Photoshop magic enchants some beloved old raytraces. Check this out!

Work continues apace on the this blog, which has needed a facelift for a very, very long time. I'm also tackling the challenge of The Lost Songs, which has been in limbo for about as long as the conclusion o the Game of Thrones book series! And if I do say so myself, I've got a raft of better reasons for letting the story slide into limbo than George R.R. Martin has! Read the backstory behind what happened to The Lost Songs, and why -- and what's coming next for this project -- right here. 

And to prove it, let me show you these:

Leon Greatsword: 2023 repaint...

Leon and Iphigenia: the 2023 re

These are the 2023/24 repaints of the old images from 2012. Wow. What a difference. This is purely Photoshop magic; nothing has been re-rendered, but everything can be repainted -- and, of course, the illustrations for the remainder of this story will come into the world looking like this. In fact, it's worth taking a look at the old and the new, side by side. The one that needed the least work was the Lux Render; the old raytraces, however, dated from a time when I could barely turn on shadows without making the computer crash! Ah, those were the days...

So ... bear with me while I get this project into shape, and then ... let's have this finished, as outlined in the post I referred you back to above!

In other news ... work continues on the photo blog, travel blog and so forth. And also on the art galley site. I'll reiterate: if there is anything on the old site you want to keep, grab it now, because when it's gone, it's gone. 

The Mighty Fred ... and Autumn comes to Fangorn

 

Argh. What a day. Nothing went according to plan, and so much went wrong ... I just want it to be over. I managed about one tenth of what I'd intended to do, and even that was a change of plans from the day I'd wanted. Still, we'll end the day with a car that actually works, and the cloned, fake facebook account removed, not having bought into a telephone scam, having read the riot act to a stalker on social media, and with a pot of chilli on the stove for dinner. Aside from being deeply out of pocket to fix the car (ouch), the rest of it is under control. It's just been way more aggravation than I can take and come up smiling.

So ... another take on the fantasy hero, with a Lexica disaster rescued, repaired, repainted. What a mess this one was! Lexica buried the costume inside the character's body, muddled the leather and the metal ... took ages and a lot of work to fix it, so I'm abso-ruddy-lutely signing this one.

On the other hand, I won't sign the "Autumn in Fangorn" images, because I didn't do much of anything at all to these. Dodged and burned them to get the most out of them, otherwise the prompt seemed to work very well indeed. I've been having some good results with landscapes in the last week ... I'll share some more soon.

For now, all I want is coffee and make today go away. So ... signing out. 

Fantasy hero, Terragen type landscape -- and the cat!

 

The cat is a Maine Coon called Tyson ... he was out for his walkies with his mom, on a long lead and riding in a stroller until he felt like hopping out and investigating a shrub or the water's edge, at Laratinga a few weeks ago. I asked the lady if I could take a few photos, and as soon as she said yes, naturally Tyson wouldn't look up, or look at me. I grabbed the best I could get! Here, he's painted from the photo, down to the edge of his white ruff, or mane ... below that, I haven't much clue what he looked like, because he was in the stroller -- so I just blur out to impressionist strokes at that point. Am quite pleased with this one -- probably the best from-scratch painting I've managed yet. Most of it was done in Photoshop, because for some reason Krita didn't want to play nice at all...

The fantasy warrior began life as another disastrous Lexica picture which had to be rescued and re-re-repainted. I asked for a fantasy warrior; I specified "no helmet, no armour, no weapons, no shirt." Well, it managed the no helmet part, but it loaded him up with ironmongery ... and apparently, if you specify "no shirt" in Lexica, it's a cardinal offence which will get your account suspended. So, heaven help you if you're trying to render Conan the Barbarian, or a prize fighter or professional wrestler in the ring. Okay: message received and understood, and -- fair enough. I guess they've levelled the playing field, because if you could specify "no shirt," they'd have to do some extra work and specify that they didn't want topless females. Because you know what they'd get. Insert eyeroll emoji. To compensate for getting the helmet part right, Lexica saw fit to give this guy eighteen fingers. Eight fingers and a thumb on each hand,. His hand looks like a packet of sausages in the supermarket cold cabinet. Insert a second eyeroll emoji. So -- it's good thing I like painting, and can paint, or this is another one which would have gone right into the bin. Argh. Thank gawdz I haven't paid money for this ai. If I had, I'd be pretty disappointed -- because it's not cheap. I looked.

Anyway, this is where I am at the moment: painting happily, messing about with images and trying to stay off social media as much as possible. It dawned on me the other day how much of my time facebook is eating up, and for no useful purpose. In fact, it's too easy to blunder into mindless debate with strangers on facebook; and when they lose the debate, they slingshot right into abuse. It happened. It was somewhere between the pits and a laughable scene best forgotten. Having said that, there's better ways to spend your days; life's too short, and all that. So -- less time on facebook, for me, and more time enjoying life. 

