Making faces ... and repainting old images

Having a lot of fun creating faces ... that's the Michael 8 skinmap, but a whole new face designed to go along with it; and that's the DMM Rebel skinmap, complete with tattoos, but that's a face as designed by me -- largely because, at this moment, I can't get Rebel to install properly. I might have mentioned this before, but the file structure for Genesis assets is different; even when you've put them where they're supposed to go, Studio can't access them. I seriously need to think this through, work it out.

It's also been a day for revisiting old projects -- and repainting them! Like --

These are infinitely better than the versions I did a few months ago. That's actually just the Genesis 8 figure wearing Georgia's makeup options! It was mostly a mix and match experiment for costume bits and shaders. But I have to say, I do like the G8 male figure who's wearing Michael 8's skinmap. I think I could do a lot with that. Hmm... A few ideas are occurring to me, even as I type this! This is going to be fun.

Genesis 8 gets new hair ... and I discover new depths to 3Delight ... whooo!

Been amusing myself making new faces with Genesis 8. I rather like these ... might use them agaibn. They were just done quickly to test-drive the new wig I bought the other day. I wasn't 100% sure the hairdo prop would work, since manual installation is still a little bit iffy, but there's the proof of it -- it works!

The hairdo is "Side-Part Hair for Genesis 3 and 8," from DAZ. It has six different styles and numerous colors, so you can mess it about, make it long or short, tousle it -- stand it on end. It works well, and I got the installation figured out, first jump out of the gate. I think the basic file structure is going to be the same for newer DAZ materials (not Poser formatted files, of which Michael 4 himself is one). In the case of hair props, it's this:

My DAZ 3D Library \ People \ Genesis 8 Male \ Hair \ Side Part Hair  ... with extra drop-down folders with \!!Styles and \Materials sorted for Iray and 3Delight.

These two snapshots were done in Iray, obviously, before I changed projects. I wanted to get back into 3Delight; and I haven't said that in yonks. In fact, I've spent the last four years or more trying to escape from 3Delight, which was the one true bugbear of Studio 3, if you ask me. The freebie installed in the interface was too rudimentary, and the pro version was too expensive. Well, that was then and this is now --

Iray was yanking me about so much the other day, I got so cross with it I said, 'Nuts, I'll just raytrace this!' And I stumbled into previously unknown depths in the Studio 4.11 version of the old engine; additional features which appear to be specific to Studio 4.x, and possibly even to the later versions of 4. Soooo...

This is a re-render of a Studio 3 image done five or six months ago:

I have never seen such response out of 3Delight ... this is a fairly quick raytrace, just ten minutes; and what I'm seeing is already getting fairly comparable to the work delivered by the Firefly engine built into Poser 9 and 10. I'm still 75% clueless as to what I'm doing as I configure the raytrace engine, but I'll work it out. You can configure this version ten ways from Tuesday, and I've barely started, but I like what I'm seeing! Can I persuade you to look at this, at full size (roughly double the size you see on the page here):

Even with just a little nudge in the pixel sampling and shading rates, gamma and gain, there's easily twice as much response in the skinmap. Whooo! Exciting, innit? Michael 4 is wearing Xurge 3D's 'Untamed' costume. I painted a new diffuse map for the metal parts, to make them gold; the original costume has steel gray, which looks a bit drab, I thought. The good news is that the new map applies itself automatically on the old UV coordinates, so -- cheers. 

And if you want to take a look at the hairstyle Genesis 8 is wearing in these snapshots:

Catalog image. See this. 

The good news is, this wig renders much faster than some other G8 styles, and at the same time it looks more realistic than the Landis Hair -- I'm having a tussle with that wig, trying to get it to look more like hair, less the a plastic hat. I know it can, and should, look great; but I'm not getting good results so far, to the point where I'm wondering if I'm missing a map. Is an opacity map not working out?? That would do it. Must look into that.

More soon -- probably not tomorrow, because we're going out for the day. The day after, I think, because I still have a Wilverine-style leather jacket for Genesis to install, and an SF costume ... and I'm dying to get back to playing with the raytrace engine into which I blundered by chance, LOL. 😎

Yes, we need another hero! Check this out...

