Michael 4: such versatility -- what an actor!

Just a grab-bag of images today ... mind you, there's a theme behind them. I was fiddling around with faces, and came up with a good one. This seemed to yell for long hair blowing in a sea wind, and sandals and island wear. The hardest part of it was fiddling the jewelry into place. Result: vacation shots. Looks like the gorgeous gay boy you met while on holidays in Barbados...!

Then, on a whim, I couldn't resist seeing what would happen if you took the exact same character, changed the costume and hair. Here's the result:

I swear, it's the exact same morphing of Michael 4 -- all I changed was the costume and hair, and suddenly ...

The art was barely finished when I got the word from above: "Stop right there, don't change nuthin' else, because that's Curt Gable." So spake Mel Keegan, and I'm delighted to be able to call another of the NARC characters -- the Starfleet pilot who just transferred over -- done! Next thing on the agenda is to pose this character with the Mischa Petrov character (the man you love to hate!) and check out the result. I'll get to this in the next couple of days.

And this one, below, had to render overnight, it took so long:

It's the starship model which is so huge, DAZ won't even open it, so these shots are rendered in Bryce 7 Pro, then tweaked in Irfanview and finished in GIMP. (Repainted in Photoshop, in 2024.) Super-carrier in the Rabelais Drift ... Hellgate. Oh, yeah.

Jade, September 30

***Posted by MK because the internet is AWOL. Intermittent crap. Be warned, guys: our connection is going to be in and out for a week or two, as of this point: Telstra (or whatever) is doing a lot of work on the landlines in this area. And as you know, if you've been looking at the "poster notes" on these journal entries in my looooong adventure through the world of CG, 3D and digital, even at the best of times we can find ourselves with dialup speeds in this area. This is why MK has been making many posts for me, since Day One -- Keegan has the fast connection, not me! (This should change in the near future, when the cables or whatever are updated, and they stop working on them. At least, s'wot Telstra promises.) Credit where it's due: this blog would not have been possible without the support of a pal with decent internet. Because ours sucks. We moved into this area about six months before I got into Studio and blogging about it, and I almost quit right there: DAYS to download something from the DAZ store, at one point. Argh. Thank gods for friends when you need 'em! 

Science Fiction in Bryce ... nice!

One of the benefits of getting the hang of Bryce is that I can work with models that are too much for DAZ to handle. Now, it's perfectly true that 3D Studio Max handles them like a dream ... but I never got the hang of 3DS. It's about 1000% more complex than DAZ and Bryce. Actually, triple that, come to think of it. The manual is 1,250 Letter-size pages of close-packed type. It's like a phone book. And I just never had the time to learn it, which is why DAZ and Bryce came as such a welcome surprise: they don't take all that much learning before you're confident in what you can do.

A while ago I splurged and got a star destroyer model ... thirty bucks in a sale. On of the most expensive models I've ever invested in. I promptly discovered that DAZ can't even open it! Too many "polygons." Now, all models are made of polygons, and by the time you get up to modeling things like human faces or the behemoth starship in the shots above -- well, your average computer (and software) will barf before it even opens the model.

The good news is: Bryce is a wireframe environment, and will handle this model eeeeezily. The better news is, I'm living Bryce 7 Pro a lot. So it was an obvious move to render the starship in Bryce. Then, when I saw the final render I thought to myself .... hang on, I can import this into DAZ as a backdrop!

Add the Vanguard spaceship prop and set some lights.

Add Kevin Jarrat at the pilot's controls and set some interior lights.

Render up a storm; finish one of the shots in GIMP, to put the flares on the engine exhausts...

And you have a picture sequence as Captain Kevin Jarrat, Raven 9.4 himself, is on approach to a big ship. Remember the Starfleet carrier, from Scorpio? This could be it.

Woohoo! Expect more -- lots more -- just like it.

Jade, 29 September

***Posted by MK because the internet is AWOL. Intermittent crap. Be warned, guys: our connection is going to be in and out for a week or two, as of this point: Telstra (or whatever) is doing a lot of work on the landlines in this area. And as you know, if you've been looking at the "poster notes" on these journal entries in my looooong adventure through the world of CG, 3D and digital, even at the best of times we can find ourselves with dialup speeds in this area. This is why MK has been making many posts for me, since Day One -- Keegan has the fast connection, not me! (This should change in the near future, when the cables or whatever are updated, and they stop working on them. At least, s'wot Telstra promises.) Credit where it's due: this blog would not have been possible without the support of a pal with decent internet. Because ours sucks. We moved into this area about six months before I got into Studio and blogging about it, and I almost quit right there: DAYS to download something from the DAZ store, at one point. Argh. Thank gods for friends when you need 'em! 

