Merry Christmas to all, 2019!

To family and friends everywhere ... 

wishing you a very Merry Christmas 

and 

a safe, Happy New Year!

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!

HAPPY HALLOWEEN! Featuring ... 'The Possessed'

Happy Halloween, guys! And the last piece of 'Halloween Spirit' art for 2019 is The Possessed. It's the half-seen, half-materialized figure in the background that creeps me out. How about you?!

Looks like a job for the Exorcist we saw the other day, right?

This week's been fun ... psychic warrior, vampire hunter, exorcist, warlock, possessed, the works! This one, today, took an hour in Iray: Genesis 8, Landon hair, costume -- and one light. That's it. The rest is a blurred out, painted-over backdrop, and all the other effects are Photoshop over-painting.

The character reminds me of -- well, has anyone seen Look What's Happened to Rosemary's Baby, starring Stephen McHattie? This guy has McHattie's cheekbones, no doubt about it! The other movie you might have seen is The Possessed -- 1977, a TV movie with Harrison Ford (!) in a costarring role, looking exactly like Han Solo in spectacles. I kid you not. Too cute, right? You think I'm kidding? Nope. Try this for size:

...and if you fancy scaring the willies out of yourself, you can watch it on YouTube. You're welcome! I actually have a copy. 😝

So -- Happy Halloween to all! More soon. Only one image today, because I was out of commission with a migraine for half the day, didn't even start to come back to life till about 4:00pm, so there was only time for one project. Blisteringly hot weather is migraine weather for me, what's new?

Don't go down to the woods tonight ... really. Uh, Halloween!

Halloween spirit! If you go down to the woods today, you're in for a big surprise ... there's no teddy bears, for a start! The battle between light and darkness is being fought out on this turf. There's a 'night warrior' abroad, armed and dangerous, and he's on the hunting trails.

Which means we need the reverse shot here -- get a look at what, or who, he's hunting! Here we go:

The warlock -- weird, and altogether not nice! Let battle commence...

That's CC Foster in the first picture, which is an Iray render. The costume is "kit bashed" from three different cossies ... that's the grave marker from the Reparation set, and a lantern from one of the DM sets. A couple of the Gnarly Old Trees props ... also some lovely props from Merlin's Wild Borders in the background, but with the DOF set so strongly (ie., a big virtual aperture), alas, you can't see them properly. In the second picture, that's a raytrace of Michael 4 wearing the Warlock morphs and skinmap, the Hermes hair, the Lockwood shirt, which I painted out into a robe, plus a couple of very neat props from the Staff Pack. Both were painted quite a bit in Photoshop to increase the atmospherics and spooky factor.

No particular story attaches to these images: it's too obvious! There's evil on the loose, and the locals have sent for the warrior who takes them out, or down, or whatever it is they do. Fun!

More Halloween spirit: this vampire plot thickens!

Is it me, or is the vampire hunter Jean Pierre Marin as irresistible as the plot? I couldn't leave this alone so soon, so we're coming back to the hero one more time. This would be the scene where he seeks help from his friend, who is an exorcist with a power to handle energy--

Did you miss Part One? See it here. Now: The exorcist, an Englishman by the name of Daniel Crowe, has followed the vampire Alighieri from place to place through France, for months trying to put an end to him. Crowe was summoned to deconsecrate the church, where Alighieri slept in the crypt for over a century. The tumbledown ruin -- long said to be cursed, and avoided by all who knew it -- was watched over by an old, retired priest who knew its sect. Nothing Pere Andre could do would prevent the demolition of the church, and he saw Alighieri leave the crypt on Midwinter's Night. It was Pere Andre who wrote to his old associate, the exorcist, Daniel Crowe. Now, a trail of blood has led Daniel to Paris, where he and Jan Pierre meet, on the same hunting trail...

And Daniel, of course:

It's delicious, isn't it? In fact, I could really get into this! It needed to be a movie, starring Keith Hamilton Cobb and Hugh Jackman about 15 years ago, when they were both at their most delicious. Anyway --

The set-up for the piratical young hero is the same as last time; just switch out the backdrop. The set up for Daniel Crowe is obviously Michael 4, wearing the Lee skinmap and Neftis's GQ Event hair, and the Beowulf suit. Because I used a backdrop (another clip out of a Sveva image) it rendered fast ... it also rendered so flat in Iray, I did a second one as a raytrace, slapped both of them into Photoshop and blended them together, then over-painted almost everything to get the most out of it. This one is mostly painting, while the top image is almost entirely pure render. No matter: the M4 render took about eight minutes, and the Photoshop post work, another ten. Who's going to complain, at that!

