Angel and demon ... unlikely allies: neat CG fantasy!

Had a neat idea for a fantasy ... suppose an angel and a demon joined forces to fight a common enemy ... and I just happen to have an angel and a demon in my own cast of characters!

I also used this as a testbed for some experiments. First, I raytraced is in Studio 3, and it took about 45 minutes. Then I raytraced it in Studio 4.10, and it took about three minutes! So there's a reason to put 4.10 to work -- speed. The new engine is soooo fast. Nice.

Then, I sent it to IRay, to see what would happen. Now, I know, I know, I know ... every single surface in an image that's going to be rendered by IRay is supposed to have a shader applied! But you have to BUY them thar shaders, and also the pro set-up lights ... and if I'm not careful I could throw a thousand dollars at this. Which I can't afford to do. Eventually I'll have to turn to Reality, because, as I remarked yesterday, IRay is a very deep money pit.

But here we are -- IRay without shaders and pro lights ... this is just the render straight from Studio 3, to 4.10, to IRay... which is what I have to work with:

Well worth the experiment, but as you can see, it's "six of one, half a dozen of the other." Without the pro lighting sets and the endless libraries of shaders which must be applied to every single surface, an IRay render is a bit different from a raytrace, but not really superior in any significant way. (In fact, Reality is better at rendering with garden variety lights and plain old mapping.) Alas, the cost of all those lighting sets and shaders for IRay is, frankly, prohibitive, for me.

So I will indeed to opting for Reality: their lights and shaders are free and/or built into the plugin. You drop fifty bucks one time, and you're good to go. That, I can afford. Hey ho.

DAZ Tech Support opened a dialog today, but only to ask for a screen shot of a window. No joy as per getting Studio 4.10 to access any content. So all I'm doing is opening Studio 3 renders in it, and playing, to learn the interface. OMG. Urg. To say I do not like it is an understatement, but it's the only way to work with the Genesis figures and the new Reality. Grit your teeth, Jade, and get it done, right? But Tech Support has to get this problem fixed for me first, or nothing new will happen! Aaarrrgghh.

CG and Photoshop fantasy: Murder in the Thieves' Market

(click to see all images at large size)

Murder in the Thieves’ Market ... the idea was simple. The warrior (and it could be Conan!) has received a message from Subotai (and yes, I do know Subotai was a character created for the John Milius movie, starring Big Arnie; but I'll be honest, I really liked what Gerry Lopez brought to the project, being the absolute opposite of everything Conan was). The message says: Meet me an hour after midnight at the market ... but when the warrior gets there, all there is to show of his friend is a smear of blood on the ground, a bloody spear, and a strange cornucopia that’s ... smoking with the residue of dark magic.

So far, so good. The scene was pretty easy to set up (Michael 4, the DAZ Millennium Horse with textures by CWRW. Elements of Powerage’s Supreme Armor; Dragon Lord Horse Armor for the horse; a lamp (it might be from the Pirates of Tortuga prop set — I forget), plus odds and ends ... a lamp, barrel, wagon wheel, incense burners, from various prop sets, wall, ground, spear, cornucopia.

So I had it posed in an hour, then spent an hour switching out all the textures for my own. But ... damn’n’blast, between the deep shadow map and the raytrace, there was no “agreement” about what would render properly and what was going to jack around. And I was out of time...

In the end, I went with the raytrace and then painted virtually every single this in the frame. The jerkin, the skin tones, the shield, the hair ... You name it, it was painted, which was waaay easier than trying to get it to render properly. Heaven only knows what was going on at the software level, but it was Photoshop to the rescue. I’m very happy with the result.

The character is one of mine -- you might recall this: 

...see the whole post here...

That was the Mitchell hair and skinmap by SAV, but I have to admit, the original face/body morphs don't do anything for me, so I designed a character around the skimap -- which is usually the opposite of what you do. You design a character and go looking for a skinmap! (And this is what's landed me in some strife with Neil Travers, from the Hellgate series of books. The face is right, but I can't find a skinmap to fit to everyone's satisfaction! It's been years, and I'm still looking for a perfect match on the skinmap. This is the reason you don't see Neil Travers depicted a whole lot more often. Note to self: try the Mitchell skinmap on Neil. Now, that's not a bad idea...)

