Serendipity! Okay, call him Curt ... and fitting Genesis 3 hair to Michael 4 -- easy.

A few very minor adjustments to his nose (which I thought was too large), and here he is, in his own photo shoot. Talk about serendipity! If you haven't been following this -- "the story so far." Wanting to break Jarrat and Stone out of storage (you know -- from Mel Keegan's NARC, nudge, wink), I loaded up a Michael 4 and applied the Jarrat character preset. If this were Studio 3, it would have worked, but in Studio 4, I didn't get Jarrat at all; I got a whole new character, s Studio 4.15 interpreted the preset, got it wrong, and produced...

And I like what I'm seeing -- a lot. This is a beautiful new character, and he wears the Genesis 3 hair as if it were made for M4. Okay -- let me write a little about how to fit the G3 hair to M4, because I suspect a number of people will be trying to do it, and it can be extremely fiddly.

• Load your M4 figure in the 0 position, meaning 0 valued on every transformation parameter. Unselect the figure. Load the hair into the scene without anything being selected. It loads also on the 0 position, just too low to fit the M4 -- meaning, if you jog it up till it looks good, the scalp cap will fit. You might need to jog the z (back/forward) parameter to make sure the back of the head is well covered; when it is, the hairline should be right. Do this in the Perspective view, so that you can swing the scene around easily without moving the M4 at all. Lastly, in the scene menu, select the hair prop and drag it upward throug the list till you can drop it onto the M4 'head' list item. This will parent it to M4, and now you can adjust the styling and colour to your heart's content. For the best fit, use Genesis 3 hair on Michael 4 or Victoria 4.2 ... and enjoy!

And we call him Curt because Mel Keegan has just given this face and body form the nod ... this is Curt Gable, the Athena's Third Officer, soon to move upwards through the ranks as the series develops! Very neat indeed!

Second major thing fixed today:

Yep, the problem with the visor on the HAAS Armor helmet, by Xurge3D, was caused by an opacity map which Studio was reading incorrectly (it was original configured for the Firefly engine, in Poser, maybe ten years ago). Basically, I just deleted the opacity map from the "Cutout Opacity" channel in the Surfaces pane. Now, if I want a semi-opaque visor, I can either drag the slider to 75% or whatever, or else apply a glass shader. Great -- with this problem answered. I can load the rest of the Xurge3D content without a qualm. 

A grab-bag of goodies

 

Old OBJ models and new shaders ... it's an adventure in Iray, with results that can be astonishing ... or not so good. Depends on a lot of random factors. The question is always on my mind, "What can we do with the old generation four models, since almost everything I have was designed for Michael 4, and while the new Genesis stuff is terrific, I just don't have another three or four thousand dollars to spend on renewing everything in the 3D cupboard! So what do we have here? Well --

This, above, is Iray's rendering of the Jagger skinmap for M4; he's wearing Neftis's Ricardi hair and Sickle Yield's track pants; but I resurfaced the trackies with Iray shaders, so they look pretty good. The results here are not so very different from the Genesis figures -- with one exception. M4 ain't as posable: wait till you start to bend the limbs, and you'll soon see that they don't bend realistically; they just sort of fold, and tend to crease, which Genesis limbs usually don't.This effect is very, very noticeable with Victoria 4, also --

Now, this is Victori 4, wearing the HR Donna skinmap, and one of the Neftis wigs ... it's actually more of a test of the costume, which is one of Powerage's old fantasy sets, the Fantasy Cult costume. It depends on metals and transparency maps, and it was never designed for Iray! But it turns out the transparency maps worked wonderfully in Iray ... the metals? Nope. So I resurfaced all the metals with a gold shader from Mech4D's immense pack of shaders, and the result is actually very nice...

The crystals are a prop from an old fantasy collection, Magic Containers, which I think came from Renderosity about the time Noah was launching his ark. Obviously, it was never going to work well in Iray, but I used a volumetric diamond shader from Mech4D's collection (from DAZ), and the result is very nice. I can use this prop, and many others ... we're happy!

The Elven Merchant Ship was from Renderosity too; and I'm not enormously fond of this prop, which is why I've never used it much. It was made using textures rather than materials, so the surfacing on it is disappointing; and no templates were provided, so one can't go in and paint a material. Soooo ... I put it into silhouette by placing the key light almost behind it, and did some overpainting in Photoshop, which increased the realism. Cool.

