Touching base ... with apologies to J.R.R. ...

Just a ditty to keep contact with this blog while there isn't much to talk about. Yeees, the art started its life in Bing, but I promptly cut it up, rearranged it, repainted it, did a lot of things to it. And yes, I would have painted from scratch, if I had the whole day to spend on this (I don't). And yes, I would have rendered it in CG, if I had a spare hundred bucks to spend on the props (I don't). So we'll embrace the concept of compromise: AI + digital painting.  In this instance, AI is saving me a lot of time and money, and it is being used as a tool, with reason. Argh.

Life has been interesting in the last month. I had intended to invest a tonne of time in art and writing ... nope. Not going to happen. I have done a whale of a lot of editing, yes. (I'm working with the well-known Sherlock Holmes novelist, Mike Adamson). And my romance with my new camera continues unabated. I've entered the wonderful world of Canon EOS technology, and it's amazing. Loving it. I've actually written (yes, written. Don't faint) an invitation guest post for the ANALOG blog (because Firegrounds is in the latest issue, which is out about now). But aside from this, Real Life has been biting so hard, so deep, that any creative juices that might have been flowing in June were quite literally turned off at the taps. Okay ... let's start yet again, right? Right. Never say die, and all that.

So, let's see if I can't get the reins back between my hands -- and possibly the bit between my teeth, while we're dabbling in metaphors. 

And now the aforesaid ditty --

With Apologies to J.R.R. ...

I sit beside the fire and knit
And all the sweaters that don't fit --
All the scarves that fall in mud --
Are made right here, although I could
Be off and roaming 'round the Shire!
But I'm afraid that something dire
Will happen if I leave this hill,
So here I am, and I'll be still:
Comfy by my hearth I'll sit...
And dream adventures. While I knit.

This is starting to be fun again!

The truth is, you can forget how much FUN this used to be. Fourteen years ago, I was all about spinning stories and running reams of images to illustrate them -- like these pictures, from the little comedy, "Vampire Hunters in the 23rd Century." They were Horace and Hortense Hershey, under-dressed for a Halloween party when they got a message from their snitch, Willie the Weasel to tell them that the vampire they've been tracking for years will turn up at the old cathedral tonight. They divert from their party plans and wind up vampire hunting in silly costumes. 

It was huge fun. But in the endless quest for better and better renders ... renders that look like photos, or movie stills ... dang, you can lose sight of the FUN. You end up with one image that you slaved on all day, and no story. Eventually, the magic just goes away and in the end ... phhttt. If you're like me, when the magic goes away, you can't get into it anymore.

So ... in search of the old, old magic, I've been rummaging through the Ancient Archives, pulling some of these antediluvian images into Photoshop and giving them the treatment...

Now, nothing, repeat nothing, is going to take a Deep Shadow Map or the simplest possible raytrace you can get (because the PC will crash if you ask for anything more), and turn it into the kind of image you were seeing from me in 2019. But having said that --

-- dangitall, I had some great ideas in 2010 - 2012. All my best ideas date from this period. Not the best work. The best ideas.  My best CG work dates from 2019-2020. Yes, to some extent, Photoshop can make many of these pictures much more presentable for viewing today, but nothing replaces the know-how, the hardware and the software to simply ... make better pictures. 

Now, in 2010, this was the best I could do with the hardware at my disposal:

Fast forward thirty months, and this was doable:

Due to one thing and another (Real Life: my mother passed away after a loooong illness; I landed in the hospital for two surgeries; had a fall, spent some time in a wheelchair, then hopped on crutches for six months ...) I took a few years out of CG art, any kind of art. Then I came back, in 2019, and while we were still raytracing, those raytraces looked like this now:

But even so, the fun had fifty percent gone. I was imagining the stories that went with these images, but I never wrote them. Looking back into the Ancient Archives, I used to write stories all the time. Much later, I "went pro" -- I've been in ANALOG Science Fiction twice! But the old fun never came back as I hunted and hunted for that cutting-edge Iray render, all that photorealism. In the end ... I quit altogether, took another couple of years out, and came back as a digital painter! And don't get me wrong --

Digital painting is actually where my heart lies. This is me painting with my new Huion pen tablet, in 2023:

...but I'm remembering the sheer fun of spinning yarns and illustrating them with raytraces that are sooo quick to do, you can end up with four or five ina session. Heaven knows, you take something so old, it's been gathering dust for an eon, let Photoshop loose on it, and end up with this:

So ... my fingertips are actually starting to tingle to start up Studio and ... and ... and ...!

