SF Heroes, a vampire, a butterfly and a mystery

Having just finished the last NARC trilogy, I find myself having terrible Jarrat and Stone withdrawal symptoms, so I've cycled right back to the beginning and am four chapters into Death's Head ... for about the twentieth time. Sorry. Can't help it. Blame Mel Keegan, it's all his fault. I could live in this universe. In fact, I think of it as my second home, keep running back there when Real Life gets so boring, shooting yourself starts to sound like a reasonable alternative. So --

Another Jarrat and Stone render, using every bit of skill and resource I have today. Must go back and re-do a lot of the 2011 shots. They were such good ideas, but these days I can do them sooo much better. Ack. Just for fun --

The 8x10 movie still version of this, as if NARC is a major motion picture series (golly, I wish it were) ...

Going back through the old, old files, I find myself fascinated by this character:

He's actually appeared in two guises: he was a vampire originally, and then he guest-starred in the unfinished (sorry!) Abraxas story, as Leon's cousin. Happy happy, joy joy, I just stumbled over the project files, so I can reopen them and return to this character. Let's make him a vampire again, and have some fun with this. How about ... Amadeus's arch nemesis, or rival?!

(On the subject of Abraxas: you may not believe this, but I have intended to get back to it, finish it out, every single day since it was suspended. It got away from me when Stuff Happened: in 2012 we had to move house from one massive place to another ... I "did my back" during that move, and it never came good. Going on seven years later, I still have spinal degeneration, it's one of the things contributing to my current disability. Then, Mom entered the very last phase of her life, and made her exit in 2017 after a couple of years that were ... beyond description. She lived the most amazing life, but the last few of her years almost put me in the ground. Eight months before she passed on, I began to suffer pancreatitis, and it took two surgeries to get through that (late 2017), then most of 2018 to recover. Then, it was disability, the inability to even walk ... and you know how depressed you can get about that?? Uh huh. Since I last wrote a chapter of Abraxas, you name it, it's happened to me. Now, so long has gone by, I'm not sure I could get back into it and actually write it; but what I can do is "tell you the story," the short version of What Happened Then. Let me get to this, and get it done, and illustrate it with some lovely art. Then we'll call Abraxas complete, one way and another.)

Searching through the old project folders, I also found this:

A terrific abstract piece done (!) in Bryce 7 Pro. The only thing is, I have no idea, none whatsoever, of how it was done. The only lucky thing is that I found the project file ... I can open it, reverse engineer it, work out what the [deleted expletive] I did to get this effect!

However, I do know what I did to produce this:

That was wrangled in Photoshop, when I was tinkering around with all their filters and effects, still learning my way around the program. I'm pretty sure I never uploaded it, and it's actually rather charming, so ... here it is.

More soon, but not tomorrow: we're taking the day and heading south into the Fleurieu for a "grand tour" of the coasts and lunch at Sails, at Clayton Bay, to celebrate Mike's birthday. This will be fun.

Yes, the tavern scene. Plus Terragen highlands, and Amberlight dazzle

Even the faer folk take a shift off now and then ... head for the tavern and indulge in a mug! The Raven: lose the armor, switch out the textures on the shirt and pants underneath said armor; restage the whole thing in DM's Anardhouse set, which goes back about eight years but still renders up as well as anything I've ever seen. It's one of those rare sets that are detailed on the interior as well as the exterior:

Here it is from the outside, rendered in Bryce 7 Pro; actually, done in 2015, I think ... not sure I ever uploaded it. Perhaps I did ... it's about a thousand images ago, and my memory isn't going to play nice over that span! And here is the interior --

-- also rendered in Bryce 7 Pro, today. But the main image was done in DAZ Studio ... just a raytrace on the old fashioned render engine, and then some serious painting in Photoshop to take up the slack. It renders up very nicely indeed -- and so does this character. That's the Yannis dreadlocks he's wearing, and the texture mapping on the costume makes it look like soft, soft crushed velvet. Nice:

Also ... Terragen highlands ... and big experiments with the sky today:

That is a gorgeous sky! Two cloud layers to get this effect. High cirrus and low cumulus. It's another part of the same landscape I designed yesterday; I just flew the camera somewhere else in it, and dropped it down to ground level. Then, after I got this one, I flew it up onto the top of that outcrop and spun it around 180 degrees. Notice the way the shadows fall, above? Now --

