Wildlife Photography (as promised)

As promised, a look at my Australian Wildlife Photography,with just a few uploaded as images and the rest zipped into a slideshow. I know most of the visitors to this blog are looking for beautiful guys, art featuring same, and tips on how to produce said art, rather than anything remotely like this, so I'll keep it brief!

Here's the whole video...



...and I'll be back in a day or two with a "shoot" on a whole new character. A while ago I mentioned getting a new skinmap and costume. The skinmap is great, but the face morph that accompanies it, as delivered by the designer, does nothing for me. It looked much better in the brochure pictures at Renderosity than in renders at this end. So I plopped the skinmap onto Michael 4 and designed a face of my own around it: a mature guy, age about 38 - 44, with loads of character. I really like the results, and am in the process of doing a full sequence of images. They're just taking upwards of two hours each to render, even on The Mighty Thor, and even "just" as raytraces! Patience is a virtue.

Also, am writing the next segment of Abraxas, so I will be back, and soon!

Jade, October 13

Microcosm

click to see all images at larger size

As promised: the world of the very small ... the forest floor at Belair National Park on June 1, 2009. These are a small selection of the images I shot -- and lost for three years! While searching for something else, I stumbled over them. I never forgot taking these pictures. It was a magical day, not really cold, just chilly, misty, dead of winter ... the sun would come out for a while then vanish again as the next bank of clouds came over.

The hardest thing was choosing a dozen from the shoot to upload here! The "first pick" was over 60, and whittling it down was tough. One of the "filters" was to take out everything that didn't pertain to the "Microcosm" theme. Before getting these images, Dave and I had stopped for lunch at another region of the park, Playford Lake. There were birds galore -- a whole flock of Ibis on the lake, and a lot more, including the male superb fairy wren ... and he stood still long enough for me to get two pictures -- which was no mean trick, when you consider he's the size of your thumb! Then, after getting these pictures, we took a hike in a third region of the park, and I was photographing koalas and kangaroos. So -- out they all went, leaving only the "Microcosm" theme. Even then, I had to cut about 40 images to 12, soooo...

I thought to myself, how about whacking the rest of them into a video? Which reminded me that I'd bought Corel Video Studio 2010, back in, uh, 2010. 

Next step: get the program installed on The Mighty Thor, and try desperately to remember how to use it. Figure out that it hadn't installed properly, because nothing worked. Uninstall it. Restart the computer. Reinstall it. Try again. Hey, it worked the second time around! (Thanks to Dave for jumping through the last couple of these hoops. I woke up with a migraine today, and if it had been up to me, I'd have frisbee'd the installation DVD back into the corner. Dave had more persistence!)

The soundtrack is empty: silent. You're not missing anything, and you haven't left the sound muted! It's just that I can't afford a hundred bucks to put halfway decent-sounding legal music on this little show. You know that YouTube is recently using a kind of "audio proofreading software" which scans the audio content of whatever you upload? You'll soon get a strange little email from them to the effect that you're breaching copyright law and will be investigated in due course. Don't want to go there ... also, I do understand about copyright. It's always so infuriating when people pirate ebooks, so in come to think of it ... why would I blithely "borrow" the music of some musician who also has to buy groceries and pay power bills? However --

I did take a look around at available canned music, before making the decision to upload this little show silent. Cheap music sounds dreadful -- it would actually detract from the quality of the video. By the time you get up to anything that sounds decent, you're looking at $100 investment. It's out there, and there's plenty of it. I've bookmarked a site called Royalty Free Music Dot Com ... guess what their URL is. (No, really?!) LOL ... if/when I ever get  seriously  into making YouTube videos, I'll get a bunch of stuff from https://www.free-stock-music.com and will do the remix, mashup thing, which is perfectly legal. 

2024 Edit: the original link in this place was royaltyfreemusic.com, but that appears to be dead. I've just tracked down what looks like a replacement service, but note that I have not (yet?) looked into it, so I don't know how good the stock is, or how much they charge, and so forth. This is just a quick fix for a dead link on an ancient post.

[Note to musicians: if you charged $10 for decent music, not $100, about a million people would pay you. Charging $100 just makes folks like myself say, "Not today, thanks." Makes sense to anybody???]

Till I feel ready to invest hundreds of bucks on soundtrack elements ... well, silence was good enough for Charlie Chaplin! Or --

Wing it, guys. All you gotta do is play an MP3 in the background while looking at this show. YouTube doesn't have an argument with that!

So, here's the video ... [drum roll, cymbal clash] ...

My reactions to Corel Video Studio? Not bad, but it's not as flexible as I'd have hoped, for $90, or whatever the pricetag was. It has a very annoying feature that you can not turn off: it's panning and zooming all over the images. All I actually wanted was a static slideshow! Noooo way to stop this, sorry. So long as the subject matter is landscapes, scenery etc., it doesn't really make much difference, but the first time I used this software was to make DVDs of people pictures, for my Mom to watch on TV. With Corel's panning and zooming, you mostly got people from the nose to the chin, or the hairline upwards! It was disastrous. I wound up making individual slideshows in Windows Movie Maker on my laptop, and then importing these segments, daisy-chain fashion, into Corel to master the DVD. How silly is that? But for sheer convenience I did this one, here, in Corel...