So Murder in the Thieves Market was more about painting than rendering:

...and to really illustrate this point, see the warrior, "raw" and painted, side by side here:

And obviously, you'll need to see the above at large size to see the results of painting! I've been asked why I bother putting a caption on an image, and then including the caption, or a close version of it, in the body of the blog post. Method in my madness: Google can't read text that's buried in images. Like everyone else on the tipple-dub-ya, I'm still trying to reach people who would appreciate this blog and follow it, so I want Ma Google to be able to read the whole text, and fish out the keywords, like Phoshop, raytracing, fantasy. CG art, and what have you. At the same time, when a Google Image Search pops up the picture only, the caption is there to catch the attention and interest of the potential visitor and make him or her click through to the site.

And I'm still interested in fiddling around with framing and bordering on images, so as a parting shot I did this:

I guess this would be the prologue to the story -- the scene that drags Conan into the plot. And speaking of the plot --

Of course, Subotai isn't dead. The blood on the ground belongs to the assassin whom he dispatched when rescuing a gorgeous woman from being murdered ... she bade him accompany her to a passing caravan, where she enchanted him, and not in a good way. Turns out, she's a dark sorceress, which Suobtai only discovers when he's brought out of his trance (read: hit on the head with a waterjug) by the story's heroine, a young lady who's avenging  her father, who was killed at the hands of the gorgeous sorceress. This young lady hired the assassin to do the job for her -- but Subotai was too good, too quick. About this time, Conan -- who has been hacking his way through the sorceress' outriders and shape-shifting man-bear guards -- catches up with the caravan and meets Subotai and Triana, the young lady bent on revenge. Triana offers Conan the same deal: dispatch the sorceress for me, and I'll pay you the assassin's fee. Turns out, Conan recognizes the sorceress from an earlier altercation: it's none other than the evil Ursula, who manipulates the spirits of bears, and were-bears, and who has a blood-soaked history. He also knows Triana, though he hasn't seen her since she was knee-high to the waterjug with which she bashed Subotai over the head, to bring him out of the trance ... Triana's father was Conan's great friend. Conan did not even know the man was dead, and now the barbarian is PO'd enough to be out on the vengeance trails.

So beings a story that twists and turns through 140 more pages before the legendary words 'The End' are seen (never to be confused with the dreaded 'To Be Continued'). And if I had enough time, I might even write this one -- it's a fun story!

Alas, there's no time, but what I might do is model the characters and stage some of the scenes, and maybe give you the rest of the tale in a skeleton form ... now, that would be doable!

***

I also want to talk about another subject entirely, nothing to do with the art and story above. I guess it's about the "politics" of the 3D marketplace -- and DAZ specifically. You might or might not know that a lot of people have knocked DAZ all along, for claiming to be "free software," when in fact only the core engine and base characters were free to download. Everything else -- all the models, textures, the works -- you had to pay for, and without them, in fact, there's not a whole lot you can do with DAZ (or any 3D posing program). But at least a person starting out in DAZ was able to get a feel for it, find out if they like it, before they start putting down wads of money, because not only the core engine but also the base models -- Michael, Victoria, and their over-muscled cousins, the Freak and the She-freak, were FREE. No strings. No hidden costs. Just download, play, enjoy, figure out if you like this kind of art before you start paying heaps.

Over several years, the DAZ base models were given away -- possibly (probably!) more than a million times. Think about this: a million freebies, while the parent company made fortunes in all the add-ons that make up the scenes. After paying zip for the software and base models, I must have spent anything up to about two or three thousand bucks on props, costumes, textures, poses ... and I'm a fairly average artist. 

To me, that was the fair way to go: let people start to love the art, then hit them for the big bucks; and this was the way for years and, as I said, millions of free downloads. 

