When things go wrong -- you learn something new!

Good old Michael 4 himself ...
The actor: "Screentest, take two!"
(He's pinup size . Enjoy.)

LuxRender: an exterior noonday sun render:
Street scene in Mos Eisley. (Well, that's what it looks like!)

Byce 7 Pro:
A surreal arctic land/seascape with fog and glare

LuxRender: an exterior sunset render:
Sunset in the woods.

WTF?! An all night render, and
Lux gives me crap? Say, what?! And --

Problem could be inherent in the skinmap, because it has gobs of probs
even when you just attempt an old fashioned raytrace, Hmm. But --

LuxRender and a DAZ Studio raytrace of the 100% exact samemodel. You gotta be kidding!

Lovely detail rendering up in the street scene ... LuxRender. Nice.

Extreme closeup in low light ... also LuxRender. Nice!

There's an old saying that you learn a lot more when everything goes wrong than when it's all going smoothly. The old wisdom is absolutely spot on. It's been a long, long time since I had a render go catastrophically wrong and take two days to fix, but I guess you're never too smart to never have this happen!

The other day I had a fancy to create a whole new Michael 4 character. Fact is, I'll be using the old M4 for a while longer at least, because I don't have a spare grand to invest in the Genesis 2 system and new Reality gear. So, if I'm going to be flirting with Michael 4 for the foreseeable future, why not have fun? Cool in theory. So ... okay, one new character coming up. Here's the idea: he's a young actor trying out for a part in a fantasy film. The original idea was to have "ooparts" in there somewhere ... like, a wristwatch, smartphone, camera. In fact, I never got that far!

A new face and phsyique (designed by self), new arrangement of an existing hairdo (Aether hair); one of the really nice skinmaps, with a very good venous map (JM Falcon for M4). Set it all up with a quick series of test renders in DAZ Studio, send it to LuxRender, and --

Urk.  The wheels came off utterly. There's something about this skinmap that Lux hates. I tried a dozen different things to get better results, all to no effect, by which time I was frustrated enough with the process to go right back to Studio and see what I could wring out of a raytrace. Set it up again, and --

Urk. The skinmap is glaring with highlights as if the model is coated up with a gallon of baby oil. I tried everything I know in the surfaces settings to fix this, with absolutely no result at all; and confess to being rather flummoxed. It's been a long time since I abandoned a render! Then, on a whim...

I went into the parameters for the lights. Not the skinmap. The lights. Selected "diffuse only," and did another test render. Well, now. That certainly cured the glaring highlights -- the only trouble being that the "diffuse only" render is so flat, the model now looks like he's wearing a thick coat of body makeup, that "bronzing mud" the catwalk models wear. Then inspiration struck.

The solution was to do two renders and blend them in Photoshop. One shot with the glaring highlights, t'other with the bronzing mud effect. Lay one over the other and fade 'em together till it's juuust right. Then, lay over a blue-gray cast to dial down the brilliant colors, plus a couple of "washes" in the margins of the shot to make them more interesting. Done!

So what you see here is "just" a raytrace, but if I do say so myself, it's a very nice on. Fact: it's way superior to a bad render from Lux. Sure, it ain't gonna  rival the photographic effects they'r getting with Michael 6, whom LuxRender appears to adore; but that's fine. Those days will come.

(Speaking of which, it was mentioned to me that I was "courageous," showcasing the cutting edge figures and art on the blog here, when I know I'm not competing. Courageous? Well, it's not a competition, is it?! And if it were, I know what it'll take to put me on the touchline in front of the Liverpool goal, with the goalie flat on his face twenty yards away. Anybody got a spare grand?! No, I haven't, either! Not right now, anyway.  Next year. Also, am thinking of the thousands of fantastic renders done over several years by great artists in Poser and Studio ... the fact is, if the photographic realism of the later Genesis models, added to the super-realism of the top-end plug-in render engines, will negate all that gorgeous art --! No way. That's not just wrong, it's daft. A great picture will always be a great picture.)

But what went wrong between this skinmap and LuxRender? Search me. I never did get it figured out. And it's not like I haven't used this skinmap before -- I have. A lot! Like ...

L-R, Gil Cronin and Joe Ramos, from the NARC series.
Inspired by, and courtesy of, Mel Keegan.

