Space Pirate! Also a fantasy city, and landscapes...

Playing with comic art again today ... also a bit of "fine art" in Photoshop, and a bundle of landscapes. I would love to tell you I rendered the landscapes in Terragen, but it would be a barefaced lie, and you know me better than that! The truth is, Terragen is dandy, till you want to put plants, flowers and trees into the frame, and at that point it rockets out of reach: too expensive. No can do. Truth: it would have been a stretch for me when I still had a cashflow, but right now -- I haven't seen money in a loooong time, and am not likely to see it for many years to come. So when I do landscapes, it'll be photography, AI, or nada. These are AI. But they have that Terragen look about them, no? I like the comic art, to a point ... I prefer the "concept art" style, if I tell the truth, and of course, if you can achieve something like an Iray render, great. I'm not finding a way to do that at the moment, but I keep trying. 

Note to self: start up Studio, dangitall, and git rendering! 

Yes, but not today. Pain levels are too high today. Whose big idea was it to go hiking on Monday, and go so far, and climb such hills, that my left hip is still shrieking, even while I sit down?! Nobody to blame but myself ... which doesn't make it hurt one bit less, lol.   

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. 

Shaders, shaders everywhere; and new hair on new characters

With DAZ having a 55% off sale, who could resist? New Genesis 8 Male character here -- Yonni. This is one of the very few that look good (to my eye) right out of the box; I didn't do anything to him, just posed, lit and rendered him. Am extremely impressed with the skin tones and the eyes. It's well worth taking a look at these eyes, close up:

That's absolutely wonderful, and there's no drama in configuring this. Some characters are very difficult to light (such as Rex, who renders almost too dark to see details in the skinmap), and others have facial angles that can just look "wrong" when they render up. But Yonni is close to perfect. The hair is the Deck Hand hair, which renders marvellously ... and it fits perfectly, too! You wouldn't think fit was a lot to ask for, but it is. Next ...

Shaders! Here, I'm playing with some fantastic shaders I just got from Renderosity ... I may never have to buy fabric shaders ever again! This pack is amazing. I call this picture "Autumn Breeze." The hair is new; Dax Hair for G3 and G8. It's much tougher to work with, but when I get it figured out, it'll be very good. The falling leaves to the left were added with transparent .png clip pics from a free site: https://www.vhv.rs ... it's a massive site, so I assume it's legal and above-board; there's almost 900k items in their library, and that didn't happen overnight, so... anyway, the clipart is free and top quality. And --

Shaders! I've got shaders on everything here, from the floor to ... well, everything. This was a lot of fun to set up, though I have to say the shaders on the costume are very difficult to light, because they're so glossy, they burn out as soon as you put a spotlight on them that's bright enough to render skin tones properly. I'll try again tomorrow, and perhaps light them only with IBL environment lights. They're fabulous shaders, but you can't put a bright spotlight on them! The vehicle is the old Thunderbike, which I resurfaced with car paint -- Shelby Monza Red. Big wow factor. And...

The oars are juuuust about back in the water with Terragen! I've jogged my brain about 55%, still have some things to work out, and I'm not driving it without long, hard thought, but I should be able to generate the atmospherics for Studio work without further ado. Am still making a lot of rookie mistakes; managed to saddle myself with a 25-hour render, when it should have been about two! But I know what I did, and won't make that booboo again. So ... looking good! 

The Lair of the Goblin Queen -- and so forth

 

Please see this full size -- it's quite a visual feast! Taking inspiration from Frazetta, I've put the G8 Female, and a G8 Male, into The Throne of the Barbarian King, and then lit it largely with its own torchlight. The G8F is Ginnie HD, wearing the Crimsoneye costume and Axarra headdess. The G8M is Michael 8 with the Dae face turned on 100%, and the Angelic Fallen tattoos added. All else is lighting. Oh -- Conan, here, is wearing the AS Hair for G8F; the prop works well on the male, though it's very glossy. I need to work out how to make it look less like a shampoo commercial -- or else, as I did here, zap it with some virtual paint to "paint it down." I'll come back to this barbarian soon ... I rather like the Conan thing we've got going on here!

And now for something completely different ... an android. doubtlessly. Compete with mauve hair and purple fingernails, and a costume that's been resurfaced with (!) car paint! The car paint shader was a freebie from Deviantart, and I went back to the page to find the link, to be include it here. Its a fabulous set of colors, shades, gloss, the works. Highly recommended -- click here to go there. And here's something pretty...