Tarzan in Caprona ... or Fangorn Forest, if you prefer!

 

Have I mentioned that I love my Huion pen tablet? Well, let me mention it again. I looooove my Huion pen tablet! Now, this is the kind of work I've wanted to do got a long, long time, and here we are! The first thing I painted was the background, a few days ago --

Fangorn Forest, as painted mostly in Krita, and a little bit in Photoshop. I was looking at this and thinking, "That reminds me of the Mario Larnaga concept art for the original King Kong" (the one that's coming up to its 90th birthday), which in turn made me think of the art that was done for the Tarzan comics and films, waaaay back when, and this popped into my mind. Noice!

In fact, it's so pretty, I did several different crops:

...that's the full screen version of the art, which I would call "Tarzan's Dark Domain." And in turn, this version made me think how this could make a great wallpaper! So -- here you go, guys, help yourselves and enjoy: this one is 1600x900, which suits my own monitor, and if it doesn't suit yours, I'm sure you have some kind of imaging program that will change the size to something that does. Feel free.

Wallpaper version -- 1600x900 ... help yourself!

While we're in fantasy land ...

I won't lie: this is 75% Lexica, and 25% me (whereas the Tarzan is 100% me, wholly digitally painted, right down to the last blade of grass in the background. I'm still mucking about with AI, but I'll be candid: it's highly frustrating, on so many levels. If I get into that here, I'll be grumbling in an hour's time, and it has as much to do with sexual politics as with the vagaries of AI technology, or even the highly dubious copyright status of pictures generated by a machine. So --

Dangitall, let's just paint:

...and here we are, right back in a world of digital doodling. That's all from me for now. Time to go and organise some dinner. 

Tarzan at the Core of Mars ... or guy candy, at least

 

Tarzan at the Core of Mars ... now I'm just being silly

repaint and matte of the Forest Goddess art from last week

Not much to write today ... just the images I've been working on since last I posted, and on a personal note -- I have flu. How it is possible to have flu when you're still wearing your covid mask because you're scared tod death of getting the plague, I do not know; but yes, I have flu. So... when in pain, distract the brain. Argh.

You could be almost forgiven for thinking the he-man image is an Iray render, but it's not. I managed to get Stable Diffusion to give me something halfway reasonable, and painted from there. In fact it was a bit of a mess ... notice, I've deliberately obscured the hands. They were hideous. I've also painted the costume,  and various bits of his physique that were bizarre, but at least I got halfway there before painting. AI art is way more difficult and stubborn that 3D rendering; it's just cheaper. I haven't paid anything yet, whereas, to do these as renders (which could be done), I'd have dropped a couple of hundred bucks. Sorry, my cash flow has stopped since retirement, and I can't go there any longer. 

But I've halfway got AI working well enough to get the elements from which to paint, and this was the original object, what I had in mind when I set out to do this. Not to just dish up images given to me by some machine, but to generate elements, and paint. So --

If you're trying this yourself, you might like to know what the prompt was, that got me the barbarian, close enough to fix him with a load of painting. Okay, try this:

fantasy man, young man, muscular, handsome, long black hair, studio photograph, high resolution, photorealism, Boris and Julie Bell, head to waist photograph,

negative prompt: beard, moustache, beard shadow stubble. too many muscles, eyes too big, cartoon, comic style 

I'm not going to promise that will work for you, because every time you come to the dang machine, you get different results. But today ... it worked. What goes wrong, predictably, ad nauseam, with this kind of creative process? Well... hands with six fingers, faces with the mismatched eyes from two different people pasted together, arms with two elbows, human figures with three legs and horses with five legs. For whatever reason, I don't seem to be able to stop if happening. Almost as if ... getting a good image happens accidentally. 

Anyway, I shall persevere, since I can't afford 3D props and costumes! At least I'm creating images, but I'd hoped for a replacement for 3D elements... Harrumph.

Now, I have flu -- I need tea, and pills. Here I go.

Fantasy, guy candy, fun in Photoshop, and a little fiction...

This batch was a real, genuine adventure. To begin with, the portrait of an elf ... Legolas, if you like ... was rescued from a pretty awful Lexica image: parts of a helmet growing out of his head??? Lines and wrinkles on a young, immortal elf??? A beard line, on an elf??!! Noooo way. So -- it looks like, if we want Legolas, we're going to paint! So be it.

