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.

The boys are back in town!

 

Well, that was a marathon, but I did it! Safe to say, the boys are back in town -- meaning, I have working Jarrat abnd Stone models that are viable in Iray, so we can be seeing them as they've never looked before. But if I thought I'd had problems getting Jarrat "out of storage," Stone turned into a nightmare. Oddly enough, the character preset applied properly, and in preview it looked fine ... but as soon as I saw the render, I groaned. This is the same character preset as renders perfectly as a raytrace, and even LuxRender (Reality) was kind to it -- in Iray, you see immediately, the mesh on the brow line has crumpled, collapsed, whatever you want to term it. If I didn't get in there and uncrumple it, I'd have to paint out the crumpled mesh every single time I rendered Stoney. Yee-ouch. Sooo...

Basically, I've managed to resurrect about 95% of the character. The brow line in "Stoney 2.0" isn't the same, and can't be, because those morphs -- applied legitimately with Morphs++  -- cause the mesh to buckle and look baaad in Iray. Harrumph. But 95% is pretty good, and I'd happy. That's still Stoney as we remember him from years ago, and much closer to photorealism. Now, you're never going to get 100% photorealistic renders from the Generation 4 figures ... there's just not enough polygons in the old mesh, end of statement. But these guys now look at least as good as the figure work we saw in Final Fantasy II The Spirits Within, and we were gobsmacked --

-- it's up to me, now, to light, pose and render them in a way that does the figures justice. And even though they're Gen 4 figures, I can do that. Here's a case in point --

No, that is not a Genesis figure. That's old Victoria 4.2, albeit wearing Genesis 3 hair, which illustrates perfectly what you can do with the old figures, if you're smart, and careful. (In fact, the only thing I don't like about the Stone model is the way Neftis's GQ Event Hair renders in Iray. I do have another hairdo which I can try on Stoney, and we'll see if it renders well without changing the way he looks too much (or, if it does change him, it's an acceptable change). If that doesn't work out, I'll try some Genesis 3 hair on him ... but if Stoney ends up wearing G3 hair, it means Jarrat will have to get the upgrade too, because if they're posed together, the old hair will really be noticeable. We'll have to see. Also...

That's a re-render of something I did in Bryce 7 Pro back in 2014, and it's another case in point. The old Bryce picture was good, and a great idea, but the Iray render is far, far better, and illustrates what can be done with sheer cleverness, opacity maps, tone mapping, photometric lights, shaders, whatever. So, take this degree of sophistication and apply it to the Gen 4 figures. Yeah. Let's do this. One area in which the Gen 4 figures way outperform Genesis is in the render times. You can render a whole crowd of Michaels and Victorias without choking your graphics card (GPU); or render one of them at high-rez and large size in under five minutes. Try that with Genesis. Ahem.

Stay tuned!

Serendipity! Okay, call him Curt ... and fitting Genesis 3 hair to Michael 4 -- easy.

A few very minor adjustments to his nose (which I thought was too large), and here he is, in his own photo shoot. Talk about serendipity! If you haven't been following this -- "the story so far." Wanting to break Jarrat and Stone out of storage (you know -- from Mel Keegan's NARC, nudge, wink), I loaded up a Michael 4 and applied the Jarrat character preset. If this were Studio 3, it would have worked, but in Studio 4, I didn't get Jarrat at all; I got a whole new character, s Studio 4.15 interpreted the preset, got it wrong, and produced...

And I like what I'm seeing -- a lot. This is a beautiful new character, and he wears the Genesis 3 hair as if it were made for M4. Okay -- let me write a little about how to fit the G3 hair to M4, because I suspect a number of people will be trying to do it, and it can be extremely fiddly.

• Load your M4 figure in the 0 position, meaning 0 valued on every transformation parameter. Unselect the figure. Load the hair into the scene without anything being selected. It loads also on the 0 position, just too low to fit the M4 -- meaning, if you jog it up till it looks good, the scalp cap will fit. You might need to jog the z (back/forward) parameter to make sure the back of the head is well covered; when it is, the hairline should be right. Do this in the Perspective view, so that you can swing the scene around easily without moving the M4 at all. Lastly, in the scene menu, select the hair prop and drag it upward throug the list till you can drop it onto the M4 'head' list item. This will parent it to M4, and now you can adjust the styling and colour to your heart's content. For the best fit, use Genesis 3 hair on Michael 4 or Victoria 4.2 ... and enjoy!