Right out of a storybook. What I must do (soon) is work out how to get fully photographic results with the horse. This is the exact same lighting set I used for a G8F fantasy gypsy-warrior a little while ago; on the human character, I got a photographic result. On the horse ... pretty, but nowhere near to photographic. This is one I must work out, because I'd love to get photo-realistic horse renders. 

That's all for now, from DAZ, but --

I've just started up Terragen for the first time in several years, and I'm making every rookie mistake! I've saddled myself with a 25 hour render, and it's 97% done by the time I get up next morning, figure something has to be wrong, research it, get a lead on what I did to sabotage myself ... it's not worth stopping it after 21 hours of render time, so I'll let it go, and finish -- and I won't make that mistake again! First experiments are jogging my memory nicely...

The object of running Terragen is to be able to create custom atmospherics for DAZ renders, so the 25-hour booboo I have finishing up sometime today, which involves sunlight sparkling on water, doesn't need to be repeated. From here on, I'll drop the skyline low in the shot, and just render the sky. Oddly enough, Terragen renders the skies quickly. Since this was the whole point of installing it --! More soon, but right now, the system will be tied up all day, finishing a pretty simple picture: mea culpa. My bad, as they say. Aarrghhh.  

 

Greek temple ... Genesis 8, M4 ... Iray throws a hissy --

As promised ... the ancient Greek temple set. Above, you see the result of about an hour's work to configure it for Iray with shaders, because the original textures, maps and materials from 2013 do not work in Iray. They look a treat in an old fashioned raytrace --

-- but those textures, maps and so forth go completely bonkers when you send something to Iray. Have a closer look at this version of the image, both in Iray and raytrace:

This is the Iray version, where the temple is build of various kinds of granites, with marble ornamentation. The OBJ imports cleanly into Studio 4.11, and I worked with the "Stone shaders" pack, which I believe might have come from Renderosity. It's pretty good, actually.

This is a detail shot from the raytrace, with Michael 4 standing in it. Keeper of the Temple.  Nice render, all in all ... but I have to say that the work of reskinning it with stone shaders was well worth the time invested.

Now, up to this point I'd been working with the low-poly set, and the low-poly figure (good old M4 himself). So last night I thought, what happens when you add a Genesis 8 figure to this? The experiment was too delicious to refuse, so, rather than doing another long shot, I drove the virtual camera in closer, for a good, close look at the set itself. I also kept the costume as simple as possible. What you have here:

Genesis 8
Dae face and body morphs
Michael 8 skinmap
Varun hair
Cool Style pants
Palladio set
Stone shaders
...and a lot of work to make the set viable in Iray

Here, have a closer look at the figure:

Welll, phooey. The Palladio set must be lower-poly ... and also, I admit, I added a low-poly tree, and a whole lot of shaders; and the Varun hair is probably very high poly. Harrumph. The picture rendered for about six or seven hours, then I spent another two hours painting out unresolved pixels -- or, fireflies, or sparkles, as they're also called. No way would this image finish rendering. Soooo...

Don't laugh. The next experiment (after I've had another cup of tea) is to render the background separately, then stand the figure against that as a backdrop, and do a second render. Sure, I realize, it'll still be five hours of render time -- but at the end of it the picture is done, there won't be swarms of fireflies to paint out. Hmm. Let me think about this. I'd also have to eye-match and hand-paint shadows. I can do that. Takes me back to 2009, the very early days, when I'd always have to hand-paint shadows, because the moment I turned them on, in Studio 3, my poor old computer crashed!

Speaking of backdrops, I used a Terragen render as the sky and horizon line for this -- an image I rendered about six months ago, I think:

I haven't don't a heck of a lot with Terragen in the last couple of months. Been too busy figuring out Studio 4.11 and Iray. I'd love to get back to Terragen, but the truth is, Iray commandeers the computer for so many hours, I run out of time. Duh.

My imagination is full of images, and my wishlists at DAZ and Renderosity are full to busting with about five grand's worth of products, LOL. It'll take years to get the lot, but -- what a hobby! It's all about having fun and and keeping the brain functional which, as we enter our Golden Years, is no mean feat. Ack.