 ...this one, above, for a start -- posted Feb 15, 2012. Joe Ramos (a key supporting player from Mel Keegan's NARC series of novels) is wearing it. Swoon, am I right? It's a gorgeous skinmap. So what in the name of the patron saint of 3D artists went askew?! if anybody out there knows, drop me an email. You can still reach me at jade @ dream-craft (dot) com. I should mention, for the record, that since Dave and I officially left DreamCraft behind, the domain itself has passed into the hands of Mel Keegan.

Back to the drawing board! There's a lot more to learn about LuxRender ... and it's not to late to learn a thing or two about good old DAZ Studio itself. Experiments will commence, LOL.

Assignment: rejacket about half of Mel Keegan ... and do it in three days, thank you. Ouch!

Click on all images to see at large size!

Every so often an assignment comes along, right out of the blue, and you wonder how in the world you're going to pull this particular rabbit out of the hat. This one was a beauty. Produce something like fifteen book covers, and get them "good to go" in two or three days, max! Ouch.

You're asking yourself, why this should be necessary? It's a long story, and one that caught me unawares. I'm rather out of touch with the business end of publishing at this point, because --

As the more observant Mel Keegan fans can hardly fail to have noticed by this time ... DreamCraft has actually closed its doors. This has been a while coming, and the close-down process was underway for more than a year, but ...

Yes, we've gone. DreamCraft as we knew it has passed into history, while Dave and I have gone on to other things; and I know this has left Mel somewhat high and dry. It's always like this when publishers close, and alas they tend to close their doors quite often, leaving writers scrambling. (Sorry, guys. We reached a point where it was necessary: life, the universe and ... everything.)

Since DreamCraft has been spiraling down for a long, long time, I haven't been keeping up with the changing requirements of the vendors, such as Kindle and Smashwords. All this, I passed right along to Mel, who's been keeping his titles online, right where they've always been.

Everything was smooth sailing till he received a surprise email from Smashwords, informing him (along with several gajillion other writers and publishers) that Sony's cover art requirements had changed. Say, what?!

Out of the blue, Sony (as in, the iBook store), decided they wanted BIG images to illustrate their catalog. Heaven only knows why, because teeny little thumbnails are all they ever display -- but Kindle has this same requirement. Beats hell out of me: don't ask. Truth is, it also probably beats hell out of Mark Coker, the boss at Smashwords, which is the vector and portal by which folks get into the Sony store, right? For years, Mark Coker's requirements ran along the lines of small images, 400x600, that kind of thing: small and quick to up/download -- made sense.

Then, bam! Not only does Sony tell Smashwords, the distributor, that they'll be needing BIG cover images, but also, nobody's going to be grandfathered in ... so all you guys out there who have looong backlists at Sony, supplied via Smashwords, will have to upload new cover art. Oh, brilliant.

Now, this might not be a problem when a book is pretty new and the art's on hand -- but what about books that go back many years? Do you still have the art? What version? What size? You guessed...

Most of the art for the Mel Keegan covers goes back as much as ten YEARS ... some of it doesn't even exist anymore at large size. We had a hard drive crash and lost a tonne of data a long while ago. It was never an issue, as the old covers were just "there," sitting where they needed to be, in an acceptable format --

Until suddenly they were no longer acceptable. And there was no way ... none! ... to just open up an old file and whip up a big version. Soooo...

Leave it to Gmail to dump two out of three of the Smashwords notifications directly into the trash, so Mel didn't know anything about this till almost the eleventh hour. Then, leave it to Mel to not check emails for long enough that the covers on 15 of his titles had actually gone down at iBooks before he realized what was going on, and sent up the balloon! (Okay ... Mel's working hard and putting up with way too much strife in his personal life for me no apportion any blame here, in reality. Just kidding, kiddo.)

So: panic. "Help! I need about thirty BIG covers fast, what can we do?!

 "We?" What's all this "we" business?!

First thing I did was go through the old hard drives, searching for the ancient developmental files for the old covers. Found some that worked just fine. HELLGATE stuff -- no problem. Images like MORE THAN HUMAN, HOME FROM THE SEA and whatnot -- these are new enough for the art to be there when you look for it. So half the list was easy.

The problem was, I came up fifteen covers short. Fifteen book covers that are going to represent Mel, catch the eye and (duh) convince prospective readers to part with dosh, in the Sony store. Gak. What now?

