An alien city, ships in orbit ... and an SF hero on the street

Today -- science fiction. Because I feel like ... science fiction. Give me a reason why not! I'm not going to tell you I designed the city: it's a standing set for Bryce 7 Pro! I bought it a loooong time ago and haven't done very much with it, and stumbled over it again just the other day. It's fun driving the camera around in it, and by the time I'd rendered this, below --

-- I thought, that would be a terrific scene for a movie, Cinemascope and all. What it needs is a character in costume. So ...

Now, the digital actor is a slightly new version of a character I designed for a book cover back in something like 2014, but it was never used. I just changed the hair for this. Nice! No, I didn't ship Michael 4 into Bryce and render him there. Not that you can't (you can), but the results are never satisfying, at least to my eye. I just imported the Bryce city render as a backdrop and raytraced the character, then did a little overpainting in Photoshop. Cheating? Maybe. Probably. But frankly, the results are better this way. Go figure.

Also in Bryce 7 Pro today...

I felt like doing something along the lines of Chris Foss! This was a lot of fun, came out really well, and took my mind off the bloody pain I was in after seeing the dentist. Dang, they do know how to torture people, don't they? Over five hundred bucks, and soooo much pain. The only good thing to come out of it is that no more can be done for these teeth, so I'm through paying and paying. There are still problems, but right now it's "Come back when something starts to bother you," and presumably we've reached a point where we start waving bye-bye to them. Uh huh. Between you and me, I will not shed a tear: I'm really, truly, seriously fed up of them. 😬 And the upside to that is ... now I can look at spending some bucks on the computer! Tomorrow (when I'm in less pain and thinking clearer, with hopefully fewer pills floating around in the bloodstream), I'll check out NVIDIA video cards, and the requirements for IRay and so forth...

CG fantasy on a really squeezy deadline ... nice!

click to see all images at large size

This one was a tremendous pleasure -- a commission, to illustrate a story in an upcoming magazine. As I read the story, at least a dozen illustrations jumped into my mind, but this was the one that was the "stickiest" -- meaning, the one I kept coming back to over and over.

What was I saying last week about rendering large and then cropping to your heart's content? With this one, the editor will have loads of options -- and you can even cut entirely different images out of it, just as you could with the gypsy boy. Like this:

There's also a great fascination for the super-wide shots. I would love to do something that was in "true cinemascope" rather than the 16:9 format that we know so well from tv screens and also YouTube videos. The aspect ratio is close to this:

...the problem for me is that when I set up the shots I usually can't bear to crop out the top and bottom, which is where so much of the beauty is. Though, I have to say the cinemascope crop of this piece looks pretty stunning. 

Reading the story, it seemed to me that the sky and water, the landscape, were principle players, and that any illustration had to feature them, or else be "missing the important part." So the first thing I did was get into Bryce 7 Pro and custom-design the sky and water. Here it is at half-size: 

...this backdrop was actually rendered at 1600 pixels wide and then imported into DAZ Studio for the character and props to be added. You might actually recognize the "actor" ... you've seen him a couple of times, and he was perfect for this piece. The sword is the same prop you saw in the "Absent Friends" piece, but once again I changed the dimensions and switched out all the materials to give it a new(ish) look. The ground cover was done completely in DAZ by using full-size shrubs, but reducing them to about 40% size and sinking them into the "ground" so that only the tips show through and look like small plants. This works well -- it takes a looooong time to render, so I set it up to render overnight -- but it's well worth doing it this way. You get a better overall result than trying to paint the foliage. Also worth mentioning is that this is "just" a raytrace ... if it were a LuxRender picture, it would still be rendering. The deadline was (!) 48 hours, from "go" to delivery. It really was a case of "drop everything and just do it," which was another reason to do the foliage as 3D objects rather than painting them. Painting is fun, and you can get wonderful results but when you're doing this kind of work, you might not have the time to get really terrific results fast enough. The last thing I should mention is that to get the hair to look like that I combined two hair props. Here, you're looking at both the Yannis Rasta Dreads and the Spartacos hair by SAV!

So then the bare render was shipped into Photoshop for over-painting. A lot of over-painting. As cool as the raw renders are, it's the post work that makes them come to life, gives them the depth and vibrancy ... so what was painted? A lot of the shadows, most of the highlights (on hair, skin, costume, sword), mist, birds, "godrays." I think this one was painted in something like about 12-15 layers.  And I'm very pleased with the result.

Adventures in Scrivener Part 2:

It's a breeze! Don't let anybody tell you that this writer's tool is hard work, or has some kind of learning curve, because it doesn't. It's as easy to run as a word processor, and I'm in the process of getting Mel Keegan to switch over to it. Mel is overflowing with ideas but has very little time to write these days, due to having a work load that would drop a charging buffalo in its tracks. Imaging having the ability to open a project and just chuck ideas into it, and then push and pull them every which way. Scrivener gives you this ability, and it's a tremendous freedom. I'm enjoying it a lot ... full marks to the program's designers, who hang out at Literature and Latte. 

