Watching old artwork "pop!" in Photoshop. Nice!

The Barbarian was rendered original in Lux (which doesn't even exist anymore); the drowned city, the house by the sea, and the spacecraft were done in Bryce 7 Pro (!); Mr. Lace Shirt and the grieving warrior are raytraces. I've just spent a fascinating hour or so, running them through Photoshop. Nice! It's amazing to see the old work "pop" when it's given the proper treatment, which is why I keep posting selections of the old stuff. Second Life. The truth is, 12 and 14 years ago, I didn't do justice to the old renders. Many of them -- ten years old and more now -- are still delicious images even today. 

Having said all that, my fingers are itching to start Studio again, and get back into rendering. I haven't done this in waaaay over two years, and I'm trusting to "muscle memory" to get me going again, because I'm racking my brains for the details, and, um, it's been so long, I'm hazy, lol.

I did need to generate some book covers a few weeks ago, and I had intended to do a lot of the work in DAZ and Iray, but the way things worked out, time-wise, I ended up doing the whole thing in Photoshop. The author was delighted with the result, and now it's over to the publisher to decide which of these (if any) will jacket the book when it's published in a year or two...

See? I can still do this, lol, I haven't forgotten how! I just have gone somewhat hazy on the finer points of working with Iray, and figuring out how to get Studio to raytrace ... because I really, really, want to PAINT. Here's the thing of it: start out with a raytrace, and you can paint to your heart's content and end up with something beautiful. Start with an Iray render, and you really can't: it's like painting over a photo, and when you add digital painting to a photo, it looks soooo fake. You don't get "hybrid art," you get a bit of a mess, actually. So ... I want to paint, which means I need to be raytracing.

Luckily, the raytrace texture sets have been supplied for the props I've bought in the last six or so years, with the exception of the Iray shaders, which are (duh) Iray specific. But the thing is, I used to make my own texture sets (call them shaders) for the raytrace engine, and it was a lot of fun. So -- yes. It's just a question of getting the time away from a blizzard of work. I'm working on it.

More soon. I have some news, which I'm not yet at liberty to share, but it should be fine to share it next week. Hope to be back here sooner than that, because I'm aching to get back to art.

Painting on a hot, humid afternoon

a repaint of an old raytrace... second life.

also a repaint: coming back to the original,
it looks dull and boring. Now look at it!

At the end of summer, time seems to slow down. You're hanging on, waiting for the hot weather to end, desperate for rain, and everything ... slows ... down ... as if you're in the grip of some deadly time dilation. Falling into a gravity well where something you can't even see is going to roll you flat. Wellll, that's what it feels like when it's hot and humid and you're fed up of the season! 

Not much is going on, artistically (or any other way, come to that). Most of what I'm doing at the moment is editing, though I'm about to collaborate on a story project -- a true collaboration for the first time. Can't recall ever having done this before, but my writing partner and I have developed a very easy, almost symbiotic relationship, and it should be rewarding. Even easy. We'll see.

So I spent the afternoon editing and painting to pass away the time. Only the landscapes are truly new today; the others are repaints of old projects -- the barbarian on the horse really needed it. Coming back to it in 2024, I found it pretty dull and boring, though the idea was fine. Photoshop to the rescue. In fact, I like this one enough to recut and remount it. I'll leave you with this:

It also is a raytrace ... those are not shaders, which we use in Iray. In raytracing, you're responsible for all your own textures -- and I'm just remembering how much I used to enjoy doing that. Shaders can make the work easier, but it's nowhere near as rewarding as designing a whole suite of textures yourself -- some of them, hand painted. Soon as the weather breaks, I must start up Studio (for the first time in two years!) and ... play. 

Old favourites, new techniques ... nice!

 

Old favourite characters from soooo long ago, I'd actually forgotten about them. This was a nice little romantic fantasy back in 2010 (!) ... and I decided to use some old, old renders to test out some new theories. I've wanted to paint for a long time now. Not render. Paint. What you see here is 50% ancient raytrace, 50% painting -- and when you upscale an old, old render, boy, do you have to do some painting. They pixelize badly ... which gives you a project, and opens the door to a whole lot of painting. This was all done in Photoshop, for the sheer convenience of it. Not saying it couldn't have been done in Krita, but the truth is, it's rather a long time since I've played in Krita: the interface isn't as familiar as it used to be, and I'm way too tired to faff about. But -- yay -- everything worked! Now I can't wait to do more! Oh, yes. And speaking of painting --

That was an interesting project, and I'll leave it to you to figure out what was painted, what began as a transparent .png, which bit started life as a photograph, etc.. It's a combination of all three, and/but nothing was used in its original form -- which is why it looks seamless when it puzzled together.