Now, you're going to have to get creative; and whatever you're going to do, you better do it fast. So the job can't involve fifteen new paintings, each of which take a whole day ... nor can it involve fifteen new Lux renders, each taking up to 40 hours! The window of what was doable was fairly small. Hmm.

The first thing I looked at was using a powerful imaging engine to double the size of some of the old renders. Irfanview is the best I know for this: better than Photoshop. Sorry, guys. It just is. So I was able --

-- to get some pretty good base art to work with; and then a lot of painting began. For example, check out the cover for GROUND ZERO. That one was worked up from a small image enlarged by a 2:1 ratio. The result was good enough to pass muster, when a lot of digital painting was added over the top.

We got away with a few covers using this technique. Another two that were workable-with on this model were SHADOW AND FLAME and TIGER, TIGER. But...

-- for a number of the others, it just wasn't going to work. In some cases, the only artwork surviving was way too small, and in a couple of cases there was nothing for it: it was a fresh render, or bust! And in two cases even this was impossible, and the problem was cured with public domain artwork over which a tonne of digital painting was performed.

The covers using the public domain art are FORUNES OF WAR and WHITE ROSE OF NIGHT. And the two for which the new renders were done are BREAKHEART and CALLISTO SWITCH. (Also, the work for AN EAST WIND BLOWING was interesting, since it was compiled from an old render of mine from years ago and a public domain photo of the Sutton Hoo Saxon-era helmet, plus a lot of Photoshop work.)

And in one case, I got to do a "flash" painting at high speed: STORM TIDE. This one actually turned out to be a damned good painting, even though it was whipped together in under an hour. It's a photo of a storm sky from years ago, and a photo of the ocean from last December, joined at the horizon line and then color-matched in Photoshop ... and then a lot of overpainting using Photoshop brushes. I have to admit, I was surprised and pleased by the results. I'm quite proud of this one!

Finding the original art for the TIGER, TIGER cover was an adventure ... a trip through history in the form of hard drives that haven't been accessed in a looong time. But there it was, albeit too small to be useful today. Irfanview did a terrific job of resizing it, and then a lot of Photoshop work was done on top of the art, to bring it up to scratch for today's usages...

And in the course of hunting this one down, I stumbled over rafts of digital art going back to something like 2005-2007 ... many PCs ago, and long before my association with 3D and Photoshop. Dang, but there's some gorgeous art there! Am going to dig it out, and post it on the blog here because ... well, it ain't 3D as such, but it's gorgeous art that I haven't seen in years. The truth is, I'd forgotten all about it.  So watch out for a post or two resurrecting all this stuff.

This is the first project where I've ever used public domain -- mashable -- images. The images for this one, above, and for FORTUNES OF WAR, were sourced from Wikimedia (commons.wikimedia.org) where the provenance of the images is supplied, and licensing details provided, so that you, as an artist, can be sure you're allowed to do what you're doing. They have about a zillion images, but you'd be surprised how few are available on any given topic. You're not choosing from 200 images of Cruades era subjects, for example; so getting a picture to fit is something of a crapshoot. With these two, we were lucky.

So, with the artwork more or less sorted, the next job was figuring out a format to hold it -- a template. Mel is wrangling his backlist himself right now; and this will likely continue to be the case. It made sense to draw the old titles together as "The Mel Keegan Collection," and this made it easy to design a quick, eye-catching template ... which you see here. Nice!

So, the whole assignment took a smidgen under three days, and the uploads were done by the end of that third day. Whew! And when I'd actually sunk my teeth into it, it was actually a lot of fun. Gave me the chance to do some work in Bryce 7 Pro that would otherwise never have occurred to me -- such as the new render for CALLISTO SWITCH, which you see on the left here.

Packed among the materials in Bryce 7 Pro is a fantastic set of photographic textures of the planets ... Jupiter, Mars, Io, what have you. This was a marvelous chance to load up a spaceship model, make some spheres, slap on the textures, set the lights, and click Render!

The interesting this about this one is that by the time I came to do this render the template had been designed, and I was able to have Bryce render this picture at the exact dimensons I wanted it. It's so odd, watching Bryce render something that looks like ... a bookmark. Then it went into Photoshop for some overpainting which reminds you somewhat of MORE THAN HUMAN, and ... done.