More tomorrow! I have another idea, and if it comes together fairly quickly, I'll leave it to render while I head for bed. Yaaaawn...

Halloween spirit ... vampire hunter, anyone?!

With Halloween coming up in a few days, I couldn't help clicking into the vampire hunters mode. Am not such a huge fan of zombies, to be truthful, but I can get interested in vampires, given the right setting. (Uh, Frank Langella hits the spot for me, nudge, wink.) Sooo...

Let's say...

THE STORY (indulge me)

Paris, 1893. A foggy night at the end of October ... you hear the horns of boats on the river, you smell the still, oily water. The clip-clop of horses' iron-shod hoofs, cabs and carriages going by; the shrill sound of laughter in the taverns and bordellos of the oldest part of town. Our (gorgeous) hero, Jean Pierre Marin,  is abroad, hunting an and ancient, immortal abomination who is known only as Alighieri. This vampire is so old, he was painted by Caravaggio in 1604 ... he slept in the ruins of a church outside Boulogne until the building was demolished, the crypt emptied out -- which brought him back into this world. Alighieri has already taken two of Jean Pierre's friends and captured his young sister, Roxanne, who's hardly more than a child. It's been a week-long hunt through the docks and slums of areas of Paris that were standing when the Musketeers were this city's heroes. At last, Jean Pierre has tracked Alighieri to a place from which he cannot fly, and where he cannot hide. With the life of Roxanne in the balance, the two meet in a street in the old quarter, for a  battle from which only one will walk away.

And the reverse shot --? Here we go:

Uh huh. Wouldn't like to go up against this one on a dark night!

What you have here is two NVIDIA Iray renders ... The Hunter: Genesis 8 with a body more or less designed by me ... the face is actually Rex, and the figure is wearing the Kingston skinmap and Varun hair. The cossie is the bottom half of the Buccaneer costume known as Crimson Seas (for GM 3 and 8). The backdrop is a snap out of one of the Sveva "Variety" set, with Photoshop effects applied to it; and I just flipped it horizontally for the reverse shot. In the second image, The Vampire: that's Michael 4 wearing the Bart skinmap and the JM Alexander face, the Aether hair set to dark brown. The cossie is the pants from the Lockwood costume. I did some Photoshop painting on the M4 render to make it a bit more interesting.

The good thing about rendering M4 is that you can get a render in half an hour flat ... low poly count figure. The bad thing is that M4 can render very flat. So far I've only discovered two skinmaps that render up in Iray looking superb -- Ferendir, which is very Norse, and Atlas, which is very swarthy. Am working my way through my whole collection to see what works. This one here is Bart; again, flat and matte, just like the high rez Michael 4 skinmap; but at least it doesn't dither up a red and green storm, like JM Falcon! I can just about work with Bart, but I could wish it had a healthy glow about it. Mind you, being flat, like this, it was the perfect choice to slap onto the Vampire Alighieri.

More soon -- Halloween stuff! I have some neat ideas and a few nice things to work with, so...

Ciao for now, and take another look soon.

Dark Prince meets Elf, in Iray -- technically impossible, but...

You know that saying, the one that says you learn a whole lot more when things go wrong than when they go right? Well, safe to say I've learned a hulluva lot in the last few days! Because nothing worked out the way it should. But I managed to find enough work-arounds and fixes to say that I know a lot now that I didn't a week ago.

Dark Prince Dae meets Ferendir the woodland elf ... both rendered in Iray. That's a Genesis 8 figure and a Michael 4 character in the same shot. Anyone who's ever tried this will probably tell you (rightly) that you can't render the two together, because the Iray lights that suit one are disaster for the other. To get the light right for G8 --

-- means setting Photometric lighs, which are way too bright for M4, by a factor of 4x or 5x. If you tone down the light so Michael 4 looks right, the G8 figure looks like he's standing in the dark. Soooo, what's the plan, if we want to have the two standing in the same scene?

