Let's hunt some Orc!

 

Okay, I had some time on my hands ... not because I'm actually at a loose end; I'm supposed to be editing and/or writing, and I couldn't get my head around either, so I decided to say "stuff it, do something creative instead of just spinning my wheels." So I did the second and third renders in this series: Nock the arrow and aim, and the next one on, Orcs on the Rampage! Here he is --

The story is, this band of marauding Orcs has been raiding through Elven territory all night, and they've left a path of devastation. In the dawn, the hunters go on the trails to get them -- hence, "Archer in the dawn" ... but here's the Uruk in the moonlight. Not bad, actually:

This is based on The Freak! A Generation 4 figure which the Iray Converter makes absolutely compatible with Iray. I used the Falcon M4 skinmap, for its weird warpaint, and used the Morphs++ to create a real Uruk face, teeth and all. The axe is an old, old prop; I did all the surfaces in the Surfaces Pane -- no shaders on this. And somewhere in the course of doing all this work on the old props, I do believe I've stumbled over how to get displacement working in Iray. Stay tuned ... am not 100% sure yet, but if I'm right, this is going to be great. So...

...so I've had a marvellous day rendering, with some terrific results and, I think, something major learned. If I can get displacement mapping going in Iray, that really is the last hurdle to be scrambled over. I'm liking this character a lot, too; and I must do more with the M4 costumes on G8, and also see how good they can be made to look in Iray. Hmmm. 

Misadventures with displacement maps and Iray surface parameters

 

Michael 4 in Iray; Elite Lee skinmap

Today I'm revisiting the fourth generation figure -- good old Michael 4 himself. I'm loath to just abandon the figure, because 80% if all the resources I own are for M4, and all the characters I ever designed over ten years are for M4! So the question is, what can be done with Michael 4 today, in Iray? Turns out, you can do quite a lot with the old figure, though it's also a lot of work. The Genesis figures are pretty much "plug and play." With minor exception, they load up ready to render, while M4 takes a whale of a lot of configuring, to make the old materials and maps work well. This, above, is an HD map, Elite Lee, and it renders well in Iray. But when you use a skinmap that's not HD, you work hard...

Michael 4 in Iray; Ferendir skinmap

This, above, is Sixth Sense's Ferendir, which looks fabulous in a raytrace, but looks very, very flat indeed in Iray; I pulled every trick I know to get a halfway decent result out of it, in Iray! You would not believe, would you, that this, below, is the same skinmap, raytraced --

Raytrace, in Studio 3

...and there's one other thing that Iray will absolutely, positively NOT do for you: displacement mapping. Iray utterly ignores displacement maps, which means the easy way to turn on the vascularity (venous mapping ... to throw into relief the veins in the skin) is off the table. So I did a lot of research, and discovered that Iray will recognize a normal map, which is something; and it allowed me to work with a simple prop and get better results:

Normal mapping...

That's not bad: the normal map brought up the bark very nicely. I'm now asking the question, would a normal map bring up the vascularity in Michael 4? I'd have run the experiment today, but I ran out of time (ie., wasted over an hour) when Studio began to jack around, mis-cue and generally be weird. Right out of the blue, after having no problem with lights for weeks, Iray ceased to recognize the light pumped out by a photometric spotlight! I mean, I ended up with a searchlight about a foot away from the dude's face, the preview was glaring with light, but when you clicked "Render," the Iray engine couldn't see the light. The figure rendered flat black! Say, what?!! So I lit the whole this with IBL lights and then painted it in Photoshop, to make the most of a short foray into Genesis 3, and the result is like a storybook illustration:

Genesis 3 ... such a child!

You can tell "something is wrong" with it ... if this was supposed to be photorealistic, it's more of a painting. And Genesis 3, right out of the box, is such a ... a child. That's a little boy, which is not to my taste at all. I imagine you can make something of him by adding character morphs?? Maybe so, but I've trawled the DAZ store, and I can't find any! Hair and costumes, yes, but as for character morphs and skinmaps specifically for G3? Nope. Go figure. So we'll be leaving G3 pretty much alone...