Alien pyramids, and a delicious enemy

Our neighborhood Goa'ould again ... nicely done by Iray. Still playing Stargate, because I ran the experiment, put the Pyrago alien pyramids into Iray to see how they render:

That's a sky I rendered in Terragen a while ago -- back in June, in fact. The sky is what makes this picture --

-- and it's the perfect backdrop for the old set. I only imported one of the elements, the pyramid itself, to test it out, because it's something of a pain wriggling the whole thing into Iray. Studio 4.11 won't let you install this stuff (or, if it will, I ain't found the way yet, and I've tried everything I can think of), so you have to import the OBJs directly ... then spend the next hour configuring them before you can start to play around with the lights. Not quick. But the end result is pretty darned impressive. So, tomorrow I'll play with the Palladio set, which is ancient Greek.

I'll leave you with this:

 
I'm kind of waiting for his eyes to glow. Shall pat myself on the back for this one: nice character!

Anyway -- tomorrow, Palladio, and another of the Xurge costumes I bought last week. Let's install this one into Studio 3 (soooo easy to install things into Studio 3, one of the reasons I love it)...

...and we'll see what we shall see! I have one or two M4 characters who would wear this...!

Big decisions -- and tech support

Time for the big decisions: do I start chucking wads of cash at IRay shaders? Or do I buy Reality and run with Reality's built-in materials? So -- an experiment. I've been re-rendering old Reality/Lux renders in IRay to see which I prefer. And I actually like both. Reality/Lux is better for some things, IRay is better for others. I'm seriously yoyoing from one choice to the other, genuinely unable to figure out which to run with...

The only thing I can say for sure is ... I do love the way IRay renders eyes, and I hate the way it ignores any attempt on my behalf to add bump and displacement maps (textures) to, say, fabrics. This render, above -- a double portrait, Leon and Roald against a Terragen background -- was abandoned at the 50% mark ... it could be a lot smoother, if I wanted to wait another hour or so for it to cook, but it already told me everything I needed to know --

Yes, my textures have dropped out on the fabrics (again!) which leaves them looking very flat. No, the old Neftis Hair Salon wigs don't look so good when you see them in extreme closeup in the IRay renders. Yes, Michael 4 renders up very nicely -- but those fabrics are too flat to be worth the extra hour of render time!

Sooo -- this was rendering in Terragen while we watched Thor on dvd:

Yep, the Millennium Falcon, by J. Hoagland, a freebie from Vanishing Point -- very nice! I enjoyed working with this a lot, though it was a toughie to find the model in Studio 4.10, which is so thoroughly stuffed up, it can't even find its own so-called "smart content." In fact --

DAZ tech support just recommended that I uninstall it and reinstall it, and then go in and do some other very specific things with hidden files ... all rather hair-raising. Dave will give me a hand with this tomorrow; we'll see if it makes Studio 4.10 work any better ... or if it simply is as it is! Right now, 4.10 is not really functional: there's no content in it to work with, and I can't see, to get any content into it! Everything I do, I do in Studio 3 and then open the file in 4.10 and fiddle with the renders. But you can't do that forever. Can you? Very strange. And if the reinstall doesn't bring it up to spec, well, this is the only thing tech support was able to come up with!

Ack. So -- wish me luck for tomorrow's "brain surgery" on the system! Just a short post today, but -- more soon, if/when I can get the difficulties sorted! I'm still drooling over the image quality other people can get, and I think I'm in striking range of those results, just not there yet. I did manage to get the Genesis 8 base figure to load, and it renders up fine, with one exception: its eyes are either flat black or flat white. I'm going to guess that this is because I haven't (yet) dropped fifty bucks on skinmaps (characters) which all boil down to (yes) shaders. No proper shaders = no proper results, right? Right. *sigh*

And so to bed. It's midnight, and I'm propping my eyes with my fingers.

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!

Barbarians sack a fantasy Ancient Egypt ... plus Terragen and wallpaper

The barbarian is back! Conan who? Seriously, I'm just in a mood for Conan, something like a happy cross between Frank Frazetta and Boris and since I've got the biiiig new harddrive I have the space to install loads of 3D models that I bought anything up to four and five years ago, and couldn't install for need of harddrive space. This picture is full of experiments, too...

It's just an old fashioned raytrace out of Studio 3. I might see how this renders up in IRay tomorrow or the next day ... I just didn't have time to mess about in Studio 4.10 today. Studio 3 is so fast by comparison, the fact that the raytrace takes a bit longer means nothing. The job can still be done so quickly, you're done in half the time. Take a look at this big beauty at full size (1200x1800), and see the venous mapping in the torso and arm. Oooooh, nice!

