Desperado ... also, "the sky is burning," and an exercise in digital compositing

Yep, it's the same model you saw yesterday on the historical romance book cover ... just lit differently and with a bit of painting: the beard line on this skinmap is actcually printed into the map, which means it's flush with the skin ... which a natural beard never is. So I got in there and painted it so that it -- isn't. Duh. I also painted the eyes a little, and the hair a bit, to get more out of it. Gotta say, I really do like this character. I might send this to LuxRender and see what happens. (Sometimes Lux makes a complete muck of a character; sometimes the picture "pops" and you're astonished. Won't know till we try. If Lux doesn't do it well, we'll come back to raytracing (which this is) and just do more along these lines.)

Nice! Call him Antonio, I think ... because he makes me think Desperado. In fact, that's the title of the picture. 😉

Also -- if you were ever in any doubts that photography can also be art...

This is what happened in the sky on Wednesday evening, when Dave and I were on our way home from the mountains. We got back to Tailem Bend, tired and hungry ... decided to stop off at Subway (!) for a bite and a rest because home was still 90 minutes away. Hardly had we walked out of the gas station forecourt when this began to happen! These shots were taken from the aptly named Cliff Street (or is it Cliff Road), right on the river bend.

Speaking of which -- I've posted to the travel blog: Destination: Grampians. Well worth a look. I could tell you I rendered most of those shots in Terragen, but I won't, nudge, wink.

And I was going through more of the old, old files from years ago, and stumbled over a project that was done in something like 2011 or 2012. These were a team effort:

Mike built the physical model (it's a hobby of his ... and he sometimes gets paid to do it. He does real 3D ... in the real three dimensional world we actually live in. He has a modeling blog, World in Miniature...). He took one of the photos from the window of a plane on a flight long ago; I took the sky shot from a hilltop not far from home; and Dave rendered the desert background in Vue. Then the model was photographed from various angles against a plain green background, and combined in Photoshop by me. The result is pretty spectacular, if I say so myself! I'd completely forgotten these pictures were done, but I never throw anything away. The only folders, on the old harddrives, do contain a heck of a lot of dross, but there's also hidden treasure.

More soon!

New take on an old theme ... and an exercise in light and shade

The second image here is called Lost and Forgotten. A helmet and sword, lost in the woods for so long, they've corroded away ... which conjures stories, doesn't it?! I wanted to know if I could achieve realistic, credible daylight in the same colors, tones, angles, shadow density etc., as a real, live background photo. The object was to get an image where you're not sure where the real photo ends and the 3D, CG, stuff begins. I think I did pretty well with this ...especially when I tell you, it's just an old fashioned raytrace, I haven't yet gone back to LuxRender. Not too shabby, that.

(The trick is, incidentally, to do 95% of it with one light, and just use a subtle fill-in "sky light" to un-crush the most crushed of the shadows. This really does have one light on it -- a pale yellow distant light standing in for the sun. The effect is very convincing: the foreground looks to have the same lighting as the real-world background. That's a big of woodland at Boroka Lookout, about 800m above Halls Gap, in the Grampians ... neat.)

The book cover art is an old, old idea, from April 2010! While leafing through the old projects I occasionally come across something that could be done soooo much better now...

There is is with fonts, log line and what have you; and here is the original version:

Yes, it's a great idea, but only so much was doable nine years ago. Add in all that experience and skill, a new computer, extra software. I rather like this pirate dude, so well come back to him next time and see what we can do with him too! (She, on the other hand, looks like a right, royal pain in the posterior. One of those "fiery, tempestuous heroines" that would be smothered in their sleep in reality -- or dumped overboard, before they drive everyone nuts. 😜 )

More soon. Am sorting the Grampians photos, and will start to post them to the travel blog very soon. Hehehe ... I just compared my photo work with Shutterstock and Alamy. Mine are better. Can't tell you how gratifying that is!)

Back on duty! Photography can be art too. It often is...

Photography can be art, too. I could tell you I rendered these, above, in Terragen ... but it'd be a fib, of course. The truth is, Dave and I took three days out, packed the cameras and went to the Grampians, the amazing mountains east of the border...