And we call him Curt because Mel Keegan has just given this face and body form the nod ... this is Curt Gable, the Athena's Third Officer, soon to move upwards through the ranks as the series develops! Very neat indeed!

Second major thing fixed today:

Yep, the problem with the visor on the HAAS Armor helmet, by Xurge3D, was caused by an opacity map which Studio was reading incorrectly (it was original configured for the Firefly engine, in Poser, maybe ten years ago). Basically, I just deleted the opacity map from the "Cutout Opacity" channel in the Surfaces pane. Now, if I want a semi-opaque visor, I can either drag the slider to 75% or whatever, or else apply a glass shader. Great -- with this problem answered. I can load the rest of the Xurge3D content without a qualm. 

Hello, beautiful ... but not what I expected! And breaking the armour out of storage...

 

First, the good stuff: the Xurge3D armour installs smoothly, loads perfectly, resurfaces easily, and renders beautifully in Iray. "Mirror black armor," all that kevlex-titanium ... sound familiar? Look familiar? It should! Sooo, I was inspired to break Jarrat and Stone out of storage along with the armour, and things didn't go quite as smoothly -- more on that in a second! The HAAS amour itself is great, with one exception, a problem I couldn't solve today. I'll take another crack at it tomorrow. In Studio 4.15, the helmet visor is ... missing. Yup, gone, not there. Say, what? Now, we know this suit has a great visor. This is the raytrace done for Event Horizon a few years ago --

Same armour, just different configuration and surfacing. Check out the helmet visor -- all present and correct in Studio 3. But in Studio 4.15, the exact same prop loads without the visor. It'll have something to do with incompatible opacity masks or some damned thing. I'll need a couple of hours and a clear head to work this out. Hmmm. Tomorrow. So, getting past that, I left out the helmet and thought, I'll render Jarrat wearing the hardsuit with the helmet off, right? So --

I go to my folder of Character Presets, load a Michael 4, merge the preset onto it, and I get --

-- somebody else entirely! I mean, he's beautiful, and renders marvellously from every angle; and he's wearing the Varun Hair for Genesis 3 as if it were made for him. But that ain't our Raven 9.4, not by a long shot. The last time you saw Jarrat and Stone in fresh renders was 2019, and this one here might have been it --

Well, there's another Bermuda Triangle style mystery. Though some sorcery and alchemy involving two computers, two versions of Studio and some old project files, I was able to get out Captain Jarrat back (phew!) ... now this was what I'd been expecting, and it's well worth seeing at full size:

So I was able to recover Jarrat, and had a chance to play with a great cotton shader by TwiztedMetal, for the tank top, and re-re-reworked the Mon Chevalier hair, which suits this character so much (and which renders well in Iray, if you just change the lighting model to matte!). Tomorrow, I'll see about working out the problem with the helmet visor; and if I can't, I'll figure a way to either make something to fit the helmet and do the job, or else work out a way to paint it in Photoshop -- which I do not want to do, because it turns into a major painting assignment every time the armour is rendered. Argh.

In the meantime, we got Jarrat (as I said, phew!), and we also scored a new and very attractive character, which I like a lot! Serendipity, I guess. Tomorrow, helmet or no helmet, I'll try from Stoney. Stay tuned. 

Red dwarf homeworld, Terragen atmospheres, gorgeous gay heroes and Photoshop brushes. Yes!!

Yep ... Jarrat and Stone ... and this picture is chock full of experiments. You might not believe it, but even now, after how many thousands of images, almost every picture I render and/or paint is still an experiment! I'll yack a bit more about that in a second, but for those of you who can't open the image at bigger scale (small phones, for a start), here's a closer look at our heroes:

(Credit where it's due: all kudos to Mel Keegan for creating Jarrat and Stone and the NARC universe, without which these gorgeous gay SF heroes would not exist, on these pages or anywhere else.)