The question a great many readers will be asking right now is, what's next for Mel Keegan, since DreamCraft has pulled up stumps and vanished into the night...

Last I heard, MK was talking to a couple of publishers, though I have no idea which ones they are, or what the outcome of talks might have been. What I can tell you is that, for the time being, Mel Keegan is actually in control of the old DreamCraft domain and brand. Yep -- he owns the domain. His existing books will remain online at Amazon, Kindle, iBooks, Nook, Kobo and what have you.

What about new books? Well, publishing is nowhere near as easy as many writers assume! If Mel goes that route, he's about to find himself wrangling the zillion-and-one details that make your life ... interesting. Tell me about it. And yes, he'll probably do that. And yes, I'll tell you about it when something comes along, because I've put up my hand to do cover art ... this was fun!

Creating characters in DAZ Studio 3

Yesterday I debuted a new 3D character created from scratch in DAZ Studio 3. At the time, I was just calling him "the gunfighter," because he sort of showed up like this, if you remember:


(Here's the link to see the whole series of renders). Then I had a surprise email from Mel Keegan who said words to the effect of, "Do you have any more of this guy, because I'm thinking Richard Vaurien." And as soon as MK said that ... kawoosh.

Do you know Richard Vaurien? He's the captain of the incredible salvage vessel Wastrel, from the Hellgate series, which is one of Mel's best-ever, and due to be finished this year (six books, total). Richard is not a kid. He was Neil Travers's mentor when Neil was a kid; he's about 45 now -- all growed up -- with a "mane of red hair" and brown eyes, and he towers over everybody else with the exception of the Resalq and the Pakrani...

(Trying to figure out what the heck is going on here? Check out the books! You're missing a great ride if you haven't gotten into these. Reader Alert: they are not for younger readers. Realistic violence, industrial strength political and military motivation, and a couple of gay relationships. Be warned! But also, if you're all growed up yourself, be aware that these books are out there!)

...now, in their century people live a lot longer. Richard is 45, dynamic, hard, highly intelligent, vastly sophisticated, multi-talented. So what does 45 look like in his neck of the universe?

Creating the character, obviously I started with Michael 4. That's where it ALL starts. Then, you zoom in on the face and get to work. Your usual DAZ Studio 3 face defaults to "young." It looks like a guy of about 25. Old enough to have a permanent beard shadow, young enough to not have a line in his face, and still have a round face. Boyish.

So the next thing is, how do you age a face but at the same time keep a very attractive face? The Morphs++ plugin does have an "old" routine. But it's a bit of a problem, because mostly what it does is broaden the whole face and pull it downwards. Even a little bit of aging in this routine makes a face start to look daggy ... the truth is different. The fact is, a few years on a man's shoulders look good. Guys get interesting when they have a few years on 'em.

But to get the effect you have to do it yourself by adjusting every damned thing in the parameters pane. You need to study human faces. Figure out how people age and why they look more handsome at 40 than they did at 20. Have a look at photos of older celebrities and compare them with photos of the same celeb yonks ago. George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Viggo Mortensen. Pick your own!

Anyway, once you've got it figured out, then you start to play with the controls. Load the Morphs++ and get into the Parameters pane. Change the depth of the eyes, the nature of the eyelids, the way the cheeks fit over the skull bones, the way the jaw looks when the puppy flesh of the boy has gone away (but before the jowly appearance of the older guy has set in -- unless you want a guy who's a lot older).



I set it up so that you can tell his face is changed from the youth. Jaw, brow, eye sockets, cheeks, the lot. But the trick is to adjust these so that you wind up with "a face with some mileage" not just a decrepit face! This guy is not a kid. He's also drop-dead gorgeous.

And Mel is definitely right. I'm seeing Richard Vaurien. Which also makes me remember the Amazon female warrior I created a few weeks ago. Make the hair white blond and make the leathers pale gold, and you've got Vaurien's business partner and sometime bedmate, Barb Jazinsky! And I have got to find the time to do some renders of these two together!