The output was wmv, and the upload to YouTube took a looooong time. I assume they compress the movie at their end before displaying it??? To this point, I admit, I don't know much about YouTube videos, but I suspect I shall learn. Incidentally, if you're looking for a really nice, quick way to daisy-chain video clips, though, Corel is perfect. Let's say you have a couple of dozen clips from a trip ... all the best bits chopped out ... the parts where the camera is blessedly still and the image is in focus! All you have to do is drag them into the "timeline," and then tell Corel to burn a DVD at HD quality. Couldn't be easier. Which makes it all the more weird that you can't stop the program panning and zooming over stills. Hmmm.

So there you have it: see the whole "Macrocosm" set of images, if you're inclined, without having to download about ten yards of pictures to the body of the blog. Neat. 

I might disappear on you for a couple of weeks, but don't be alarmed that the blog is abandoned. Far from it. I just have a bunch of things to do, and I don't think I'll have much time for art, more's the pity. But I do have some ideas percolating in the back of my mind!

Jade, September 30

Enchanted Forest - Jupiter Creek

click to see all images at larger size

There's a legend out there somewhere about an enchanted forest ...a place that lights up with magic at certain times of the year ... it's "dark magic" on the last day of fall (Halloween, anyone?) and it's "bright magic" on the first day of spring. And you know, I'd have to swear we saw it yesterday ... the first day of spring. The sun shone, we took a spin out to Jupiter Creek on a whim, and couldn't resist a hike, for about an hour, in woodland that was pure magic!

The trees had turned to spun gold, the ground was alive with fairy bells, there was even a ruined castle tower with a "troll hole" ... but the trolls were sleeping peacefully in this magic time. You don't even have to use your imagination to see all this --

These images have been reduced in size, some down to 1000 pixels -- sorry. It was the only way to make the download sizes small enough, at an average of about 300k each, to be practical, because there's a whole swag of them. They were actually shot at 12MP, and there's not a lot of enhancement on them -- no painting and so forth, just a bit of adjustment in the shadows and highlights, because the light levels were difficult. We're just coming out of winter, and by 3:00pm the shadows are already getting long. (These images were also captured during the space of a single hour. Everywhere you looked, there was a new picture. I took hundreds.)

In fact, Jupiter Creek is the site of the old gold mines. All this woodland you see here is secondary growth: the whole area was clear-cut for the mines about 160 years ago. There wasn't a tree left standing when they were done, and as for the native population --? They appear to have beaten a hasty retreat, and who would blame them! It was all mine shafts and "puddles" and chimneys, of which some still exist. The area (about 10 square kilometers, I would guess) is full of chain-link fences and warning signs, telling people about the deep holes and tunnels, and to keep well out --

Because there's trolls down there. Big ones. And Orks. Lots of Orks. They must be paddling around in rubber boots right now, because there's been so much rain lately, the mine shafts are flooded and the main tunnel, through which you can usually walk, is flooded through much of its length. Dave took a flashlight and went in, to see. Too much water to get right through ... but he said there were a couple of trolls, Fred and Bert, playing poker. In fact, in this shot right below, you can see a lake of standing flood water that's deep enough, and has been there long enough, to be full of tadpoles:

click to see all images at larger size

The trail runs 3k in a loop to and from the parking area (which has a picnic table, a bin, and no bathroom. Makes sense, doesn't it?) It's a quite easy walk, so long as you don't mind climbing up a hillside into which "steps" have been made -- and the steps look and feel like they "happened" as tree roots grew there deliberately to make steps into the enchanted forest (see the second from last image).

Thanks to Dave for making this happen. He suggested taking the Millennium Possum (uh ... the van. It was either going to be the Possum Van, as per Red Green, or the Millennium Falcon as per -- well, you  know what. So I said, how about the Millennium Possum?) for a spin before we hit the stores. But, where to? I suggested Jupiter Creek, never thinking that we were going to actually stop there. So glad we did!

Jade, September 2

Not this week. Well ... darn.

click to see all images at large size, 1000+ pixels wide...

Well ... darn. And I could put that in stronger language. Not quite the news  wanted to be giving you today ... we "lost our window of opportunity" for uploading the NARC books to Kindle this week, and it's my fault -- not that I could have done anything about it. I was going great till I woke up with a monster migraine yesterday, and today I'm seeing out of one eye. As you probably know, there's a heck of a lot more involved in launching a book, or series of books, than just uploading them. There's webpages, wiki pages, banners, ads, and there's the timing of the launch. A new book needs to show up in the leader pages of stores like OmniLit at just the right moment, when visitors and customers are actually looking at those pages. This means, late Friday night (in the US), through to Sunday. This is when potential readers actually see new books appearing -- otherwise, a book rapidly vanishes into the impenetrable depths of online stores that have literally millions of titles in their inventory. 