The fantasy woman is an amalgam of five different haphazard attempts by Stable Diffusion to get into the ballpark. Armour segments floating in midair, armour pieces growing out of her skin, hands that looked like demented octopi with waving, backward-jointed extra fingers ... argh. Horrrrrible. So again we painted, and then painted some more more: the best face I could get, the best attempt at the costume, the best hair option ... slap it all together, fix the eyes (one iris waaay bigger then the other one, and the wrong shape, to boot!!), remove the crop lines, from where the machine took bits and pieces of various images and stuck them together not quite at random; paint for a couple of hours; put in a new background... end of the day, you bet I'm going to sign off in the image. I work four hours on something, I danged-well sign it. 

The faerie warrior and the fly agaric is an amalgam of a Genesis 8 render I did over a year ago, and a photograph I got with my phone last week. This one was a lot of fun, and also a major challenge, to get the colours and resolutions of the two images to agree. One is a render, the other a phone pic. Even at this late stage, I can honestly say I learned something new in Photoshop. Want the original phone pic, for comparison? Here you go: 

The last image is a painting from a photograph at Carrick Hill. There's this one doorway, or gateway...

 ...and how could you resist! It's just begging to become a painting, and a fantasy at that. Delicious. The trick was to get just the right image for the "beyond" part of this. If this is the doorway to adventure, then it had better be a landscape you can't say no to. So I wrote a little drabble to go with it: 

Edgar had heard many times about the gateway -- and according to the locals who lived around Eltenham Forest, several opened into the earth, or into faraway places. He'd always dreamed of finding one, and last summer holiday he spent most of the time investigating old trees and misty dells, with no luck at all. This year, when he'd given up and wasn't even looking anymore, here it was! Maybe the magic worked this way he thought as he ventured closer, and closer ... the harder you looked, the less you were likely to find yourself a gateway to adventure.

Very close now, he could smell the clean, sharp scents of mountain air and hear the calls of strange birds, unlike any that lived anywhere near Eltenham. A chill breeze wafted from the gate, and tendrils of mist crept cautiously through at his feet. Here at Cricklewood Hall, it was a hot afternoon full of droning beetles and the heavy scent of flowers, but far on the other side of that gate, dawn light cascaded down the east side of a range of dragon-fang mountains, and the smell of pine trees prickled his nose.

He was almost to the gate, dying to step through, when he saw the man on the other side -- and the man has seen him!

So there you have it ... this was my fantasy fix in the last couple of days! I might do SF next, or possibly glam, or perhaps SF glam. I'm sure that's a thing ... and if it isn't, it ought to be. 

Guy candy, science fiction and a landscape ... loving my Huion pen tablet!

 

In the style of Boris ... and it worked!

Illustration for an SF tale: link below

There's little to say in this post! The guy candy ... well, I don't know his name, but he's a male model from the US, and I believe he's Cherokee. I saw a very small, very poor reproduction of a photo -- it had been mangled by whoever put it together, almost overwhelming the model. So I stripped it back to the original photo and turned him into a pure digital painting. Whoever he is, the need to be painted is shouting out of the photo. I wanted something in the style of Boris, and if you see this piece at full size, I think I succeeded here. 

The SF piece was done as a an illustration to accompany a "super-drabble." Too long to be called a drabble proper, because at 165 words it's 65 words too wordacious to be a drabble, but it's also waaaay too short to call it flash. Dunno what to call it, but ... if I said I could tell you a coherent SF story in 165 words, over 30 extremely short lines -- as illustrated by this painting -- and give you a chuckle at the same time, would you read it? Why not? If you would, give this a click, and enjoy. 

The landscape ... latest in an ongoing series of paintings in which I guess I'm teaching myself how to do this. So much to learn! But it's the biggest fun I know at the moment. Gives me a reason to get creative after the housework is done, rather than just picking up my knitting and nodding off to sleep! Am I getting old at last?!

Touching base again

Touching base with some re-posts ... eye candy really ... because it's been how long since I posted here? That's about how long it's been since I was able to do some fresh art. Have been sick (again), and on top of that I have (damnit) computer issues. For some time my desktop has been really struggling with Iray, and it's not a happy machine. What it can render is limited, and frankly, I'm pushing it too hard. If I don't watch out, I'm going to burn it out -- which doesn't alter the fact it'll be a year before I can get a new one! So...

I have a sneaking suspicion I'm going to have to revert to raytracing. Iray will have to go on the side burner till I can update the hardware ... that's the bottom line. Now, there's actually a lot to be said for old fashioned raytracing. Like this:

Sure, Iray is going to give you superior results (duh!), and also the Firefly engine built into Poser will give superior results (ditto) than the old 3Delight raytrace engine built into Studio ... but not when you're limping along with hardware that doesn't want to play nice anymore. Hmm.