On that render, the water was the big, big challenge. I don't own a "water prop" (yet) for Iray, and of course it's totally different trying to work with surfaces in Iray than in 3Delight. This is an Iray render, so ... what the heck was I going to do? Well, displacement maps DO -- NOT -- WORK in Iray. Or, if they do, I haven't found the trick, and I don't think anyone else has. Normally mapping works, but it won't get you where you need to go, if you start out with a created primitive (plane) and try deforming it into a choppy surface with a displacement map. No joy there. Harrumph. So (he he he) I used an old OBJ I made in, and exported from, Bryce 7 Pro, about eight years ago. Mmm. The "water" is actually a terrain, onto which I slapped one of Mech4D's volumetric water shaders. Even then, it took one heck of a lot of work with all kinds of maps to break up the surface and make it less than a mirror. There's a trick to this, which I have yet to learn ... but this is quite nice, so I'll post it and make notes to myself about figuring this out!

And lastly for today, after all that pushing and pulling with old models, I wanted something that would make life a bit easier (especially since it's over 100 degrees in this neck of the woods, and almost too hot to even think, much less wrestle with problems). So this is a set called Shady Haven, from DAZ, already configured for Iray. I have an environment light and one spotlight set, and this render, at very high resolution, took about fifteen minutes. Next, I'm going to see what happens to the render times we we stand a couple of Genesis figures in the set. So --

Let's have a closer look at how Iray handles the Jagger skinmap on the Michael 4 geometry ... and then I'm going to get a cool drink and relax in front of a fan. Yes, the a/c has been blasting away since before dawn, but it's just too hot. One thing that's definitely on my agenda: a new monitor. I'm still using an LG monitor from 2010, and it runs so hot, it feels like you're sitting in front of a heater! Not what you want, in this weather.

Something magickal for Friday 13th, with a full moon...

Behind the scenes, I'm working on the update of my gallery, which is seven years out of date. Going through the old files, I'm coming across a number of idea from as far back as 2010 ... great ideas which couldn't be done properly back in the day for any number of reasons. The main two were the shortcomings of the hardware (the computer would crash if I tried to raytrace), and the sheer lack of expertise. I started in on 3D art in September, 2009 (yes, it's been ten years, all but about a week since I turned on DAZ Studio for the first time and said, "Woooooow...).

One of the projects that really deserved to be redone is this one -- Stormlight. The original is only about 880 pixels high, that being the maximum I could render, and the best I could do was deep shadow mapping, and don't even think about turning on depth of field --

It's a heck of a nice idea, though, and coming back to it today -- Friday 13th, with a full moon! -- seemed quirkily apropos. I was lucky enough to find the original project file, right down to the background sky image, which had been painted in GIMP! Everything needed to be redone, and was. The final result ...

Nice! This one is a 1200 x 1800 raytrace. I set three lights, turned on depth of field and set the virtual aperture to f/15. The original backdrop was much too low-rez and small to serve, but I saved the color set and used it to rebalance the new render. I also redid the transparency mapping on the costume ... so easy to do this in Studio 3! Speaking of which --

This whole project was done in Studio 3. I did try to open this in Studio 4.11, but it dumped most of the props, and I just couldn't be bothered going through the process of exporting to OBJ, then importing that, and going fifteen rounds with the transparency mapping to get the shrubs to look right. Another time, maybe, but -- not today. So much easier to run back to Studio 3, where everything was quick and simple ... until it came to the rendering itself, of course. Studio 4.11 would have done this raytrace in about ten minutes. LOL, in the old program, it took about half an hour. I can live with that.

What you have here is good old Victoria 4.2, wearing the Celestial Hair, and a costume so old, I can't even remember what it's called. I designed the face and body form, and did all the surfaces on the costume. The props are PNature bushes, and the big slabs of rock from DM's Instances. For the life of me, I can't recall if the props were from the DAZ store or Renderosity. I used to buy loads of stuff from Renderosity, when installing it into Studio was dead simple. Now, getting third party content into Studio 4.11 is such a crapshoot, I'm a bit leery. Note to self: get this problem solved!