Sorry to be posting so infrequently lately, guys. Haven't been very well,  health-wise, simple as that! But I'm hoping that the worst might be behind me, and I can get well in the near future. So much to do ... so many ideas for art and also for stories!

Jade, July 5 (July 4 in the States ... enjoy the fireworks, folks!)

A bit of this, a bit of that...

click to view at large size -- 1000 pixels wide, or more...

Something for everyone today: male nude, action, fantasy, science fiction, space ships, landscapes, Bryce, digital painting, CG art ... the works! This is what I've had going through in the last couple of days.

The top three images are a sort of "pet fascination" of mine. Movie directors these days use a thing called "pre viz," or "pre-visualization" to help them frame up the shot before they waste a million bucks an hour on the set. I would dearly love to work as a pre-viz artist for a movie comany. *sigh* They email me something like stick figure sketches, and I render up "quickies" such as you see here -- they look like frames out of the movie, and they'll tell the director what'll work, and what won't, and why not. These shots took a matter of minutes, and it's a load of fun. Now, how in the world does one go about getting a job doing pre-viz --?! These images have no post work on them at all. Nada. These are just as they rendered up...

Next: a spaceship on approach to a blue-green world. Ship and planet rendered in Bryce, and all else done in Photoshop -- basically, some surface detail on the planet, the starfield, the lens flare. The nebula is a Hubble image that was dropped into the background, blended down, and a mask applied to the ship to make the nebula drop behind it. Neat.

Next: a rather lovely Bryce landscape -- fully photo realistic. At last! This is the first time I've managed to get photo realism, and it's still a leeetle bit of a crap shoot for me. This one was almost easy (almost too easy, in fact), including the Instancing lab, which "paints" plants and flowers onto the ground. The result is actually rather superb, so --

I thought I'd have another go, see if I could do it again. Nope. The Instancing lab started to crash the program over and over. I barely got the foreground set up before I just couldn't keep Bryce up on its feet for long enough to put enough into the shot to make it realistic. So I rendered what I had, and then shipped it into Photoshop and painted the hell out of it. That one there classifies as a digital painting, not a render, and this was what I wound up with after tearing my hair out by the roots...

In fact, I would up on Google, searching on "Bryce crashing when Instancing used," and it turns out ... it does. The publisher actually issued an upgrade about five months ago -- I missed it, because at the time my computer wouldn't run Bryce well enough to make it worth getting into, so I wasn't paying any attention to the website. Now, my mission is to find out of I can get the upgrade. Then maybe (and I know it's a long shot) I can get the Instancing lab to work. If not -- well, there are other ways and means, not as fast, but far more stable.

The last image for today -- the pony in the paddock -- was supposed to be photorealistic too. It's based on a piece cut out of the meadow shot. Easy enough to use it as a backdrop and put the pony into the foreground ... and then, wouldn't you know it? I had every render problem under the sun! I wound up with an image that had "problems." If you saw the actual render, you'd be saying, "Hmmmm." So I shipped it right into Photoshop and converted it to a painting, which also gave me the opportunity to just paint out the problems, and paint in the solutions! Grrr.

Suffice to say, I'm still working on getting the drop on Bryce ... I'll see if I can get the upgrade ... and I'm groaning for a decent render engine! If I won lotto next week, it would be Poser Pro 2012 -- mind you, I'm told it's buggy as an ant farm. Better to wait six months, and get the fixed version, yes? Yes.

Jade, 27 January

Playing happily in DAZ and Photoshop

Click on the wee little image to see this at full size. Please do!!

Playing happily ... deliriously, in fact. Trying to see what the new computer won't do ... and so far, I haven't found a darned thing it doesn't do, lickety-split. This render, above, was done at over 1100 pixels wide, with about 10 lights set, and textures and refractions and ... the works. The old computer would have taken around two hours to render it. This one? Seven minutes. So I was able to do more than two dozen test renders, to figure out what was right, what was wrong, and fix it all up before getting into Photoshop and doing the overpainting...

Speaking of Photoshop and painting: I reckon I've learned more since Boxing Day than I learned in the last four or five months. Seriously. The old computer was like this: click to load up an .abr brush set, and then pick up a book to kill the time it took the set to load. Uh huh. Now? Hee hee hee!

Check this out -- in fact, check it out at full size, and see the details. This one was deliberately rendered flat in DAZ, and then shipped into Photoshop to go through a ten-layer process, which brings it up like a digital painting -- something like gauche or acrylic, or a mix of both (which is something I used to like doing in the wild, woolly and far off days when I painted with (urk) a paintbrush). Here it is... 

