3D cyclorama - natural sunlight

Once again I'm just touching base here -- with copious apologies. The last week or so has been too "interesting" ... any more fascinating than this, and --! Long story short: I've kicked the pleurisy and assorted infections, am now buried in work that's been piling up while I wasn't able to take care of it, and Dave's dad is now in the hospital!

So, just a couple of renders that seem to be something from an epic movie ... I'm playing with a cyclorama here. Notice the sky. That's a real photographic sky, a digital image I shot about six months ago, when a spell of hot weather broke with a bang, and the incoming weather front brought some ripped, torn, amazing skies. Dave and I shot up to the top of the hill, about a mile from here, where you get an uninterrupted view of the sky around about 320 degrees of the horizon, and I shot about 100 frames. Then one of these pictures was trimmed and slapped onto a cyclorama, which is a big curved standing prop, like a backdrop at the theater. It's not a full 180 degrees of curvature, but it has to be close to 135 degrees, so you can drive the camera around and see the sky change in the background of your shots -- without having to set up a scene inside the full-on skydome. The sky dome is fantastic, but it's also a bear to light, and if you don't have time, you probably want to look for alternatives. Obviously, just shipping in an image as a background in DAZ would be the fastest way to go, but then, it stays the same in every shot, and to the photographer's eye that looks .... ummm, wrong.

So these shots were set up using the charactes you saw last month (they're making a movie; you also saw them between takes, bluejeans and all), and said cyclorama, plus an assortment of props. They were raytraced and finished with some digital painting -- the grass and the birds, all of which was done in GIMP, with .abr brushes.

Anyway -- suffice to say, I'm alive, I survived, and with any luck at all I'll get on top of the outstanding work, and Dave's dad will be home from the hospital, and we can get back to normal. Or at least what passes for normal around here!

Jade, 22 June (Winter Solstice)

Bryce meets DAZ: love at first byte!

Sorry guys -- all I have left of the original renders is a couple of thumbnails, which I'll include here for the sake of interest. The rest have vamoosed. A website from which they were remote loaded isn't there anymore, or an account was discontinued, or some ruddy thing. I don't even know ... it's been fourteen years. Argh. I'll pop in some other "guy candy in the spirit of," to fill the blanks -- and/but I'll stay with Michael 4 here rather than digress into Genesis. At the time I was doing this stuff (learning, learning -- making every mistake in the book, but having a load of fun at the same time!) Genesis hadn't even been thought of. M4 was state of the art. In fact, some folks were still playing with M3 and V3. So let's stay with Mike 4, and fill in the blank here before I return you to the original post!

Bryce 5.5 meets DAZ Studio 3 ... and I like the results! Picking up today where I left off yesterday: it's 10,000 BCE, it's the short arctic summer of the ice age, and a young hunter has gone out to find something to skewer for dinner. The big difference today is that the background in these renders was generated in Bryce...

I worked out how to design skies ... kind of clouds, how many clouds, direction of them, color of them. And how to change the whole color tone of the image. Then I designed two geographical objects -- a range of hills in the distance and a mossy, rocky tundra type surface -- and plunked them right where I wanted them, under that gorgeous sky.

You might be interested to see the actual Bryce landscape, before 3D props and characters were set into/onto it...

[snip .... nope. Image gone. Rats. Sorry about that...]

Not too shabby for a few days' learning -- but I have a hell of a lot to learn yet before these landscapes are seriously up to snuff. They're better as looooong distance shots. If you have a look at this one, above, at full size (click the pic to get the big version) you'll see that as the terrain gets into closeup (what would be right in front of your feet in real life) you kind of "run out of detail." It gets blocky and geometric. And I knoooow there is a way to set the level of detail, or whatever it's called in Bryce. I just haven't found it yet. Gimme time!

At the moment, though, I'm getting a bit better with configuring skies and oceans:

So that's where I am in Bryce today ... and I was actually about to imagine a landscape and then go into Bryce and make it, for today's render... however. It was NOT imported into DAZ 3D as an OBJ and used as an object. There's more to learn about that, apparently, before I get there. I can export the terrain object as an OBJ file -- no problem. I can also import it into DAZ, no problem. Better yet, it arrives with its materials already applied. But the scale is off, and I need to work out ratios and values and parameters and all that good stuff. Then, I ought to be able to bring the terrain object right into DAZ.