Queen of the Jungle ... George's kid sister. Right.

Edit: Sorry, the Tarzana images have gone without trace, casualty of a dumped account with one of those subscription service thingies. But I've left the post here and made a note to myself to come back and recreate these images ... for one thing, they could be done so much better now. In the meantime, to replace them, let me paste in a few images from 2019, for your viewing pleasure...

Victoria 4.2 in Iray

Genesis 8 in Iray

Michael 4, raytrace

Genesis 8 in Iray

Somebody mentioned to me the other day, if I was going to do the King of the Jungle when he was a lean teen ingenue, fair being fair, I ought to do the Queen of the Jungle the same way. So here you go:

Tarzana, lost in the jungle at the age of two, when a plane crashed in the Bukuvu, where she was rescued by an ape named Ape, and raised in a treehouse with a big brother called George.

Meanwhile, at a very big and expensive waterhole set --!

Seriously, forgetting George of the Jungle and getting my mind off Brendan Fraser in a loincloth for a while, this is the same set and lights I created for the Yaoi Tarzan the other day. All I had to do was import a Victoria, put on a skinmap (Yaana), a wig (Spartacos hair), and a bitty little costume that's falling off everywhere (Andromeda, with my own textures and opacity maps set), and shoot away.

The other thing I had rendering in the background while these were going through, was this (and thank gods for a quad core) ...


That's the finished version, color corrected and all. Here's a couple of screen shots of the work in progress:

Above: a finished test render.

Below: the wire-frame universe you're actually working in, till you hit "render."

I'm starting to get the hang of this, but I have to admit, Bryce is not like working in DAZ. Having said that, one day the penny drops, and I think it's starting to, for me. I finally got the hang of enough of the basics for some of this to come into shape. There's soooooo much more to learn, but my hat's off to the company: Bryce 7 Pro is fantastic. It's the nearest thing to Vue ... but here's the important part: it's about quarter the price of the first level of Vue that actually works well enough to be worth its investment, and (!!) it will actually RUN on an ordinary desktop machine. Vue won't. On a quad core with four gigs of ram and a gig on the video card, Vue 8 Pioneer (the entry level freebie) is crashing to the desktop or locking up. Makes me very, very edgy about paying two hundred bucks for Vue 8 Esprit. Meanwhile, Bryce 7 Pro is working a treat, never crashes, and I really am getting getting the hang of it.

Jade, 27 September

***Posted by MK because the internet is AWOL. Intermittent crap. Be warned, guys: our connection is going to be in and out for a week or two, as of this point: Telstra (or whatever) is doing a lot of work on the landlines in this area. And as you know, if you've been looking at the "poster notes" on these journal entries in my looooong adventure through the world of CG, 3D and digital, even at the best of times we can find ourselves with dialup speeds in this area. This is why MK has been making many posts for me, since Day One -- Keegan has the fast connection, not me! (This should change in the near future, when the cables or whatever are updated, and they stop working on them. At least, s'wot Telstra promises.) Credit where it's due: this blog would not have been possible without the support of a pal with decent internet. Because ours sucks. We moved into this area about six months before I got into Studio and blogging about it, and I almost quit right there: DAYS to download something from the DAZ store, at one point. Argh. Thank gods for friends when you need 'em! 

You can trust me, I'm a doctor. Meet Harry Del!

He's almost an outcast in his own community. He's a healer -- but they call him a "queer," and they're not referring to his sexual preference! He's an empathic healer, and a lot of people don't like the idea of someone else sharing ... not their thoughts, but their feelings.

It's about 350 years from now, and people can still find something to bitch about, right? But as it happens, they don't have much to bitch about. The Rethan mutoids were a perfectly natural product of an error in the terraforming process. The specialists who set up the machines missed something in the planet's natural environment, and in the first century after colonization, several generations of kids were born ... special. Some were telepathic, others had psychic abilities like precognition.

Meet Harry Del -- Doctor Harry Del. After growing up with the abilities of the empathic healer, he also went to college, qualified as a doctor. In fact, a surgeon. But his best work is done with his own special gift. Luckily for Kevin Jarrat. When Eve Lang scraped Jarrat off the ground in the city of Chell -- beaten and left for dead -- she took him to Harry, who was probably the only human being on any world who could mend him. Now, Stoney had been chasing his partner all over the planet, using all the resources of NARC, and no few of the Blue Ravens ... but the fact is, it was Eve and Harry to pulled off this feat of magic...

