Behind the scenes, I'm working on the update of my gallery, which is seven years out of date. Going through the old files, I'm coming across a number of idea from as far back as 2010 ... great ideas which couldn't be done properly back in the day for any number of reasons. The main two were the shortcomings of the hardware (the computer would crash if I tried to raytrace), and the sheer lack of expertise. I started in on 3D art in September, 2009 (yes, it's been ten years, all but about a week since I turned on DAZ Studio for the first time and said, "Woooooow...).
One of the projects that really deserved to be redone is this one -- Stormlight. The original is only about 880 pixels high, that being the maximum I could render, and the best I could do was deep shadow mapping, and don't even think about turning on depth of field --
It's a heck of a nice idea, though, and coming back to it today -- Friday 13th, with a full moon! -- seemed quirkily apropos. I was lucky enough to find the original project file, right down to the background sky image, which had been painted in GIMP! Everything needed to be redone, and was. The final result ...
Nice! This one is a 1200 x 1800 raytrace. I set three lights, turned on depth of field and set the virtual aperture to f/15. The original backdrop was much too low-rez and small to serve, but I saved the color set and used it to rebalance the new render. I also redid the transparency mapping on the costume ... so easy to do this in Studio 3! Speaking of which --
This whole project was done in Studio 3. I did try to open this in Studio 4.11, but it dumped most of the props, and I just couldn't be bothered going through the process of exporting to OBJ, then importing that, and going fifteen rounds with the transparency mapping to get the shrubs to look right. Another time, maybe, but -- not today. So much easier to run back to Studio 3, where everything was quick and simple ... until it came to the rendering itself, of course. Studio 4.11 would have done this raytrace in about ten minutes. LOL, in the old program, it took about half an hour. I can live with that.
What you have here is good old Victoria 4.2, wearing the Celestial Hair, and a costume so old, I can't even remember what it's called. I designed the face and body form, and did all the surfaces on the costume. The props are PNature bushes, and the big slabs of rock from DM's Instances. For the life of me, I can't recall if the props were from the DAZ store or Renderosity. I used to buy loads of stuff from Renderosity, when installing it into Studio was dead simple. Now, getting third party content into Studio 4.11 is such a crapshoot, I'm a bit leery. Note to self: get this problem solved!
Happy Friday 13th! (Any Space: 1999 fans out there? You gotta know what day this is. According to the show, the Moon was blasted out of Earth orbit twenty years ago today. Don't we wish the technology had happened that way! Right now, we're watching From the Earth to the Moon on dvd, and I'm reminded of the way we all believed, before 1970, that by 2000 there'd be cities in space and a colony on Mars. Whooo! Never happened, but it might. Today's literary science fiction is full of stories of Martian colonization. Makes you wonder, and cross your fingers, dunnit?
