Something old, something new, something borrowed, something -- yes, blue!

and if you'd prefer the not-vignette version ...

A new year ... and the painting and rendering bug has bitten me again. Starting to paint happily -- also to run all manner of Photoshop experiments. If you're anything like me, you can only learn by doing. Seriously. I can read every manual in the world -- and did! I learned about surfaces, textures, opacity, gloss, whatever, from The 3D Studio Max Bible -- but it only made sense after I went hands-on and started to render and paint. Before that, information circulating in my brain might as well be Monty Python's Galaxy Song.  Or Hugh Laurie singing Mystery. (Don't get me started. Once the giggles set in, I'm done for.) So...

Here, you have a vast variety of elements, all working in harmony. 3D renders; AI elements; Photoshop brushes by the score -- bokkeh, rain, trees, grass, shapes; transparent .PNG elements; Photoshop masks and gradients and rendered lens flares ...

And there's more to report!

I'm going to be in ANALOG Science Fiction for the third time, either later this year or over into 2025. I just signed the contract for Firegrounds, which is a story of 4,000 words, set in South Australia in about sixty years' time. It's about wildfires, firefighters, fire starters, robots and AI, in an era when wildfires are inevitable and the best thing you can do is stop them before they start. So ... happy, happy! I'll blog about this again, when the story is published, and obviously it'll be covered on my writing blog.

Do you notice that a good deal of the art I'm producing lately has the look and feel of cards? This wasn't something I pursued; it just happened. Probably came out of some of the photography I've been doing lately. Images that suit themselves so perfectly to being cards that I can't resist doing this with them:

...cards. And please do click on that graphic if you'd like to view the photographs at large size. It's over 4000 pixels high, so you can, um, see the images. What's the point of posting photos that are so small, they can't be seen? I know a lot of people are in some perceived battle to protect their copyrights, so it's thumbnails or nuthin', but ... honestly, the interwebs are overflowing with images. The days when one could claim to have something unique, and worthy of theft, are long gone. Unless you have a snapshot of King Charles with a pigeon landing on his hat while Queen Camilla falls over laughing. Now, that would be unique enough to be worth your fortune!

This is starting to be fun again!

The truth is, you can forget how much FUN this used to be. Fourteen years ago, I was all about spinning stories and running reams of images to illustrate them -- like these pictures, from the little comedy, "Vampire Hunters in the 23rd Century." They were Horace and Hortense Hershey, under-dressed for a Halloween party when they got a message from their snitch, Willie the Weasel to tell them that the vampire they've been tracking for years will turn up at the old cathedral tonight. They divert from their party plans and wind up vampire hunting in silly costumes. 

It was huge fun. But in the endless quest for better and better renders ... renders that look like photos, or movie stills ... dang, you can lose sight of the FUN. You end up with one image that you slaved on all day, and no story. Eventually, the magic just goes away and in the end ... phhttt. If you're like me, when the magic goes away, you can't get into it anymore.

So ... in search of the old, old magic, I've been rummaging through the Ancient Archives, pulling some of these antediluvian images into Photoshop and giving them the treatment...

Now, nothing, repeat nothing, is going to take a Deep Shadow Map or the simplest possible raytrace you can get (because the PC will crash if you ask for anything more), and turn it into the kind of image you were seeing from me in 2019. But having said that --

-- dangitall, I had some great ideas in 2010 - 2012. All my best ideas date from this period. Not the best work. The best ideas.  My best CG work dates from 2019-2020. Yes, to some extent, Photoshop can make many of these pictures much more presentable for viewing today, but nothing replaces the know-how, the hardware and the software to simply ... make better pictures. 

Now, in 2010, this was the best I could do with the hardware at my disposal:

Fast forward thirty months, and this was doable:

Due to one thing and another (Real Life: my mother passed away after a loooong illness; I landed in the hospital for two surgeries; had a fall, spent some time in a wheelchair, then hopped on crutches for six months ...) I took a few years out of CG art, any kind of art. Then I came back, in 2019, and while we were still raytracing, those raytraces looked like this now:

But even so, the fun had fifty percent gone. I was imagining the stories that went with these images, but I never wrote them. Looking back into the Ancient Archives, I used to write stories all the time. Much later, I "went pro" -- I've been in ANALOG Science Fiction twice! But the old fun never came back as I hunted and hunted for that cutting-edge Iray render, all that photorealism. In the end ... I quit altogether, took another couple of years out, and came back as a digital painter! And don't get me wrong --

Digital painting is actually where my heart lies. This is me painting with my new Huion pen tablet, in 2023:

...but I'm remembering the sheer fun of spinning yarns and illustrating them with raytraces that are sooo quick to do, you can end up with four or five ina session. Heaven knows, you take something so old, it's been gathering dust for an eon, let Photoshop loose on it, and end up with this:

So ... my fingertips are actually starting to tingle to start up Studio and ... and ... and ...!

