Would you please retrieve your android --?

A little science fiction humor in DAZ and Photoshop: "Paging Mr, Amadeus De La Rocca. Will you please come and retrieve your android. Fees apply.

Technically it's too hot to be doing this, but I am so bored! The a/c is running around the clock, so it's probably okay to run the computers at high-throttle. Soooo...

The story behind the picture goes like this: First, you ought to recognize the immortal vampire, Amadeus. The only thing he's done as he ages 200 years into our future is dye his hair, because he'll stick out like the proverbial sore whatever in 2220, with white hair. He thought it was a brilliant idea to order an android personal assistant, to be delivered via the spaceport ... but they come in unprogrammed, and something in the spaceport tracking systems gets their systems going. His new PA turned itself on and wandered off, wreaking all kinds of havoc. Amadeus was trying to get parking (never easy) when he heard his name over the public address:

"Paging Mr. Amadeus de la Rocca, would you please come and retrieve your android. Fees apply." Uh huh ... and you should recognize the patrol officer from the scene a few days ago! This is the nightshift at the spaceport. Takes a hard-nosed cop with a lifetime of experience with people (not to mention androids and, uh, vampires) to sort out these situations! So here's poor Amadeus trying to explain his way out of this, thinking, "Oh, I'm getting to old for this crap," while the nice officer explains that it is his fault, even though he wasn't even there ... because he neglected to specify the proper EM shielding for his purchase before it was shipped ... snarfle.

The challenge was to make two versions of Michael 4 look real -- then make Victoria 4 look like a machine, a toaster, whatever. I think I succeeded. See its face in closeup! However, its name is Betsy, and when it's been programmed it'll be a lot more lifelike. I'll render that, too...

Didn't do Terragen today, because I stayed playing with the Dystopia City Blocks (in DAZ), and then on a whim sent them to Bryce (Why? Because you can, and I was bored). Boy, what a surprise. Here's the city skyline --

Dawn:

Noon:

Sundown:

And then came the huge surprise ... because although I bought the Dystopia City Blocks in a sale about nine years ago, I had no idea they did this in Bryce:

Night, after sundown:

This shot doesn't show the sky too well -- it's actually late twilight, the sun is well down. Here's the thing, though: the city lights came on automatically when I put the sun under the horizon! 😲

Now, that was a whopper of a surprise, and it got me inspired to do this, snarfle:

Couldn't resist. Rendered the whole thing in Bryce and shipped it into Serif to have the text overlays. I enjoyed this project enormously ... it only took an hour. (No, there is no such writer as "Phoebe Q. Dillbottle." But if that novel is as funny as it ought to be, I'd read it...)

As I said, that only blew off an hour, including the Bryce render! So instead of twiddling my thumbs I went back into Photoshop and played with false color experiments:

That was actually quite interesting, and I learned a lot. It's not art, really ... you throw in masses of overlays and underlays, filters and blends and ... on and on, and you get some weird results, and eventually it gels into something that's quite attractive. Not a photo, but not a painting.

If you want to muck about with this yourself, be my guest:

There's the source photo (from my phone) and the sketch, at full size, ready to go. Have fun! Now ... I gotta get these machines turned off. You could fry eggs on them, and it can't be good for them. It's 110 degrees right outside the back door -- beside which, it's also dinner time! 

A (cute!) little demon, and a glorious evening in Terragen

Who says little demons can't be cute as all get out? This one certainly is ... it just turned out this way! When I set the lights up to simulate sunset, twilight, night, the way he "caught the light" took me by surprise and he morphed from menacing life form to people-shy cutie in an instant! So --

Here's another look at him, bathing in the moonlight outside the ruin where he lives, and...

A wide shot of the whole ruin, which is an enormous standing set by Powerage. It might have come from Renderosity ... truth is, I haven't looked at it or worked with it since 2010, and I can't remember! I've been going through old projects, old files, dating back to the very, very early years when I couldn't even raytrace without triggering a resounding crash!!! to the desktop. I had some good ideas, but not the skill to do them justice. So, here and there, something catches my interest and we're coming back to an old idea with the skills of a lot of extra years to make the images over into what they should have been.

I never did anything much with the demon wings because there's a major problem with them: there are no textures, so you're on your own (fair enough), but there isn't even an image map for them, to give you the ability to paint your own...

Even now, I don't have the skill or tools to open up an OBJ 3D model file, read its surface, paint from scratch, then make an .mtl file, or whatever they're called, to control it. That's up on the next level, where this art form turns into modeling. I'm "just" a digital painter, not a 3D model maker. So... best I can do is put a generic image and texture map on the wings, then paint them in Photoshop. (Also, the wings are made "all of a piece," you can't set different maps on the membrane and bone. They model is just exactly what you see here. Nice, though, and it does give me an excuse to paint! Yes, the hair is also mostly hand painted, and a lot of the moonlight was done in Photoshop too.)