This one, though, is a painting, pure and simple. From scratch. Started with a photo, which I took at Lyndoch Hill a couple of years ago ... did a sketch from it ... painted. Musk Lorikeet ... nice ... and this is the first time I have managed to hand-paint feathers that actually look like feathers! Every time I've tried, previously, I've got fur, not feathers, LOL. I knew I'd figure it out but -- dang, it took about five goes to get it. Ha!

So -- all experiments turned up positive results, and now I can't wait to paint! 

This is starting to be fun again!

The truth is, you can forget how much FUN this used to be. Fourteen years ago, I was all about spinning stories and running reams of images to illustrate them -- like these pictures, from the little comedy, "Vampire Hunters in the 23rd Century." They were Horace and Hortense Hershey, under-dressed for a Halloween party when they got a message from their snitch, Willie the Weasel to tell them that the vampire they've been tracking for years will turn up at the old cathedral tonight. They divert from their party plans and wind up vampire hunting in silly costumes. 

It was huge fun. But in the endless quest for better and better renders ... renders that look like photos, or movie stills ... dang, you can lose sight of the FUN. You end up with one image that you slaved on all day, and no story. Eventually, the magic just goes away and in the end ... phhttt. If you're like me, when the magic goes away, you can't get into it anymore.

So ... in search of the old, old magic, I've been rummaging through the Ancient Archives, pulling some of these antediluvian images into Photoshop and giving them the treatment...

Now, nothing, repeat nothing, is going to take a Deep Shadow Map or the simplest possible raytrace you can get (because the PC will crash if you ask for anything more), and turn it into the kind of image you were seeing from me in 2019. But having said that --

-- dangitall, I had some great ideas in 2010 - 2012. All my best ideas date from this period. Not the best work. The best ideas.  My best CG work dates from 2019-2020. Yes, to some extent, Photoshop can make many of these pictures much more presentable for viewing today, but nothing replaces the know-how, the hardware and the software to simply ... make better pictures. 

Now, in 2010, this was the best I could do with the hardware at my disposal:

Fast forward thirty months, and this was doable:

Due to one thing and another (Real Life: my mother passed away after a loooong illness; I landed in the hospital for two surgeries; had a fall, spent some time in a wheelchair, then hopped on crutches for six months ...) I took a few years out of CG art, any kind of art. Then I came back, in 2019, and while we were still raytracing, those raytraces looked like this now:

But even so, the fun had fifty percent gone. I was imagining the stories that went with these images, but I never wrote them. Looking back into the Ancient Archives, I used to write stories all the time. Much later, I "went pro" -- I've been in ANALOG Science Fiction twice! But the old fun never came back as I hunted and hunted for that cutting-edge Iray render, all that photorealism. In the end ... I quit altogether, took another couple of years out, and came back as a digital painter! And don't get me wrong --

Digital painting is actually where my heart lies. This is me painting with my new Huion pen tablet, in 2023:

...but I'm remembering the sheer fun of spinning yarns and illustrating them with raytraces that are sooo quick to do, you can end up with four or five ina session. Heaven knows, you take something so old, it's been gathering dust for an eon, let Photoshop loose on it, and end up with this:

So ... my fingertips are actually starting to tingle to start up Studio and ... and ... and ...!

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! 

Photoshop magic enchants some beloved old raytraces. Check this out!

Work continues apace on the this blog, which has needed a facelift for a very, very long time. I'm also tackling the challenge of The Lost Songs, which has been in limbo for about as long as the conclusion o the Game of Thrones book series! And if I do say so myself, I've got a raft of better reasons for letting the story slide into limbo than George R.R. Martin has! Read the backstory behind what happened to The Lost Songs, and why -- and what's coming next for this project -- right here. 

And to prove it, let me show you these:

Leon Greatsword: 2023 repaint...

Leon and Iphigenia: the 2023 re

These are the 2023/24 repaints of the old images from 2012. Wow. What a difference. This is purely Photoshop magic; nothing has been re-rendered, but everything can be repainted -- and, of course, the illustrations for the remainder of this story will come into the world looking like this. In fact, it's worth taking a look at the old and the new, side by side. The one that needed the least work was the Lux Render; the old raytraces, however, dated from a time when I could barely turn on shadows without making the computer crash! Ah, those were the days...

So ... bear with me while I get this project into shape, and then ... let's have this finished, as outlined in the post I referred you back to above!

In other news ... work continues on the photo blog, travel blog and so forth. And also on the art galley site. I'll reiterate: if there is anything on the old site you want to keep, grab it now, because when it's gone, it's gone.