Okay --

One thing I do love is "old fashioned SF" where writers like Poul Anderson (my absolute favorite of the Old Brigade ... he created Nicholas van Rijn and David Falkayn, for a start!) would not only spin great yarns but also build alien environments designed on solid science. Keegan is on my mind again lately, not merely because I'm up to Scorpio this time through (!), but also because he's writing again (!!!😁!!!), and he describes the current project as "At last, a 'Golden Age' romp without the 'warts' ... gay heroes and up-to-date tech." It's going to be great. Seriously. And what Mel is doing here really is as if someone like Poul Anderson or maybe Brian Stableford just decided to write a full-on gay adventure/love story on a fabulous alien world. Yeah ... wow. Which got my own imagination to working, and I found myself daydreaming about a fertile planet circling a red dwarf star (meaning a smaller and dimmer and cooler star than our own sun). So --

Into Bryce 7 Pro, and let's model it. The sun is small and dim and cool, so a warm, fertile world has to orbit close to it, right? So the angular size of it in the sky is somewhat larger than our sun appears; this planet sits in the "sweet spot" where the world is just warm enough to be fertile ... the cool sun looks yellow, not white, when you look right at it, and the red end of the spectrum puts a bloody wash over the sky and everything else. Makes for a very nice picture, too.

All of which got me interested in atmosphere, so --

Terragen sky: late afternoon, and ...

...right on sunset; and...

After sunset, when the sky is bronze and dimming rapidly, and the world is becoming dark, you expect the stars in a few more minutes. Nice.

(Does anyone else find Terragen a bit overwhelming? There is so much to learn that, frankly, I've decided on the old KISS rule: Keep It Simple, Stupid. AKA, one thing at a time. I've learned about all I can for now about "heightfield terrains," and "proceedural terrains" continue to baffle me a bit. Atmospheres are the next thing I need to master, then I'll come back to proceedurals, and, when the computer is rebuilt (soon!) I'll see about working with populations: adding forests and so forth. Ack. Soooo much to learn here. But it's fun. It's good for your brain, especially at my age. Put it this way: I ain't gettin' any younger. 😒

Now, going back to the experiments in today's main render! As I began, the picture is full of them, and they work! For a start --

Look at the forearm on the left, and the hands on the right. This is a combo of bump mapping and painted highlights, using a blend mode (thank you, Photoshop), plus a touch of "aging," using the special morph in the Morphs ++ package. That's ... not bad at all. The hint of veins makes this so much more realistic, yet it's subtle. Your eye expects to see this; it doesn't hit you in the face, but it makes the figure that much more "real." Well worth the extra minute or two it takes to switch out the bump maps and do a few test renders to get the settings just right. Then, this, below, was the big experiment...

...and I don't know why I didn't do this a long time ago. It's the hair. Jarrat wears the Mon Chevalier hair from Neftis (via the DAZ marketplace; you can still get it, but it's a bit more expensive than it used to be, from memory). The one thing about this toupee that always annoyed me was that, "fresh out of the box," as it's applied, it looks awfully fake, as if it's ... plastic. Eventually (rolls eyes) I thought, "I wonder what would happen if I overdrive the bump mapping on the hair???" Uh huh. Duh. A bit of overdriven bump mapping, and the hair "pops" into an effect that's far, far more realistic than the results I've been getting across the years. I could kick myself, honestly. 😝

Then, the last thing I did differently on this is...

...I hand-painted Stoney's hair. There's nothing much you can do with the GQ Event Hair when it's set to a shade near to black (as Stone's hair is described in the books). You can't see detail in it, ever. But the shape of it is always 100% identical, in every single render ... which is not really realistic. Nobody's hair stays the same for ten consecutive minutes. So this one is hand-painted, to give Stoney a slightly more tousled look for once!

The brush I'm using for the hair is a (free) download from a very, very talented artist and brush creator at DeviantArt. I want to give a plug to "para-vine," and say thank you, thank you for this brush set, which has been terrific. (For clarification: no, I don't know para-vine personally, but I'd like to shake him by the hand and say thanks for these brushes. Wow.)

