The vampire is alive and well! Plus an 'Enchanted Pool' ...

If you have a memory like a heffalump, you might actually remember the vampire Amadeus ... you know, Tails from the Crypt -- yes, that Amadeus, and his smart-alecky bodyguard.

The last time I rendered these characters was 2012, at a time when I could juuuust about raytrace, if you didn't mind waiting till tomorrow for your picture. The thing of it is, a lot of my best ideas came up in that era, were explored and set aside ... then came the days of better technique and so forth, long after these good ideas had been spent.

So I'm looking back through the old files (I never throw anything away), and having a lot of fun playing with ancient concepts and characters, bringing them up to date with the best technique I've been able to learn, and everything I can squeeze out of the existing software and hardware (which I admit, lands me back in the wonderful world of artwork, because photorealism is a stretch I can't quite make! Which isn't to say the current generation of renders aren't very nice indeed: they are).

I'll be coming back to Amadeus ... I want to tweak the face a little bit. Let's see what I can do with him -- we'll revisit the vampire soon. Maybe pose him with the conjurer, the snake charmer, the mercenaries. Neat!

Also today --

Rather than shooting for a whole landscape, I thought, what the heck, frame something small in Bryce 7 Pro, see if you can do something like a rockpool. Not too bad, actually. Again, nowhere near photorealism, but as a piece of art, not so bad at all. So I thought, "If art is what we're doing, let's try for "storybook picture" ... let's ladle on the pixie dust, do a real enchanted pool in an enchanted forest. So I switched to DAZ and Photoshop for this:

Well worth having a look at that one full sized! See the glitter on the water and all. Storybook art, and at large size it looks very nice indeed! You expect to see the fairies fluttering around...