And if you know you've missed something major -- and so long as you're an adult who doesn't freak out at glbt content, check this out!

Yes, I'm working on the art for the new NARC website -- and it's a lot like casting a movie. Mel Keegan is delighted with this design for Harry Del, with one exception -- the eyebrows needs to be heavier. To achieve that, I'm going to have to hand-paint the skin map. I can do that, but ... not today. Also, the word on Curt Gable is: the boy isn't so muscular. He's rangy, very slim. So I'll be returning to Gable in a few days, and you'll see a leaner character there. But the Mischa Petrov has the stamp of approval, so ... that's another one done! (See the first round of designs on these two here.)

Jade, 26 September

***Posted by MK because the internet is AWOL. Intermittent crap. Be warned, guys: our connection is going to be in and out for a week or two, as of this point: Telstra (or whatever) is doing a lot of work on the landlines in this area. And as you know, if you've been looking at the "poster notes" on these journal entries in my looooong adventure through the world of CG, 3D and digital, even at the best of times we can find ourselves with dialup speeds in this area. This is why MK has been making many posts for me, since Day One -- Keegan has the fast connection, not me! (This should change in the near future, when the cables or whatever are updated, and they stop working on them. At least, s'wot Telstra promises.) Credit where it's due: this blog would not have been possible without the support of a pal with decent internet. Because ours sucks. We moved into this area about six months before I got into Studio and blogging about it, and I almost quit right there: DAYS to download something from the DAZ store, at one point. Argh. Thank gods for friends when you need 'em! 

Angels and demons

All uploaded at large size: click to see details...

There's a legend that tells of a strange ruin in the wilderness, and the demon who lives there ... a creature of surpassing beauty, wrought in liquid gold. None who see him in the last rays of the setting sun ever return. So the legend says, they don't want to return to the domain of the mortal and the mundane. Is he an demon, or is he an angel? Remember, all demons were once angels who were caught up in a disagreement, and cast out. Some of them fell further than others. Some seem to be wrought of liquid gold...

(DAZ Michael 4; Albane skinmap; Elven Prince hair; Wood God kirtle; Sabby eyes; Demon Wings; Elven Prince armband; my own textures applied to everything. Ten lights set to get the sunset effect, with one of DM's trees, and the set is Powerage's Fantasy Structure.)

Jade, September 25

***Posted by MK because the internet is AWOL. Intermittent crap. Be warned, guys: our connection is going to be in and out for a week or two, as of this point: Telstra (or whatever) is doing a lot of work on the landlines in this area. And as you know, if you've been looking at the "poster notes" on these journal entries in my looooong adventure through the world of CG, 3D and digital, even at the best of times we can find ourselves with dialup speeds in this area. This is why MK has been making many posts for me, since Day One -- Keegan has the fast connection, not me! (This should change in the near future, when the cables or whatever are updated, and they stop working on them. At least, s'wot Telstra promises.) Credit where it's due: this blog would not have been possible without the support of a pal with decent internet. Because ours sucks. We moved into this area about six months before I got into Studio and blogging about it, and I almost quit right there: DAYS to download something from the DAZ store, at one point. Argh. Thank gods for friends when you need 'em! 

Finding the face of a science fiction hero

The Bryce landscape ... those misty mountains I uploaded yesterday ... reminded me strongly of a place called Ballyntyre -- "Bally," to the folks who live there -- on the continent of South Atlantis, on a world called Rethan. It's a small town in the boonies, surrounded by temperate rainforest. And there's a woman called Eve Lang who lives there -- runs a business called Roadrunner Towing and Salvage. She used to fly medevac ships back in the corporate wars ... she rescued Kevin Jarrat, who'd been left for dead, got him to a healer called Harry Del. And the rest is history. In fact, it's the enduring cult classic of gay science fiction, Death's Head. (A small caveat, before you click these links: these are adult books for adult readers. If glbt content upsets you, best not click. But if you love a hot and heavy SF romp, you just hit paydirt.)

Oh, yes! The challenge: put a face to one of the strongest female characters in fiction. A woman who's got what it takes to fly gunships. Big, strong, tough, and yet 200% woman. Not a kid; still in Military Airlift Reserves -- quite capable of reactivating her old commission and putting in for a transfer ... quite capable of flying the Blue Raven gunship.

If you haven't read Scorpio and Aphelion, well, sorry for the plot spoiler there. But you knew it was going in this direction -- the roadsigns are ten feet tall, in the unabridged Death's Head, right?