Hey ho, it's only money, right? Yep -- a skinmap for Genesis 8, and I've also used the face and body morph in this set of test shots. (These are comparatively quick renders: I let each cook for an hour in IRay, and because it's just one model, one garment, one hair prop, the CPU handled it just fine.)

I'm about 85% of the way there with this character ... it's not absolutely right, but it's close. I confess, the eyes are painted in three out of four of my shots today, because the scleras (the white parts of the eyes) are glaring like searchlights ... they make him look like a Goa'uld! There's no built-in control to tone them down, so I'll have to muck about in the materials pane and dim down the diffuse color, or specular color, or specular values, or reflectivity, or whatever it turns out to be. That should be a comparatively minor fix ...

...and I have to admit, he's kind of pretty just as he is; although I have a feeling I'm also not getting the body shape quite as depicted in the catalog images. This is probably because I don't yet have the Genesis 8 Body Morphs. Now, the product page at DAZ does not say that you need the body morphs in order to load this body shape, but I think maybe it should, and you do, because...

catalog imagage. Dae for Genesis 8

... that body is a fraction different from what I'm getting, and frankly, the only issue that could cause the difference is that I don't have the body morphs. Anyway, that's by the by. I'll have them soon enough, then you can expect the body to load up and be identical. Also --

DAZ catalog image. Dae for Genesis 8

The catalog images show the eyes rendering the way they ought to ... those scleras do not glare like searchlights! So the solution has to be in the materials settings. That's a challenge for tomorrow.

I also bought a pack of (gasp!) IRay shaders for fabrics, so there's a lot to play with. I confess, right now I have only the vaguest idea of how to handle IRay shaders, so there's a lot to learn.Since I don't yet have a tonne of costumes for Genesis, I thought I'd try pasting the shaders onto other stuff and see how it renders up. This will be interesting!

Also, I ran an experiment to see if Terragen would render a figure exported out of DAZ. The answer is, it will ... but it imports only the diffuse map (ie., the image that makes the visual pattern or texture on any surface), and ignores everything else. Which makes a character look weird indeed! You do get a drop-down menu, where Terragen asks for the correct shader for every single surface on the OBJ you just imported. Ooof. In other words, it would take a day or two to organize the simplest image you can imagine. Hmm. Not worth the time it takes.

Quite happy with today's work! More tomorrow...

A delicious 3D fantasy: Escape Plans. Whoo!

Escape plans ... but I leave it to you to figure out who's the captive, and why. This woman could be a High Chief's secret agent, come into the enemy palace to win freedom for the warrior prince of a tribe across the hills, who was taken on the battlefield and is being used as a hostage against his people. And that's not a bad story idea, if I do say so myself!

I don't often work with the Victoria 4.2 model ...

... for the simple reason that 99.5% of everything out there in 3D art land is female, female, female: babes in skimpy costume, or no costume at all, striking poses in front of the virtual camera. I got nothing against babes. Dangitall, I used to be one (in fact, my husband will tell you, I still am, though I think he needs his glasses checked...) But you can just "get enough" of them, after five thousand or so, and you want to work with beautiful guys instead. Nothing wrong with that, right? Right. But ...

Just occasionally I get an idea, and it really does need a female model to make it work. So here we have something different for today ... and a pretty neat story idea, too! You've seen the male model before --

Yep, that's him, in a render going back about five months. In fact, you've actually seen a prototype of this female model before, albeit in 2010! And no, I don't expect anybody to remember that far back! (Even I don't. But I do rummage among my ancient project files to see what's in there.)2010 was the time when I couldn't even raytrace, because my computer of the era would crash to the desktop if I tried, LOL! This was the best I could do at the time:

...which is not so bad, for an old fashioned deep shadow map with no post work whatsoever. But coming back to this character, I redesigned the face somewhat, and did everything that you can do with a raytrace. As I said the other day, these raytraces may be among the last ones I do, because next week, Wednesday, the computer is going into the shop for its new hard drive, and ...!

So there you go: Escape Plans. Now ... pick your own storyline!

