Second Life (again) ... more Photoshop magic

 

Photoshop brushes...

...and lighting effects

Dinokonda and reflections

Bryce sky, Photoshop birds and moon

Photoshop lens flare and lighting

Working through the old archives -- weeding out dead links from 2010 and 2011, deleting stubs that go nowhere, replacing artwork that has vanished -- I find myself wondering, where in the world did I get all that inspiration and energy, fourteen years ago? Twelve years ago?! It's true that sooo much has happened in the ensuing years, and I've pretty much had the enthusiasm knocked out of me, like everybody else in this world. But dang, looking back on the volume of the work I did, and the vision that drove it -- how did I manage all that?!

Jarrat and Stone, commanding NARC-Athena

Mike 4 struts his stuff

Even by by 2011, the images had enough substance that in 2024 Photoshop can process them through in about a minute each and give them a quality that's quite acceptable, and attractive, even today. I still have a lot of work to do in the early years ... I thought I was done, and then stumbled over a recurring issue that's taking some considerable tracking down and mending. But I'm getting there. Meanwhile...

Vickie 4 still looks good

What's next? Well, I'm editing at the moment. Turns out, this is a job I rather enjoy, especially working in cahoots with a writer of the calibre of Doctor Mike Adamson -- the well-known Sherlock Holmes novelist. A new chapter of life and/or career might be juiuuuust about to begin, and I have to say, I'm looking forward to what might happen here! So...

Bryce creation, for NARC Aphelion

...it's way past time to start up Studio and se if I can find my muse again. But not today. Tomorrow, perhaps. Or at the latest, next week -- thus spake the imperatrix of all procrastinators. Nudge, wink.

Shaking hands with some old friends: remastering old, old images. Nice!

Michael 4 in Lux Render

Michael 4 in Lux Render -- done in 2012

2x M4, painted raytrace -- done in 2012

2x M4 ... Raytraced and Photoshopped

Still sorting through told old archives ... still playing with the ancient images in Photoshop because -- well, I don't have the energy at the moment to do much more. Right on cue, my health fell to pieces again. I'm trying to pick up the pieces, but I have to be honest and say that every time this happens, it gets harder to drag myself back up and start again. (Fair to say, also, that I ain't getting any younger. Sigh.) Having said that -- playing in Photoshop is a lot of fun, in lieu of doing fresh images.

The blog is starting to really come into shape now. There's just a little work left to do on the very, very early posts: dead links, Flash Player slideshows that haven't been supported in almost a decade, images that have vanished for one reason and another. The last thing I'll do on this job is (!) go through the retag everything. Honestly ... if you've tried to find something, anything, on this blog -- well, good luck with that! I can't find a dang thing myself! But the retagging is the last job of all, after which -- this whole blog is in very good shape indeed. 

Have been collaborating in a writing partnership lately -- which also has been keeping me busy and hence eating up what small amount of energy I have/had. But yes, I seem to have broken the drought, defeated the worst case of Writer's Block imaginable. I've collaborated on two stories and written another solo, for which I did this little piece, which appeared on my writing blog:

That's an amalgam of "odds and sods," pasted together, dropped into monochrome, colourized, and then painted with a tonne of snow. No it's not representational of an actual place in London. It's only supposed to be evocative of a time and a place: ice age hits Europe, and this is how London copes. Eep.

Last thing for today: I'm actually going to stand up here and defend the Generation 4 figures. I read something the other day where this one guy was utterly rubbishing Michael 4 and Victoria 4, as if nothing was good before about Genesis 5 or whatever. I'm going to stamp by foot and say that is utterly untrue. In fact, it's balderdash! Example:

That, there, is not Genesis anything. That is Victoria 4.2 in Iray, with a tiny bit of Photoshop enhancement after the fact. Actually LOOK at this --

Now, I designed that face and boy myself, using the Morphs++. The skinmap is Angel, with it's tattoos turned on. Shaders on the fingernails. Here is where it gets clever: that is a Genesis  Male hair prop she is wearing. Yep -- V4 can wear a G8M hairdo! The rest of it, though? If you're thinking it has to be Genesis -- nope. The great thing about M4 and V4 is that they are low-poly enough that older systems don't herniate, trying to render them.