Breathing new life into old goodies -- and a major question answered

Okay -- call this a success. Not all experiments work, but this one did. I wanted to know how the images behave if they're repainted and relit ... now, I knew it worked with raytraces (the Consulting Mage and the baby dragon called Trouble -- that's a raytrace), but how "fake" would the process look if you tried it on an Iray render? The horse, above, it the 3D/CG equivalent of what artists would call "mixed media." The props are so ancient, some of them are 2D! The backdrop is an actual painting. The horse was rendered in Iray ... the mane and tail were added in Photoshop, from CG's packs of add-ons for the Millennium Horse, from Rendo. It's a 2019 render, and very "storybook," and I was nowhere near to confident that repainting and/or relighting it wouldn't just make it a messy fake. Okay -- no problem. So I delved back into the archives for an "okay" Genesis Iray render -- Sinbad. It wasn't bad, but I always knew it could be so much better. Ha! Now it is, and yes, you can do this repainting, relighting on Irays, and they don't look fake. Neat! 

Second Life ... repaints breathe fresh life into age-old renders. I like it!

 

An ode to the increasingly lost art of raytracing! There are no Iray renders in this post; one was rendered in Bryce 7 Pro ... all were heavily repainted in Photoshop to bring them to life ... make them deliver what the eye expects to see in 2024, after a decade of Iray, Lux, Octane -- and reams and reams of digital painting. The truth is, the old renders need the work. There was only so much I could squeeze out of Studio 3 -- and, from memory, people back in the day were always knocking Studio for having a less-than-great render engine built into it. True, the free version of the 3Delight render engine left a lot to be desired. It still does --

But that's not the point. The point is that it provides the artist with a canvas on which to paint. Which is what I'm doing here, as I breathe new life into so many old, old pictures, and ... it's fun. As whacked-out weird as this might sound, I'm actually enjoying this process a lot more than wrestling with Iray, and the new props and figures that are actually too much for this computer to handle...

Going back through the ancient archives as I tidy up this blog to make it functional for another decade, I'm impressed by a refrain that has been repeating from Day One: render blues. Render issues. First, all I could do was Deep Shadow Map -- any attempt to raytrace caused an instant crash. I bought a new PC to fix that problem. Then, I could raytrace but I couldn't turn on shadows, because that would crash the system. Upgrade the system. Then I couldn't run Iray. Then, I could run Iray, but not render a Genesis 8 figure. But a new computer.

On and on. It has to stop! In 2024, the problem (if I chose to go there: I don't) is that I can't render the new generation of props, costumes and hair for love or money. DForce crashes me now. I can only squeeze a limited amount into the old GPU without the system gridlocking and falling over. So I have to fall back on art. Painting. Cleverness. And I really am enjoying the painting process to the point where I'm longing to turn on Studio 4.x and ...! All I need now is the time. Ahem. 

Repaints ... an ode to old-fashioned raytracing!

There is not one single Iray render on this page. These are painted raytraces ... and a couple of them were done in Studio 3, so long ago, I'd forgotten the even existed, till I started trawling through the ancient archives, mending this blog (taking out the dead links, removing the "404 images" and tidying up loose ends that didn't go anywhere). Then I started to look at the best raytraces of 2019 ... and I looked, and looked some more ...

I dug back further, to 2012 and 2011, and started to haul out some of the best of those ancient renders, and ... I put them into Photoshop. Ye gods and little fishes, to quote my Irish granny.

Here's the thing of it: for about ten years now, everybody has been running desperately towards photorealism, demanding that Studio renders be ever closer to  photographs. Even I bought into that! And honestly, I should have known better --

I'm a painter! I'm an artist, not a fashion photographer or whatever. Sure, I managed to get a number of excellent renders that were very, very close to photo, but, but but ... why? Honestly, why?

Here's the bottom line. The closer the images came to photographs, the less I was interested. The artist in me, the painter, was being starved out. I got bored and drifted away from DAZ, 3D, CG, and I've been away for about a year now, I think. The artist in me is awake again. I've spent the last few days repainting old renders ... old raytraces ... and I'm tickled pink with the results. 

Call this an ode to raytracing. I feel the artist in me coming back ... I feel the desire to start up Studio again, and render something the old-fashioned way, and they -- paint. Yes, paint!