Here's a real "storybook" image ... and it's irresistible. Consulting Mage ... with Dragonling, of course! It's a reworking of an old, old picture, and much better this time --
I should have done more with the dragons, but somehow I never got around to it. Time to remedy that, I think. (One thing about being disabled: it sucks, immensely, but with so much time on my hands, I have all the time in the world to do art.) I did two renders of this: deep shadow map and raytrace, both at 2000 wide. And it's one of those rare, rare pictures were the deep shadow map looks better! Then it was into Photoshop for loads of painting to bring up the colors and contrast and highlights, and all the things that the crappy 3DLite render engine build into the old DAZ Studio doesn't do very well.
Yes, I know, I need to get back into LuxRender. Soon. (Soon as my head stops aching, perhaps: it's been aching non-stop for a loooong time now.)
Anyway, I wanted to play in Bryce 7 Pro some more, and the final result of today's work is this:
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| Bryce 7 Pro: Rescue on Mars |
That's not too bad, as a stab at realistic daylight, a believable landscape, shallow water through which you can see the bottom -- I call it "Low Tide." Fair enough. Nothing startling, but I did learn a lot, and the most notable part of the process was that I hand-painted the map from which the terrain is built. Oooh, ah. Well, you gotta start somewhere, right? But then it dawned on me --
If you turn OFF the clouds, delete the water, and switch out the textures for red rock, and turn the sun to an orange cast --
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| Bryce 7 Pro -- Martian Landscape |
Anyway ... Welcome to Mars! Which is also a very good YA novel by James Blish, incidentally...