Happy Friday 13th! (Any Space: 1999 fans out there? You gotta know what day this is. According to the show, the Moon was blasted out of Earth orbit twenty years ago today. Don't we wish the technology had happened that way! Right now, we're watching From the Earth to the Moon on dvd, and I'm reminded of the way we all believed, before 1970, that by 2000 there'd be cities in space and a colony on Mars. Whooo! Never happened, but it might. Today's literary science fiction is full of stories of Martian colonization. Makes you wonder, and cross your fingers, dunnit?

A French cafe, a mystery at Ponte Maggiore ... too many islands, but great clouds!

This was very nearly "the render that didn't happen" ... I knew that eventually I'd come up with a render that just could -- not -- be done. Or, not with my software and hardware! This seems to be it, because what you see here was composited from three layered images, when the original configuration stalled at 42% ... forever.

Initially, I had two buildings across the street, hit by spotlights; two walls to make a corner of a little French cafe; a transparent plane with bump map and reflection values set, to be the window glass; table and chair; bottle, glasses and plate, with transparency mapping on bottle and glasses; a Michael 4 (same dude as Amadeus, but with a honey matte on the Akaste hair); there was a lovely transparency map on the shirt too. It will render as a deep shadow map image, but as soon as you turn on raytracing, no joy. Soooo...

I took out everything but the buildings in the background, set lights and camera and rendered that, then re-imported the image as a backdrop and deleted the buildings. It still wouldn't render the remainder, so I did the bottle, glasses and food separately ... then did the table, chair and character against the backdrop -- with the window glass in place and reflecting ... and just pasted the bottle and glasses in!

Even then, it was an hour to raytrace the character, his hair, and the reflection in the glass, at which point I was so sick of this process, when the render turned out to be pretty awful, I almost chucked it in the bin. Sigh. Into Photoshop, and paint. And paint. And paint. And of course now I'm glad I did, because the nett result is rather good -- you just wouldn't believe how much painting it took to save it!

Harrumph. Anyway, this cafe scene came out of ideas spinning off a render I did yesterday that gave me phenomenal problems,  but was fixable inside the render:

The problem with the car was that it looked like a huge slab of plastic. The human eye expects to see reflections in highly-polished Duco, and there was nothing because, of course, the 3D stage is not the real world: there is nothing to be reflected. Soooo, I went in and used a photo of some buildings on the foreshore as a reflection map. Now the car looked like a bloody mirror. So I went back in and added a displacement map to make it look like there are the usual million tiny imperfections in the surface, which got rid of the mirror effect. Put in the sky image as the reflection map for the windows ... and so on, and on, and on. Aarrggh. In the end, it came out right, but ye gods--!! Admittedly, it is a very complex render, with a vast set.

And it got me thinking: there's a story in here! Someone went to meet a friend at the bridge on the canal, but all they found was a pair of women's fashion shoes, abandoned. Shook up, our hero goes to a nearby cafe to make a call, wait for a detective to arrive, and have a fortifying glass or two. Et voile. Thereby hangs a tale.

More misadventures than adventures in Terragen in the last day or two: island creation is giving me strife (or a challenge):

Safe to say, I'm not doing it right yet. There has to be a way, and I have a few ideas. It's not as simple as making very tall islands in a common "hightfield terrain," then flooding it: too many islands!!! And it's not as simple as making a "power fractal" terrain, slapping some heavy detailing on it to erode it or whatever ... again, you don't get one island, you get a thousand. I don't want a thousand. I want ONE. Tomorrow, I'll see if I can make a credible island in Bryce, export it as an OBJ (this much, I can do), then import it into Terragen (it should do this), and (the bold experiment) see if I can have Terragen apply its surface shaders to the OBJ island/terrain/mountain structure, to work up the color and texture. I don't know if Terragen will do this, but it ought to, and it's worth a shot! If not, well, back to the drawing board!

But this came out reasonably well:

Same project as the "better" island scene, with the camera flown up to about 10,000 meters and tilted to look down on the clouds ... then, the sun repositioned for noon-ish, and evening. That's not too bad at all -- and I'm pleased to report, I'm doing this on my own, without chickening out and running back to the tutorials! Getting there. Slowly.