Jade, 24 January

***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?!!!

Jade's First Post

PRIVACY POLICY

This addition is being made to the first-ever post on this blog, to bump us into agreement with Mother Google, because on 17 May, 2010 ... close to Post 300! ... I just added Google ads into the margin. The Google ads are there to hopefully earn a buck or two for the starving artis ... um, duh. Why else would anyone put a Google ad box on a blog?! However, this statement is here specifically to assure you, the visitor, that I (Jade) collect NO information from you whatsoever!!! None. Zip. Zilch. Nada. So even if I were a seven-headed monster in artist's clothing, and wanted to use such information to bring about some nerfarious end ... there's no information to be used, so it's all null and void!! Seriously, people -- all humor aside -- privacy is as important to me as to you. No way in the world would I do anything to damage the privacy of a visitor to this blog, but this message has to be in place to please Mother Google, and here is is. Please consider yourself 100% safe on this blog, and ... enjoy.

And now, with all that said, let's return to The First Post...!

The first thing I want to do, as I start this ... which is actually my first blog; can you believe that? ... is to say a big thank you to Mel Keegan for getting me into 3D artwork. I've been in digital art for ten years, but it's all about photography, digital painting, combinations of the two, and the startling effects which can be generated therefrom! 3D art is very different.

Update, Christrmas Eve, 2023

I've just spent several days sifting through this enormous body of work, deleting all the twelve and fourteen year old links that no longer work, taking out Flasplayer videos that no longer work, deleting references to a blog that has been lost utterly, can't be retrieved ... and marvelling over ho far I've come since I got into this!

I'm just going to paste in a few images here, to illustrate my point. It's been a fourteen-year journey, from the first steps with everything to learn, to being able to get, and guarantee, satisfying results such as... 

...and please do click on any of those to see them at full size. The work is still a sheer joy, but nowadays it's done in Iray and Photoshop as well as DAZ. The synthesis brings a special magic to the art. Once again, I asked myself, should I take down the early posts, since they're in no way representational of my work as it is these days? And again, when I asked friends, they said that people who are trying to figure out how to do this stuff can learn a heck of a lot more from following the step-by-step approach of a blog that traces the looooong path of a learning experience. So the early posts are going to remain, at least for the time being --

In fact, I started the blog because I wanted an indelible record of the progress (often plodding; always experimental) from "just got my feet wet" to, "just spent 40 hours rendering this in Lux, whoooo!" ... and as I look back over the close-to-1,000 posts, I'm very glad I did this.

But eventually I'll have to come to grips with the question: should I leave the old posts up or take them down, or replace them with new content? Doctor Mike actually nailed it: people who want to actually make a start in CG art or digital painting will get more out of the early posts, because the later ones are so technical, you have two years or more of catching up to do before you can understand what's going on in them.

So we're going to leave the early posts up and running ... by I'm going to gussie them up with updates like this one.

With all that said, then, let's get back to the original blogpost:

Something had prompted Mel to look into 3D art creation software -- there are several packages on the market, from the most user-friendly and affordable (Poser, Hexagon) at one end of the scale to the Pro end (3D Studio Max and so on) at the other. Dame Fortune let Mel in a beeline to DAZ Studio 3, and since it's a hefty app which demands a heck of a lot of RAM and one hell of a video card, it wound up being run on one of the big systems at DreamCraft.



Looking over Mel's shoulder as the first forays were made into this creative realm, I saw what was going on, on the screen ... ooooooh boy. I was hooked. Instantly.

Mind you, creating great images came a week or two later! There's a learning curve to be climbed even in this app, and even though it's the proverbial cake-walk by comparison with the top-end progs like 3D Studio Max, don't let anyone tell you it's an easy climb -- well, not if you're going to know how to handle the lights, surfaces, materials, D-formers and all that stuff, rather than just buying existing models and posing them, and then rendering the shot.

So ... I got into DAZ Studio 3 in a big way in August, and I'm having so much fun with it right now, it's time to share.
I'm going to try to post every few days; and I'll also tell you what software was used for the post-production, and where to get it, and (!) how the work is done. It's a hell of a lot of fun, and as always, I want to share. So, thanks to Mel Keegan for getting me into this. In future posts, I'm going to be showcasing a bunch of covers I've already done for Mel's 2010 titles, and also for a new writer who's just signed with DreamCraft. Jayne deMarco will soon be quite well known in the GLBT realms, and I've had huge fun doing the covers for her first round of releases. So --

Welcome to Jade's Adventures in 3D!