First, make it simple and use a backdrop to cut down on render time, because you need to render the scene twice. Pose both characters as if you were about to render them together. Set up the lights, too. Then go into the Tone Mapping and play with the shutter speed on the virtual camera (!) to change the light levels -- figure out two levels, one for each character. Jot this down! Now -- whichever character is standing behind gets rendered first, with the shutter speed set for him: but while you make this image, "hide" the other character, plus hair and costume. Store this "bottom layer" render. Now, re-set the shutter speed for the character who's in front, and "hide" the other character ... render again.

You now have two renders, one of each character, both shots perfectly exposed. Paste them into two Photoshop layers and just ... erase the area of the background in the top layer, the part of the background dude is standing in the other shot. Yep, as you erase a swatch of the background in the top layer, it's as if you're painting in the other character, he just ... appears, perfect.

Well, mostly perfect. The truth is, the lighting is off a tiny little bit: Genesis 8 should throw a mild shadow over Michael 4 ... but you would need a very keen eye to spot this. I could have hand painted it, if it was critical, but it isn't so important ... and it's a rather nice picture. Yaoi image, anyone? I get definite Yaoi vibes off this!

So we'll call this done, and file the trick for future reference.

Less success with the experiments with the JM Falcon skinmap, though. I'd had high hopes for this, since it raytraces so well. Based on great results with the Ferendir and Atlas skinmaps in Iray, I'd rather hoped for another stunning result with Falcon, but --

Nope. It looks halfway decent when you see it at postage stamp size, as above -- but see it at full size, or even at 50%, and you'll see the truth. It dithers! This means it refracts, or breaks up, into a mottle of red and green in the Iray lights; and on top of that, it's so matte, I had to do all sorts of things with it to give it anything like the "glow" of healthy skin. Well, dang. So Falcon is purely for raytracing. Harrumph. Then again, I wasn't overwhelmed with the way the High Rez M4 skinmap rendered in Iray either. In a raytrace it looks pretty good, and in Lux, or Reality, it looks fine. But Iray didn't seem to get hold of properly it at all. It was basically ... pale and matte and fairly ho-hum. Is the term naff?

Anyway, there are plenty more maps to try out, and lots of things to play with. I shopped a couple of sales at Renderosity ten days ago, picked up some lovely toys and a couple of new shaders. Here's a quick look at two of the many items a acquired -- catalog images; see Sveva's Store for the lot:

It's just a question of finding the time to play with all this stuff. Have been so busy lately -- but I'm getting there. Back soon with more -- loads of experiments just begging to be done!

Iray shakes hands with Michael 4 ... nicely!

Back in Iray today with a couple of experiments that produced extremely nice results. You don't too often think of rendering Michael 4 in Iray, and in fact, sometimes it doesn't work at all. But when it does, the results are rather rewarding.

This, above, is the high resolution Michael 4 skinmap, rendered for about 90 minutes ... that's an actual set in the background (another of Jack Tormalin's, 'Curious Passage'), with one of Merlin's Trees as filler, DOF set on the camera, and a very mix-and-match costume put together from several different odds and ends. The only thing I had to change was the texturing on the shoulder harness. That, I switched out for an Iray shader. Now --

By now you recognize this guy: my woodland elf, wearing the Ferendir skinmap with the facial tattoos turned on. That's the shorts from The Wood God costume, and I must say, that looks amazing in Iray -- just as it comes, nothing done to it. This one, I used one of DM's columns from some set or other, can't remember which, sorry; and that's a clip cut from a commercial backdrop (look up Sveva on Renderosity). The backdrop made this one fast -- just an hour to get this, whereas the top render really needed closer to three ... if had a lot of fireflies, or unresolved pixels; but I've figured out a five minute Photoshop fix for those. Turns out, it's dead easy to get rid of them with a couple of clicks, which saves a tonne of wear and tear on my tired old processor. Phew. That's a weight off my mind, actrually.

Okay ... one thing left to figure out here. You notice that Iray has dropped out the vascular mapping. You're supposed to be seeing nice venous mapping as you saw on this one, which was a very successful raytrace; but Iray just doesn't see the displacement map. I need to get this figured out for M4. One or two ideas, which we'll try tomorrow. I'd also like to see how the JM Falcon skinmap renders in Iray. It looks fantastic in a good raytrace --

-- this "big beauty" is Joe Ramos, whom you may know from NARC, and ... that's the MJ Falcon skinmap. Raytrace. Soooo, if a raytrace looks like that, what can we hope for, from Iray? Uh huh. Stay tuned, lets' find out!