That's all from me for today. Back soon -- hopefully tomorrow, because on Wednesday the computer goes into the shop and you won't see new art for a few days while it's upgraded. Whoooo!

Beefcake, as promised!

As promised, a fresh look at Blue Raven 6 himself, Gil Cronin. That's James Cargill Cronin, to those who know this stuff, nudge, wink! (Credit where it's due: major thanks to Mel Keegan, without whom Gil would no more exist than would Joe Ramos, Jarrat and Stone, and the rest of them.)

This is a terrific character to render, because the camera loves him ... and you can get the fastest raytraces on record, because since he shaves his head you don't have to wait forty-five minutes while the computer does several trillion calculations to render hair. That's the basic, original high-rez Michael 4 skinmap on a face and body of my own design, with some additions: the hairy chest and forearms are hand-painted in Photoshop ... like the diamond stud earrings that are Cronin's signature:

I always liked this character, right back to the first book. Did I say 'beefcake?" Want more? Well --

I've been sorting through the old archives and rebalancing some of the images from yesteryear, and some of them are coming up very nicely indeed. This, in LuxRender:

This one, above, has also been resized: worth seeing this at large size: it's 1800 pixels wide now, and looks a treat on the larger monitors. That looks like the SAV Atlas skinmap he's wearing. It does render up beautifully. I call that character, and image, "Fugitive." Also...

This one is almost a reimagining of a 2011 image: enlarged, rebalanced, blue-shifted, lots of little things done to it, making the old raytrace infinitely more interesting. The truth is, you can get a lot out of raytracing if you know what you're doing. The shots of Gil Cronin are also raytraces ... it's becoming a lost, or forgotten art, in this day and age of LuxRender, IRay, SuperFly, Octane and what have you. That's too bad, actually, because ... Hmm. Well, I put this to you:

NOT an ad. A screen capture... do NOT click!

That's a capture off the actual flag-carrier advertisement for the new Victoria figure, the Genesis  8 female, and it would have been rendered in IRay or, less likely, SuperFly (Poser's answer to LuxRender). Hmm. I'm actually not all that impressed. This is the new Genesis figure, and she doesn't look one whit more realistic than a hell of a lot of the stuff I'm doing with the ancient pre-Genesis, generation 4 figure, and old school raytracing. Like, for instance --

And that is why I'm not going into hock to rebuilt the computer, and racing out to get Genesis 8 and IRay, plus a few grand's worth of "assets," meaning skinmaps and costumes. To be absolutely honest, the only thing about the Michael 4 character that bugs me royally is the way the joints bend. Knees and elbows do NOT bend realistically. If you're highly observational, you might have noticed that these days I tend to keep the arms a lot straighter, or if they're bent, I put a shirt or jacket on him. M4's elbows often don't look quite right when you bend them. And yes, I will get into Genesis and all the rest eventually ... but first, my dentist has a Porche he wants me to finish paying off for him. Ack. Got to get your priorities straight, right? Right.

More soon. I feel in the mood for a fantasy barbarian! Let's see what we can do tomorrow ... after I get home from the optometrist: having my eyes checked and 3D scanned. Dang, is it that time of the year already?

And speaking of skinmaps and characters --

Last post, I was talking about the Falcon skinmap for Michael 4, which I use for the Joe Ramos character, and I found myself wondering ... I wonder what Joe looks like with that hair unbraided? So... there you go! In the books, he's described as half San Carlos Apache, one quarter Mexican and the rest Dublin Irish ("a big beauty, and he knows it"), and this, above, works for me! (All due credit to Mel Keegan, without whom Joe Ramos would not exist. Next time, we'll have another look at his partner, Blue Raven 6 himself, Gil Cronin.)

Thought you might like a closeup look at the skinmap (as well as the character. As I said, highly recommended, not merely because it has a lovely texture and color, but also because it has a terrific venous map which even renders up in LuxRender (a lot of bump and displacement maps either don't work at all in LuxRender, or they look terrible for reasons I never worked out). I used it here:

This one is worth looking at at larger size, to see the detail you can wrangle with this bump map. And yes, I know, I have GOT to go back into LuxRender. Soon. I've gone as far as you can in old fashioned raytracing, and yes, the results are sooo nice. But even so, there's a leap when you get into a proper "unbiased" render engine. Lux is the one I have (albeit an ooold version), and the way things are looking, it will be an even longer time before I can get my computer rebuilt to handle the new software, and IRay. (*sigh* It's all about dentists, how much they charge ... and I think I'm buying this guy a bloody Lexus.) So we'll muddle along with what we have, and see where we can go.