A grab bag of goodies, all over the spectrum

LuxRender: Leaning on a Lamppost

LuxRender: Fallen Angel

Bryce 7 Pro: Forgotten

The first image -- "Leaning on a Lamppost" -- was an experiment to find out how you force LuxRender to honor a transparency/opacity map set in DAZ Studio. Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn't, and if your whole picture pivots on getting an effect like this:

...and LuxRender (or perhaps Reality) leaves the opacity map behind, your picture will actually fall apart at the most fundamental level. The answer to this question was -- don't fight it. If LuxRender is leaving the transparency settings behind, just set the whole thing in Reality instead --

And the only problem there was working out what in the world reality calls an opacity or transparency map. Turns out, in Reality it's called the Alpha Map. Aha. Once you know that, you're pretty much off to the races. The only chore left is numerous test renders to find out what percentage you need to set on the Alpha Map to get the effect juuuust right. The test renders can consume a lot of time ... roll on the next version of Reality, which will be seven times faster!

The next one -- "Fallen Angel" -- is a re-working of an old, old idea. I wanted to ee what LuxRender could do with it; and I wanted to see if I could just do it better in good old DAZ Studio itself. So I not only ran it through Reality/Lux, which you see above, I also ran it through Studio 3 again:

This one has different, subtle lighting and depth of field turned on -- you'll need to see it at much larger size to get the most out of it. Hmm. The truth is, occasionally good old DAZ Studio comes up with a render that's very good indeed, and some subjects suit the "artwork" type of render as much as they suit the more photographic treatment. Which is best? Well --

Here's the comparison; I leave it to you to decide:

Sometimes the "depth" of a picture only comes out when you see it at large size -- or if, during the course of working out composition, you add in, and take out, various elements to see what works best. In the third picture -- "Forgotten" -- which was done entirely in Bryce 7 Pro, the original idea was  that this was a forgotten temple, overgrown and decaying, in the foothills of the mountains. It was going to be a mountain range in the background, dwarfing and overshadowing the man-made structure, which was falling into ruin. Then a better idea occurred to me. I took the mountains out and added this into the background:

A futuristic city shrounded in its own smog, where people are so absorbed in their high-tech lives that their own history is forgotten and decaying within sight of the city. This was the picture I wanted, yet it's very different from the one I actually set out to create. The atmospherics in this shot are what make it -- and Bryce 7 Pro lends itself brilliantly to dense, smoggy air and low, brooding skies.

The 3D model for this one is Palenque, which came from the DAZ Marketplace, right here. The model is very fine; the catalog images are not. This, at left, is one of the pictures from the DAZ online catalog, and the designer of the model has made something of a rookie mistake, which has the effect of making his beautiful OBJ look like a toy. Can you pick it?? It's the backdrop. The palm fronds at the right hand side are nicely blurred out, but they're so far out of scale ... if this temple were real, those palm trees better be as tall as skyscrapers in NYC, with fronds the size of airliners ... otherwise, if those fronds are in scale, this temple is the size of a dog kennel. Dang.

Don't let this put you off: the model itself is terrific, it's just the catalog images that let it down. I've used the model several times; in fact, you can get your virtual camera right inside, and I used it as the stage for "The Man in the Hat." (The thing that I really can't believe was that that image was done over three years ago. Dang, where did time go?!)

Still messing about with digital painting (and loving it), an idea occurred to me:

A shot from Hubble Space Telescope?? Did Dave and I just buy a massive Celestron?? We wish... Ahem! Nope. this shot is purely digital and took about five minutes flat. The secret?

It's a cloudy sky, turned upside down to get rid of the obvious gravity and distance effect of the right-way-up shot; then you drop it to grayscale and crank the contrast to make space BLACK. Then you can add some layers and paint in colors, which is pretty much what astrophotogtraphers do, since all deep-space images start life b&w. The big stars are Photoshop brushes; the small stars are just pale dots. Done!

I could get excited about this trick. Next time I need nebulae in the background for a space shot -- say, something for a Hellgate illustration -- I don't need to look at Hubble shots. Cool.

Still fiddling with digital painting, I was running every experiment I could think of in Photoshop, combining and re-re-recombining filters, to get an idea of their aggregate effects. Check this out:

You may have to see this at larger size to see what's been done. I dropped the old Tag Heuer commercial into grayscale, converted it to a sketch, recombined it, recolored it, and painted over the top with a variety of brushes for effect. The result --

-- is pleasantly weird. But even weirder is that the process took LONGER than some of the stuff I've done from scratch! So this is not something you could use to save yourself a lot of time in painting.