But not anymore. With the advent of DAZ Studio 4 and the Genesis figure, all the previous base models are said -- by DAZ itself -- to be obsolete. So why is there now a pricetag on each of them? And why is the price so high? I could understand charging $5 or $10 for an obsolete item that's been free for years and given away more times than you can imagine. But Michael, Victoria and company are $29.95! (As I type this, there's a sale on -- save 40%, so that $17.97 looks like a good deal. It ain't.)

Is it just me, or is this not kosher? These base models are obsolete, for goshsakes. They ought to be cheaper than before, but how can something that used to be free get any cheaper? I'm just not seeing the sense of this, and I do know that artists now entering the field are being seriously inconvenienced. They're paying an arm and a leg for what none of us paid for, when I got into 3D art, back in August 2009. 

I guess I just want to lodge a protest. 

Consider it lodged. 

Perhaps DAZ will come around and rethink its position in future -- I would hope so. Are the Generation 4 base models obsolete? Well ... yes and no. Genesis is more malleable, more poseable, with fewer flaws and a greater degree of reality in the model itself. But remember that the base model is where an artist starts, not finishes. Nobody who's serious about this uses Michael 4 right "out of the box." The face and body are molded, sculpted; a skinmap is added, and a toupee. The degree of realism that's achieved is entirely up to the artist, and his or her skill level. Don't judge Michael 4 too harshly: he's raw material, like putty, or clay, ready to be molded into ... well, anyone. 

Here they are, (top) Michael 5 and Victoria 5, for Genesis, and also (below) the old Michael 4: 

The combo bundle of the new figures is (wait for it) $124.95. And they only work with DAZ Studio 4. They don't work with Poser, or any prior version of DS. And if you don't lay down the bucks for these figures, you have little to work with in Studio 4. Genesis is like a plastic doll: genderless, ageless, close to featureless. You slap the figure morphs onto it all of a piece, and the doll morphs into the realistic form ... but at what cost?! (And I won't even go into the issue of the Workspace From Hell which is the Studio 4 desktop. I've taken a look. Not for me.) 

So if your pockets are not that deep, you're right back to Studio 3, of which there are gajillions of free copies floating around, just as there are an equal number of free copies of Michael, Victoria and the gang. The program was packed on disks in the ImagineFX magazine, for a start, and copies of are changing hands on eBay, legally, all the time. Studio 3 was also included on the DVD-Rom in the Figures, Characters and Avatars book, which you can still get, and will be able to get, for a long time to come; and that disk, plus many (not all, apparently) of the ImagineFX disks, included the base figures. (I don't have all the IFX issues -- only a half dozen or so. Turns out that I got lucky with the figure inclusions; so if you're looking for the base figures on the IFX disks via eBay and so forth -- make sure you know what's on the disk before buying.)

So getting Studio 3 free isn't the problem. Getting the base figures, so you can do anything with Studio 3, is the challenge. It's almost as if DAZ wants Studio 3 to just go away, vanish, and let the dreaded Studio 4 thrive because there isn't any competition. Charge enough for the obsolete models, and this might happen, in a process of atrophy.

I'm more sorry than I can say that this is happening, because beginning artists are being shut out of what was once a free party. If I'd had to pay $125 up front for base figures, back in '09, I wouldn't have bothered, because the risk factor is too high -- 

Suppose you just can't figure out the interface? Suppose you discover you hate it? Or have no knack, no talent? Or the work gives you a splitting headache? It was fantastic being able to take it for a spin at no cost, and DAZ was rewarded to the tune of a couple of thousand of my dollars, for models, props, costumes, so forth. 

And the part I really have a problem with is that what used to be absolutely free is now $29.95, after millions of beginners (self included!) benefited. Not fair. 

You know me -- I've worked for more than a decade in the world of ebooks; and like any publisher, I can tell you, DAZ has got the pricing mechanism backwards. The product is charged for at full price when it's new. As it gets older, it goes on bigger and bigger discounts. When it's ancient, it costs a peppercorn, or else it's given away free, as part of a bundle to get readers to spend in an era when, in fact, very few people have the bucks to afford luxury goods ... and both ebooks and hobbyist 3D art are pure luxuries.

