More "strange allies," the sun sets in Terragen, and ... waiting some more

The "strange allies" concept I've been pursuing for the last couple of days is so appealing, I couldn't resist this! I thought, "What if the two images -- the angel with the little demon, and the fantasy hero archetype withthe troll (or whatever he is), were images from the same story. So it stands to reason that the The Big Green Guy and the little demon would be pals. The works deliciously!

And, playing in Terragen...

This sky is a beaut, which made me wonder what it'd be like at sundown. So I took the camera right a little way, and up a bit, panned left and tilted down ...

...then dropped the sun close to the horizon behind that same cloudscape. Whoo! Gotta admit, I am loving Terragen! Next things is working with trees and plants. In fact, I have the Xfrog store bookmarked, and here's why:

This, above, is a catalog sample image featuring their Autumn Library. Now, the library pack costs US$100, which is about A$150 right now, so it is not cheap, but ... but ... you have to salivate! Terragen is sooo rewarding to work with. At least let me get just a few trees and see what can be done, right? (Although, I think you actually have to pay the hundred bucks and get a library, because one plant is about fifty bucks, and for the hundred you get twenty, which works out at five bucks each. How odd.) Anyway, Terragen also imports OBJ files, and I do have some quite nice OBJ plants and trees (which you've seen many times in DAZ and Bryce pictures). Must see what Terragen can do with them!

There was supposed to be another major image today: the angel and the fantasy archetype (duh ... the last pairing of the Strange Allies group), but I blew off way over two hours trying to get an FTP client configured. Ended up on tech support with the domain wrangler for an hour to get it straightened out. But it's working now ... I just lost a lot of time, so the last in this set of images is going to have to wait for a day or two. It won't be tomorrow: it's my day out! Yay.

And I am still waiting for any word back from Tech Support at DAZ. Yes, I know, they work nine to five, Mon to Fri ... but it's also as if you can only have one round of contact with the Help Desk per turnaround, which means you get 2-3 lines of dialog with your support person per week. It's going to take a looong time to get this sorted, which is why I've just gone back to good old Studio 3, which may not have the bells and whistles, but it never skips a beat. Does as it's told first time, every time.

Anyway, we'll see what next week will bring!

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!

Viking warrior - the Bifrost key ... an Arabian pony at evening, and dawn in Terragen

Beauty shots ...  bit of fantasy ... a rather beautiful Arabian pony! There's a story goes along with the new character, the Viking warrior (berserker?) and that sword ...

Who out there hasn't seen the Thor - Dark World - Ragnarök trilogy? Who could have failed to notice Heimdall (be still, my beating heart) and that sword, which is the key to the Bifrost. Incidentally, the sword has one, if not two names. I've heard it called Gultoppr, and also Hofund. I'm no specialist, nor an Asatruar (not quite yet...), so I couldn't tell you which is the proper name. But I was looking through images a while ago and couldn't help noticing...

...I have a 3D sword prop that's awfully like it. Not a dead ringer, but enough like it to give me ideas. So here's the plot:

Asgard falls (kind of sounds like Gallifrey Falls No More!) and many objects of power are scattered across the cosmos. Some fall to earth, and occasionally are found -- like the Weirdstone of Brisingaman (which you can get as a free download in pdf right now. You're welcome). Enter our Viking warrior, who stumbles across a relic of incredible power:

Call him Ragnar. He doesn't realize at first what it is, and then weird, and wyrd, thing begin to happen. Oh yes, he's found Gultoppr, Heimdall's lost sword. It's far too powerful for Ragnar, he wants only to be rid of it before it utterly consumes him.

So our young Ragnar takes it to the last of the Asatruar priests, perhaps in Iceland, and offers it: " 'Tis the Bifrost sword itself," he says, "take it from me, now, for I've no wanting for it!"

But the priest won't touch it. Instead, he -- or she (and she would be much more interesting: anyone remember the witch, the rune-caster, Kitala, in The Vikings? --

-- yes, definitely a priestess) says it must go back to Heimdall, who is the only one who can handle it, since the passing of the All-Father. 

Now, by what magic does one raise Heimdall? And what happens when Gultoppr, the Bifrost sword, is returned to him? Whooo! 

I do love to spin stories. I just very seldom write them (though I have sold three to magazines in the last year or so, as it happens; and won an honorable mention in a competition on top of that). 