Lastly for today -- was playing with the DAZ Studio cartoon render settings:

It's a really neat effect, and too-often overlooked as we all scramble towards ever-more photographic effects. This is Leon and Iphigenia from a scene faaar down the chapter list in the Abraxas story. Yep, it was all plotted, miles into the future, and I did rafts of illustrations. What, you say -- write it?! Yes. Definitely. Starting to think seriously about that. Soon. Promise.

Trees, elves, daylight and playing god in the vitual world

click to see at large size (they're compressed for quick download)

The quest for Bryce 7 Pro daylight appears to have been rewarded! I won't claim that these renders will appear fully photo-realistic on close examination (especially not the second one, featuring the really neat tree in the foreground -- more about that later) ... but at quick glance, your eye is just about fooled, because (hee hee!) that's a pretty good representation of daylight. 

What's the trick? Well ... I was hunting through the Atmospheres pane of the Skylab (that really is what it's called), and I saw something called Basic Daylight. Now, everything in the Skylab is a preset ... you can get alien planet skies, midnight storms, storybook mornings, whatever you want, basically ... anything except for real, genuine, normal, ordinary, garden variety daylight. So when I saw something called Basic Daylight, I had to take it for a spin...

Hmm. Not too bad -- at least, it gives you a place to start. What you do is, load up the Basic Daylight sky, and then get real busy: change the sun position (by dragging an icon on a virtual globe), and then ... gird your loins and get into the actual sun/moon controls, and literally "play god" and tell the sun how bright to shine, and what color! Me like. A lot.

And speaking of playing god ... something about "Only Zeus can render a tree" (with all due apologies to Joyce Kilmer; who is no relation to Val. I think). I know, I know, it was make a tree. But, sheesh, you'd need to be zapping lightning bolt around (or maybe your name better be James Cameron!) to render proper trees properly...

This one you see here --? I, me, myself, actually made this tree in a program called Carrara, which is DAZ Studio's bigger, brighter brother. They're up to Carrara 8 Pro now, so they're giving away Carrara 6 -- it was packed on the disk in the back of their promo book, which I bought via Amazon about two years ago. Frankly, I never even bothered to install it on my old computer. It would have been a world of grief. But with the new machine, I loaded it up the other day and Dave, who has some acquaintance with it, showed me around ... showed me the tree lab.

Aha, says I ... I shall play god big time, and make a tree! The upside: the perogram makes it quite easy to get some very good results with tree making. The downside --

Dang. This tree, which looks about 500% more realistic than your average 3D tree, has over 650,000 polygons!! I exported it out of Carrara, got it into Bryce, set it to render (and not even on the top settings, either), and even with a super-fast computer, Bryce was going to take thirty HOURS to render it at a large size. So I rendered the picture at half-size, about 750 pixels wide. That took about three hours, and it's all on account of the polygon count.

Well, shoot. Now you know the reason why 3D trees usually look pretty poor! They're made simple, of necessity, because anything more complex would take the rest of your life to render, or crash the computer, and probably both! Unless your name is James Cameron, and you're rendering on about 50 processors ... or you happen to be Zeus, and you have access to every processor in the known universe.

Not being either one of them, I'll tread carefully when it comes to making trees! But daylight is doable, and I just stumbled into how another part of Bryce's materials lab works. You can sometimes scale your materials to fit the object you're slapping them onto. Not all the time, but sometimes. And that's so handy.

Speaking of daylight ... before anyone asks, the sun rays in today's figure work were not done inside DAZ studio. They were painted on in Photoshop, in post work. In fact, they could have been done in DAZ, but I didn't have time or inclination. To have these render as part of the scene, you'd paint them in Photoshop, save them to a black and white image, and load up that image as an opacity (transparency) map, which would be applied to a primitive, a plane, which you make in DAZ by clicking "create primitive." You'd jiggle the plane into position, so that the rays were in the right place, and render. But there was quite a lot of other post work to be done on these shots anyway, so I thought, why bother?

Here's the detail from the second one:

...and as nice as this is, I knooooow what it would look like, if it were rendered in a proper render engine. I'm drooling over the Firefly engine, which is built right into Poser. Meh. Whimper.