Bear with me. I'm starting to recover my health a bit, and am juuuust about at the point where I want to see how far I can push raytracing, to get that last little bit out of it, before we get to Christmas 2020, and I'm breaking open a new box, spending two days installing software! I mean, get real here: this is a raytrace:

So let's give the poor old computer a break: stop trying to render stuff that looks photographic, and just turn out some lovely artwork. Yes? Yes. Okay. I used to enjoy the heck out of raytracing! It's over eight years since I did these:

So! Artwork coming up, rather than experiments in photo-realism ... let's just go out there and have fun, at least till I'm breaking open a new box!

Moonlight, swordsman -- the Genesis figure in place of Michael 4. Whoo!

Only one image today, because it's been rendering all day! As promised yesterday, let's repeat the process and see about the starlight, or moonlight, Iray project, but using a Genesis 8 character rather than the old Michael 4. The beauty of the Michael 4 figure is that it renders so fast -- this would have taken about 45 minutes. Then again, you wouldn't have a figure that rendered with this kind of integrity. Flip back to yesterday's moonlight shot and compare. Sure, that's a heck of a nice render too, but this one is a knockout. Moonlight, starlight ... got it.

For those of you who're rinkering with Iray right now, and ready to give up (I know, it's a bear) ... the trick is, it's done half with an environment lighting (ie., an image used for IBL lighting) and half with a single spotlight. And this seems to work every time, so -- happy, happy.

More tomorrow, I guess. There just isn't any more time today to do anything ... this was a looong render. Well worth it, though, right? Right.

What I used here...

Genesis 8 male
Michael 8 skinmap
Custom body morph
Custom face morph
Elan hair for G8
Legendary Swords prop
Ivy props from the Reparation set
Pedestal and planter from the Mirador set
Backdrop, blurred to be out of focus
One very blue IBL environment image
One orange (!) spotlight
DOF and big virtual aperture on the camera, to match the backdrop blur

Shake and bake. Set that to cook and come back in six hours. One becomes very adept at thumb twiddling. My kingdom for a faster computer! Anyway -- good results are their own reward. I like this. I also like the character ... will use him again soon!

And so to bed ... yawn.

A little spring romance, anyone? It's spring down under!

I treated myself to a nifty set of props a couple of nights ago. Merlin is one of my favorite content providers, because his stuff is so different, and so well done -- and at the same time, priced where I can afford it, and it's render-able with the PC I have right now. So --

The flowers look so convincing, how could you resist? The model is CC Foster, for Genesis 8 ... which can sometimes work, and can at other times be a bear to work with. When it works, the results are very good indeed -- though I've adjusted the gamma and balance on this render to put some tone into his skin, which tends to render up very pale indeed, in anything remotely similar to natural daylight. Still, take a long look at Foster if you're looking for a very useful Genesis 8 guy:

Catalog image. See this.

I ought to use this character, or parts of him, more. Hmm. Expect to see elements, and versions, in the very near future! In the 'spring romance render, he's wearing the Landis hair, which I got last week along with the Varun hair, but this is the first chance I've had to play with it:

Catalog image. See this.

Good news and not-so-good news with the Landis hair. It looks fantastic, but after six hours of render time I still had to paint a little here and there to get around a lot of unresolved pixels. It's high, high poly, and with a slow(er) system, it could be rendering for the rest of your life. But if you don't mind painting on it a little bit, it does look great in the final product.

The props are what make this shot, honestly. Otherwise you just have another Genesis 8 with its kit off. Cheers to Merlin for crafting a really fantastic set of wild flowers -- I find myself wondering if they might just work in Terragen, too! Can't see why not -- Flinx's trees work in Terragen, so... 

I only used a few of the wild flower props to create the 'Spring Romance' picture, and these will be showing up in sets and scenes everywhere. Lovely! I did a CU shot on the cow parsley, which rendered for about two hours to get to this point, at 600x900 size:

Now, that is nice. It's also a full-on 3D rendered shot, no a backdrop -- everything in here is from Merlin's auto-load (ie., load the whole thing with one click), but you do have to set up the lighting; the lights packaged with the auto-load scene make it look like a raytrace. 

I'm thrilled to bits with the results, dying to work more with these props. They're on sale as I type this, and they're not expensive to begin with. If you're interested in this kind of thing, take a look --

Catalog image. See this

Images springing to mind everywhere, right? Now, the challenge will be to see what's doable with a system that's not exactly on the cutting edge of desktop PC tech today! Speaking of which --

I've been wanting to check out the dForce dynamic fabric function of Studio 4.11, so I went over to YouTube and had a look at the tutorials. Phhht. Ahem. Not on this computer, sorry, guys. Anything dForce is going to have to wait till Christmas 2020, when I can run it. Right now, it would just be a time-waster and (another) source of endless frustration. So, for fifteen months, we'll stick to the old morphing costumes and hair, and let the rest slide on by. 😜

More soon!