Meet Dimitri ... "making faces" for fun

CG character creation is fun. End of statement! Occasionally you come up with something (someone!) you're really, really pleased with -- and this is one of them. Call him Dimitri ...

I stumbled over this face and form when I was playing with the character of "the vampire Amadeus." I'd wanted to tweak the old face, make it a bit more unique, a bit less "idealized," but I guess I went too far with the tweaks, because by the time I was done, it was on its way to being a great face but it surely wasn't Amadeus anymore! Here's the work in progress:

From here, I changed the skin map and hair, did a few minor adjustments, and then put him into a sort of medieval setting. Turns out, Amadeus has a kind of "evil twin," the Loki of this family (a vast, ancient vampire clan) who causes nothing but trouble and everyone else has to sort out matters before it's war between the great vampire houses, over the last 2000 years, right? Neat idea, actually! A vampire with a sense of humor...

Same character, outside the tavern, with a "day for night" filter added in Photoshop to give you the impression it's night (same principle that's used in TV, when they shoot during the day with a filter on the camera). I like this character a lot.

The other experiment I ran today was in painting a displacement map to age a character by adding wrinkles to his face. Skin maps are usually imaged from very young models, meaning there isn't a mark on their juvenile faces, which may or may not suit the role you're casting. So...

If you have a look at this guy at large size, you will see lines in his face. Uh huh. This was done by painting lines (!) onto one of the facial skin maps, saving it back and applying it as a displacement map. It, uh, works. I need to go in and paint lines into the neck mapping too,  because this guy still has the smooth teenage neck of the original skin map. But the face worked well.

Too hot to do more today. This place is sizzling, and I'm going to shut down the computers before they cook.

CG Hero: chasing photorealism

CG character design ... sophisticated render: uploaded at 2000 pixels:
please DO see it full size! 

Chasing photorealism: depth of field, a single light source, film grain, you name it. This guy is pretty impressive, and if I had to make the call ... I do believe this render is a candidate for the best work I've ever been able to wrangle. Sophisticated. Here's a closer look, a detail crop:

It really has the look of a still from a movie. You take a second look and think, "What did I miss?"

I've got ONE light on this scene. Just one. The venous map is on the figure; the face is less than perfect (not pretty: very human -- a new face, designed for this project. Body designed for this project too). The focus is "off" just the tiniest bit, to fool the eye into accepting this as not a digital creation. This time, rather than doing Gaussian blur in Photoshop, in post work, I turned on DOF and did it in the original render --

Not a Lux Render! Just a raytrace ...  not a Genesis figure either. Oooold fashioned Michael 4, in DAZ Studio 3. 😀

Yep. I'll be coming back to this character!

The Mercenary ... CG character design, just for fun; and "Summer in the Woods"

Slow, slow days on the run-in to  Christmas, so ... painting to pass the time, and having loads of fun seeing how much I can squeeze out of the old software! I call this one "The Mercenary," and it really is just begging for a story. You might not believe it, but this is the same face I created for the Falconstone book cover a month or two ago! I used a different hairstyle, put beard shadow on him, but that's the same face --

In the background, I used a photo of a fantastic sunrise from February 2017. I just can't remember which of three amazing dawns it was in Feb that year. One, I photographed from the backyard, one from the top of the hill. Now, which is this?!

I have a feeling it's the one from the backyard! In fact, I'm certain of it ... because I recognize those trees in the foreground. Anyway, it provides a very moody and spectacular backdrop for the character here. He looks like he's on an assignment, and the "fun" is about to begin!

Quite a bit of painting went into this shot (chest hair and beard shadow, for one thing ... or is it two?), but the original render is pretty good, too. Just a raytrace, Michael 4 ... not Lux and Genesis or any of that new stuff. Finished off in Photoshop.

But this one, below, was done about 50% in Photoshop and 50% in Krita:

I call this one Summertime. It's a painting from a photo captured at Mount Lofty Botanic Gardens a few years ago. Not a bad photo, in fact, but the painting is better. I'll give you a detail shot, too --

...you really need to see the whole thing at full size -- I uploaded it at 1600 pixels wide, so ... do give it a click and see it big! (Also, the mercenary was uploaded l-a-r-g-e too, so ... enjoy, nudge, wink.