And that's not all. I tried my hand at painting the texture map for a gas giant like Jupiter:

The planet is a sphere generated in Bryce 7.0 Pro and exported, then imported into DAZ to be fixed up with its hand-painted texture, and lit. It took about as long to do as this description is taking to write. So, nothing daunted, I decided to stretch the frame into Cinemascope and add a spacecraft on approach to this giant world...

One of the enormous plus factors of the new machine is that I can now get BIG renders. I used to be rendering in a keyhole, in order to get something under an hour or two, and to get through a complex raytrace without the computer falling on its face (or butt. Whichever). But now ... well, here's an outtake from today's leading shot -- just in case you didn't click on it to see it at large size, and enjoy the details. You have got to see this:

Since the render is BIG, the details don't get compressed into less space than the average carbon atom. Look at the texture in his hands and ... so on! This is one of my faces and body morphs (in other words, I designed the face and body...) but he's wearing the Falcon skinmap and the Akasta hair, and the pale green eyes from the Eyes Have It pack of eye textures. 

Is there a story behind this image? If you like. And you decide which scenario you like the best. Is this the warrior after a long, hard day at the wars, who's inviting the courtesan or the body slave to come play? Or is this the courtesan or the body slave, who's been waiting at home for the warrior to get his butt back from the wars, and come play? That, I leave up to you!

There's a downside to all this, though. Have been sitting in front of the new machine (known as Thor on the home network, until I'm juuuuust starting to forget what my legs are for. I feel my backside going flat and square. And I'm starting to really, really neglect the work that's piling up around me, demanding to be done. Well, it's the holidays -- I'm taking time off, right? But I have to get back to work in a couple of days. Rats. 

Jade, 30 December (yikes, one day left of 2011!)

3D art meets prose ... somehow, somewhere

Telling a story in pictures ... or pictures accompanied by as little text as possible ... is a very attractive challenge for an artist. Graphic novels and comics are the perfect expression of this -- you could also nominate movie storyboards as a perfect example. Somewhere out there, there's a sublime marriage between the written word and art. Not language and images per se, because that sublime marriage is called motion pictures. It's something else, and it transcends both comics and prose. I'm not quite sure what it is yet, but I think maybe Walt Disney had the same kind of vision and spent a lifetime trying to capture what he's glimpsed.

Way back when, in the days of yore when Disney was literally inventing cartoon animation on the one hand, and a guy called Willis O'Brien was inventing stop motion animation on the other (King Kong, 1933), the technology was so primitive, it took a regiment of artists years to produce a story that could be told in about 75 minutes.

And now? Wellll, unless you have four or five powerful computers, you still can't animate; but by golly, the visualization is doable right there on the desktop. So -- how long before the computer power becomes available to the ordinary artist, to be able to animate? I'm guessing about five years or so, when PCs have ten processors, never mind two or four, and they're cheap as chips. And ... am I looking forward to that!

But till then, I'm hunting for something that's a marriage between prose and art. Just can't ... quite ... find it yet. It's right there on the edge of my imagination, though. Shall keep looking.

Jade, 5 August

***Posted by MK: my connection is intermittent, too slow for this. Seriously, guys, I've got dialup speeds. How are you expected to do anything these days, at 1990 dialup speeds?!!!

Merlin's Medieval Tavern ... amazing!

2014 Edit: here you are seeing several; renders from 2021, done in Iray ... the original 2010 renders have gone down the black hole, like so many others. I have a couple of thumbnails left to show what they were, but ... nothing exciting. No reason to shed a tear over them. 

Merlin's Medieval Tavern ... what can I say? "Blown away" is the line that leaps to mind! It's going to be two posts today from me, almost certainly. Was on a tea break and installed this incredible 3D set ... and frankly, it's so amazing, I just had to do a few quick renders and share these!

... and this is only one tiny corner of it! You're flying the camera around the inside of a box: look up, down, left right, everything is 100% detailed -- then you can fly out of the box and zip around the outside of the set.

There's kitchens, bedrooms, stables, the lot ...! I just need to find my way around ... because you fly the camera down passageways and through doors... it's exactly like playing a video game, but when you find just the camera angle you want, you stop and render the shot.

Incredible! This is going to be fun beyond describing! I have noticed that even the quad core slows down a little bit with the sheer weight of props loaded in, so it's going to be interesting adding Michael and Victoria into the scenes. For the first time ever I might have to switch to wire mesh display. I'm cool with that. The alternative is to render backgrounds and ship them into a separate scene as 2D backdrops, and then load up the Tavern props in that scene as the foreground materials.