Yep, you are now standing on top of the outcrop, looking back at the very place you were standing on the valley floor! And just to be outrageous, after I got this one, I decided to flood the area and see how it would look as a lake:

This is fun. Understatement. Am delighted with the way this work is turning out ... the shorelines and detail in the water -- reflections of the clouds are so on, are wonderful. Here, have a closer look:

Whoo! And to top it off, I went into Amberlight and beguiled away the time it took the other computer to do the raytrace on the tavern scene:

Amberlight also is a lot of fun. Visually dazzling abstract stuff. There's a Version 2 out now, but I have yet to even scratch the surface of Version 1, so I'm not in any rush to upgrade. Pretty!

A cowboy fantasy, a truly glorious digital sunset, a kerfuffle with lights, and ... trees!

Just a (cowboy) fantasy ... a test-bed, in fact, to set up and hammer the problems out of a lighting set that's bothered me since something like 2012. You've been doing this stuff for almost twelve years, you think you know lights backwards and sideways, right? You think nothing is going to catch you unawares? That, my darling possums, is an excellent definition of hubris. Ack. Then this happens:

😵😳😱 WTF?!!! At first glance, it looks like the mesh collapsed, or buckled, but nope. Delete all lights and take another look. The mesh is fine. What you have there is two lights having a fight (ah, the joys of biased rendering...) and making it look like the mesh collapsed.

So now we re-re-re-relight what should have been a simple scene: an exercise, like a musician playing scales and arpeggios for practice. Yep, I learned a lot. This image was only intended as a test stage to work the bugs out of a lighting set, but it turned itself into a two hour marathon. Simple as it is, it almost beat me (I did have a smashing headache at the time, and I was full of pills: that could have had something to do with it). But, never say quit, right? Right.

Then I noticed something...

Is anybody out there old enough that if I said, "Johnny Madrid" you'd know (or care) what I was talking about?! Honest to gods, this just happened, and it's only a trick of the light. If the character turns around, the illusion will vanish. But just right there ... Johnny Madrid by accident.

Played in Terragen some more, and came up with some lovely stuff, one in particular:

That one looks superb at large size: I uploaded it at 1600 wide (no, I'm only using the free version at the moment, so the biggest I ever render is 1200, but Photoshop and Irfanview do a nice enough job of enlarging the images. I will be doing the subscription version of Terragen eventually -- but not on this skinny little laptop. It's struggling, and will burn itself out if I run it much more, or much harder!
Also...

Above: exact same landscape, water and clouds, different time of day. Am starting to play with clouds right now: I want to be able to do big, dense, dark thunderheads, then have the sun come peeking around them. I think I see how it's done. Will play some more tomorrow. Also...

All the other landscapes were done with the old heightfield terrain, which you can only drive so far. For this one, above, I switched to an alpine fractal ... something or other, which has these really neat erosion patterns built right into the mesh:

I love the erosion patterns in the rock faces ... and the beauty of it is, Terragen does this stuff automatically. You just have to add in the "shaders" for snow, vegetation, rock color, what not...

In fact, the last thing these landscapes are crying out for, now, is ... trees. And I know where to go to get them. There's a company called Xfrog which seems to have modeled every bit of herbage on the planet, and they are very, very nice models. Such as this:

They work out at about A$65 per tree, if you just buy a single tree, or A$130 for a "library," where you're buying 20 trees for a particular geographical zone -- for example, they've covered Europe in three packs. I mean, I am drooling, seriously:

I haven't taken it to this level yet. for two reasons. One, they're not cheap. It makes no sense to spend $65 for one tree, when you can get 20 trees for $130, so you know ahead of time, you're up for $130. Which is actually out of my price bracket at the moment, if I tell the truth. Second, I need to know before I spend money what adding plants will do to the render times of my Terragen scenes -- because longer renders mean a lot more work for the computer, and this really is a skinny little laptop! If I burn it out, asking it to do the implausible, I'll need to buy a new one ... uh, no. So, the plan is to get hold of the free samples and take them for a spin first. Then make the decision.

And I know I'm only delaying out of sheer cowardice! I could do it tomorrow. I might. Or ... I might go play in LuxRender, which I haven't done in years, but I do need to do, because I have a book cover to render up for a client in the fairly near future, and it's going to depend on Lux, because it has to give the impression of being a photo, which (with the best will in the world) raytraces don't.