DAZ, what are you doing???

Is it any surprise that there are loads of "torrent" sites at which you can download the base models? Normally, I abhor torrent sites because they rip off authors, artists, musicians, programmers, filmmakers; and as a rule I say that anyone who downloads off such a site deserves everything s/he gets when they contract a deadly computer virus along with the pirated goods. Torrent sites are said to be loaded with malware and what have you -- what else would you expect from illegal sites? But in the case of the base models, one can only say that his time around there's rather good reason for people to be breaking laws and sharing. My guess is, the torrent sites don't even scratch the surface. My intuition is that Michael and Co. are being shared back and forth between friends, as often as they used to be downloaded free, so in the end, who's winning?

In the meantime, if you're wondering how one makes the connection between Studio 3 and Studio 4 without laying down gobs of money ... well, so long as you're already "in the game," and you have the base models, it's easy. Studio 4 had complete retro-compatibility. You build your scene in 3, save it, open it in 4 and then go on and do whatever it was that Studio 4 offered you, to make you want to go there in the first place. How much of my work is rendered in 4? None. Nada. I sometimes use it as the bridge to get my work over into Reality/LuxRender, but then the rendering is done in Lux, not in DS. 

I really am sad at what's happening, on behalf of artists. And I'm still gobsmacked that DAZ would do this. I just hope/pray this isn't a desperate attempt to rake in some last-ditch revenues, because the company is losing a ton of money since Studio 4 and Genesis came along, and is about to go belly-up. That would be bad. That would be very, very bad indeed...

Rant concluded.

Back soon with a Neil Travers skinmap experiment, and, I think, the warrior's mate who took on the assassin in the Thieves' Market!

Jade, February 11

The Man in the Hat, the Guardian Dragon, and more

click to see all images at large size...

And speaking of heroes (well, I was, in the last post, a couple of days ago...) try this one: the man in the hat. Uh huh. Try looking at the shadow, not the figure -- and in case you don't want to click to see the pic at full size, here's the detail shot:

Indiana who --?! I think anybody in the world would recognize that silhouette! I just couldn't resist this. The project started off as a "working class hero," and he was going to be (probably still will be) a partner for the PI type character you saw the other day. But as it started to go together, something just made me chase that shadow, and I'll admit, it took an extra half hour, but it was huge fun. Mind you -- the character himself is pretty darned good. Have a look:

...and he's actually standing inside the Palenque ruins standing set, which is an enormous structure. You can get into the temple at the top; and here, I've overdriven all the bump maps in order to bring up oodles of detail which will work well in close-up. Though I confess, I did hand-paint the edges of the big column that appears in the foreground in the full-frame shot. It has perfectly-square edges, which an ancient ruin wouldn't. Easy to fix that, in Photoshop...

The second piece today is Dave's "Guardian of the Mountains" ... a 50-hour Vue render! He's doing fantastic things in Vue, and the render engine is amazing. He needs more RAM -- his computer will max out at 16Gb, and we'll take care of that in a week or two. With more RAM, you could get images like this every day or two, instead of waiting most of a week. He loves to work with dragons, but getting him to do a guest post is like trying to squeeze blood out of a turnip, so I decided to just post this one myself. This piece is really fantastic. Dragons, SF, fantasy, and the gray zone where they cross over is where he likes to work --

Meanwhile, on my side of the desk, the quest for photorealism in 3D goes on:

Adventures in Reality/Lux, Part Three:

Here's the car I promised. I actually did it several times, with different results every time. The top shot, here, is ... welllll, it's a cheat. I took two versions and composited them to get the shot I was trying for. The second shot, below, is the raw Lux render, with just a bit of color correction in Photoshop. I learned a lot. A lot. And I still have about 95% of the learning curve ahead of me. It's an amazing engine, sooooo different from anything I've ever used before. 