Notice the background in the figure shots?! The view outside the window. Yep, it's the Bryce landscape (or a piece out of it), which you see today, with full daylight over the craggy skyline with the canyons in the background. I just cut a swatch out to fit the render size of the figure shots, and adjusted the gamma and contrast waaaay up to simulate the brightness of "outside" which your eye would expect, when the virtual camera is getting a correct exposure on a figure in the dimness inside. Neat.

The cute little sparrow is a prop I bought from Content Paradise a year or more ago. The costume is the vest from The Hunter, and I wish I could remember what the bottom half of the costume started life as! I changed out every texture and map, and I've totally forgotten what the original prop was, sorry. Likewise with the skinmap. That's one of my own face morphs, and I have 100% forgotten what the skin is. But the hair is the Akaste Hair prop, that much I can recall. (Makes note to self: get brain examined.)

Jade, 18 January 

***Posted by MK because the internet just ... ain't  there. No connection.

A grab bag of digital goodies

A grab bag of pieces today ... what I've been fiddling with in the last couple of days -- and it's an eclectic mix. A bit of everything. I've uploaded these at large size, so folks who are curious can see details -- but you might need to be patient with the downloads. They're a little large, and could take a few moments.

There's a portrait of the barbarian you saw the other day -- I'm quite pleased with this face, and in the render I uploaded before, you don't really see it. Then ... an experiment in reflections, transparencies and surface textures. Exotic science fiction, complete with the next-to-naked female and the robot, which are two prerequisites -- but the real gist of it is about the surfaces! A lot is going on in the picture; it's definitely one frame out of a large story, but search me what the story is. Anyone...?

Then, Bryce landscapes ... misty mountains, trees and all ... and the second one is a re-visitation of the one I was playing with a few days ago. I went back into it, and put in cliff walls, with weathered rock formations. A... ha. I think. I do believe a couple of pennies have just dropped. Bryce is starting to make a tiny little bit of sense -- in other words, when good things happen, they're not 100% accidental. Maybe only 80%! Theres so much to learn.

Then -- simple shots, but so effective. A couple of models I knew I'd bought about five months ago, and couldn't find for love or money; they showed up while I was looking for something else. The space sphere is the key model in these last two images. It's the spherical environment in which the spaceship and space observatory are positioned. The ships are inside your actual, genuine sphere, so you can point the camera virtually anywhere. What you see here are pre-set textures -- those backgrounds. My next challenge is to paint my own textures for the sphere, and go fly around in it. The last picture of all is shot from inside the cockpit of the Vanguard spacecaft model, on approach to the space observatory...

Loads of fun, and all down to the processor power I have now. Thanks go, once again, to my husband, for sliding the new PC under the Christmas tree while I wasn't looking! 

Jade, 11 January

CG fantasy and ... check out this 3D water!

Happily 3D modeling in DAZ and Bryce, and painting in Photoshop ... having a ball doing the things I always imagined, but couldn't do before I opened the box that magically appeared under the Christmas tree. (We don't have a chimney, because we don't have a fireplace. I guess Santa must have teleported in. In fact, a guy of that girth must be teleporting down chimneys. Right?)

Above: the Raven again, and some very cool painting effects. Also very simple. But sometimes the simple things are the ones that work out the best. Now for something that was faaaaar from simple!

You might assume this was done in Bryce:

Bryce landscape. Is it? Nope. Well ... I guess you could say it's a bit of a hybrid, becase that is a Bryce sky I used as the backdrop, and the ground, the "terrain" was created in Bryce, before being exported as an OBJ Object. But the scene was built and rendered in DAZ Studio 3. I've uploaded it at full size, and I urge you to click on it, see the details -- and in particular, the water! But --

I also know that these pleas often fall on deaf ears, so here ... here's a swatch out of the picture, at full size, so you can at the very least see that water:

Yep, all done in DAZ, not Bryce, with just a tiny bit of overpainting in Photoshop (birds in the sky; grasses on the skyline). Any Photoshop painting on the water? Nope. So -- how was it done?