Last night, around midnight, I was messing about with Terragen --

Am delighted with this -- for a start, I was in control of it, LOL, it didn't just "happen." The water is very shallow; that green color is the lake-bed, and I set that surface shader before flooding the terrain! The clouds have bulk and structure. Sooo nice. Almost reminds me of the River Iss segment of John Carter of Mars.

One more thing for you today: another wallpaper at 1920 x 1080 size:

Park that on your desktop, set all your icons off on the right side ... neat! It looks a treat ... you're welcome! Tomorrow, with any luck, let's see what my barbarian looks like in IRay! I do like the new battle-axe; it's part of a collection of antique and historical weapons that's been waiting for installation for about five years! Good gods, where does time go?

More soon! 

The cover model, the Thing ... and the Highlands

Just starting (and I stress that, starting!) to get Studio 4.10 under control ... still messing about with IRay, because still waiting for DAZ Tech Support to help me get get the installation problems squared away, and ... well, I don't know about you, but I can't quite bring myself to put my hand in my pocket for something like $400 for odds and sods, like skinmaps, costumes, hairdos, plus Reality, when I'm not even sure they're going to install properly! So ... here's a whole new Michael 4 character created this afternoon...

That render took about 35 minutes. I could have left it cooking for a lot longer, but this answered pretty much everything I wanted to know about IBL lighting within Studio 4.10. Uh huh. The last thing that's got me scratching my head with the IBL lighting is, how the heck do you get proper shadows?? And yes, I've set a spotlight as well, to try that. And yes, I've been into the tone mapping controls and said, "crush shadows, burn highlights." Hunh. More experiments tomorrow!

This is a quite useful character, and I used this physique in, uh, this:

I wanted to know just how far you might be able to drive Michael 4 in IRay, because I've been looking at book covers ... romance book covers ... and am thinking to myself, "I can do that." Some of those male models you see on the book covers, they are CG, not photos. Michael 4 is almost good enough. Not quite, I think. It's going to take Genesis 3 or 8, or both, to get juuust what we need. Hmmm. So, the best you can get with the old model and the new render engine is this:

...and the truth is, I'm actually quite impressed. With the head cut out of the shot, and the venous mapping worked out, and a looong render to get rid of fireflies and whatnot, you're hard pressed to decide if this is CG or a photo. (This is a crop from the book cover image, just as it rendered, no touch ups or Photoshop work.)

Anyway, that mockup book cover is a 150 minute IRay render of M4, Photoshopped in post, against a Bryce sky, with typography in Serif. It's not bad at all, actually. You'll notice, I got the venous map to show on the model! The trick is this: you overdrive the settings, to the point where, if you raytraced the image on those settings, it would look like this:

And that is just so ghastly, it looks rather like the character in the Marvel movie, what is it? Fantastic Four, is that right? The rock dude. The Thing? I think his name was Ben --

LOL, if you compare poor old Ben there with the overdriven bump map that's necessary to get IRay to show any venous detail at all on the Michael 4 ...! 😱

While messing about with raytraces, I'd already put the book cover model through that process too, for the sake of interest:

The raytrace has its own charm, doesn't it? But what really annoys me is the way the POSE changes when you send the Studio 3 file into Studio 4.10. Look at the angle of his head! Also, the boots and the gnarly trees dropped out in the file transfer ... but I've had a humongous headache today, and couldn't be bothered going through the process of adding them back in. Ack. I leave it to you to figure out which you like better, IRay or raytrace, and I won't blame you if you choose the raytrace!

Last item for today: "Here in the highlands, the Highlands if Scotland," to quote the opening song from Brigadoon --

Terragen ... with a gorgeous sky, lovely water, perfect atmospherics (see the way the distant hills go hazy), and the tree right where I wanted it, LOL! Actually, I blew off about a hour, trying to work out how to add populations of things like grass and small plants, but it's waaay too complex for a day when you're full of pills and occasionally the headache punches right through the fog and slugs you. So we'll call this one done, and will see if we can figure out populations another time! Fortunately, YouTube is full of videos, like this one, and if worst comes to worst, I can always admit defeat and watch the tutorials! ("Instructions? We don't need no steenkeeng instructions!" 😀😁)

More soon...