Back soon with more!

A little CG romance for Valentine's Day

At last, I found the project files for "The Princess and The Barbarian, which was rendered so long ago, I couldn't even raytrace at the time! So ... a beautiful new re-render, widescreen, re-lit, and fully painted for effect. The hair is all hand-painted, and so much nicer this time around; and the lighting is delicious. A little romance: "Meet me at the old temple, at sunset." Happy Valentine's!

And a picture Dave asked for:

Millennium Dragon 2, Castle Creator fortress, Bryce sky...

The dragon, guarding the castle. Not attacking it, but guarding it. Very neat idea ... a pain in the posterior to organize, and in fact the final result is just a little flat, for reasons I can't (yet) quite fathom. If the penny drops, I'll come back to this and re-render it.

Playing with Amberlight again...

...and these got me to thinking about abstracts and combinations of layers:

This last one is particularly intriguing. Quite the brain bender. It's five or six layers deep, laying effect on top of effect. Amberlight is the bottom layer, and then ... experiments with transparency, opacity, reflection, refraction, diffusion, and ... so on, and on. Neat.

Happy Valentine's, folks! 

A little romance, between punch ups and chases --

click to see at large size, 1000 pixels or more...

A little romance -- gay romance at that! -- I couldn't resist, since the characters are back "out of the box" and I'm working with them every day, while I get the series prepped to go to Kindle. A lot of you will be looking for a progress report, so here goes:

Scorpio is just about finished. The last one of the NARC novels to be fully packaged, ready for Kindle, will be the cult classic itself -- Death's Head. And the date for uploading is February 9th. The Kindle "process" takes a day or two, so ... second weekend in February, you'll be able to download all five novels direct from Amazon itself. Jarrat and Stone on your Kindle at last!

Speaking of which, did you know that Kindle has an app, "Kindle for Android" --?? In other words, you can shop Kindle to feed your smart phone or your android tablet. I was at the Kindle store just the other day, basically taking a look to see what it looked like on the phone. On the Samsung Galaxy, which has a 4" screen, the store looks very good. I browsed the lists of our writers and was impressed. So you can be on your smart phone, and buy/download Kindle books right there. Now, that's handy.

Anyway --! As I said, I couldn't resist these shots: a little (gay) romance between the punch ups, shootouts and chases. Here's Jarrat and Stone in a romantic setting for a change. Sub-text on the images? Well ... take a good look. Time has passed between the two shots ... it's raining out now. Missing shirt; Jarrat's barefoot. Hey, enjoy the daydream, right?

These shots were so complex, they had to be done in three stages. The characters were posed in one file; the set was built in another file, then they were combined. Then a huge amount of Photoshop work was done after the renders were complete. I think I spent more time painting in Photoshop than I did on the renders! What made it complex was the details: so many props, lights, shadows, reflections. Originally, I'd wanted to do the background -- the city outside the windows -- as a separate scene, and just put it in as a backdrop, but life never works out the way you hope or plan! So, instead, those buildings are actually part of the 3D scene, in DAZ Studio; and making them look realistic -- blurred with distance -- is something I organized it in Photoshop. Take a look at this:

It's, uh, raining out there. You're looking at about five Photoshop effects stacked one on top of the other. The whole scene was painted in about 12 layers. Oddly enough, it didn't take as long as you might think -- and it was huge fun.

The other shot today, I call "Launch to Orbit." This was done n Bryce 7 Pro and Photoshop. Am very proud of this piece -- it's well worth seeing at large size (it's uploaded at 1100 pixels wide). The raw render was done in Bryce, incorporating the sky, land, buildings, water, moon and ships. Then the fun began. That one took a load of painting. When your eye gets used to the finished version, and you look back at the raw render, it looks oddly plain, or empty.

As I type this, Dave is investigating Vue, finding his way around the interface ... and loving  it. Vue Esprit is on the shopping list for the very near future, and I look forward to playing with it myself. I could wish Vue would run on a computer that's quarantined from the Internet, as mine is; but it won't. You can set it up, but the images don't just carry the company logo, they're "watermarked" all over with obnoxious overlays. There is no way I'm going to take my month-old computer anywhere near the damn' Internet! So I'll explore Vue on Dave's system, and keep on playing with Bryce... 