I was doing fine, on pace to make it comfortably. I had all of Thursday and Friday to make up the pages and the ads. Then I opened my eyes Thursday morning -- or tried to. Nope. Not going to happen this week. It's now late Friday, downunder time, and I still haven't been able to make the ads ... and as for doing the work on webpages ...? My guess would be Sunday, earliest, for that work. Any migraine sufferer will tell you, when your eyes are like that, you can't stare at a computer for long enough to get the work done. Sigh.

Okay, so the NARCs launch on February 18th, not February 11th. Copious apologies go to Mel Keegan for the delay...

Please do click on this image, right above, and see the inside of the domed city I built for the cover of Scorpio. I never did get the chance to share this, and the details don't show on the bookcover. But believe me, if they weren't there, you'd notice! All the details have to be in place for the "whole" to look great on a cover. There's a park, complete with hills and trees, in the middle of that city ... and of course the city is floating in the air of an arctic world. If you didn't see the original post where I uploaded several renders of these "cities in sky-spheres," click here. And if you missed the Aphelion cover where they were built into the montage artwork, then click here. 

(One thing that's been very gratifying: since I've been uploading artwork featuring Jarrat and Stone, and have been blogging about the process involved in getting the books into the modern marketplace, there's been quite a lot of interest in the paperbacks. I mean -- paperbacks! It's so nice to tell old fashioned books.)

The two leader pieces today are a visual treat rolled into an experiment. If you can drag your eyes off the hunk for a second, look at the ground! The ground! Real, genuine, proper meadow grasses and flowers and what have you. These are Flink's Instant Meadow props -- scores of them, carpeted all over the little terrain I have the hunk standing on. There's 10 different patches of plants, and you just keep on whacking them into the ground space till you build up a meadow --

Then you stand (or sit) a naked hunk in the middle of it, so people will look at your picture --

--because, let's face it, if I uploaded a picture of  the ground, you'd say, "yeah, yeah, sure," and wouldn't bother to even look, right? Right. So here's a naked hunk wearing the SAV Atlas skinmap, and suddenly you're looking at my ground. See, it worked. Ulterior motives. Also ... he's a beauty, isn't he?

Not to mention ... sunlight! At first glance, you might be thinking these were rendered in Bryce, but no, these are still DAZ Studio renders. I've pretty much got the knack of getting photo realism (or very close to it) in bright conditions. I haven't managed to get this in low-light conditions, but I'm still experimenting with "black light," or multiple very-dark lights of many colors. 

Next week, I'll be watching the mailbox -- it's not impossible for Poser Pro to be delivered this soon, but it also wouldn't astonish me if it didn't arrive till the week after. Meanwhile, Dave is doing fantastic things with Vue, and he's also "gotten his feet wet," buying some small props and models at the Cornucopia3D store. The other place that's great to shop for the .vob models which are native to Vue is Renderosity. If you're ever interested, and have a few minutes to kill, go there and do a Marketplace Search specifically on Vue models. Whoooo. 

The Bryce landscape, I call "Top of the World." Photorealistic? No. I did everything I could with this one to make it cross that line from art to photo, and it wasn't going to budge ... I was also having big, big problems with Bryce. Crash, crash, crash. The other day I bought two sets of materials which would have made terrains much more realistic, but they won't install. All I get, when I try to import them is -- crash! The program has crashed, and is crashing, so often, it's become profoundly unstable -- and it's done this in about six weeks. The least I can do us an uninstall-reinstall, to bring it back up to usability, but I really, really need to get the upgrade, or patch, or bug fix, or whatever it is, from DAZ. This is on my agenda, soon as I have the time. In other words -- not today, but soon.

Jade, 10 February

The fantasy horse ... the enchanted forest ... just beautiful!

2014 Edit: Sorry guys, the original images have gone. All I have left is a few thumbnails, and they're not worth posting here, even as placeholders. If anything ever shows up in the future, I'll return to this and do a 2028 update or something. Unil then, though -- let me fill in with some horse renders from later. Still the Millennium Horse, still the same basic idea, but mostly Iray. Here we go:

Genesis 8 Male, Iray

Genesis 8 Male, Iray

High-ho onward, Shadowfax!
With the DAZ Cat

Flinx Tree from Renderosity; plus
Mane and Tale elements added in Photoshop

The fantasy horse ... the enchanted forest ... the old, old story, like a favorite movie you half-remember from being a kid. Please enjoy these shots -- "just" beauty shots today, guys, because I'm sooooo far out of time. I saw my chiropractor this morning, had my back "cracked," and the adjustments were enough to throw me way off kilter. I'm trying to catch up with myself, with a dizzy headache and the works. Not uncommon, when my chiropractor's had another go at me. But I'm going to land so far behind today, work-wise --!

I'll be back tomorrow with the fantasy guy to accompany the fantasy horse ... and yes, I will be coming back to Jarrat and Stone very soon. I just thought, we've had a lot of SF lately, so everyone must be ready for a break! Many thanks to Mel Keegan for posting on the subject of my NARC renders...!

Jade, 12 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.