In the meantime, this one is an artistic fake. The backdrop is the Bryce render. The foreground is the "floor" from the Fairy Tale Story cyclorama set. You turn OFF the sky dome and the cyclorama, and the cloud plane, and all the pre-set plants. Then you import your logs, boulders, pebbles, grasses, and get everything arranged to artfully hide the fact the scene's been "staged" rather than "shot on location." Actually, it works out fine, and it is so much easier than fiddling around with the full-on terrain OBJ. Whew!

I love that overcast sky with the low cloudbase and the sun glow...

Jade, 20 March

***Posted by MK: my connection is intermittent, too slow for this.

3D 10,000 BC

This is a great fantasy consume ... on sale for less the $2 the other day! It makes me think of early humans around the time of the last ice age ... so I put it on Michael 4 and then added the Elite texture known as Lee, which is Asian. Then added the Midnight Prince hair set to raven-black ... all of which looked fantastic. But what do you do for a background?

Well, a lot of the southern lands suffering the ice age did actually have a summer. It was just a short one -- and the same thing happens in Alaska too, even today. Summer there can be 12 weeks long, when breakup came late and the first snows came early. So, instead of having the character prancing around in the snow dressed like this (!) I thought, how about the brief summer of the arctic?

Lush growth... waterfalls as all that ice melts off ... green everywhere, arctic flowers ... also mosquitoes the size of floatplanes, but we won't depict those today!

Turns out, there's a really nice DAZ environment that'll do the trick: the Fairy Tale background, cycloramas and props! They surely weren't trying to model a summer's day in 12,000 BCE, but they did a pretty good job of it!

Staying on the theme of Arctic and ice ages, here's where I am with Bryce today:

I call this Sunrise on Svalbard. And the best thing is ... all this was done deliberately, and I know what I'm doing to get this effect, meaning I can do it again at whim. The lens flare was added in Micrographx, to get the sunrise effect, and ... done. Nice!

Jade, 19 March

***Posted by MK: my connection is intermittent, too slow for this.

DAZ 3D environments ... a jungle fantasy

2014 Edit: sorry, dudes ... all I have left from the original render series is a couple of thumbails. You're welcome to them, but the pictures have vamoosed, like so many of these old, old projects. I'll fill in, later, with some other "in the spirit of" images," but I do want to include the original text, because it talks about something that has gone now: the DAZ Environments. They're no longer used, now that PCs are fast enough to load enough foliage props to be significant... 

3D meets George of the Jungle ... want more George?! You're in the right place! However, today's post shakes hands with George of the Jungle again ... want more George?! You're in the right place!

2023 digital painting: Huion pen tablet

2023 digital painting: Huion pen tablet

and now, back to the original post:

However, today's post is actually about the DAZ 3D environment -- the cyclorama. Still, it's not a proper post without a beauty shot or two, so let's do it again before we start talking about mundane stuff like cycloramas!

There ... nice! Very nice. But what about the cycloramas?! A cyclorama is a big projection screen, ofter curved. The DAZ 3D environmental ones are close to a semicircle, so you can get in there and pan and tilt the camera, and get a different view, different backdrop, every time.

There's the main cyclorama and a couple of smaller ones featuring outtakes from the main one; and these can be set up several at once, in the same scene. If you're really clever, you can get a terrific illusion of tremendous depth.

However, you can also just click on the main environment and have the program load everything up to the palm trees and a lot of plants. Then amuse yourself adding more plants as "props" anywhere you need them ... before you add in your figure.

Here's the full panoramic shot -- cinemascope -- right across one of the smaller outtakes. The main one has the waterfall and pool (see yesterday's renders, which were shot in the full set). The detail is amazing, and the trick is not to get too close to the backdrop, with too much resolution in the shot. You're asking yourself, where's the back wall of this set?! Well...

If you shine a light right on it, and do a high-rez render, you can see the background -- click on the above image to see it at full size. There's your back wall!

So ... duh ... don't drive the camera in so close, and don't shine a light directly on the background! You also have to be careful when lighting these scenes, not to have your character(s) cast shadows on background elements that are supposed to be faaaar way. In fact, it's all an optical illusion -- the waterfall isn't far away at all. It's actually standing right behind George, and if you're not careful with the lights, his shadow will be on the water! If you can handle them just right, the effect is stunning. Have you every read Edgar Rice Burroughs's original Tarzan stories? They're nothing like the movies ... they're nothing like the real Africa. They're a fantasy-scape with a rich darkness which is absolutely separate from reality. And that's what these backdrops look like.