The third and fourth shots are revisitations of renders I did not much under two years ago, relit and re-rendered to bring them up to speed. I can do so much more, now that I can handle stupendously large scenes without the system just crashing. This one, below, has a close-to photographic quality:

That's Curt Gable, standing at the parapet of the NARC Air Park, on the roof of the NARC building in Venice, Darwin's. I'm rather proud of this one, because I designed a lot of the textures and mapping myself; I did the atmospherics and depth of field ... and this is still a DAZ Studio render. Am still seeing how far the 3DLight engine can be pushed, for two reasons. One is that it'll be weeks, maybe a couple of months, before I can get Lux to do exactly what I want (!), and the second reason is that 3DLight raytrace renders take a matter of minutes, whereas Lux renders --? Well, the second of the two car shots took five hours.  So, with the best will in the world, and all the skills to boot, you can still only have one Lux render in a session, whereas you could have a whole pile of raytraced images. So it behoves me to get the "ordinary" renders up to the absolute max that can be achieved, right? Right.

Speaking of which -- the last image today (Jarrat, Stone, Cronin and Ramos in the hangar) was completely relit, and marginally reposed. Thank gods I didn't trash any of the original project files! What I've done  here is to reimport the new, improved Joe Ramos character: I redesigned him a while ago, and he's much, much better than before. Then I reposed Jarrat and Stone a little ... deleted all the lights and reset them. Changed some of the texturing, and rerendered it. The original of this, way back when, wasn't even raytraced -- four characters in the shot, plus a set, and a half dozen lights --? Crrraasshhhh! Impossible. Couldn't get anywhere close to it. Can now. Cool! So this one, here, is very nice. Four completely different skinmaps, face morphs, the works. To my eye, Gil Cronin is the one (second from the left) who renders up the best in this shot. It's the way the shadows fall around his face. 

(Incidentally, if you're wondering: sorry, you can't buy these face/body morphs anywhere. Two out of the four were completely designed by me, starting from the raw Michael 4 model; another started life as JM Falcon and was heavily reworked to make Joe Ramos, and the other did start life as a stock morph -- I forget the name -- but he was re-re-reworked, including having the skinmap repainted, for Jarrat.)

Dave and I have something special for you tomorrow. The renders are already done, so -- join me then!

Jade, April 16

Daydream in moonlight ... an early version of Amadeus

2024 edit: The big issue I have with the 3D trees of this era is ... the leaves. They're the size of hubcaps or dinner plates. Back in the day, this was pretty much to be expected of any 3D asset an ordinary user such as myself would be using: the smaller the leaves, the more of them you're going to need to fill out a tree, right? The more leaves, the more polys. And verrrry soon you will run right out of ram. So this effect, here, with the hubcap-sized leaves, was par for the 2010 course...

 

 

The Yaoi vampire ... the moonlight rendezvous ... the elegant courtyard ... thank you, DAZ! Looks like the Vampire Amadeus has taken a vacation, and it's a beautiful night with a clear sky ... warm and balmy. Makes you wish for a vacation yourself, doesn't it?

Seriously -- there's a trick to simulating moonlight in 3D. It's not just the colors -- though this will get you halfway there. Blues, grays and silver-greens are what you're looking for, and unless it's supposed to be a cloudy, stormy night, do turn on the deep shadow maps. But also, remember to adjust your shadows to soft, not hard. Also (and this is really important) remember to have only ONE set of shadows.

You can afford to have two or three light sources in the daylight, and cast shadows in several directions. Sunlight is strong enough that it gets bounced back from surfaces like white walls, windows, open water, and the reflected light casts a shadow too. But moonlight, now -- that's a different question. Moonlight does reflect, but it has to be bounced back off glass to be bright enough to cast much of a shadow.

The courtyard is a really nice set -- designed by me, using odds and ends from several different kits. The walls and gate are from the DM The Gate kit; the water feature and stone benches are from the BRC Cloisters kit; the tree in the planter and the vine-covered vase are from the DM Instances kit...

Amadeus is played by Michael 4, wearing the Midnight Price hair set to white, and the Jagger skin map (but not the Jagger face). He's wearing the Narquilir trousers and shirt with the colors set to deep blue, almost black.

And it looks like he went out to meet a paramour. Which inspires a whole 'nother daydream...