Snake tales, apples, and a smidge of humour...

It has been said (it is written?) that if God had wanted to avoid The Problem altogether, he should have created Adam and Ed, rather than Adam and Eve...

Uh huh. 'Tis a little-known fact that his almightiness did indeed create Adam and Ed first. And guess what happened next?

"Pssssst," said the snake.

"Who, me?" Adam was looking around for something to polish an apple on, and not finding anything really useful about his person, because he had no pockets. Or jeans. Or undies, come to that. "I say, you haven't got a bit of rag, have you, Snake?"

"Rag?" demanded the snake. "Do I look like the kind of creature who goes around carrying bits of rag?"

"Well, no," Adam admitted. "Then again, you look kind of sneaky."

"Makes two of us," the snake observed.

"Me? Sneaky?" Adam batted his long, curly eyelashes in outrage.

"Were you," the snake asked, "or were you not told not to eat the apples? You can eat any other bloody thing in this garden but apples, and what are you doing? Scrumping."

"No I'm not," Adam said, too quickly. Then, "Well, yes I am, but he made me do it."

"God?"

"Ed." Adam idly juggled with the three apples he had picked. "Do you want one? I seem to have a spare."

"Snakes don't eat apples."

"Oh? What do they eat?"

"Mice, rats. Vermin. Odd, don't you think, that there'd be enough vermin in the garden to support a creature the size of me?"

"You are a very beautiful snake," Adam observed, for 'twas but the truth.

"Don't change the subject!"

"What subject?" Adam was confused, and growing more so.

The snake sighed. "Never mind. It was something about fruit ... speaking of which, has anybody ever told you about the birds and the bees, young man?"

"Birds and bees, we got plenty of," Adam said dolefully. "All they ever do is pollinate and catch flies and make honey and make little birds and bees."

"Hmm," hummed the snake, "you're not quite as dumb as one might have imagined. So, uh, what about you and Ed, then?"

"Me and Ed?" Adam stopped juggling. "What about me and Ed?"

"You ever, uh, make like the birds and the bees?" The snake would have winked, but his eyes had not been designed to permit winking, so he gave Adam a nudge with one of his coils instead.

Adam only shrugged. "Honey makes my teeth ache, and bugs get disgusting when you squash 'em, and we already got enough little bugs and birds. Don't need any more."

"Not," the snake mused, "that you and Ed would be likely to make any little bugs and birds."

"Me and Ed?" Adam snorted. "We're both fellas. Jeez, mate, somebody needs to have a talk to you, before you get any older."

The snake would have slapped a hand over his eyes, if he had possessed hands. This scene was not going as intended. "Let me start again," he said with what patience he could muster, which wasn't much. "Come over here, let me whisper in your ear."

Adam looked suspicious. "What for?"

"Because I'm going to make a few suggestions," the snake said, waggling an eyebrow. "Oh, for godsakes put the damn' apples down and get over here!"

And he whispered into Adam's ear. And Adam's eyes grew round as saucers. And then he turned his back upon the serpent and spake in the direction of the olive groves, from whence cameth the sounds of song, where his countryman was singing in praise of blueberries. And Adam sayeth, while the serpent slithered back into the fronds of the garden,

"Yo! Yo, Ed, get over her -- I got an idea!"

And the rest is history. Or mythology.

ooOOooOOooOOoo

Meanwhile, I have "The Fugitive" rendering in Lux (you remember the raytrace/Photoshop version from yesterday, right?), and this makes a perfect opportunity to answer a recent question, and show you what the LuxRender workspace looks like. There's actually two interfaces. The one you think of as LuxRender is, of course, Lux itself:

On the left are loads of dropdowns in which you'll find yourself selecting film types, film speeds, setting F-stops and shutter speeds and so forth. If you have a good grasp of the theory of photography, you will LOVE the way Lux works. The penny is really dropping for me now, and one step at a time I'm starting to make sense of it all. (My challenge at the moment is to figure out how to make Lux "honor" the bump mapping, because right now it barely registers any bump mapping I load onto objects. I'm probably doing something wrong, still. Must find out what.)