Tomorrow, I'll see if I can figure out what Studio is doing with the lights (not rendering them); and I'll see if normal mapping will make the venous detail appear in M4 ... and I'll have another go to see if I can get a coherent raytrace, and perhaps we can get back to this kind of work -- which is a raytrace, and you can tell that because M4 has the vascularity on and working ...

Raytrace, in Studio 3

A swordsman in the snow ... whooo!

Hunting around through the "assets" I bought a long, long time ago -- and never had the harddrive space to install! -- I came upon this skinmap: Ferendir, by a designer called "SixthSense." It's a gorgeous skinmap, and renders beautifully ... though I do admit, I painted the eyebrows, which are too pale and thin for my liking; and I also applied the SAV Atlas displacement mapping on the torso and arms to bring up good venous mapping. But just take look at this skinmap in closeup -- if you can, see it at full size:

That's superb. A pleasure to watch it rendering! Using the Atlas displacement maps adds an extra dimension to it; and I designed a new face to go with this map. This is not the Ferendir face morph, as packaged by the designer. To be honest, the original face doesn't do anything for me. You might like it, and the good news is, it's still available from Renderosity.

So, not wanting a teenager, I designed a face and body I like, and came up with this:

This is what I love about working with Michael 4: it's so easy, and so quick, to get results. Sure, Genesis  can be significantly closer to full-on photo-realism, but it takes soooo long to get anywhere, especially on a slow system like mine. With M4 you can create new characters on the fly in a snap. I rather like this face -- and the eyes are the brilliant green item from The Eyes Have it set:

The hair is hand-painted, based on the old Mario's Hair for M4, from Neftis Hair Salon. That doesn't render up so well (well, it's quick, but the downside to that is, you pay for speed in low-rez results: human hair isn't supposed to go around corners, and so forth), but it does give you a good base to paint over, and ... Photoshop to the rescue again.

The snow is an old .ABR brush, Ron's Magical Snow, from the days when Ron's brushes could be used with Photoshop Elements. Alas, his new brushes need the full on Creative Suite version, or whatever it is these days ... I can't use them. I'm still running Elements 9! It works, I own it outright, and I've no reason to change it, since it does everything I want it to! The only thing is, sometimes people come along with fabulous new brushes which I can't use; but there's a free site, All Free Download (dot com), which is loaded with old fashioned brushes. They are absolutely free and this is not one of those sites plagued with viruses and such antisocial rubbish. It's perfectly safe, and the worst thing you might have to do is look at a couple of pay-per-view commercials in exchange for downloading some very good .abr brushes. Enjoy!

This sword is Merlin's Katana ... but I've been unpacking loads of props from years ago, and just discovered that I own Xurge 3D's Ranger weapons! I had no idea I had these -- expect to see them very soon. I honestly have no idea what I have stashed away from 2013 or so. Even though I didn't have the harddrive space, I shopped a lot of sales, grabbed fantastic special offers. Now's the time to bring them out, dust them off and play! The Ferendir skinmap is one such stashed item. It renders as well as anything I've ever seen, and with the pixel and shadow sampling settings cranked way up on 3Delight, the resolution is brilliant. That skin absolutely glows.

The costume is the bottom half of Xurge 3D's Medieval Royalty cossie; you saw the whole thing yesterday. Now I've got the surface texture adjustments worked out to get good results in Studio from an item configured for Poser, it's easy to work with...

And so to bed. More tomorrow! 