We took several thousand pictures, and I'm just beginning to look through them. Whoa! Some of them are so amazing, they straddle the line between photography and art ... and none of these you see here today have been into Photoshop. I cropped some, and gave the values a tweak, in Irfanview...

We were only in Hall's Gap for two days ... I wish it could have been two years! I'd like to photograph the Grampians in all four seasons (apparently the native Aboriginal people recognize six seasons in this region, which they know as Gariwerd. It took an incoming Scotsman to realize how much these mountains reminded him of homeland and promptly rename them) and every time of day -- and also in both telephoto and macro ...

The truth is, I could go entirely nuts with the cameras in this place and not come home for years. I could also jump in the car and go back there every other week: it was magic! The only downside is that from Adelaide it's a 5.5 hour drive to get to Hall's Gap, even if you don't stop ... and if you don't stop, you will kill yourself with fatigue. The Duke's Highway is incredibly long, and the trucks on it are incredibly big, so...

Above: outbound via the Tailem Bend region. Middle: follow the train tracks due east, while listening to Freddie Mercury, K.D. Lang, Johnny Cash, Hobo Jim, Slim Dusty ... ABBA, Guardians of the Galaxy, Pirates of the Caribbean, Puss in Boots, anything, everything, and keep 'em coming, because they keep you awake! Then finally you cross the border, keep on going for another eon ... at last, hang a right at Horsham and run south into the Wartook Valley, and ... there ... they ... are. The mountains rise right out of the Victorian pancake landscape (which doubled for Texas in the Ghostrider movie, incidentally).  Wooooo...

What can I say? Dave agrees with me that this is the best trip we ever did, and we'll do it again. It was "time of your life" stuff. He caught this shot of me, below, while I captured today's last image. I checked the time indexes on the photos, and they coincide:

Is that cool, or what?! That was dawn on March 27, just yesterday. Hall's Gap is down there, under the mist. I'll go through the photos gradually and get some posts together for the travel blog. I won't post them here, because this page is dedicated to art, but I will give you the links for the posts on the other blog, in case you're interested in Aus, or the Grampians, or photography, too...

AWOL, I know ... and about to do it again ...!

Yes, I disappeared on you since Monday: sick like you wouldn't believe. Three-day migraine "with all the trimmings," and for those of you who know what that means ... yes, it means ALL the trimmings, plus some you might not have suffered yet! Then, I hardly drag myself back to my feet, and --

-- I'm packing for a three day road-trip to Horsham and Hall's Gap, bushranger country in the Victorian highlands. Dave and I have had this planned for six months! It's the trip to celebrate our twentieth (as in, wedding anniversary), so ... "Up on your feet, soldier, and get them bags packed!" The one thing I couldn't do in the last few days --

-- was fresh art. Couldn't even look at a computer most of the time, if I tell the truth. So what I'm doing today is uploading a freshly-rebalanced set of images culled from the last eight or nine years. Unless you've been following this blog for a looong time (or have trawled its very depths) you won't have seen much, if any, of this stuff, so it'll seem new. And these are some of the nicest images from getting along toward 1,000 posts. So --

Yes, I'm about to vanish on you again! We're driving out at 7:00am tomorrow, and won't get back till late on Wednesday, but ... yes, I have a lot of art ideas, many images to realize. Like the man said in the movie, "I'll be back." And for now --

-- please enjoy this selection, which has everything from character design to fantasy, SF, beauty shots, critters, humor, and on a closing note, below special effects! Back soon with more...

Making magic ... and a mountain lake at dawn and sunset

Now, there's an exotic for you! You might not believe it's actually the same guy as the conjurer, or magician, whom you've seen several times. What a difference the beard makes! I was after something like Zax, from Facelift ... anybody know the character? Google it. Anyway -- I do like this:

I think I could do more with this character, too. That's the Dinokonda plus in the foreground, and a fantasy weapon ... I actually did the castle in the same shot, not as a backdrop, standing on a bit of terrain created for the purpose in Bryce. The hair chest is hand-painted in Photoshop, of course; and I painted the hair, too.