The Magician ... boy, didn't this render up and paint nicely!

Couldn't resist coming back to the character I was playing with yesterday: the conjurer, the magician, what have you ... "Cassandro," with the touring magic show. Wanted to see how the character would render up with the "venous map" that makes him look like he's just being working out, and some tattoos added for texture, and a gypsy earring. Sooo nice! I changed the face very, very slightly, and did some painting:

...and you've got to like that. Someone is going to be asking, so ...

Nope, this is not Genesis anything. This is just good old Michael 4.2, wearing a face and body designed my me. That's the Aether hair, set to a kind of hazelnut brown and then painted red (Photoshop). The tattoos and magickal effects were also painted on/in in the painting stage. I also painted his eyes, and it took a lot of painting to get rid of the "artifacts" where the 3D mesh collapsed in the figure when I applied the venous map for extra realism. I've got DOF turned on ... and something like ten overlays of color painting to make the back/foreground visually interesting.

This is also not a Lux render. It's just a raytrace, while pulling every trick in the book to bring it up to a competitive level! And I reckon it worked. All the fabric textures and texture maps are also mine ... basically, photos of fabrics around the house.

And yes, I will be coming back to this character. I like him a lot, and there's a lot of potential in here. This sort of this, I can live with as a viable alternative to Lux and Genesis and all.

Help! The project files are missing!!

Well, fudgesickles, as Dave says. I've just spent about an hour and a half tearing several harddrives apart, looking for a whole swag of the project files for Jarrat and Stone, the Hellgate characters, and a lot of other stuff which I've been wanting to rerender in Lux and so forth. A case of mild panic ensued. A lot of the files are there to be found. A lot aren't. Well ... dang. The good news is, Jarrat and Stone have survived; and Rick Vaurien, Mark Sherrat and so forth. The bad news is, some of the minor characters -- such as Tully Ingersol, the Weimann specialist on the Wastrel, for instance, is just gone. So...

Some of the characters will have to be reimagined. Like this:

There's the new Tully Ingersol -- somewhat serendipitously, because I'd just finished doing fresh art to rejacket at old book...

...and couldn't resist playing around with the hairstyles. Would you believe that the two characters you see above are actually the same Michael 4 morph, just with a switch of hairdo! Amazing, but true. I'm barely believing it myself, but the facts are right there in the software. Cool.

So the next weeks will see me recovering a lot of the old ground ... but this is actually a good thing, because so much of the art from 2010 needs to be re-rendered in any case. It's always astonishing, the way it comes up afresh in LuxRender -- or even with the techniques I learned in later years.

In fact, we're running up to a milestone. The first post went up on this blog on September 25, 2009. We're racing toward the seventh anniversary of the day when I decided to share the process of "nutting out" 3D art. Dang, what a long way I've traveled -- and we're not done yet.

Stay tuned. Good things are to follow.

Sunlight in LuxRender and atmospherics in Bryce 7 Pro

Achieving real sunlight is difficult in any render engine,
bu there's a knack to it. LuxRender gets you halfway there
by virtue of offering "unbiased rendering."

Depth of field is turned ON in this shot, which gives
a beautifully natural photographic effect .. check out
that background! A photo stripped in? Nope.
The whole thing was done in LuxRender.

The exact other end of the scale from the
photorealism of LuxRender is the cartoon
render function of DAZ Studio itself ...
never experimented with this before. Fun!

Bryce 7 Pro is really starting to do what it's told for me now ... it's
only taken about three years of fiddling about before the
proverbial penny dropped! But drop it did, in the end.

Bryce atmospherics can give great results:
check out that depth of field, and how the
horizon is soft with ever-increasing haze. Nice.

Two left-side images: DAZ Studio. All others: LuxRender.
Loads more goodies to upload. 