First, I created the "terrain" in Bryce, and exported it as an OBJ. This was imported into DAZ, and it was given a diffuse map -- a huuuuuge picture of grassy ground -- and an immense displacement map to ruck up the surface into loads of teeny tiny detail that looks like grass or groundcover plants. The terrain has mounds and hollows ... so I created a "primitive," a simple plane, which became the surface of the water. This was jiggled into place in the hollows ... I put an image of the surface of a lake on it; and an opacity map which told it to be transparent in wave-shaped patches; and a displacement map that told it to assume the shape of waves; then I told it to be glossy, or shiny, and highly reflective. I set rocks and boulders under the surface, to show through, then went along planting ferns and grasses and shrubs along the water's edge. The lights were a challenge: full daylight, very bright, but starting to get along through afternoon. The weather: fine, with a high haze. Several dozen test renders ... then set it to raytrace. And even with the new computer, it took about an hour and a half. On the old computer? It would have been a complete system crash before I even got the plants into place!

The good news: the new machine is powerful enough to render all that in the background, while I go on and do something else in the foreground:

Hand painted from a digitally-derived sketch ... I was trying to get a watercolor effect, and I'm not a hundred miles away from it. There's so many different ways to do this kind of work -- what I'm trying to do now is to get my brain wired up for freehand work with the mouse pen. Don't want to lay down some serious cash for a good one (Wacom) before the brain can handle it. So right now, I have an old Digitizer pad with a new Kanvus pen, running on the generic, plug-and-play drivers from Windows 7 ... you might not believe it, but it actually works, quite well enough for me to paint up a storm and get the brain wired up for doing this before I head off to Wacom's website and spend some silly money. 

I really am having a blast with art ... and I hope you're enjoying the results! Thanks for visiting, and watch out for a lot more, and some very new things, now that the capability is sitting on the desktop. (Thank you, thank you, once again, to my husband, who knew exactly what to put under the Christmas tree ... and he didn't have to squish down any chimneys to do it!)

Jade, 3 January ... 2012

Very chic ... but would YOU go to war in this?!

Back earlier than expected ... because I have a job that I just can't get my head around, which means I can't get into it till tomorrow at earliest, so I have a bit of spare time. So ...

The other day I mentioned that I'd picked up a copy of ImagineFX Magazine, and these mags -- which are a stupendous price, something like $22 per copy in the stores here -- have CDs of materials and goodies in the back. Here's the magazine:

...and it is an absolutely amazing mag, I just can't afford to buy it! The one on the right is the issue I got for my birthday last year, and the one on the left, I got off eBay in a sale for $10, which is half price!

And occasionally, the content packed on the CD is really interesting. In the issue with the closeup shot of the Arabian swordsman, the big freebie was a DAZ Studio 3 model, The Sentinel, by the designer, VAL. Well, I just had to load this up and play with it, didn't I?

Ummm ... very chic. Very chic indeed. But I put the question to you: would YOU go to war dressed in this? One is inclined to say, "Daaaaarlink, du vill dezerve everytink du getz, and du vill get plenty." Of course, that might be the plan (I might have been watching too many episodes of Up Pompeii lately...)

Hey, this is a fantasy, right? This is a 14 year old boy fantasy, the kind of thing that would have Harold Green drooling all over his plaid shirt and shorting out that video mixing console he wears slung like an acoustic guitar. So --

If we're going to have a fantasy, let's have the proper fantasy, right? Here goes -- let's put some flesh on the poor woman's skinny bones, a big mop of windblown blond hair, and let's pretend those scrawny arms can lift a big piece of sharp steel by magic (presumably the same alchemy by which the rest of her anatomy gets to look like this!) ...

Seriously, this is Victoria 4.2 wearing the Jenna skinmap and face morph, but the body morph -- especially of the Amazon princess right here -- are by me. The costume is VAL Sentinel. The short hair is the Uranus hair, the long blond locks are the Nana hair. The texture on the boots is a brocade I made myself. The "shirt" (ouch!) and the skirt (double ouch!) started life looking like wisps of silk. I made them into "lace chain mail" (give the poor woman half a chance!) with the use of opacity and displacement mapping, and some nice reflectivity. The wall in the background is from the Castle Creator prop set; the candle-stand is from The Mage's Study. The battleaxe is from the Fae Weapons set. You can get most of these at Renderosity, and if you don't find them there, they'll be at DAZ.I have four or five lights on this and two shadows set ... they're not raytraced (takes too long on this computer).

And the last place in the world (sorry, Harold) where you'd see a cossie like this would be on a battlefield, or on the ramparts of a castle.

Damn! That would be cold around the kilt.

Jade, 12 October