It's actually far too hot to be doing much of anything, but I did play in Terragen this morning:

Terragen: evening skies

Terragen: perfect evening on the lake

Terragen: sunset colors on the lake

Essentially the same landscape with different weather conditions, different time of day, and (duh) I flooded it for a shallow lake, then turned the clouds back on. 😀

Am enjoying the hell out of Terragen. One day, when I've upgraded my hardware, I'll invest in the paid version and will be able to do the kind of thing you see in the on-line galleries. Have made this promise to myself. And now ... back to my book. Too hot and tired to do more today, but am pleased with these. Dang, that little demon is cute!

So endeth February, on this side of the dateline. Two months or 2019 already gone! 😵

A rough night at the spaceport, and a flight to the Italian Alps!

This one was inspired by the train of thought I was in yesterday, when I had to render the cafe scene in three layers and paste it together like a jigsaw. I was (!) thinking about rendering in layers, and when I saw the Bryce image that became the background for this shot, a scenario popped into my mind. The character is new: a hard-nosed patrol officer who works at the spaceport. Very neat. It's based on this one, of course, from February 5:

Lots of rendering and painting later, it's very much more dramatic!

Also ... a flight to the Italian Alps, in Terragen:

The only thing I'd wanted, that I couldn't make Terragen 4 do was to put a chop on the mirror surface of the river/lake. Nothing I did raised a chop on the surface, so ... what the hey. It was a still day when we went flight seeing, right? Right. Next time, I'll go back and experiment till I can get a choppy surface.

Note: the experiment to see if I could generate a terrain on Bryce, export it as an OBJ and have Terragen work with it went phhht. Terragen seems to require imported OBJ models to arrive compete with their texture/surface mapping. And yes, I did generate all the maps in Bryce prior to export, but Terragen is incompatible, can't read the file format. Well, fiddlesticks.

But since I'd designed the terrain, I went ahead and rendered it in Bryce. I managed to squeeze this out of the old program:

As Bryce goes, not so bad. Better than most. But it's not photo-realistic, as even the quickest, most neophyte render in Terragen is.  You can almost buy the spiky "noise" on the island as fir trees, which is the intention...

But here's the rub: I got all the Terragen scenes in the same amount of time it took to make Bryce do this one simple image. Ack.

Very, very hot weather is coming: the forecast is for a 100+ degrees every day till next weekend, so I might not got back to this for a few days. Don't want to cook the computers!

A French cafe, a mystery at Ponte Maggiore ... too many islands, but great clouds!

This was very nearly "the render that didn't happen" ... I knew that eventually I'd come up with a render that just could -- not -- be done. Or, not with my software and hardware! This seems to be it, because what you see here was composited from three layered images, when the original configuration stalled at 42% ... forever.

Initially, I had two buildings across the street, hit by spotlights; two walls to make a corner of a little French cafe; a transparent plane with bump map and reflection values set, to be the window glass; table and chair; bottle, glasses and plate, with transparency mapping on bottle and glasses; a Michael 4 (same dude as Amadeus, but with a honey matte on the Akaste hair); there was a lovely transparency map on the shirt too. It will render as a deep shadow map image, but as soon as you turn on raytracing, no joy. Soooo...

I took out everything but the buildings in the background, set lights and camera and rendered that, then re-imported the image as a backdrop and deleted the buildings. It still wouldn't render the remainder, so I did the bottle, glasses and food separately ... then did the table, chair and character against the backdrop -- with the window glass in place and reflecting ... and just pasted the bottle and glasses in!

Even then, it was an hour to raytrace the character, his hair, and the reflection in the glass, at which point I was so sick of this process, when the render turned out to be pretty awful, I almost chucked it in the bin. Sigh. Into Photoshop, and paint. And paint. And paint. And of course now I'm glad I did, because the nett result is rather good -- you just wouldn't believe how much painting it took to save it!

Harrumph. Anyway, this cafe scene came out of ideas spinning off a render I did yesterday that gave me phenomenal problems,  but was fixable inside the render:

The problem with the car was that it looked like a huge slab of plastic. The human eye expects to see reflections in highly-polished Duco, and there was nothing because, of course, the 3D stage is not the real world: there is nothing to be reflected. Soooo, I went in and used a photo of some buildings on the foreshore as a reflection map. Now the car looked like a bloody mirror. So I went back in and added a displacement map to make it look like there are the usual million tiny imperfections in the surface, which got rid of the mirror effect. Put in the sky image as the reflection map for the windows ... and so on, and on, and on. Aarrggh. In the end, it came out right, but ye gods--!! Admittedly, it is a very complex render, with a vast set.

