Dangerous liaisons

And he sez to me, "Keep your hands right where I can see 'em ... lose the gun, drop the jacket. I don't trust you as far as I could throw a wet wookie." And I sez to him, "What the hell is a wookie, and what's so bad about them when they're wet, and why can't you toss them far?"

Seriously ... Continuing on with the theme of the "leather clad hunk" who arrived on the spaceport platform in "episode one," and went looking for trouble in "episode two" ... well, looks like he found it right here in episode three!

Of course, there's many different kinds of trouble. I couldn't resist rendering another kind:

There you are, you see ... until the camera pulled back, you had no idea he'd not only gotten rid of the jacket, but the leather pants and boots as well. And was offered a martini (a gin martini with the hell stirred out of it), and is now reaching out to take the drink before sprawling on the couch in this ten-thousand-credits-a-night hotel suite in the High Five orbiting hotel and giving a sultry look to whoever just handed him the martini...

It's an interesting scenario, and you could go a looooong way with this. [grin]

The background is a real hotel interior, just not the hotel in Abu Dabhi which provided the spaceport exterior the other day. This one is a hotel somewhere in eastern Europe. I think. I can't actually remember! But no, it's not a 3D model, and even if it were, I didn't model it. That will come along later, when I've gotten into Hexagon and learned how to do this stuff. For the moment I'm more than happy learning the ropes about lighting, matching model and background colors so the model and the pasted in image look like they belong together rather than being different entities. Because if you don't match the model to the background, or the background to the model, you don't get a "scene," you get a photo montage.

The color matching is done by either jinking the color of the background in red, green and blue till it "comes good" (and the best prog I know for doing this is the free one, Irfanview!), or else setting up lights on the model and changing the color of them to ... well, change the color of the model.

The model we've been following from the spaceport to the boudoir is DAZ's Michael 4, wearing a face and hairdo designed by me, and the high-rez skin map (which you buy separately).

You know, I might just follow this scenario along and see how much trouble this particular hunk can get his luscious self into. Mind you, if I did, I'd be uploading the images someplace else! I swore up and down I'd keep the contents of this blog "general" enough not to have to slap a warning on it ... and this scenario could get, uh, real steamy, real fast!

Jade, 6 November

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

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!