The render from hell. Seriously.

The render from hell -- no, not this guy, above. That's a Genesis 8 character based on the Michael 8 skinmap, Varun hair and a lot of dial-in tweaks to make a new-ish face and body -- dead easy, with a couple of Merlin's trees set in the background plus the raytrace of the Moon Gate you saw the other day blurred down  and set as a backdrop ... two hours cooking in Iray, and I haven't done anything to it. Nada. That's just the raw render. Okay, soooo --

This was the render from hell:

...this was a render that just didn't want to be done. Studio 4 crashed repeatedly, and since I can't save a file out of Studio 4, every crash meant starting from scratch; then, the textures drop out on the Xurge 3D costume and have to be reconfigured every time ... and the lighting gave me hell. The Ferendir skinmap that rendered so beautifully the other day looks plastic on the older human figure. The elf looks okay, but what's going on with the human?? I got this two-hour raytrace out of Studio 4, then it crashed yet again and I said, stuff it. I am NOT doing it over. Sometimes you just can't win. I suspect there's something "wrong" with the lights, making the skinmap look plastic on one figure, but I don't have the time or patience to start yet again. We'll try a whole new project tomorrow, and run some experiments.

So, just as I switched back to raytracing when Iray was jerking me around, this time I switched back to Iray when 3Delight was jerking me around. The results are pretty nice ... though I do admit, the Iray shot is soooo simple, while the raytrace was many times more complex. If Studio hadn't been crashing, I'd have worked it out ... if I could save a file in Studio 4, I'd have worked it out. As it is, what you see is what you get. I'm not 100% happy with it, but it's not bad, so... there you have it.

Try again tomorrow. 😐

Evening rendezvous at the Moon Gate...

Yes, a new set: Jack Tomalin's Moon Gate -- and it renders up beautifully. "Evening Rendezvous," you ask? Doesn't a rendezvous requite two characters? Uh huh. Yep. And I had the whole thing ready to render when Studio 4 crashed to the desktop. And since I cannot save a file in Studio 4, the whole thing is gone as if it never existed at all. So what you wound up with is one of the characters (the woodland elf wearing the Ferendir skinmap and facial tattoos), who came here to meet someone. He's, uh, still waiting. I'll try again tomorrow to get the second character into the shot, but the thing of it is, two characters + the set + render settings high enough to get a raytrace so gorgeous you can barely tell it apart from an Iray image = way over three hours render time on my machine; and that opens the gate to the same sort of crash. Soooo...

I might render the set separately and use it as a backdrop, which will take eons off the final (difficult) render. Interested along these lines, I did this:

That's a twenty minute raytrace, and it's beautiful -- very, very happy with this. Moon Gate at evening. As I said, the set renders up like a dream. So, how about this:

Now, that one is Iray, and it's a mix of two sets: Jack Tomalin's Moon Gate and Merlin's Wild Borders (all the plants and grasses, the ground and tree. Very nice sunlight; and I used the skydome to light it rather than messing about with spotlights and whatever. Nice result. So --

Same camera angle, processed into night, complete with stars. Before you get excited ... it's a Photoshop job. Yep, I did one in Iray, but I was rather disappointed with the result, after about two hours cooking; so I went back to the sunlight shot, put it into Photoshop and did "day for night," which used to be the old cinematic trick, where the action was supposed to be taking place in the dark, but it was shot in broad daylight and they slapped a filer on the camera. It worked. You can also do it with bucket-filled overlays and blend modes, in minutes in Photoshop ... save the wear and tear on your groaning old PC!

Okay, so my "rendezvous" ended up as one guy waiting at the gate to meet someone, LOL. I'll try again tomorrow, see if I can get Studio 4 to play nice. If it won't, well, damnit, Janet, I'll shove this whole thing into good old Studio 3 (in which I can save a file!!) and although it will take a lot longer to render, and you won't get progressive rendering, at least you'll get a blasted picture, right? Right.

Back soon with, uh, the rendezvous! Hint: Yaoi vibes, anyone...?!