Okay, off the soapbox. But I did want to say that. Done. More soon ... I do have many images in mind that I want to produce, and if/when I can find the energy and the time, I can't think of a better way to blow off a winter's evening. And winter is arriving rapidly in our neck of the woods. After the lingering heat of March, it's most welcome!

More pretty things ... why is it always the day from hell?!

 

Why is it always the day from hell? Always! Things were fine till evening, and I thought, "Hey, we're going to get a good day." Then you hold your breath, because you're just "waiting for it to happen." And it did -- something always does; you can count on it. Argh.

So ... indulging myself in a little art, working on this blog some more, to take my mind off the sheer aggravation. Sigh. I wish I could tell you these are new renders, but they're not. I still don't have the time to invest in fresh art -- a quick sketch here and there is the best I can do lately, and to be honest, I'm too tired even for that, most of the time! These are old ones, but they've been touched up in subtle ways to make more, and better, of them. 

Still working on this blog! I though I had it in good shape, then I looked back at it, spot checking here and there. Nope. Lots of missing images, dead links, obsolete stuff ... lots more work to do, to get it right! Bear with me. I also haven't yet had the chance to finish my new gallery site. Life just keeps getting in the way. And there's soooo much to do in the next few days, it would be futile to say, "Tomorrow's another day, we'll start again," because that would be utterly impossible. 

We soldier on! 

Breathing new life into old goodies -- and a major question answered

Okay -- call this a success. Not all experiments work, but this one did. I wanted to know how the images behave if they're repainted and relit ... now, I knew it worked with raytraces (the Consulting Mage and the baby dragon called Trouble -- that's a raytrace), but how "fake" would the process look if you tried it on an Iray render? The horse, above, it the 3D/CG equivalent of what artists would call "mixed media." The props are so ancient, some of them are 2D! The backdrop is an actual painting. The horse was rendered in Iray ... the mane and tail were added in Photoshop, from CG's packs of add-ons for the Millennium Horse, from Rendo. It's a 2019 render, and very "storybook," and I was nowhere near to confident that repainting and/or relighting it wouldn't just make it a messy fake. Okay -- no problem. So I delved back into the archives for an "okay" Genesis Iray render -- Sinbad. It wasn't bad, but I always knew it could be so much better. Ha! Now it is, and yes, you can do this repainting, relighting on Irays, and they don't look fake. Neat! 

Second Life ... repaints breathe fresh life into age-old renders. I like it!

 

An ode to the increasingly lost art of raytracing! There are no Iray renders in this post; one was rendered in Bryce 7 Pro ... all were heavily repainted in Photoshop to bring them to life ... make them deliver what the eye expects to see in 2024, after a decade of Iray, Lux, Octane -- and reams and reams of digital painting. The truth is, the old renders need the work. There was only so much I could squeeze out of Studio 3 -- and, from memory, people back in the day were always knocking Studio for having a less-than-great render engine built into it. True, the free version of the 3Delight render engine left a lot to be desired. It still does --

But that's not the point. The point is that it provides the artist with a canvas on which to paint. Which is what I'm doing here, as I breathe new life into so many old, old pictures, and ... it's fun. As whacked-out weird as this might sound, I'm actually enjoying this process a lot more than wrestling with Iray, and the new props and figures that are actually too much for this computer to handle...

Going back through the ancient archives as I tidy up this blog to make it functional for another decade, I'm impressed by a refrain that has been repeating from Day One: render blues. Render issues. First, all I could do was Deep Shadow Map -- any attempt to raytrace caused an instant crash. I bought a new PC to fix that problem. Then, I could raytrace but I couldn't turn on shadows, because that would crash the system. Upgrade the system. Then I couldn't run Iray. Then, I could run Iray, but not render a Genesis 8 figure. But a new computer.

