Pin-up time: a little guy candy for Easter ... any why not?

 

Going back through posts for the last few years, I'm discovering that loads (and I mean loads!) of pictures were never posted here. Time to catch up with that! And then there's new stuff, which is starting to pile up too, while I try to make the time to keep up with this blog. (I also run a writing blog, which is being horrifically neglected ... I've been selling fiction professionally for the last few years; I don't know if I ever mentioned that. 2022 did such a number on me, I'm hopelessly out of date with everything.)

So let me post some pretty things and say "Happy Easter!" 

The dragon is a full-on, 100% digital painting: "Dragon's Dominion." The other pieces are 3D renders which have been re-re-re-repainted, and I have to say, good old Michael 4 never looked so good. He renders well in Iray, and he paints up well in Photoshop. Okay, so he's never going to be as photographically realistic as a Genesis figure, but here's the thing: if you're not looking for photographic results, and are content (nay, happy?) with art, Michael 4 is dead easy to work with. M4 and V4 render very fast, and by the time they're painted and turned into art, I don't see an issue with the fact the work began life as something not-Genesis.

Translation: I'm getting the itch to start up Studio again, and if I can't render the brand new stuff, which won't squeeze into my GPU, then so be it!

Last thing for today: it's AI. I don't know what the heck it it, but I like it a lot. Using Stable Diffusion, I put in the incredibly vague prompt "The Meaning of Life." Gawds alone know what the machine is thinking, but for that prompt, this is what it gave me:

To me, it looks like some kind of alien creature, and it's strangely compelling. Oddly enough, I like it a lot. And on the completely other end of the scale, I painted an Easter card this morning. Let me post it here, wish everyone all the best for the long weekend, and get myself off to bed! Goodnight to all...

Ruins in the dying light -- and browsing for a new leading man.

Here's an unexpected pleasure! The sale at Renderosity never stops, and since there's been a few things I've wanted (can't actually say "needed") for a while, I decided to take a look. This is AppleJack's Ruined Church, and it renders brilliantly. I added some skies photographed in the Flinders Ranges last week (where the sky is overwhelming, and gets very dramatic several times a day), and then got clever with IBL lighting, actually using the same images for backdrops and lighting. In this one, above, I added a hugely bright, warm spotlight, angled off to represent the lowering sun, and two copies of Merlin's crow, from the Wild Borders set.

The Ruined Church set may be old, and low-poly enough to render like lightning, but the finished result is more than good enough to feature on a book cover, for example -- and with careful lighting and camera work, it can be indistinguishable from reality. Neat! Very glad I shopped this sale! I also got a boat and a bridge, and you'll see more of all this in days to come. 

Next thing on my list of gotta-have items is this:

https://www.daz3d.com/michael-4-for-genesis-2-male

Rather speaks for itself, doesn't it? Basically, you can dial the exact-same body morphology for M4 into the Genesis 2 Male, which means that all your costumes and skinmaps will work. What won't work, of course, is the Morphs++ for M4; and you lose the head morphs. So the old characters (Jarrat and Stone, Leon, Sebastian, Amadeus, the list goes on) will be much, much harder to resurrect in the high-poly figure; though I wonder if it might be possible to go a step further. For US$50 there's a face transfer system, whereby you put in a clear full-face image, and it drops it onto the Genesis 8 ... mind you, not the Genesis 2! So there's a major compatibility clash, and to date no one has offered to resolve this. Hmm. US$50 is a a lot, but supposing Jarrat and Stone and the rest leapt into being as Genesis 8 characters. Lemme think about this. You have to wonder if there aren't better ways to go ... do what Hollywood does, and "recast" the parts. Try this for size:

See that full-sized, please ... I uploaded it large. This is Ragnar for Gianni 7, for Genesis 3 Male, by GypsyAngel, who also designed the Rex and Dae characters I use so much. Hmm. I really go need to think this through before I run hither and thither, chucking $$$ in every direction! Gianni 7 bundle for $90, and the GM3 Body morphs for $20, and Ragnar for $20. You're out US$130, but see where you are at the end of that spend! Huh.

See where your imagination goes, on a lazy Sunday afternoon?!

Goa'uld eyes fixed! And -- IRay shaders, first try, first look

First things first: fix those damned eyes! And yes, I guessed right ... you can go into the surfaces pane and dull them down with a diffuse color. If anyone else is getting this problem, the chromatic gray I used is 176-176-195, and it works like magic. This guy went from having eyes that looked 100% fake (spoiled the effect of the character, in fact) to looking fairly natural. Very pleased with this. Then --

Starting to experiment with the pack of IRay shaders I bought the other day. Took me about half an hour to figure out how to apply them, because DAZ Install Manager didn't put them in Smart Content or even in some special "shader" folder, so that they'd appear in the surfaces pane. Nope, it just dumped them into the A-Z, 'everything but the kitchen sink' cache of assets ... and how the heck are you supposed to apply them from there? The instructions (yes, I read them!) say that you select a surface and double click the shader of your choice to apply it. Good luck with that: it doesn't work. What does work is drag and drop. I tried everything, and then tried this in desperation, and wham, there you have it.

Now, I need to figure out where these blasted shaders live, inside the Studio filer hierarchy, so that I can top up on free ones, and less-expensive ones, from third party retailers. Can't afford to buy everything at DAZ, which means I can't rely on the Install Manager. Installation has to be done manually, from ZIP files or similar. So ... file structure, please. At the same time as getting it worked out for the shaders, I'll be able to figure it out for other third party content (I hope), so that lots of stuff from the earlier version of the program will pop into the A-Z bin of the Content Library. Then, if this works ... kind people who post freebies at DeviantArt, CG Share, and even Renderosity might just save my financial life here!

Very happy with the way Michael 4 is rendering ... still waiting for tech support to tell me what's going wrong with the file save routine, where the M4 figure drops out and is replaced by a stack of boxes! But yes, I can pose him in Studio 3 and just open/merge that file into 4.11, and ... in fact, here's a project for tomorrow: let's put the Genesis character, Dae (the brooding one with the Vulcan eyebrows) and my own Amadeus into the same scene, render them together. Hmm. Interesting!

I also need to get the Genesis 8 guy something to wear. Right now, he has a pair of slacks, a tee shirt, a dorky pair of shorts, and a sweatshirt of some kind. But this looks promising:

Badlands Gladiator G8 costume

And now ... bed! It's the wee small hours, and I'm tired. Yaaawnn. G'night, all.