Carrara and Bryce. No joy. All I get is error messages galore. The Collada files I'm making don't seem to be compatible with anything. And Carrara is supposed to be able to open a DAZ file (on the .daz file tag), but all I get there is an error message too, so ... scratch that plan. Hmmm. Next: bite the bullet and install Poser Pro 2010 to my boot drive --

Speaking of which, in an attempt to get around the problem of not being able to get the Michael  and Victoria base models into Poser when it's running off a drive which isn't the boot drive, I spent a few minutes at Content Paradise, which is the model store of the company which issues Poser, SmithMicro. And  was absolutely bloody dumbfounded. Not in a good way. I was looking for FIGURES to plug into Poser, to get around the absence of M4 and V4....

Content Paradise is stuffed to busting with figures. 95% female. There are about four male characters, all for M4 (which rather defeats the object!), and this tiny handful of male characters are either ugly or weird. 

Now, what do you make of that?! Like I said ... dumbfounded. So it's M4 or bust, and I'll install Poser to my boot drive and keep my fingers crossed!

The SF shot -- second from top -- was done in Bryce. The starship is one of a pack of .OBP file format spaceships I got a little while ago, and the ringed planet --? Made that myself. The shot is lit with one light and a "cheat light" to create some fill-in and beat the too-dense shadows, to get an attractive image; the render was done at large size, and the subtle starfield hand-painted in Photoshop. This becomes the starship Gilgamesh ... and I used this on the book cover I just painted, for More Than Human. More about this shortly.

More odds and ends of CG doodling:

Here, I'm playing with lights and textures, basically looking at the interplay of the bounced light off ONE light source that's waaaaay out there and cranked to huge brightness. Actually, to get this much light from a single "source" that's a zillion miles away, I created three or four distant lights on the same coordinates. They're pretending to be the same light, but to get this much illumination, it took several of them. The experiment? I'm trying to get a realistic area of shade on an otherwise brightly sunny day. Like, a backstreet in the shadows at ten in the morning. And I reckon it worked.

And I think I can get back to you inside of February, because this is a leap year. Handy, that.

Jade, February 27