Nope, not yet. Grrr.

As the post title suggests ... nope, not yet, no call from the workshop to go and collect the computer ... which means Tuesday is the next earliest date I can expect to have it back. Whimper.

But the time hasn't been wasted: I downloaded manuals. And read them.

Which means I ought to be able to hit the ground running, and have also thrashed through a number of the problems which beset users -- not least of which being in the download itself. Fortunately, one of the things I paid for (and it wasn't cheap) was a full upgrade on the operating system. This should give me all the bang up to date drivers to run something called dForce --

-- and dForce is the next generation on from the old dynamic cloth idea. I was never able to get into that, since I toughed it out with Studio 3 for many, many years. Now, I'll probably leapfrog dynamic  whatever and go right for the dForce engine ... I hope. What's it do for you? Well --

-- with any luck, it ought to drape fabrics like this, above, which is a catalog image (credits printed into the picture: not my work. I think it's from the DAZ shop: it certainly looks familiar). It does automatically what you'd spend eons doing by hand, and comes up with results which follow gravity and so forth...

Catalog image: track it down here

This is all absolutely virgin territory to me, but thank heavens, YouTube is just loaded with tutorials; so, so long as my drivers are all sorted and I can get nice, clean downloads of the software and plugins, I ought to be in business.

In the meantime, the desktop has taken most of my programs with it: DAZ, Bryce, Photoshop, Krita ... I've got nothing on this laptop except Amberlight and Terragen. Am playing in Amberlight because it's soooo easy, and if I tell the truth, I'm too tired to make Terragen do anything. It's winter now, dark and cold, and when you're nursing a huge backache and listening to driving rain ... urk. So --

You won't (can't) see any new art from me till the desktop is home and everything is up and running. My arms aren't long enough to reach IT Warehouse from here, and even if I could, I imagine they have the case laid wide open and cables dribbling out of it. One last Amberlight image, and I'm going for dinner. *sigh* Maybe, a phone call tomorrow? If not, Tuesday?

It's worse than being an expectant father. I think. 😶

There. Dinner, here I come, then a DVD, and call it a day. Too, too exciting, right?

Yes, the tavern scene. Plus Terragen highlands, and Amberlight dazzle

Even the faer folk take a shift off now and then ... head for the tavern and indulge in a mug! The Raven: lose the armor, switch out the textures on the shirt and pants underneath said armor; restage the whole thing in DM's Anardhouse set, which goes back about eight years but still renders up as well as anything I've ever seen. It's one of those rare sets that are detailed on the interior as well as the exterior:

Here it is from the outside, rendered in Bryce 7 Pro; actually, done in 2015, I think ... not sure I ever uploaded it. Perhaps I did ... it's about a thousand images ago, and my memory isn't going to play nice over that span! And here is the interior --

-- also rendered in Bryce 7 Pro, today. But the main image was done in DAZ Studio ... just a raytrace on the old fashioned render engine, and then some serious painting in Photoshop to take up the slack. It renders up very nicely indeed -- and so does this character. That's the Yannis dreadlocks he's wearing, and the texture mapping on the costume makes it look like soft, soft crushed velvet. Nice:

Also ... Terragen highlands ... and big experiments with the sky today:

That is a gorgeous sky! Two cloud layers to get this effect. High cirrus and low cumulus. It's another part of the same landscape I designed yesterday; I just flew the camera somewhere else in it, and dropped it down to ground level. Then, after I got this one, I flew it up onto the top of that outcrop and spun it around 180 degrees. Notice the way the shadows fall, above? Now --

Yep, you are now standing on top of the outcrop, looking back at the very place you were standing on the valley floor! And just to be outrageous, after I got this one, I decided to flood the area and see how it would look as a lake:

This is fun. Understatement. Am delighted with the way this work is turning out ... the shorelines and detail in the water -- reflections of the clouds are so on, are wonderful. Here, have a closer look:

Whoo! And to top it off, I went into Amberlight and beguiled away the time it took the other computer to do the raytrace on the tavern scene:

Amberlight also is a lot of fun. Visually dazzling abstract stuff. There's a Version 2 out now, but I have yet to even scratch the surface of Version 1, so I'm not in any rush to upgrade. Pretty!

A little CG romance for Valentine's Day

At last, I found the project files for "The Princess and The Barbarian, which was rendered so long ago, I couldn't even raytrace at the time! So ... a beautiful new re-render, widescreen, re-lit, and fully painted for effect. The hair is all hand-painted, and so much nicer this time around; and the lighting is delicious. A little romance: "Meet me at the old temple, at sunset." Happy Valentine's!

And a picture Dave asked for:

Millennium Dragon 2, Castle Creator fortress, Bryce sky...

The dragon, guarding the castle. Not attacking it, but guarding it. Very neat idea ... a pain in the posterior to organize, and in fact the final result is just a little flat, for reasons I can't (yet) quite fathom. If the penny drops, I'll come back to this and re-render it.

Playing with Amberlight again...

...and these got me to thinking about abstracts and combinations of layers:

This last one is particularly intriguing. Quite the brain bender. It's five or six layers deep, laying effect on top of effect. Amberlight is the bottom layer, and then ... experiments with transparency, opacity, reflection, refraction, diffusion, and ... so on, and on. Neat.

Happy Valentine's, folks! 

Cthulu Manifests! Also barbarians, SF heroes, and more...

Cthulu manifests! Do you know your H.P. Lovecraft?! This picture came out of an observation that one of the Amberlight images I did a week or so ago seems to have an alien face looking out of it...

Original Amberlight render

...so it was a case of spinning the image around, using custom numbers to get it upright, then painting it lavishly in Photoshop:

Photoshop painting over Amberlight render

Ouch! Then it occurred to me that this would make one heck of a great backdrop for a much deeper work, where a human bears witness to the manifestation which tore open a great rent in the cosmos as we know it, so -- back into DAZ Studio for the barbarian to be added.