In fact, I'm taking some of the old existing renders and running them through Photoshop just to see what can be done to smarten them up with a little image restoration and enhancement, since the raytraces themselves are pretty good, and the ideas behind them were terrific...

It's actually quite surprising what you can do with five minutes and Photoshop Elements 9! These are great ideas. Right now, I'm trying to find the project files, and they're squirelled away somewhere on the old harddrives, eluding me. Would love to say, "Oh, let's re-render this!" But, not without the project files. I had an absolutely loony way of filing things, back in 2010-11, and actually didn't have the disk space to save everything. I find myself wondering which files got trashed to save space. 😨

Anyway ... more soon. Let's revisit Gil Cronin (hey, I promised beefcake), and then, all being well, I'm onto something new. Ideas buzzing in my head...

Dartagnon ... and fighters on approach to a star-carrier. Neat!

Dartagnon, anyone?! Rummaging through old project files, I found this guy hiding away, and couldn't resist playing with the character and the concept. And yes, am able to infuse so much more skill into the treatment, it's well worth doing. The magnified detail and image integrity is everywhere, and perhaps nowhere more striking than in this detail shot:

For years, I grumbled that Michael 4's hands were the things that often "let down" a render: they were plastic, juvenile, child's hands, didn't look like a man's hard-worked hands. Uh, well, not really. You can actually squeeze this out of the old model (and an ordinary raytrace), though you do have to know what you're doing.

(For those who're trying: I used the Aged Morph, in Morphs++ for Michael 4, to bring up the bones and knuckles; then you apply a "venous map" to the limbs and adjust it till it's juuust right. Now, it's very difficult to even find a venous map for M4. Few characters (skinmaps) have a decent displacement or bump map packed along with the texture set, and if you want to buy a stand-alone venous map for M4, via DAZ marketplace, it's not cheap. The one I'm using was packed with the Native American skinmap ... now, what was it called? JM Falcon. It's highly recommended. First, it's a gorgeous skinmap ... I use it for the Joe Ramos character, at right below:

...left, above, is Gil Cronin. You're looking at Blue Raven 6 and Blue Raven 7 ... and I would dearly love to get back to these guys --

Also, the Falcon venous map is very good and can be applied as a bump map on top of virtually any other M4 skinmap, to great effect. The venous detail continues into the hands, and renders very nicely. So there you go: secrets revealed.)

Yeah, yeah, okay, I've caught the NARC bug again. No excuses. Blame Mel Keegan, it's all his fault. Am reading Death'd Head again for the twentieth time, and can't resist setting up images like this --

These were designed to look like frames from a movie: cinemascope. That would be Jarrat and Stone coming back aboard the Athena, in the VM 104 Corsairs ... ahem! Actually, it's J Hoagland's Dragonfly fighter plane (from the Renderosity marketplace), posed inside of the Starcarrier set (from the DAZ store??? I don't actually remember), with backdrops in Photoshop. In fact, Gil and Joe are standing in another part of the same set -- it's vast. One of my favorites.

So sorry to be absent again this month: blame it on iffy health. I just haven't been feeling well. I have LOADS of projects in my mind, but my body has to catch up with my brain. Being disabled is a major bummer. But with any luck, I'll be feeling better now, so ... art is on its way! Beefcake. Does one need a reason?!

Lastly, I was just tinkering with textures, mapping, lights and shadows...

That's actually not bad at all. Not spectacular, nor as immediately arresting as the aforementioned beefcake (!) but ... not bad as a new experiment based on an old, old one I did soooo long ago. If anyone has been following this blog long enough, you might notice that it's running up to its tenth birthday, and close to 1,000 posts, and over 900,000 hits. That is just ... amazing. Where did time go?!