Thanks for indulging me as I tell stories in a thimble here, almost like extended captions to the images I dream up along the way! 😎

I was rather pleased with the pony. It's the fabulous mane that makes it:

And I'm not going to tell you I painted that. The process takes way too long. Believe me. However, I was digging through old, old files and stumbled over buried treasure. A set of "manes and tails for horses" packed as Photoshop layers, pre-painted by a phenomenally talented artist about ten years ago. I just now touched down on Renderosity and yes (thank gods!) you can still get them, and a whole lot more than were available the last time I looked. Soon as I get my computer upgrade, I feel a shopping spree coming on! These days the artist, CWRW produces the most outrageously gorgeous fine art prints you have ever seen (or not seen). They're expensive, but ... phew. Google on "CWRW horse art," and see what comes up. 

Last thing for today is the "Minutes Before Dawn" Terragen render, which took 90 minutes last evening. It's the longest Terragen render I've done so far, because that sky took 90% of that render time. I'm working my way to thunderheads ... think I know how it's done! We're getting there. The last things I need to figure out are how to properly handle power fractal terrains ... I'm doing far too much guessing right now: the penny ain't quite dropped yet. Then, I must get the depth of field function worked out. Then (gulp) working with objects. I might chicken out and read the tutorial before I start trying to feed objects into the program ... then all bets are off, because if -- if -- if -- it looks like it's going to burn out this poor, skinny little HP laptop, the rest will have to wait. But not for too long! 😁

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!

Stormtroopers (This IS the droid we're looking for!), uh, Doctor Jones (!) and a sunset picnic spot in Terragen!

The man in the hat is back! Indiana Jones, anyone ...? We shall return to this character. Soon. 😀

Then, I was in Terragen, looking for something like Dune (Arakis), or that other desert planet, nudge, wink...

There you go: Tattooine. And having done that, the next logical step was --

This IS the droid you're looking for, apparently. The Stormtrooper armor was a 3D freebie many years ago. I don't do much with it because it's a bear to work with: doesn't fit the Michael 4 properly at all, so you spend an hour making it look right from one angle to get an okay picture. This is not 100% right, I know, I know ... but it's as good as it's going to get, and -- enjoy!

Having done that experiment in Terragen, I went on to this with great joy:

Lovely! Picnic spot in the mountains. And I found the way to create the illusion of vegetation, green scrubby growth on the lower slopes! Soooo ... while you were having your picnic some pretty clouds came up:

And that's the kind of sky that till be pretty at sunset, too. So I thought, "Hmm, what would this location look like just after sundown? Here we go:

The sun is actually down below the horizon, just touching the upper slopes of the highlands in the background there. And that is ... nice! I want to work some more with water (some questions to solve), and then the next thing will be ... trees and plants, and ... so on. Yes!!! 😜

Badlands ... and the android PA accepts its program upload!

Early the next morning ... yes, Amadeus got his android PA home and got it programmed. Phew ... what a difference:

You really need to see that at large size! It was actually tougher making Victoria 4 look like a machine than making her look more lifelike. Designing the apartment was fun, too, placing all the props, putting the textures on the furniture and all. That was very rewarding ... the backdrop is the same Bryce cityscape I used as the gag bookcover the other day. Mike happened to be walking by and suggested a "snapshot" of it without the characters:

There you go: Amadeus's place in the year 2220, about 200 years from now. Very neat ... the immortal (vampire) being what he is, he still has antique furniture and BOOKS even though he just bought himself an android PA.

Also, in Terragen -- a photo expedition to the badlands:

From altitude, in the plane or helicopter, flying in:

Then, two shots from the exact same location, with the camera pointed 180 degrees apart:

That's quite interesting, because it's exactly the same point on the surface of this virtual world. Just waaay up above it in the altitude shot, and then turning a half circle in the other two. I love the cloud shadows, and the red cliffs in the distance!

Making some headway in Terragen, but I still haven't solved the question of how to generate a specific land form rather than a whole environment. Working on it: the answer is out there somewhere. Probably at YouTube! Honestly, I am loving Terragen 4!

Hiding out in the Giant's Cave ... sneaking a peek at Michael 6 ... and more

LuxRender plus DAZ Studio and Photoshop:
Hiding out in the Giant's Cave ... at Morialta!

An old snapshot, taken in 2006 and quite low-rez, provides
the perfect backdrop for the render.

First, raytrace some stone walls and vines on the left.

Second, LuxRender the figure alone, using the same lighting set
as was created for the cave raytrace...

Here's the raytrace test for the shot, which was used as a
map/guide for hand-painting the shadows...

Comparison of LuxRender and the raytrace. Why bother with
an overnight render ...?! You be the judge!