So here is Eve Lang, who literally scraped Jarrat off the asphalt in an alley in Chell, Rethan's old, smoggy, corrupt spaceport city. Remembering the scene in Scorpio where the gunships literally held a skycity suspended while the Ravens were in the bowels of it?! The challenge was to put the face to the woman who did that job.

Mel Keegan's verdict was a resounding "Whoa, that's Evelyn!"

Next on the agenda: Yvette McKinnen, the undisputed queen of cybernetics, who was able to debug a super-carrier before it blew itself to smithereens -- and then took on the corruption of Earth's own politics. Brilliant, tres chic, and an unlikely ally of Jarrat and Stone.

Yep -- I'm working on the images illustrating the NARC website. The characters and locations are coming to life in 3D, one by one. Loooong way to go, yet, but we're getting there, and I really am happy with this character.

Jade, September 24

***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?!!!

Tarzan ... and misty Bryce mountains

As promised, something sensual and beautiful ... Tarzan, in fact. You know, Tarzan wasn't born at the age of 30! He grew up in the rainforest, and there was a time he was 18, and, uh ... yeah. Have you ever read the Tarzan stories -- the original ones? They're amazing. In its day, this must have been right out there on the leading edge of fantasy.

So here's a young Tarzan, and what's spectacular about these shots (from my perspective) is the WATER! None of that is a preset. I made that water from scratch. You create a primitive -- a plain. You give it a color, set the transparency ... give in a displacement map so it ripples ... set the reflectivity, and so on. You create a ground plane underneath it, so you can see through it. That effect is terrific ... sooo realistic, and so beautiful.

See the reflections and the ripples? Click to view these at 800 pixels wide, and you'll get a better view of what I mean!

The other thing I've been doing is playing in Bryce. All the above are DAZ renders, but these are Bryce:


And again, I am soooo pleased with this, because nothing is a preset. The misty mountain landscape was done from scratch, using about 8 terrains, all made by me.  

2024 edit: I could wish the Bryce engine were faster. It's a neat engine, but even with a big, powerful computer, it's so clunky, I can barely get it to work. At the same time as which, you can get into the other landscape generator and do things in Terragen that will astonish. I did these a couple of years ago, and ... sigh. I do like Bryce, I just don't have the time to fuss about with it...

Jade, September 23

***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?!!!

The view from the roof

One heck of a view from a 3D roof, out over a futuristic 3D city. This was done using Dystopia City Blocks (from DAZ), and I made the rooftop and parapet using pieces from the SFCS Science Fiction Construction Set. The sky and skyline were rendered separately in Bryce; the lights were set up in DAZ to compliment the sky colors, and the sky was changed three times to simulate different times of day.

These were uploaded at 1000 pixels wide -- click on them to see them fill-size ... check out the detail ... there's a park down there, trees and all!

So, where are you standing? I can tell you exactly! You're in the city of Venice in the northern tropics of Darwin's World. The simulation grounds are way off in the southwest. Fairview Sector and the seashore are behind you and a off to the left. You're standing in the airpark right on top of the NARC building. The club where Jesse Lawrence dances -- since he's given up being a Companion, and left Avalon to live in his city -- is downtown -- right before you there.

Imagine heavy, sultry air, tropical humidity, the squawk of parrots and the distant rumble of heavy engines ... the spaceport is just south of here. And Darwin's World is about two weeks' flight time from Earth in one direction, and a couple of weeks from Avalon in the other. Colonel Bill Dupre parks on this roof, and this is where the shuttles bring officers like Jarrat and Stone when they're on Darwin's.

>>>> Adobe/Macromedia Flash movie removed: gone are the days when anything on the interwebs supported that format! Which was a pity, because one could animate in it. In fact, one did. Sigh.

This is so cool, you gotta love it! )If you're wondering what all this is about, and if you're all growed up and everything, you could do worse than ... check this out. The only caveat I need to make is that this is not kidstuff.)

Right now, a lot of the artwork I'm doing is for the new website, so these books are very much on my mind. Also, we're about to take on the monster job of processing all the books through to go to Kindle. So again, this SF series is never far from my mind.

But tomorrow it's going to be something very different ... grand fantasy and breathless beauty. See you then!

Jade, 21 September

***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?!!!

Tropical paradises and SF characters...

EDIT: many images are gone -- they vanished with one of those subscriptions like Photobucket or whatever. I can't get them back, so ... sigh. I'll preserve the text, and maybe one day I'll come back and re-render whatever these pictures were! 

So interesting to look back from 2024 and see the way a character developed over time. The original post, here, was the first outing for the character who would eventually become Curt Gable. Fascinating, but the next evolution (refinement??) took the character design here ...