Getting LuxRender and Bryce 7 Pro to "play nice" has been one of the good things that happened in the last couple of years. Each system is enormously complex -- dauntingly so, in fact; but if you persevere, they eventually start to make sense. Of the two, LuxRender is the easier to master because the Reality "bridge" between DAZ Studio and Lux proper is designed to make the job ... well, not "easy" as such, but doable. The Bryce interface is something of a logistical nightmare, especially when compared with Vue; so it's no surprise that Vue is where I'll be going next. As good as Bryce images can be (and some of them are amazing, especially the phenomenal landscapes of the greatest Bryce artist anyone knows, David Brinnen), Vue work is ... well, distinguishable from photographs only due to the fact that reality don't never look that purfek'!

And even now, I haven't gotten the new harddrive for my desktop! So I'm still loading scenes into LuxRender via DAZ Studio 3 files opened through retro-compatibility in Studio 4 ... which faffs about like you wouldn't believe when asked to open a Studio 3 file. Suuuure, it'll open the file, but due to the way it reads directory structure, half the props will be missing. For example: you wanna see a male nude, the whole picture, rendered in Lux? Uh huh, so would I. But DAZ Studio 4, when opening a Studio 3 file, leaves the poor man's dangly bits behind. Michael 4 arrives as an unhappy castrato. (And no, I can't install Michael 4 into Studio 4, due to the aforementioned harddrive problem. It's a long, long story. And no, I haven't switched to the Genesis figure, for unavoidable reasons which are way too complex to go into here. And no, Reality 2.0 will not work in tandem with the final version of DAZ Studio 3, even though it swears up and down that it will. Go figure. And yes, I know that the new version of Reality is out, Version 4.0.x ... and I'll be getting this when I have the new harddrive. Oy.)

However, that new harddrive won't be far away, and the good thing is that in the two YEARS I've spent battling to stay alive and sane while not having one braincell to even think about upgrading the PC ... the hybrid drives are now about 25% of the price they used to be. Which means I can get a HUGE-capacity drive for the same money. Which means I can get Vue, and the new Reality version, and the newest version of Poser, and "triple-install" all my 3D props to suit these various programs; and I might even be able to afford to get the PC's chip updated. When Dave got me the system -- fastest on the market 38 months ago -- the workshop put in one of the best motherboards in the country with a heat sink that'd cool Vulcan's forge. So I oughtta be able to just update the chip and bring this baby right up to current spec. Hope so.

Click the pic to see larger...

One of the things I'm currently trying to learn (still!) is how to hand-paint really good, realistic hair in Photoshop. This is an artform in itself, and when you start to work on human figures in LuxRender, you really must learn it ... because LuxRender has a nasty tendency to render 3D toupees badly. The finished render can look like the model is wearing a plastic bag on its head. It's surprisingly nasty. Spoils the shot. So, hand-painting hair is something you just gotta learn.

The work is done in Photoshop, with tiny brushes, a Wacom Bamboo ... and a hell of a lot of practice. Am still getting there, but when it works, it works. This one, at left, is fairly decent -- also gives you a closeup squiz at the face work done on the Michael 4 model to give him an "alien" aspect ... he's about three inches tall and has pointed ears and lovely blue wings, as well as a foot-high battleaxe with which he could probably chop your foot off at the ankle if you strayed too close to the bottom of the garden where this faery clan hangs out! This work was done in good old Morphs++ for M4, and the effect is extremely nice. This is just a crop out of the middle of the main render (it was a 40-hour render ... you wouldn't want to do it over!), and -- check out that background. A photo stripped in? Nope. The whole thing was done in LuxRender, right down to the most distant tree, with the sunlight cranked up high and the depth of field turned on. Nice. The best hand-painted hair I've seen yet is done by digital artist Nan Fredman, who frankly waltzes rings around the folks who're tutoring this subject in ImagineFX magazine. Right now, I can only aspire to those effects, but I'm getting there: prektiss, prektiss, prektiss.

Jade, 3 February 2015

Poseidon Rising -- revisited

click to see at larger size; #2 is a 1:1 crop from the original

About 20 months ago I did a render, with Poseidon rising from the ocean, and for some odd reason it popped back into my head a few days ago, and stuck there. Maybe it was watching Percy Jackson! Whatever -- the original render floated back out of memory. If you've been following this blog for any length of time you might remember it:

...and see the full post here. Golly, that goes back a long way. That post is dated July 31, 2011. I've always remembered this as one of my best face/body morphs, and I really wanted to go back to it, and do more with it. Sooo....