But before you get to Lux, you get to Reality, which is a plugin for DAZ Studio. Load up your scene in DAZ, get it all set, and you're ready to render, right? When you click on Render, with the plugin installed, you get the option of calling up Reality as your render option. Take this option, and the user interface pops up right over the DAZ screen:

...Reality's interface is all about tabs, menus and numbers. You're jigging about a hundred parameters which interact with each other to make a million different values. It looks simple, and the interface itself is -- it's as clean and "stripped" as the old DOS interfaces we worked in, and with, about 20 years ago. (Sounds of nostalgia.) But hiding behind the straightforward GUI is a very powerful bridge to get a DAZ scene into Lux. I've got the lights about 70% figured out. If I can get bump mapping figured out, I'll be cruising. 

Jade, May 4

Screamin' Science Fiction ... go, Flash, go!

Along time ago in a galaxy far --

No, hang on, That's Star Wars. Start again.

There are those who believe that life here began --

No, wait a trick, that's Battlestar Galactica. One more time...

A looong time ago, around the date when Noah was hammering the last nails into the ark, they used to print these science fiction magazines, full of wonderful, naive stories about characters with names like Flash, and Buck, and Buzz, and villains you could really detest, with names like Ming and ... so on. Everything was black and white in those days (including the printing; not to mention the movies). Good was good and bad was bad, and nary the twain ever met in any gray zone betwixt those poles. Then things got complicated, and heroes developed dark sides that made them do questionable things, and villains were known to have suffered horribly, which punted them onto the path to devastation. Nobody was altogether good, or bad any more and the laws of physics really started taking the fun out of a lot of plots. Little things like gravity and vacuum were known to screw things up completely.

There was something very Alice in Wonderland about SF back in those days -- loooong before I was born, in fact. But before the age of about 10, you can still read the old "golden age SF" fiction and get the same kind of zing out of it that grown adults used to get when Noah was still swinging a hammer. And it's very true that then you grow up, and the magic rushes away, never to return...

Yet there's still a kind of magic in the artwork of that era -- it's not the art itself, mind you. It's the ability of he visual medium to reach right down into the roots of your mind and tickle the part of you that's been dormant since you were 10. It's like smelling something you haven't smelt in 40 years, and memories rush back. With art, the same kind of thing happens, but it's not memories that come back, it's the sensation of delighted wonder, delicious fascination, a desire to go somewhere, do something, be someone ... else.

Of course, these days we know there are no plutonium pirates on Pluto, because for a start there isn't any plutonium, because (contrary to popular misconception) Pluto is not where plutonium comes from. We also know (fact) there are no vampire hunters on Venus, because there are no vampires on Venus. Vampires come from the constellation Vulpecula. Everybody knows that.

But oooooh, it used to be fun when you could believe all this stuff, reading in bed by torchlight...

Anyway --!

Here's a salute with gentle humor to the classic SF genre! I guess this would be a still from the Exotic Adventures of Flash Scroggins, possibly from Episode 42: The Beast with 200 Tentacles, which apparently came slithering up out of the purple lagoon and made of with Flash's pants when he wasn't looking. Of course, what he was doing with his pants off in the first place is another question. Better ask the mad monks about that!

What in the world inspired this? The raygun. Seriously! A while ago one of the model designers did a set of "Classic" rayguns -- real Flash Gordon specials. I just unpacked them today to take a look, and they're great! The rest just ... happened.

You might also enjoy this post...

...which was the original outing of the "Screamin' Science Fiction" idea. I kinda like it..

Jade, 16 March

***Posted by MK because the internet is AWOL. Intermittent crap. Be warned, guys: our connection is once againgoing to be verrrry spotty for a week or two, as of this point -- same deal... Telstra (or whatever) is doing a lot of work on the landlines in this area. And as you know, if you've been looking at the "poster notes" on these journal entries in my looooong adventure through the world of CG, 3D and digital, even at the best of times we can find ourselves with dialup speeds in this area. This is why MK has been making many posts for me, since Day One -- Keegan has the fast connection, not me! (This should change in the near future, when the cables or whatever are updated, and they stop working on them. At least, s'wot Telstra promises.) Credit where it's due: this blog would not have been possible without the support of a pal with decent internet. Because ours sucks. We moved into this area about six months before I got into Studio and blogging about it, and I almost quit right there: DAYS to download something from the DAZ store, at one point. Argh. Thank gods for friends when you need 'em!