... and he continued to evolve, until by 2019, this, below, was the Curt Gable we came to visualize in the part of the Athena's Second Officer:

Now, that's still Michael 4, but this is an Iran render; he's wearing a Genesis 3 hairdo (yes, you can fit G3 hair to Michael 4 -- it works), and the skinmap has now been switched out to Jagger, with a few tweaks. It's actually the same skinmap Jarrat wears, but those tweaks make all the difference. If you want to see more on this character, click here: "Call him Curt."

Okay ... now -- back to the original post, and we'll take a look at how Curt Gable started out: 

ooOOooOOooOOoo

My imagination is running away to tropical islands ... and gorgeous hunks in exotic fantasy tales ... because I'm still too sick to think properly. Messing about with art is about as far as my brain will go. Apologies to all who are waiting for me to catch up with myself and be brilliant with

 complex jobs. I can't make it happen right now: editing requires more braincells than I seem to possess. And how I have FOUR editing jobs waiting for me, so I knoooow I have to get myself back into gear. A few days, guys. Bear with me.

Resurrected today are two more of the NARC characters: the Russian XO of the NARC-Athena, and the pilot who's next in seniority right behind him. Mischa Petrov looks to be giving Curt Gable a rough time. Then again, he gives everybody a rough time -- if you know the books, he's "the man you love to hate!"

I do have a couple more characters designed, and will debut them in the next couple of days. The above at characters designed for the NARC series, by Mel Keegan. Very adult science fiction which is coming to life in 3D art, while you watch...

The wolf, in the fantasy renders above, is a great model -- but no way can I get the fur to load, so what you're seeing here is the best I can do with textures and displacement maps. It's fine if you don't look too closely, but it doesn't stand up so well when you get very close to the model. I'm still waiting for an answer from DAZ's tech support about why the fur won't load ... will keep you up to date with how that turns out.

Now, back to the couch with the blankie and the pillow --!

Jade, 20 September

***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?!!!

3D alpine snows, and website design

Edit: as in a good number of the 2009 and 2010 posts, the images have vanished along with a dropped subscription to something like Photobucket, or whatever it was. Sorry about that ... nothing to be done about it. Sigh. So I'll paste in a few other images that DO exist, to make up for the "grab bag" that has gone forever. (The first two of these were book covers I painted in 2016.)

More or less a grab-bag today, because I feel horrific ... not well. Need blankie and pillow and world to away and leave me alone -- but it's not likely to, so you "solider on" regardless!

Two things to blog about ... and it depends on your perspective, which is the most important If you're trying to get Bryce and DAZ to shake hands and work in concert, then you'll be more interested in the renders above. If you're more interested in gorgeous heroes and cutting edge science fiction, then you'll get more of a buzz from this:

Yes -- at long, long last can tackle the job of building the NARC site ... the website absolutely devoted to Mel Keegan's NARC novels. can get into this properly because I've recently been able to recover the characters that were designed 6 - 10 months ago. They were lost due to a software malfunction which meant couldn't open any of the old project files. Then I was able to recover them ... the characters are back full force. Now, have the dimensions to work to for the art. It'll take hundreds of renders to flesh out the website, and I'm going to enjoy this!Working with alien cities, spaceships, super-carriers, exotic heroes -- oh, yes! The website won't happen overnight, but it'll be along, and I'll keep you posted as the work comes together.

The renders that went up first are more interesting to artists trying to wrap their heads around Bryce. You could be forgiven for thinking they were all rendered in Bryce ... not true!

The first render was done in Bryce -- the one with the stormy sky, and twilight. Then I wanted to stand Michael 4 in the landscape, and believe it, it's faaaaar easier to export the terrain out of Bryce and import it into DAZ, and add the other scene elements there. So this is what you do:

Design the terrain, get it looking juuuuust right. Then export it at top quality, with TIFF bumps and texture files. Then import this into DAZ, and import all the rest of the bits to make the image. This one uses DM's fir tree, plus Michael 4, wh's wearing Neftis's GQ Event hair, and the Morphing jacket, and the pants and shoes from the Lockwood set. The roll-neck sweater is actually part of the jacket prop.

Someone needs to design some fantastic sweaters for Michael 4 ... Argyle, Fairisle, cable...

Actually, I really like the way DAZ renders this terrain. Bryce generated it easily, and DAZ loves it. I'm going to hang onto this one, for anytime I need a really good mountainside. You do need a bit of processor power, because in the high-rez settings used to get the exported OBJ this detailed, it's a 52B object ... then you add the textures.

Jade, 19 September

***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?!!!