All art is about illusion. This goes double for 3D art!

And purely for interest, here are the surviving thumbnails from the antediluvian renders... yes, I agree. The digital paintings look waaaay better. But you have to start somewhere, right? Baby steps.

Jade, 28 February

***Posted by MK, because I have no viable connection to the www today. 

Yaoi 3D meets George of the Jungle ... wow!

Yaoi is an art form that's gaining momentum right now, and it'd gain a hell of a lot more momentum, and do it faster, if it were more widely recognized that Yaoi does not mean underage kids!! It means "young," and "youthful," and -- invariably -- Beautiful. Specifically, beautiful young men. I do this kind of art when I'm (honestly) sick and tired of the avalanches of babes, clothed or un-, that so dominate the www, you just can't get away from them. There's almost nowhere you can go to look at the equivalent young males, so ... DIY. Check.

Something clicked in my imagination yesterday. I was thinking Brendan Fraser as George ... I was also thinking about The Jungle Book (Brendan Scott Lee as Mowgli). And I was remembering waaaay back to Ron Ely as Tarzan. Anybody remember Ron Ely? As in, six-foot-six, and ... this, which I grew up with (explains much, dunnit?) ...

Then I recalled that I had downloaded the Heart of the Forest cyclorama set ... and the rest happened. George as seen with the yaoi art filter on the binoculars!

Y'know, I grew up with George of the Jungle (Brendan Fraser probably did too ... if you were around in the 60s and 70s, George was just part of a Saturday morning). But George Primate didn't turn into a drop-dead gorgeous hunk until 1997, and suddenly he was on the sides of buses! That was the point when I sat up and started taking notice ... a lot of notice! It was also the first time I saw Brendan-- not his first movie, I know, but the first I'd seen myself.

And since 1997, "George of the Jungle" has meant the gym hunk from heaven, with the long, flowing locks and the chiseled physique and ... all that stuff ... until yesterday a whole suite of concepts clicked in my imagination, and after I'd done playing with the cyclorama set to see how it all worked and what was available in it, I could resist adding a figure ... a Yaoi figure ... George.

This is what you're working with in the cyclorama "environments" ... this is not "true" 3D as such. They're 2D "planes" which are set up in ranks and give a fantastic illusion of depth and perspective. If all the trees and plante were true 3D, the computer would soon overload with the number of models in the shot. So these cyclorama sets are a great compromise. You just have to bit a clever with how you set them all up, and where you put the camera. Every time you change the camera position, you get a new view, or scene. Fantastic!

So here you have Michael 4 wearing the Jagger skin map and the Danyel hair, and one of my own faces (same as you've seen on the dancer-assassin several times now ... I cast him over and over because he's one of my favorites).

Yaoi meets George. Or, George meets Yaoi -- whichever way you want to put it. Nice!

Jade, 27 February

***Posted by MK, because I have no viable connection to the www today. 

3D Art: beauty shots ... ars gratia artis

Just beauty shots today, folks ... but I am putting up three of them! ... because I'm in a hulluva rush, work to do, New Year stuff to do, domestic stuff to do.

The top image here, I call it "Ripples in the Mirror" ... 3D Fantasy, and here's the fantasy: is it a mirror? Stick your finger in it, and it ripples, and you could ... and I say could! ... step through!

The middle shot is actually the same character, and the same mirror prop in the background. All I did was change the pose, zoom right in, and put a different expression on his face. When I rendered it, I though, my gods! He's the first cousin (on his mama's side) to the Angel from the Madonna of the Rocks! You know the painting? Here's the Angel:

And the bottom render is something new ... I never worked with proper sets before, but I just got something called "Space Blocks," which was on sale for about $14, and therefore within my price bracket! There's so much to learn when you start working with sets. The results you can get are amazing, but I'll tell you this much: it ain't easy! When I get this figured out, I'll be able to write about it, but right now it would be like the half-blind wearing coke-bottle glasses, leading the blind!

The penny is slowly dropping about how to navigate around a closed set. Here's where it's very different from anything I ever did before: these sets have two walls, floor and ceiling. You have to fly the camera inside them! You switch over to the camera's eye view, which isn't hard as soon as you realize what you're doing.

What's hard is setting up the lights to render the set properly:


I'm pretty good at this stuff, and figuring out how to get the lights inside a box, and chase after them with the camera ... took me about six goes!

So -- just beauty shots today, folks, before I run back to work.

And here I go...!

Jade, 30 December