On and on. It has to stop! In 2024, the problem (if I chose to go there: I don't) is that I can't render the new generation of props, costumes and hair for love or money. DForce crashes me now. I can only squeeze a limited amount into the old GPU without the system gridlocking and falling over. So I have to fall back on art. Painting. Cleverness. And I really am enjoying the painting process to the point where I'm longing to turn on Studio 4.x and ...! All I need now is the time. Ahem. 

Repaints ... an ode to old-fashioned raytracing!

There is not one single Iray render on this page. These are painted raytraces ... and a couple of them were done in Studio 3, so long ago, I'd forgotten the even existed, till I started trawling through the ancient archives, mending this blog (taking out the dead links, removing the "404 images" and tidying up loose ends that didn't go anywhere). Then I started to look at the best raytraces of 2019 ... and I looked, and looked some more ...

I dug back further, to 2012 and 2011, and started to haul out some of the best of those ancient renders, and ... I put them into Photoshop. Ye gods and little fishes, to quote my Irish granny.

Here's the thing of it: for about ten years now, everybody has been running desperately towards photorealism, demanding that Studio renders be ever closer to  photographs. Even I bought into that! And honestly, I should have known better --

I'm a painter! I'm an artist, not a fashion photographer or whatever. Sure, I managed to get a number of excellent renders that were very, very close to photo, but, but but ... why? Honestly, why?

Here's the bottom line. The closer the images came to photographs, the less I was interested. The artist in me, the painter, was being starved out. I got bored and drifted away from DAZ, 3D, CG, and I've been away for about a year now, I think. The artist in me is awake again. I've spent the last few days repainting old renders ... old raytraces ... and I'm tickled pink with the results. 

Call this an ode to raytracing. I feel the artist in me coming back ... I feel the desire to start up Studio again, and render something the old-fashioned way, and they -- paint. Yes, paint! 

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...

Happy afternoon's painting -- and here's a face you might recognize...

 

posted at full size -- enjoy

Edit: I wasn't happy with the face on this one, so I 
went back into it and ran another experiment:
face replacement. Hey, it worked!

It's been a day for experiments ... and most of them worked! Here's a face that might be familiar ... in fact, it's an old character I created a lot of years ago, but this painting is brand new: painted from scratch, from an old raytrace, with a new sky which began as a photograph I took about six weeks ago. It's painted in four layers, and ... it worked! The "blue goddess" is another kind of experiment, and that worked too.  Starting to feel like I'm making some genuine progress here, and these paintings can afford to start getting more complex. It was really gratifying to begin with work that began in DAZ Studio 3 about ten years ago, and end up with a full on painting. Nice! Guy candy. Call it what you will. 

Meanwhile, I'm trying to fathom how to paint feathers. I keep getting fur, not feathers, lol. Working on a painting of a couple of cute Tawny Frogmouths, and the plumage ... well, birds that look like owls don't have fur, but these do. Back to the drawing board and start again, I think!

A little SF, a little fantasy

 

She's the boss! Or, "This alien tomb is eight thousand years old, you are not blowing it up!" There's a story idea running through this sequence of images. A field archaeologist has her dig invaded by the military, and naturally their idea of getting things done involves explosives! I've been installing more old goodies from yesteryear ... DM's Pyrago set as never looked better, and the Xurge3D space armour renders so well. That's actually Jarrat wearing it ... I wanted to put the scene together quickly, so I merged in an existing figure...

And the other day I bought a new Genesis 8 Female character -- on sale for about $7.50 and too good to go past. It's Fumiko, and it renders like a dream -- soooo easy, literally no way for it to render poorly with this HD skinmap:

And the other thing I've been playing happily with is the hair shaders, by TwiztedMetal, which are a little tricky to use, but can give some amazing results, like this Genesis 3 hair prop, which fits Michael 4 perfectly...

Varun Hair for Genesis 3 male, fit to Michael 4, with shaders by TwiztedMetal

Must play with these some more, and really get the hang of them. Tomorrow, I'll be installing the set of ceramics shaders I bought the other day, too. From the catalog pictures at Renderosity, they look amazing ... this will be fun!