You might like to see the courtyard set itself, just for its own sake: 

Very nice set indeed ... except for those leaves!
But what could you do?! 

2014 edit: the tree problem would haunt me, and virtually everyone else, for about eight more years, before PC systems simply got fast enough to allow for proper foliage -- trees ad grass! Then, you could start doing it properly, like this:

Jade, 17 March

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

DAZ's Michael 4 steps back in time...

And now for something completely different! The Regency beau ... in 3D, naturally, this blog being what it is! The costume is amazingly realistic, and the add-on textures make it very special. It does take a fine touch to get everything to fir properly, but adjustments and morphs are available for all kinds of body shapes. I'm very impressed:

The old saying goes, "Clothes maketh the man." But in 3D it's truer to say, "Materials (MATs) maketh the clothes. It's the add-on mixture of "Christopher" and "Fitzwilliam," added to the M4 Regency costume base, which makes this so realistic.

The model is reliable old Michael 4 ... I added the Remendado skin map, and the Ricardi hair, set to golden blond. He's also wearing Jagger's blue eyes, because I really don't like Remendado's own eyes ... too many broken veins in the whites.

Look out for this character in future ... I this a lot, so you can expect to see him again! Also, the costume is going to look great on several other characters you know well from the pages of this blog.

That's Castle Howard in the background -- a private house about the size of a palace, in England. I've actually been there ... I think I was nine y.o. at the time, so the memories are hazy. I remember magnificent interiors, oil paintings the size of walls, genuine furniture ... and it was cold, even in the summer. Every room had a fireplace, but none were lit. It also echoed -- everything was dressed timber, polished floors. Amazing place. I believe it was bombed during World War II, or at least there was a fire there during the war. Before my time, I'm glad to say!

Jade, 7 March

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

Fantasy horses and guys ... 3D, of course

2024 Edit: Sorry, guys, the original images have vamoosed. I'll fill in the blanks with some later renders, but I'll leave the text, which is still germane. These renders you see here are still the Millennium Horse, nothing fancy ... and those are the CWRW Pro textures, from Rendo, plus one of the Manes and Tails packs, which gives you the ability to play about in Photoshop with 2D/3D addons, and save a whale of a lot of time and work in digital painting. 

The CWRW Pro textures for the DAZ Millennium Horse are still fascinating me today -- and I had a few minutes spare to muck about with a combination of these and the horse body morphs. The "daydream" above is the CWRW blue roan, with a body shape re-re-retweaked, plus a reworking of one of the stock horse poses, and a composite background. Just like yesterday, I set off with one painting in mind and wound up with another -- but that's okay, because I can take another crack at the picture I didn't get ... and it was fun not getting it!

There are four general equine body shapes DAZ offers offer as sort of "bench marks." Mustang; Arabian; Thoroughbred; and Draughthorse...

...and you can slide -- literally! -- back and forth among all of these in order to get a body shape that's always going to be close to something you want or need. To get a match for an exact breed takes some doing: you start with a set of reference photos and use the auto settings to get as close as you can, and then start tweaking manually.

The beauty in today's "fantasy horse" render is a manually tweaked design that looks lovely to my eye (and I'm the first to admit, everything I know about horses I learned from the movies! Hidalgo, and Flight of the White Stallions, and The Valdez Horses, and even Ladyhawke.

To get this particular horse, I experimented with making her legs 5% longer than the default "geometry" and her head 5% smaller than the default. Then I went to work with the MAT-MOR Mane add-on, which let do wonderful things ... and then I set up blue, green and mauve lights to bring out the fantasy in the blue roan's coat.

Deep Shadow Map only...

The background is a composite ... a seascape, a painted sky, a shot of the moon that was pasted over the real moon and filters applied. Then this was saved at 800x1000 and imported into DAZ Studio 3 as the backdrop...

Beautiful. Also on my mind is the guy from yesterday's renders -- and I'm fascinated by this guy. I thought, okay, sure, you're looking at him in a purely fantasy setting, but what about if you lift him out of that and do this:

...because I couldn't raytrace...

...at this time! Not to save my life...