Whoa! Anyway -- had to share this! I know there's now around 30 people visiting this blog regularly, and a lot of you are taking the same path of development as myself in this field of artwork. So there's a number of you folks who'll be interested to see these first, early-days renders ... and here they are. Merlin's Medieval Tavern ... Jade's rating: 6 out of 5 stars!

Jade, 12 April

***Posted by MK: my connection is intermittent, too slow for this.

Good news, bad news ...

There's good news and there's bad news. The good news first: the computer should be salvageable, and I haven't lost any data (yet). The bad news: the system that's gone down with a rotten, lousy, insidious virus that's been lurking in the background is the quad core which handles the big, powerful programs ... like DAZ, Bryce, Serif and so on.

So, at this moment I don't have any real access to the system that does the artwork, and it's driving me batty!!!! Things just stop working for no apparent reason. First webpages are unreachable. Then browsers crash on startup. Then the windows clipboard won't allow anything to be copied to it. Then every link on a Google search results page,when clicked, results in a page redirect ... to a BAND on MYSPACE!!!!! And on and on and on.

It's a virus, nothing else it can be to produce this weirdness. AVG missed it utterly, so we uninstalled that and bought Avast. Here's the problem: Avast won't install. The virus again??? So I tried to reinstall AVG ... and it won't reinstall. Now I have no virus protection whatsoever on the quad core, so it's quarantined from that swamp of infection and infestation otherwise known as the WWW.

Next, we did a lot of work on my laptop to bring it up to date, and I was going to switch over to that for emails etc. And now, darned if I can get it to go online. So I'm on borrowing Dave's computer (we're starting to run low on available systems here: only two left after this one, and one of them is unavailable, and the other is ooooold and slow).

It's been a wonderful day (sound of sarcasm there), with about 6-7 hours blown off trying to install things that didn't want to be installed, and get computers online when they have no intention of complying. I guess I'll surrender for today and try again tomorrow.

Sigh.

Jade, 28 March

***Posted by MK: my connection is intermittent, too slow for this.

DAZ render settings: an embarrassment of riches!

I couldn't resist rendering this one in CinemaScope. It looks like it needs a couple of planets in the sky ... the young hunk in rural Tattooine pauses in his labors to look up and watch a pod making its descent into the Jawa- and Sandperson-infested dunes. Click on it, see the whole thing at full size -- I set it to render at 1200 wide, and compressed the image a bit to make it suitable for upload. The bigger the image is, the better it looks ... frames from a movie that was never made.

Anyway, this was the third render of the same subject, and it was an exercise in variety ... here's the medium shot:
And I rendered a closeup, too:

The model ... Michael 4, as usual, wearing a face designed my me, and the GQ Event hair in dark brown. The one and only drawback to Michael 4 is that the "base" is still so new, there's not an ocean of add-ons and accessories for him. Give 'em time: I imagine a hundred designers are right now working on clothing and props. I wish someone would do a nice shirt series -- business shirt, Hawaiian shirt, that kind of range. I have a teeshirt, a tank, an overshirt and a leather jacket, plus a pair of jeans, shorts, speedoes. What I'd really like to see on this model is leisure wear.

And like I said, give 'em a chance. It takes a fair amount of time to design 3D models. I guess I'm just impatient. I understand the models are made in Hexagon, which is something I don't have any experience with ... I will soon, though. A working version of it is packed on the CD-ROM accompanying the DAZ manual, which ought to be in the mail right now...

Don't CinemaScope images just kick you in the imagination? Your brain starts working, trying to fill in the rest of the story! Me like.

Jade, 28 October

Experiments in Cinemascope

One of the things I've wanted to try playing with for a while is the "CinemaScope" render setting that DAZ makes available. Think about this: you're illustrating something, and you can make your artwork come up like ... stills or frames from a movie that hasn't been made. Oh, yeah.

(Click on the above to see it at full size ... you'll be surprised!)

The Cinemascope setting is to be found in the drop-down menu under Render > Render settings > Presets. They have every preset in the world on the menu. The CinemaScope one is 600 x 225, expressed in pixels.

Which means you can set up your backdrop to the last pixel, and then work with a pre-designed character. This is too easy. The shot above was done using a 1200x 450 crop from a shot of Lake Alexandrina, over the rooftops of the "shacks" at Milang a couple of years ago. It's quite en evocative shot to start with. Then, add yet another permutation on the Michael 4 model, and get the whole thing posed ... and render it.

(This Michael 4 is wearing a face designed by me, plus a blond version of one of the hair styles ... the Billy Hawke hair, I think ... plus the leather jacket and rollneck sweater.)

The shot says a lot. It's dawn, he's making his way into a small town, and he's looking for someone or something. Could easily be a movie frame. I'm very pleased with this effect ... will be doing more in this format. You can get tired of being "stuck" in the 2:3 ratio for book covers. The artist hiding inside starts to rattle its chains, wanting to get out.

Jade, 27 October