And it got me thinking: there's a story in here! Someone went to meet a friend at the bridge on the canal, but all they found was a pair of women's fashion shoes, abandoned. Shook up, our hero goes to a nearby cafe to make a call, wait for a detective to arrive, and have a fortifying glass or two. Et voile. Thereby hangs a tale.

More misadventures than adventures in Terragen in the last day or two: island creation is giving me strife (or a challenge):

Safe to say, I'm not doing it right yet. There has to be a way, and I have a few ideas. It's not as simple as making very tall islands in a common "hightfield terrain," then flooding it: too many islands!!! And it's not as simple as making a "power fractal" terrain, slapping some heavy detailing on it to erode it or whatever ... again, you don't get one island, you get a thousand. I don't want a thousand. I want ONE. Tomorrow, I'll see if I can make a credible island in Bryce, export it as an OBJ (this much, I can do), then import it into Terragen (it should do this), and (the bold experiment) see if I can have Terragen apply its surface shaders to the OBJ island/terrain/mountain structure, to work up the color and texture. I don't know if Terragen will do this, but it ought to, and it's worth a shot! If not, well, back to the drawing board!

But this came out reasonably well:

Same project as the "better" island scene, with the camera flown up to about 10,000 meters and tilted to look down on the clouds ... then, the sun repositioned for noon-ish, and evening. That's not too bad at all -- and I'm pleased to report, I'm doing this on my own, without chickening out and running back to the tutorials! Getting there. Slowly.

The Barbarian ... Frank Frazetta style. (And flying Terragen to orbit!)

The Barbarian ... Frank Frazetta style

This might be the best single piece of work I've ever done, for dynamism, impact, technique across many levels and several programs (rendered in DAZ Studio, painted in Photoshop and Krita). It's a hybrid, neither completely a digital painting, nor completely a 3D render. (I've uploaded it at 2000 pixels high ... please do see it at full size!) It doesn't even look like a render --

What inspired me? Looking through the Icon art book. Seriously. I've always been a huge fan of the art of Frank Frazetta. His figures might not be as 'correct' as the textbook-perfect forms of artists like Boris and Julie Bell, but there's something about his work that connects with the viewer, a sense of immediacy, and kind of 'smack in the chops' impact, where the picture jumps off the page and hits you before you know what's happened! Stuff like this:

Fank Frazetta: yes copyright ... call this a free ad for Frank...

Frank Frazetta, as above. Free ad. Okay. 

Look, don't take my word for it. Go over to the Frank Frazetta gallery pages, or get on the facebook page, visit the Frazetta Museum site or even go to Pinterest, and ... see for yourself, if you don't already know what I'm rattling on about here! For me, Frazetta has always been one of the beacons of dynamic art. He was so different, not merely from Boris and Julie, but from virtually every other artist you can mention, and the dynamism speaks to me.

It was that dynamism I was after ... and the color control, symmetry, and so forth ... in 'The Barbarian.' Uh, Conan Who --? Nudge, wink. We'll certainly come back to this barbarian later. I can actually see him cast as something like Tarzan. Hmm. Lemme think a minute...

Also -- further Adventures in Terragen, as I negotiate the interface and find out what I can do. I was prepared to be amazed, and I am being amazed! Yesterday I worked --

From a patch of mud right at your feet (a fractal procedural terrain, for teeny detail):

...to a short from low orbit, right on the edge of the atmosphere of an exoplanet:

...and then back down to Earth for a 'beauty shot' where I was after something like the highlands of Scotland:

...Okay, the mountains are a bit too pointy to be Scotland! I know, it ain't perfect, but that does look like heather on the crags, and I do know how I did it, so I can do it again. Today, I'll experiment with water once more. The plan is to generate rocky islands in a sullen ocean under brooding, overcast skies (which itself will be a major project for a newbie like self), then drive the camera way up above the clouds, looking down from altitude, as if from an aircraft, and render the clouds from above. Now let's see if I can do it. In another week, I ought to be ready to work with 'objects' -- trees, boulders, plants --

Then the experiment will be how long the renders take, and if this little computer can actually do the work. If adding a tree (much less a forest) blows out the render time to a day, or several, I'll defer that kind of work for another time, when I can afford a much more powerful system. One thing I don't want to do is literally burn out this little thing. It's still new, and not woo wimpy  -- eight core processors -- but one thing about being disabled is, one learns to count the cost of things. I only bought this a few months ago, when my old laptop died after eight years of loyal service. I can't buy another computer (at those prices!) for some time. So, caution will be my watchword.

Fantasy hunk, SF, landscapes, spaceships -- the works!