...at least, not yet! Bear with me!

The essential gothic hero ... the images are almost like panels in a comic, or frames out of a movie, telling a story. He's being stalked ... ears something ... turns to listen, draws the sword and then you get the closeup as he rasps out, "Show yourself, right-bloody-now!"

It's the play of light and shadow that makes this work. That and the costume. Boy, is this mix and match:

Midnight Price hair set to Burgundy
Moccasins from the Wood God set
Pants from the M4 Utilitize (sci-fi) costume/prop set
Tee Shirt from the M4 Basic Wear set, changed to black
Great coat (duster) from the M4 Cowboy set
texture on the coat from the Tex textures set
Great Sword from the FAE weapons prop pack
Michael 4, wearing his high-rez skin map and face by me.

And it's the way the shadows play out across the background that make it go. Notice the way the shadows march across the wall as the camera and model change position ... the lights stay still, the camera and the model move. I set three distant lights fairly close together, offstage to the character's right and ahead of him...


I'll be coming back to this character again. I want to see what he looks like teamed up with the young dancer/assassin ... maybe they're on the same job? And tomorrow I'm going to try again for the horse image I wanted to do today, and seemed to get everything except what I'd "seen" in my mind's eye!

Jade, 6 February

***Posted by MK, because I have no viable connection to the www today. 

Want more SF Heroes? Welcome to Hellgate

Sci-Fi heroes have never looked so good! 3D art suits this genre so well, and it's my great pleasure to introduce you to Neil Travers, one of the central characters in the incredible world of Hellgate. If you're not big on gay heroes, there's plenty more on this blog to inspire and delight. Browse around, you'll find every kind of guy, every kind of hero. And if it's the "how" aspect of this kind of artwork which gets your blood moving, check out the Tutorials section. But...

If heroes with a GLBT twist put the kick into your life, you're on the right page, and -- welcome to Hellgate! I guess I should say a few words about what Hellgate is, before I go on a ramble about how I'm systematically creating the characters for this universe. First: it's not a movie. Well, not yet! It could easily be ... and there are those of us who would stand in line to buy tickets! But at this time Hellgate is still a series of books: 4 out now, 2 more to go to finish out one of the wildest rides in science fiction -- and they'll be out by the end of 2010...

The teaser for the series is this: In a place where time and space collide, the future of mankind will be decided.

And that, my friends, is the tip of an iceberg the size of the planet Neptune! I was hooked, with these books, from the first part of the first volume, and I can even tell you why. Imagine, if you can, a series of REAL books with plot up to the eyeballs, mainstream SF that could have come from Greg Bear or Kim Stanley Robinson, or one of the best in the business ... and then make the heroes gay. It's like Greg Bear wrote a space opera twice the length of Lord of the Rings, and the heroes are gay. Which is a cause for a grin as wide as Sydney Harbor.

(If this sounds like your idea of a way to spend some delightful rainy afternoons, you probably want to click here: that link will take you the the Hellgate Page on MK's website, and you can catch up in no time. In fact, if you prefer ebooks over paper, you can be reading in half an hour.)

A loooong time ago, when Mel Keegan first signed with DreamCraft, the idea we had in mind was to publish the books to CD-Rom. They were to present the whole text with masses of art and animations. That idea sounded exciting to some people, but not to a wide enough audience to make the amount of work involved attractive...

However, The World of Hellgate has stayed in my mind ever since. I've always thought, how fantastic it would be to use this idea as a promo. Till recently, though, artwork has meant the usual: painting. And anyone who's done it knows how long it takes! Imagine having to do about 50 - 100 paintings, minimum, for one promotion.

Then, along came 3D art and everything changed. Suddenly I can design the characters and stage the artwork in about 1% of the time. In other words, I can do 100 3D paintings in the same time it would have taken me to do one. And suddenly The Word of Hellgate doesn't look so scary.

Step one: get the characters created.

And that's not as easy as you might think, because there's DOZENS of them, and they're all totally different, and every one needs to be approached as a separate project and then combined later. It takes about a week to get a design that Mel Keegan will say "wonderful" to. (Not a full 40 hours, y'understand, but tinkering on and off and sending images on emails and getting feedback.)