Hiding Out in the Giant's Cave is an idea that sprang to mind just a few days ago, and instantly I had a flash vision of what I wanted to use in the background. Winter of 2006, Dave and I went for a hike at Morialta Falls, and climbed up to the cave, which is set high in a cliff wall overlooking the gorge. The view is spectacular. Though the cameras way back then were low-rez by comparison with today's cameras, the pictures are striking. The weather can be awful at Morialta -- at least at the time of the year when the waterfall will be running. (This is Australia ... you want water in the falls? Then, it's been, or is, raining. Duh.) I remember, on this day in '06 it was drizzling half the time, and cold -- but very beautiful.

Anyway, there was your perfect white-sky backdrop, to which I added some rocks and vines at left, raytraced to complete the illusion of a cave mouth. The rocks are actually Nike Image's The Path, rotated through 90 degrees, and with a lot of heavy bump mapping. Easy to make the cave, and fast to raytrace --

But I hit a snag instantly. I couldn't get the props to load in Studio 4, which is my way of getting onto the Reality bridge across to LuxRender. And I didn't have a lot of time to fight with this, so I thought, "stuff it, render the figure separately, using the same lights, and put the whole thing together in Photoshop."

Which is what you see here. Picture #4 has the figure only. The alpha channel is turned ON in Reality, and -- come back tomorrow for a 3k-samples-per-pixel render. It's a lovely render, and the job of putting it all together was actually pretty simple. Just some touch-up work on the figure, where the mesh showed as a lot of triangles and pyramids (!), and then sky color, clouds, mist, birds, vines and so forth, which isn't a long job at all, using Photoshop brushes.

Am very pleased with the finished picture. You've seen this model before:

Also a Lux render, "the fugitive," from May 11, 2012

...it's the Atlas skinmap by SAV (from Renderosity), though the character face/body is one of mine -- and the above Lux render was the second time this guy had been revamped. Here's the original raytrace, also from May three years ago:

...and that's just about as far as you can drive a raytrace, with  a bunch of painting to make the most of highlights and so on. It's not bad at all ... but still, you can see why LuxRender is such a lure.

Speaking of things which are alluring ... I couldn't resist having a long, hard look at Michael 6, whis is, of course, the second generation Genesis male base figure.

This is what A$50 or so will get you these days:

...and of course, having put down the plastic for the new generation base figure, that's where you start shopping. Now, you want wigs, skin maps, costumes and morphs. So, might as well buy a bundle (link) that has the base figure and several of the above, for "only" about A$175...

And having committed to this upgrade, you're going to want the "mesh smoother morphs," which make the body ultimately malleable (link), able to be posed in any contortion, without the mesh buckling, which was always the problem with poor old Michael 4:

...and for an extra A$40 or so, the line between art/fantasy and reality really is blurring.

So, now you might as well go the whole hog, since you're in over two hundred bucks already, and also get the high-def, high-rez, hand-sculpted add-ons to Michael 6 (link), and be done with it:

...and this one, here ... darned if I can tell this 3D model from the real deal. So your shopping list is going to be the Michael 6 Pro Bundle, which gives you the base model plus a few wigs, a couple of skin maps, some poses and costumes; plus the Ultimate Natural for Michael 6 Body, to get the absolutely perfect body mesh; plus the Michael 6 HD Add-On --

And now you can start shopping for skin maps, toupees, costumes and so forth. As an educated guess, when I upgrade to Genesis 2, I'll need to drop about a grand, Aussie, to get my oars back in the water. Eep. Worth it? Oh, yeah ... when I have the bucks. Check this out:


...and there really is no answer to that! So, yes, of course I'll be going here.

Left: a render appearing over at DeviantArt ... Michael 5 (the precursor to 6) as poster-boy, pinup-boy. The artist has sadly only uploaded two renders, and nothing in years. But it's amazing what's being done with the Genesis figures, even without resorting to the top-end render engines. Have a look at this one, for example! Now, there's pretty. (And if I were a model working in the, uh, artistic category, I'd be starting to get worried, 'cause the stuff that's being done in that zone, with cutting-edge 3D models and the top-flight render engines, is rendering the human element obsolete! Interestingly, the "digital escort, or companion, idea is being toyed with -- pardon the pun -- right now. There's a story at Strange Horizons which is well worth a read: Kenneth: A User's Manual, by Sam J. Miller. Whoa.)

So, yes, of course I'll be upgrading . It's just a question of getting my hands on the cash and at the same time, having nothing pressing to do with it at the time! Right now, if I had a spare grand, well, upgrading software wouldn't be even close to the top of my agenda!

For the moment, I'm just going to chug along, doing what I'm doing -- which is actually having a lot of fun!