Was browsing through the big Icon art book -- the Art of Frank Frazetta -- which put me in the mood to do a "sword and sorcery" style barbarian. This one is a beaut, somewhere between Frazetta and Boris in style, worked in DAZ (just a raytrace; I haven't yet gotten back to LuxRender) and Photoshop (a lot of painting). Very happy with this ... and will come back to the barbarian in days and renders to come. The skin map is superb: Atlas, by SAV, for good old Michael 4. Most of the hair is hand painted, and .. mmm, very happy with the result. Do see it at full size: I uploaded it at 2000 pixels high, so -- enjoy.

Also: more Adventures in Terragen! Been busy in the last couple of days, but didn't upload yesterday due to having a Very Major Migraine in the late afternoon. Right now, am juuust beginning to really drive Terragen, not get taken for a tide by it. For instance...

I wanted an upland meadow, something like the "Heidi" landscape:

Yep, got it! Then, a real, genuine lake in the hills:

No problem! Then, something like the high mountains of Central Asia:

Yep, can do. Then, the sun rising over the Takla Makan region:

Oh, yes, this is doable. Cloudscapes to order? Here we go:

I've worked through two of the tutorials and am off on my own, playing with everything to see what it does. It's huge fun! And Terragen does in minutes what Bryce won't do in weeks. 😁

Okay, so Bryce does have it's uses, though...

Bryce 7 Pro: Exoplanet system

I did this in Bryce, in a few minutes, and painted the starfields in Krita, which has this fantastic "star field" brush. That came out well, so, inspired to stop trying to make Bryce make earthlike landscapes, I went for a thoroughly alien world:

I call that one "Night Patrol," and ... yeah, okay, Bryce has its uses. But making fantastic, realilstic landscapes on planet Earth isn't one of them! A handful of people can make it do that ... heaven alone knows how. Beats me. And very few software forms beat me. Anyway, we have the best of all worlds now. I'm heading into "fractal procedural terrains" with Terragen tomorrow. Oooh, ah!

Irresistible rascals, and ... let there be landscapes -- good ones!!

First, I wanted a beautiful picture (or, what's the point in bothering?!), second, I wanted a challenge, something to stretch the creative fibers, within the long-established perimeters of well-understood software. The experiment in this render isn't even visible ... but the trick took thirty minutes off the render time!! You can't even see what I did, but the result is a whopping saving in time. You get half an hour back, and that's actually pretty considerable. Then...

That face is 100% painted. This is not from the 3D render at all. I wasn't happy with the face as it rendered up, and didn't have the time to start over, so I thought, "What the hey, I'm supposed to be clever with this stuff, so paint." And I have to say, I'm extremely pleased with the result.

And I do love the depth of field  games I'm playing these days...

Yep, it's soft focus, only the grass heads in focus. Over-painting on everything to get this texture and saturation. The sky started life as a very quick Bryce render (almost the only thing Bryce is good for...), and then a Photoshop fantasia both before and after rendering the content. Nice.

Well, the title of this blog is Adventures in 3D, right? So let's do some adventuring! I call this one, "Assassins on the Job." I wanted the archetypal "irresistible rascals" here. Mission accomplished I think.

And now for something entirely different:

Yes, these are my work. No, they're not photos. And before you race to the conclusion that I've suddenly been able to make Bryce 7 Pro do what it's supposed to do, but won't ...

Honestly I got tired of wasting my time with it, trying to generate realistic terrestrial landscapes. I can make SF worlds, no problem. I can get storybook landscapes that would suit a children's book down to the ground (and they do have their own merit). But I just cannot get Bryce to make a believable earthly landscape that has the photographic quality one expects today. So....

I threw up my hands, looked around for an alternative (on the firm understanding that I can't afford to run Vue, and don't have the hardware to run the program eitherer). Answer: Terragen 4.

Now, years and years ago Dave used to play with the original Terragen, when it was still in its shakedown stage. I was always drooling over his landscapes, green with envy. Well --

What you see here, above, was done inside the first two hours of downloading and installing the free version of Terragen 4. My new laptop (the old one died) will run it (just), and I'm working my way through the interface, learning it the way I do, hands on. It's good for my brain.

Now, before you get excited, Terragen does a lot of this stuff automatically. I have 2% of an idea of what I'm doing at the moment, and it's still taking me for a ride some of the time. For instance, that glorious blue haze ... is there because I can't yet figure out how to turn it off! So, if you're going to get "Smokey Mountain" pictures, you might as well enjoy it, while you learn! So, you have Sunset Mountains, Arctic Sundown, and Blue Mountains ... each final render took about 12 minutes on the laptop, and ... 😀

Now, I just have to learn how to control Terragen properly, make it do what I want. We can save Bryce for fast-rendering backdrop skies or making alien planets. Cooool.