Michael 4 fantasy, in and out of Iray ... and feeling optimistic --

As promised yesterday, we'll step back a couple of paces, go back to simpler things and work back toward what's doable in Iray (for me, with my hardware). So -- for a start, we'll do a raytrace! And here's where it gets interesting. I've never really delved into the 3Delight engine in Studio 4 -- why would you? You to to Studio 4 to get access to Iray, right.? But I did "go backwards" for a while, and wound up noticing that 3Delight is a lot more fully featured than it used to be --

The version built into Studio is the freebie. The full-on pro version of 3Delight is about A$2000, which is dumb, when you realize NVIDIA Iray is free, like LuxRender, and you can even get Maya, from Autudesk, for about a grand, Aussie. The major thing Poser users always held against DAZ Studio 3 wasn't the interface, which is fine, but the very rudimentary render engine built into it. The truth is, by comparison with Poser's Firefly engine, 3Delight is extremely limited. Disappointing. Soooo ... I was intrigued to dig around in 3Delight, as built into Studio 4.11, and discover a lot more ways to configure it... Hmm.

You can now squeeze a lot more out of raytracing than you used to get out of it. There is a downside: as you crank up the sampling and so forth, render times blow out massively. Duh. You have to look for the sweet spot, because you could wind up with a raytrace that took longer to render than an Iray image! Anyway, this raytrace, above, was done at much higher settings, taking about an hour. I can tell the difference.

Curious to see what Iray could make of the same material (all of which is low-poly: two Michael 4 figures, a couple of props, a set), I gave the picture one hour in Iray, at half size:

Very different, isn't it? The same render time as the raytrace, albeit at half the size. Seeing the result here made me wonder how our avenging angel might render in closeup, so --

That's an hour in Iray, too -- and the beauty of this is, there renders are finished, whereas the Genesis 8 work I've been tackling in the last week or so chokes my system after about five or six hours and can never be finished on my current hardware! I do like Michael 4 a lot, actually. With this character here, the only thing that's missing is the vascular mapping: the venous, or vein, mapping. Soooo...

I'm 99.75% sure I have the manual installation thing worked out now. Seriously. I've got the old content working tolerably well in Studio 4 (even though I still can't actually save a file in Studio 4!), and I was feeling optimistic enough to shop a sale DAZ is having right now. One of the things I just got was this:

Catalog image. See this.

This is a very, very nice displacement map for the Michael 4 figure. It was on sale at about 70% off, so how could I not get it? (I also got some Genesis stuff, including a new wig). I just have to slog through the process and get this installed and working ... tomorrow. Then we'll mix and match skin maps, hairdos, costumes, and we'll see what we shall see! This is going to be fun ... stay tuned!

Mister Versatility himself -- and a boat! Terragen, Iray, and more...

It's always tempting to see the 3D characters as actors, and if they're actors, they can walk out of one movie and right into another. Hmmm. So --

Yesterday's Conan is today's undercover cop, roughing it in some slum zone, busting the kind of people who sell firearms out of the trunk of a car. Neat! (Just a raytrace, set up to look like a flash photography shot. A closed set, and somene just popped a flash in the dimness. Very effective. Also, am very pleased with the bump mapping on those hands: they look realistically battered, as any adult's hands usually are! Garbage as set dressing is also interesting ... a wheelie bin, an abandoned chair and an old pallet! It was fun overdriving the bump and displacement maps on everything. Very pleased with the floor...)

Say, this is a still from a movie that hasn't been made -- which leads me back to remembering the b&w 8x10 movie stills we used to collect back in the days of yore:

It actually looks very good in monochrome. I might see what Iray can do with this tomorrow --

Speaking of which, I did feed yesterday's Conan into Iray, and came up with this:

The best thing about this render is that floor! IRay also did a great job on the Anubis statue and the ax blade ... but every bump and displacement map dropped out, and nothing, repeat nothing I could do, in this project, would get them back --

That's just the basic diffuse maps on everything; and adding whatever shaders were supplied along with DAZ Studio 4.10 didn't work or help ... and I do not intend to spend several hundred dollars on shaders, and work all day to get a single picture ... not when the shaders are free with Reality 4.0, and they're configures with a single click. Aarrggh. I blew a couple of hours on forums, following a Google search: "bump maps not working in IRay." Uh huh. So I'm not the only one to have this problem? And it turns out that overdriving the bump values is not the solution after all: I tried it on this guy, here, and it didn't work. Back to the drawing board. The forums, incidentally, were (to quote Jack Sparrow, enormously not helpful. Ten people made suggestions which didn't seem to work, then the thread petered out ... in 2016. Every single time, the bottom line with IRay seems to come back to buying shaders, which may or may not even exist (they don't for Michael 4), and if they do, they cost a packet! Ack.