...like this abstract. Now, that's a weird one, which just "happened" in the course of figuring out how shapes, transparencies, lights and reflections interact. Very cool indeed.

Jade, 31 January

Camera's eye view ... CG doodling -- book cover concept "sketches" and so on

Working with concepts today -- exploring the part of 3D work that's one of the most important, and the one that's most overlooked. The camera position...

So I thought I'd combine ideas and play around with three or four things at once. I wanted to check out the impact of abstract backgrounds and a sharp foreground subject, and I have to say, the effect is striking. The more extreme the camera angle and the more paint-splatter-abstract the background, the better it seems to work! These are along the lines of book cover concepts -- hard-hitting stories about a strong central character. In fact, a couple of these are just begging to have a book go along with them!

And then, still playing about with the camera rather than any other element...

The set is by Powerage, their Viex Quartier set ... a tatty, shabby street scene in small-town France, all peeling paint and crumbling masonry, very evocative -- even before you add a luxury limousine (the model is from Vanishing Point), and then start to do camerawork that seems to suggest a scene from a movie. Hmmm...

Nothing especially startling here -- as the post title says, mostly it's CG doodling, renders which I have going through in the background while I plow through the most boring work known to mankind. Gotta pay the bills, you see. Drat.

But I'll tell you what ... some of those book covert concepts are just screaming to have a book added to them, aren't they?!

That's Michael 4 wearing the Samson skinmap, but the face and body morphs are my own. The hair is Midnight Prince set to auburn. The sunnies are from the M4 Real Jeans set, by Billy-T, and those are the Real Jeans themselves. I have about five lights on the male model, with two shadows set -- these shots are not raytraced, because, well, they're just concept work, like sketches, and also I didn't have a lot of time. But the street scenes are indeed raytraced -- they take no time at all, because there's no human hair, no trees or bushes. Everything else rayraces like lightning.

The best thing about 3D work? Being able to have the worlds hunkiest models come into the studio and happily stand (sit, lie...) there while you fuss with your lights. Hee! Did any of you ever try working with real, human models? Or worse, cats?!

Jade, 8 June

***Posted by MK because the internet is AWOL. Intermittent crap.

Urban Hero

Think Anime, Yaoi, the urban legend. I really like this piece, which I call "Urban Warrior." It has a smoldery sensuality without the need for, um, skin. This is one of my theatrical company of characters, but I switched his hair color over to copper-red...

Incidentally, the hair color switch was NOT done using a "material" or "texture" sold by the company that designed the hair. If you know what you're doing, you can change the hair color yourself. You need to know a good deal about "surfaces" to do this. Do the terms "specular" and "diffuse" and "ambient" mean anything to you?! Get your teeth into DAZ -- really sink them in and start chomping! -- and they soon will.

Anyway, the character is a fairly simple pose; what makes the shot really work is the chiseled face (my design), the generic weirdness of the abstract background, and the fade effect...

Now, the background was created in Serif X3 ... it's about 10 layers of fades and transparencies, and one 3D object which was, again, created from 10 layers of effects before being locked into the background as part of it. The image was then exported at 200dpi, imported into DAZ as the background, rendered along with this terrific incarnation of the Michael 4 model, and then shipped back into Serif X3 to have the fade added, before it was exported for the last time at 300dpi as the finished piece.

Here's the same character with the clothing objects turned OFF, and the hair still set on blond ... stretched out on a hearthrug, watching the fire -- at least, he will be, when I've engineered the rug and the hearth! This is the basic model ... you add the rest of the elements later, and when I finish the piece, I'll upload it finished:


It's handy being able to click an icon and turn on and off the clothes, shades, boots, even the hair style. You can get some, uh, wild and wonderful effects!

And if you'd like to see where I am one year later, here's a slideshow of October 2010 artwork:



Please so browse around and watch the artist's progress! I was pondering whether to take down these early posts where the art is so comparatively simple, and I actually woke up to the word "comparatively." At the time -- it wasn't simple at all. I had figure everything out, and the purpose of these early posts was to record my journey from the start to the culmination. So instead of taking down the simpler art I decided to gussy up the early posts with slideshows and, soon, videos, and perhaps encourage folks who are just starting out to stick with it, never say die, and ... enjoy the process.

Jade, 14 October 2009