One of the final experiments I run on any piece of artwork is to bucket-fill a color layer into a blank top layer created in whatever new piece of art I'm finishing, and run through the blend modes, just to see what magical weirdness might spontaneously happen -- and it did! This time I used an ickly shade of green, and this happened:

...and of course as soon as I saw that, I thought to myself, "Dang, I can see this was a magazine cover from the golden age!" Mike got involved at this point, and we had all kinds of fun making up the ludicrous story titles and witty bylines, and running the DTP software (Serif) to mock-up the cover. Cute!

And I was fiddling with characters and starship sets yesterday, and this happened:

Soon as I saw this, I said, "I know who you are!" Do you remember Tully Ingersol fro the Hellgate series? Yeah, the chief engineer on Rick Vaurien's incredible salvage Vessel, Wastrel. Whooo, I used to love that ship, that crew. I'd happily sit down and read another six books, if the author could be coerced to write them. Anyway, I saw this guy, and I thought: I know you! (Which is really, really inspiring me to get back into the Hellgate art. The fact is, all of that art goes back to 2012, and ... I could do it sooo much better now. Okay. Let's get into this.)

Lastly for today, am starting to hammer some sense out of Bryce 7 Pro:

Now, that one doesn't bear very close examination, but it's getting closer and closer to the photo realism that one knows, academically, Bryce will deliver, but emotionally, one begins to doubt it after the fiftieth crap render in a row! But yes, the penny is starting to drop now. We'll get there.

Two vampires meet in the tavern at the Gateway, beyond which lie those Misty Mountains ...

Amadeus meets his cousin, the rogue Dimitri, who only knows how to get into all kinds of trouble. You can just see him saying, "But I didn't do anything! I just, well, you know, supped of a little blood here and there, as one does when one comes across ... appetizing peasants." Leaving Amadeus (yet again, presumably) to sort this one out.

They've met in a tavern by the gate beyond which likes the Misty Mountains (nudge, wink) ...

Bryce 7 Pro, of course...

Actually, I did this picture first. I was trying to jog my memory as to how to get a model (OBJ) into Bryce 7 Pro. Then I remembered: ah! You load it into DAZ Studio and click on "second to Bryce," and it opens Bryce and loads the model automatically. Yep, now I recall.

And I liked the landscape so much, I went back in, took out the gateway, put in a foregroud landscape and re-rendered it:

Bryce 7 Pro: Alpenglow

Okay, okay, it was finished in Photoshop, but 90% of it was done in Bryce, with proper lights and so forth. It's not quite right, not yet; but I'm getting there. Slowly. Give me strength. [rolls eyes]

Alpenglow is that half hour right after sunset in the Arctic, when the  mountains go ... pink. Seriously! I've seen it. I've photographed it ... standing right in the middle of Jewel Lake Road, Anchorage, AK, at 11:55 at night while the Chugach Mountains lit up a wondrous shade of rose. Fond memories. I need to run the scanner again, digitize some more of my Alaska pictures! You don't get the same effect before dawn...

Speaking of dawn: more of the 2017 Dawn Photography shots, as promised:

These were photographed from the backyard right here ... a fire in the sky, February two years ago.

And lastly for today, a couple more Amberlight images:

Tomorrow, I think I'll go back to the new Amadeus, and do at least one more scene with him before ... hmm. I don't know what, not yet. It'll come to me. One thing about being disabled: time is on your hands, which for me is something that hasn't happened in years! Might do some SF next.

The vampire's screen test ... Amberlight designs ... dawn shots ... and a digital watercolor

Screen test ... Amadeus, take two! Now, this, I can work with! The nips, tucks and tweaks are actually quite subtle, but the make the face more real:

Also, the lad's had a haircut: it was overdue. The old, old wigs just don't render up too well: now, when you're applying dark colors to them, it hardly matters because you don't see the OBJ model, just the color. (The last time I bought 3D models was 2014; I need to upgrade my desktop before I can back into acquisition.) But --

Amadeus's most astonishing characteristic was always his "Gandalf the White" hair. As he aged through a thousand years, as an immortal vampire, the only thing that changed about him was that his hair went white. So the hunt was on to find a 3D wig that would render up okay and be white! I was down to just two choices left by the time I changed to this one, the Aksaste Hair (which might have come from Renderosity or the DAZ marketplace, I honestly don't remember.

Okay: Amadeus is done! He looks great, and he can meet his cousin Dimitri, uh, tomorrow.

For now...

A digital watercolor: The Murray Mouth -- with textured art paper stripped in for effect...

Neat, eh? (If anyone is interested, let me know, and I'll tell you you to do this. It ain't rocket science. It's just so much Photoshop jiggery-pokery).

Also, been working some more in Amberlight...

...there's oodles more, but I'll just upload a few at a time, because you really do get your "goggle factor" burned out if you get hit with too many at once! So, let's have a change of pace.

Been sorting images, a long, long overdue task. Got the best of my 2017 Dawn Photography squared away, and I think of this as "art in the sky, by Mother Nature" so I'll include a few here now and then. Here we go:

...and again, there's oodles more. Just a few at a time, or to quote Bruce Lee, "You will miss all the heavenly glory" by having your "goggle circuits" burned out!

Tomorrow: Amadeus and Dimitri! (If anyone is wondering, yes, I'm doing a lot of art these days. Why? I'm disabled now. Temporarily, I hope, but there are no hard guarantees. I haven't walked properly in a year and don't expect to for another year at the minimum. It's very depressing, and artwork takes my mind of it. So -- yep, art by the carton ... enjoy!)