Mind you, this is a fairly good render; it's not quite photographic, because (duh) no shaders are available for M4, and even if they were, I don't have them. But this picture is still trying very hard to be a photograph, which made me wonder...

Yep, a movie still from a film that doesn't actually exist! Nice one.

Also -- soooo pleased with this picture, in Terragen:

Elven Boat at sunset, in Terragen

In that past, I've rendered this boat prop a couple of times in Bryce 7 Pro, and never been very thrilled with the results. It just looked ... flat. Here's the best I was every able to squeeze out of the Bryce engine, with this model and its maps:

Same model, in Bryce 7 Pro. Hmm. 

You'll see what I mean if you take a look, full-size: flat as the proverbial bikkie. Bryce images so often look like tabletop dioramas. So imagine my pleasant surprise when the Elven Boat prop began to render in Terragen, and I saw this coming up...

...whoa! Check out the texture in the wood, and the reflections of the lantern in the water. Now, that is impressive. This is the first time I've rendered something man-made in Terragen, and only the second time I've rendered an OBJ. The other one was a tree, a few days ago. This could get exciting! 😀

Anyway, that's been my day, art-wise. And so to bed, before I go to sleep here and my face hits the keyboard. More soon!

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!

Glam, a battleground, Terragen skies, and fall colors

An autumnal mood ... and a bit of Michael 4 glam. I was in the mood for glam, snarfle. The first picture tells half a story. I call it "Relics" ... Oh, a battle was fought here -- Orcs and Dwarves, perhaps; and here's one of the scouts from the borders of the Shire, come to find out what became of friends who never returned home. Hmmm. That's not bad. The second picture ... well, I wanted to play with color casting. That is, throwing a bucket-fill into the top layer of the Photoshop post-render work, and then blending it to see how the color cast changed the mood and tone of the image. Well now! There's no reason the experiment couldn't be run with a bit of beefcake, is there?!

If you're interested -- the artists among you might be -- the location was set up first with a background landscape; here's what you could call the background plate:

That's the location without any depth of field set, though it is lit -- just one light. The terrain is was made in Bryce and exported as an OBJ, then imported into DAZ Studio, and the textures added. I did a diffuse (surface) map -- basically, a fairly small picture of leaf litter on the ground, tiled into an enormous 3000 x 3000 pixel image -- plus a displacement map (made from the diffuse map ... you drop it into monochrome, yank the contrast sky high and sharpen it a lot. This technique is pretty darned effective. The result is extremely realistic, even if you view the render at large size, in closeup ... and it's dead easy to achieve!

The sky was a custom Bryce render ... but while it was taking about 20 minutes to come up with something that was fairly blah, I thought to myself ... "You know, Terragen ought to be able to generate something better, and probably faster anyway." Soooo...

Terragen atmospheres -- no landscapes to speak of, because I just tilted the virtual camera to look UP at about 25-30 degrees of elevation, which puts the landscape on the horizon ... just right for use as backdrops in CG composite shots. Terragen skies are very, very easy to do, and fast! These renders took from 30 seconds to three minutes each! Ahem.

And speaking of autumnal moods (well I was, a moment ago!), fall has certainly arrived in this neck of the woods, about two weeks before winter is due to begin, according to the calendar. We took a hike in Belair NP this morning, and I'll share some of the photos here, and again tomorrow. I've always maintained that there's a line where photography and art blur together, and this is it:

Those are uploaded at 2000 pixels wide -- they make lovely wallpaper (you're welcome) and they do look so nice at large size -- please click so see them that way.

Back soon with more!

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?!