That sky is an old, old Vue render Dave did about nine years ago. I got him to render me a set of "atmospheres" to use as backgrounds for my DAZ stuff ... and I just stumbled over them among the old files! Very good skies ...

Now, I'm wondering if I could use Terragen to render up atmospheres to use as backdrops for DAZ...

That's the same landscape and sky, imaged at different times of day, sundown and sunrise. I've gone just about as far as I can in Terragen before I get the computer rebuild, so you're not going to see anything stunning and different for a while. But yes, we wanted realistic landscapes, and we got them!

I only wish there was real, genuine tutorial material online for Terragen 4. There isn't, or at least I haven't found it yet. I'm juuust at the point where I'm starting to flounder around: have learned all I can teach myself regarding shaders, mapping and what have you, and now I need the manual ... except there isn't one. Hmm. Will need to really think this through from here on! I think the "easy" stuff is all behind me already.

Must go now. Big, big headache today, and now it's dinnertime. I find myself wondering what happened to the day!

Incoming storm ... with hunk and horse!

Couldn't resist rendering the warrior from yesterday's art a second time ... I did the white horse in the storm first, and then thought, "Hang on, put the Hyborian dude into the same set, since I just spent an hour building it, and relight it. (The set is constructed from numerous trees, bushes, plants and so forth, and the terrain was done in Bryce and exported as an OBJ, imported into DAZ and given the treatment with every map imaginable. Nice set.) Turned out to be one of my better ideas --

That is a very nice character indeed ... going to pat myself on the back for hand-painting the hair. As I said t'other day, juuust starting to get good at that part. In fact, I'm going to pat myself on that back for this whole thing: it rendered up a treat. The costume, incidentally, is bits and pieces from the "Wood God" costume set, but I changed out all the textures for my own, and added bump and displacement mapping. Check out the rabbit fur on the boots! Neat, if I do say so myself ... also, check out the way the hands rendered here. Now, that's what I've been trying to achieve. That also isn't painting -- that's in the render. Yes!

You might not believe it, but these images are not even raytraces. I did rayrace tests, but switching to rayrace didn't make 0.1% of difference to the shot, and it would have taken about an hour to render (all those plants!) whereas the deep shadow map took about 70 seconds. For the horse, I rendered the shot ENORMOUS, to accommodate getting the mane and tail segments into place: CWRW did the painting, many, many years ago (the Manes and Tails Pack, via Renderosity), but it's actually not such an easy job to wiggle them into place, so you're best off to render big and then resize the image when you're done.

Since I rendered it so huge, I could cut a desktop wallpaper out of it:

This ought to suit most monitors. You're welcome!

It's actually a re-re-reworking of an old idea. I used to have really good ideas many years ago, but not quite the skills to pull them off at the standard one would actually have wanted. For instance:

That's the original idea, and it's not a bad shot at all. The original file data says it was created on February 13, 2013 -- a tad over six years ago. It's a fair picture, and an extremely good idea. But this one -- second from the top, today -- hits all the marks. (You may not even believe it, but the skinmap on the horse in the old render is the same as the one in the new. The quality of the final picture is not about the texture; it's not even about the render engine. It's all in the lighting and post work. Remember, I didn't even bother rayracing today, much less wandering off into LuxRender or something.)

What I'm drooling to get into is this:

Hivewire Big Cat

That ladies and gents, is the Hivewire Big Cat, with CWRW's black panther textures applied. Ooooh, I am seriously drooling now! But Hivewire is absolutely specific, it's got to be Studio 4.9, or bust. So the big cat will have to wait a while, till I get my desktop rebuild...

Soon. First, Dave and I are taking a road trip from March 25 to 27: it's our China Wedding anniversary (actually on the 21st, but he's working), and we haven't been away from home for three years  ... Mom was in her last days, then I got sick, and I'm still disabled, but also desperate to get out, so -- our twentieth wedding anniversary is a pretty good excuse, yes? Then, after the trip, there's one or two personal things to take care of (read: dental appointments; you know how expensive they can be). Then ... rebuild computer. Then we can do all kinds of things! Tarzan, anyone?