Touching base again

Touching base with some re-posts ... eye candy really ... because it's been how long since I posted here? That's about how long it's been since I was able to do some fresh art. Have been sick (again), and on top of that I have (damnit) computer issues. For some time my desktop has been really struggling with Iray, and it's not a happy machine. What it can render is limited, and frankly, I'm pushing it too hard. If I don't watch out, I'm going to burn it out -- which doesn't alter the fact it'll be a year before I can get a new one! So...

I have a sneaking suspicion I'm going to have to revert to raytracing. Iray will have to go on the side burner till I can update the hardware ... that's the bottom line. Now, there's actually a lot to be said for old fashioned raytracing. Like this:

Sure, Iray is going to give you superior results (duh!), and also the Firefly engine built into Poser will give superior results (ditto) than the old 3Delight raytrace engine built into Studio ... but not when you're limping along with hardware that doesn't want to play nice anymore. Hmm.

Bear with me. I'm starting to recover my health a bit, and am juuuust about at the point where I want to see how far I can push raytracing, to get that last little bit out of it, before we get to Christmas 2020, and I'm breaking open a new box, spending two days installing software! I mean, get real here: this is a raytrace:

So let's give the poor old computer a break: stop trying to render stuff that looks photographic, and just turn out some lovely artwork. Yes? Yes. Okay. I used to enjoy the heck out of raytracing! It's over eight years since I did these:

So! Artwork coming up, rather than experiments in photo-realism ... let's just go out there and have fun, at least till I'm breaking open a new box!

Sinbad, anyone --?

Am in a Sinbad kind of mood -- can you tell? This is the Rex skinmap and a tweak on the face morph, wearing a couple of bits of the Huntsman costume for Genesis 3, which also fits G8 well. This one rendered for three hours before I called "enough!" and yet if you look very closely, it needed more. Tough, because my video card won't go any further! Which is a bit rough, because that's a backdrop, not a standing set. Golly, if I'd tried to do the set as well --? 😲 I also lit it with an IBL image, so the computer didn't have to prat about with a million calculations back there for Iray lights. Well, harrumph. So I called it done.

Kind of reminds me of Sindbad. somehow; always my favorite character in kids' fiction, when I was a kid myself. (And then of course you grow up and see Patrick Wayne as Sinbad. I kid you not --

We had all the fun in the late 1970s! Star Wars was the cherry on top of the whipped cream, but you can trust me on this ... there was a lot of whipped cream under the cherry!)

Just one image today. I'd intended to do a lot more, but I've been busy and am still quite ill. I'll see what I can do in the next couple of days. Got lots of images inside my head, trying to get out!

Touching base ... have been soooo ill!

Forgive me if I'm reposting some eye candy from long ago -- some of it eight years ago! I've been ill. Very. Anybody out there ever had gastro? The real, genuine version ...? Uh huh. Few times in the last week, I thought it would be easier and kinder just to roll over and die quietly! Anyway...

One doesn't get to make the decision in these cases, so there really was nothing for it but to lie there feeling like the living dead, and eventually get well! I suppose I'll live after all. So --

-- just reposting some images that haven't been seen in months and years. Easy to forget them! And I'll be posting fresh pictures as early as tomorrow. Ooooh, the images I have dancing in my mind's eye right now. Just need the time (and energy) to render and paint. Stay tuned ... and sorry for disappearing on you for ten days.

Sports car in Iray ... and luck with a great skinmap for M4 in Iray, too!

Iray ... a quick Bryce 7 Pro sky used as a backdrop ... sports car ... Michael 8 ... nice! This is far from the first car I've rendered, but it is the first time I've done a car in Iray, and -- I like it. I didn't even have to switch out the materials: the original materials as supplied with the model rendered just fine. It's called the f612 Italian Sports Car, from the DAZ marketplace -- I bough it about eight or nine years ago, and it's still available. Here you go:

Catalog image. See this.

It's low-poly enough that even my old system was able to render the car and set in an hour, and when I added the Michael 8 figure, plus hair (Shavonne) and costume (Cool Style) and a shader on the shirt, and a chrome shader on the wheel rims, I went to 90 minutes. The car still only $12.95. and -- thumbs up on this.

I can't remember the fantasy novel I'm trying to think of right now, but the name of Lackey comes to mind, and part of the blurb was, 'There are elves out there, and they drive too fast.' It was some urban fantasy, tall elves in our world. So you have got to know what I'm thinking right now. Ahem! Stay tuned.

Also -- at last! -- a little luck in the hunt for Michael 4 skinmaps that don't look 'dead' in Iray:

That's the Jagger skinmap, which you usually see on Kevin Jarrat (in the NARC renders ... one of my all-time favorite characters -- him and his other half, Stoney, nudge, wink, and cheers to Mel Keegan as the creator of same). You also see this skinmap on the Vampire Amadeus ... so I really, seriously, put it to the test in Iray the other day. I slapped it onto an old character of mine, 'The Conjurer,' and gave it an hour in Iray. Thank gods, here's a third skinmap that looks terrific in Iray. The other two are Ferendir and Atlas; virtually everything else I've tested to date will render, obviously, but the results is disappointing, especially when you're trying to render the old Generation 4 figures half the time, because Genesis 8 is so high-poly, your computer is having a hernia, LOL! Sooo...

Here's the old Conjurer character in Iray, wearing Jagger. very nice result ... I used the "hairy" and "bearded" options, which is different from Jarrat and Amadeus, who're smoothies. I like this, so now I have a pale (Ferendir), a swarthy (Atlas) and a medium (Jagger) skinmap for Michael 4, all Iray-friendly. This, we can work with.

One thing that bemuses me, though, is the way one face morph can change utterly as it's processed in a different render engine. Here, above you see my Conjurer (actually, he has a 'stage name' -- Cassandro; I guess in this render we're seeing him at home, not on-stage). That's the exact same face morph, I didn't do anything to it. But here's the same face, in LuxRender, back in 2012:

And here's the same face in 3Delight about ten months ago:

You may need to see "Snake Charmer" here at larger size to see the face clearly. I'm still shaking my head, that one face can come up looking so different as it passes back and forth between Iray, LuxRender and 3Delight. Go figure.

Anyway, we are now officially having fun, and Michael 4 has his oars back in the water, for Iray! It's taken me eight months to answer enough questions to know what I'm doing, and can do, with this computer; and we're now also officially on the count-down to The New Computer, in about a year from now. It'll either be my birthday pressie or Christmas, and since those dates are only 51 days apart, there's not a lot of difference. 😃 (Yes, I just had a birthday. Yesterday, in fact -- one of the reasons I didn't post yesterday: was out gallivanting.)

More soon!