Then  I remembered that I still have the insert disk from 3D World Magazine, from (!) November 2005 (now we really are heading back to the Paleozoic), and one of the freebies on it was Zygote's dolphin ... an unrigged, low-poly model without any surface tetxtures. Hmm. Here's the thing of it: these days, I don't mind hand-painting something to make a piece of gray plastic look realistic.

Apologies for the download size of the big image, uploaded first today. It was rendered at 3000 pixels wide (to give me painting space), and I've uploaded it here at 2400 wide, because I know a lot of folks looking at these posts are trying to work out how to get these effects ... it really, really helps if you can get to see the piece at Very Big Size, close to the original. So, it will take a little while to download, but if you're looking at ways to do the same kind of work, you and I both know it's far easier to reverse-engineer a BIG image.

Posing the model took about twenty minutes -- and a lot of it was about flying the camera around rather than turning Michael 4 every which-way. A really good "weightless" pose was a good start. Then, import the dolphin and basically use the x,y,z controls to turn it this way and that -- get it the right scale and so on. As I said, Zygote's dolphin ain't rigged (or at least the freebie on 3D World's disk wasn't), so you're stuck with the one pose.(Rigging is where a solid model is given "flex" points, enabling its sub-parts -- for instance, the fins and flukes -- to be moved independently of the whole. And, note to self: I've heard that you can rig a model in DAZ Studio 4 Pro, which I have, and which to date I've only ever used as the bridge to get from DAZ to LuxRender, via Reality. So ... must get into Studio 4 and figure out how to rig models!!)

This is "just" a raytrace. There was no point setting it to render in Lux, which would have taken about a day, because I was going to use so many "atmospheric" ... or in this case, aquatic ... overlays that all the nuance with which Lux would have imbued the characters would have been smothered by these overlays.

So ... a good face/body morph; a great pose ... the critical thing was to get the lights right. I did this with three colored distant lights, and shot myself in the foot. I'd got the lights juuuuust right before I painted the background. It was only when the background was painted that I realized (doah!) I had the sunrays pointing dead opposite where the Studio lights said the sun was. The lights were therefore jogged around to agree with the background. Then ... render.

The raytace took about seven or eight minutes -- long enough to wander off and make some tea. Then, the 3000x2500 raw render went over into Photoshop for lots and lots of painting. The aquatic effects were dead simple, and the one that gives the best effect was the simplest. I took a displacement map that creates a rippled surface on a plane (to give the appearance of a pool or lake) in the 3D render environment ... resized it, plunked it into a Photoshop layer at the "top", and gave it a Merge mode (blend) of Overlay, and an opacity of 18%. How easy was that? Some of the bubbles are .abr brushes ... the motes and impurities in the open water were actually painted into the background before it was imported --

The background was hand painted, using several undersea photos for reference and inspiration, and the motes, whatever you want to call them, in the water, were done with (!) Ron's Magical Snow brushes!

One of the things I'm most pleased with in this one is the way Poseidon's hair is foofing out with the water movement -- it looks so realistic. This was handpainted over the top of the Neftis Danyel hair, which the model is wearing. (He's also wearing the JM Alexander skinmap, but I've done "stuff" with it to make it "shine," for want of a better term.) The fish scale kilt is the Euros Skirt, with new textures and maps everywhere.

And that's basically it. If you're wondering about where the lights are (or would like a peek at the flat-plastic model of the dolphin, pre-painting), have a look at this screencapture from the DAZ Studio workspace, at larger size -- it also shows the orientation of the camera, if you notice the cube floating in the top-right corner:

Yup, I plopped the light representing the sun right where the sunrays were painted into the background. And if you'd like this as a wallpaper, you're in luck. I wanted it too, so I made a version that will fit nicely on either desktop or laptop:

...enjoy! It looks a treat on my desktop monitor -- am looking at it right now. Nice. And I do believe I'm going to do more with this face/body morph. I like it a lot. Aside from "Poseidon," he doesn't have a name yet ... I think he needs one.

Jade, March 7 2013