Last week we got the "wonderful" stamp on Richard Vaurien:

..and today, meet Neil Travers. And Neil was not easy to design ... if you know the books, you'll know that he shares a very very similar description to Stoney, in the NARC books, for which I'm also designing the characters (same reason too).

Compare Stoney and Neil Travers:

On paper, boy-oh, do they sound similar! But you don't want the same character showing up in two major projects at the same time. That could get majorly confusing. So the challenge was to create another face, another guy, who'd answer to the same physical description, but be a different man. And I'm really happy with the result. So's Mel.

Next challenge is Curtis Marin, who's Neil's partner in every way. That's going to be a big job. I think I'll start with something like the Greg Farris character I did for the cover of Ice, Wind and Fire, and work from there ... and here's the hard part. Curtis has curly hair. Ouch! There's not a lot of curly haired styles available in the DAZ catalog, and the shortage will make this, um, interesting.

However it works out ... it's fun!

Jade, 30 January

***Posted by MK, because I have no viable connection to the www today. 

3D Thrills: new characters and computer fixes

Beauty shots today ... exquisite ... and then something new (below). I'm working on a set of wallpapers, screensavers and art prints, for a friend, featuring some of the characters I've created along the way. And this one here is one of the most gorgeous. He's usually depicted as a vampire, but not this time!

The last time you saw this model he was the Vampire Amadeus, and according to that story he's about 3000 years old. But in these renders he's "just" an actor ... maybe taking time off between shots in the movie to skinny dip down by the lakeside. Now, that's beautiful! And here's something new:

For a few weeks now I've been working on the Hellgate characters as well as the NARC characters, and we finally get Mel Keegan's stamp of "wonderful" on both Richard Vaurien (on the right) and Neil Travers. If you know the books, you'll know Neil Travers is a 32 year old Master Sergeant from Bravo Company aboard the super-carrier Intrepid, which has pushed its luck in the Rabelais Drift -- known to spacers as Hellgate. In fact, the carrier was almost totally destroyed, and between them Neil Travers and Curtis Marin figured a way to get her out of there, to a place where Richard Vaurien's incredible salvage vessel Wastrel, could pull her out...

Creating characters is one of the biggest thrills in DAZ Studio 3. This is what I love the most -- this, and creating beauty shots of the most gorgeous males imaginable. So far I've managed to get Mel Keegan's stamp of approval on Jarrat and Stone, plus Gil Cronin and the Companions, Lee and Jesse Lawrence, and the ill-fated Riki Mitchell from the NARC books; and I've got Travers and Vaurien, plus Barb Jazynsky and Tonio Teniko from the Hellgate books. And very soon we'll be working on renders for video clips and artwork for MK's webpages. These are fantastic books, among my all-time favorites. Illustrating them like this is a total joy.

ALL the figures you see on my blog here start their lives as Michael 4, and almost all of the faces are designed by me. The only face I've used that I haven't designed personally is the model you saw yesterday and the day before, which is the Remendado model, and frankly, he's too cool to mess with! Someone talented modeled Sean Bean, and I'm not going to change a thing!

In the render above, also, I was trying out my computer for power. I asked Dave (from DreamCraft) to see if he could squeeze any more horsepower out of it, and he did. Hardware is Dave's thing -- I'm all about software and design. Thank you, Dave! The PC is running a lot faster and will handle a lot more before it falls over its feet.

You might not believe it, but the render above is loaded with 15 models, 5 textures, two skin maps, massive work in the Surfaces tab, 8 lights and 2 deep shadow maps ... and it rendered in about a minute! I'm delighted!

And here's something cool: see the vest Richard is wearing -- the taller, older hunk on the right. That's the same vest from the M4 Cowboy set of props! You turn OFF the textures, and then set the colors and all other values for something new. An Old West costume model turns into an SF costume.

It's fun like you wouldn't believe. I could do this all day if I didn't have to work too.

Jade, 29 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?!!!