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. 

The Viking hunk, a Chinese princess, an alien encounter, and dawn in the woods ... painting happily

If anybody tells you that AI generated art is the bee's knees ... don't you believe it. Dream Wombo handed me a lot of rubbish today, but I saw the potential in some of it and spent about seven hours painting the images you see here. AI is a very mixed bag: as a concept, it's not fair to "proper" artists, and at the same time, 90% of the results you get out of it are ... weird. My experiments are almost finished ... horses with five legs? People with seven fingers on one hand? People with two heads? A horse with two torsos? Say, what?!! 

So, I think I'm just about done experimenting. I've learned a lot ... learned what I don't like about AI generated images, as well as what I do like. Some engines are better than others; none is as hot as they're reputed to be, but the best can certainly produce the raw materials to make excellent pictures. 

The one thing I dislike the most about AI (and this is the thing that would/will stop me using it very much) is that it's totally random. You know, in your mind's eye, the image you want. The engine hands you something that's so idiotically different, you wonder what it was thinking. Example: You ask for a teacup with teapot ... it gives you (I kid you not!) a woman with thirteen fingers and flowers spilling out of the left side of her skull, holding a teacup the size of a bucket, while a teapot the size of an oil drum grows out of her left elbow. 

What?!!!!

So, experiments complete. I might play with AI occasionally when I'm totally bored, but I'd prefer to imagine my own images and create them from scratch. Like this one:

  

That was me. All me. Painted in photoshop, after being composited from a couple of my own photos, plus a royalty free image of a deer that was sourced from one of those free wallpaper sites where they make you look at 200 commercials before you get to save a picture. You could also go to Wikimedia for sources, or go to any one of dozens of free image sites. These provide the elements from which a picture is composited, and... I'll be totally candid --

In a week, I've seen enough three-armed, two-headed, fourteen-fingered people, and two-headed, five-legged horses, to last me for several years. Look at this one, on the left. Looks okay at first glance. Count the fingers. Who programmed Lexica to believe that human beings have fourteen fingers?! Soooo...

This is something I'll play with when I'm bored, but for all useful purposes, the only thing I'd use it for is to generate the occasional picture element, when I can't afford to pay a bucketful of money to buy a prop.

Fair to say, though, that AI generated art is in its infancy. Come back in five years and see what's happening in this field. The way computers and software advance, I have an intuition that five years from now you won't be able to tell something that was produced by a machine from something a human sweated blood over, for a week. And that's what worries me the most. In fact, it's worrying the entire creative community -- musicians, writers, artists, the lot of us. Many people can see their livelihoods going away. I'm lucky, I don't have to worry about that. I'm retired, and this is just a hobby...

I like to paint. Like...

The "raw" image showed enough promise for me to paint on it for about ninety minutes. But check out the original raw image ... those eyes are doll's eyes; then, as if that wasn't enough, the computer set his hair on fire!!! And the shoulder of his tunic is going right into his skin. There's no depth to the image, and nothing is "happening" in it. It's good raw material, but as a finished image... nope. Good thing I like to paint, right?! 

Same deal with the Chinese princess. The original offering from Dream Wombo was filled with flotsam and jetsam, the face had weird buttons and bits added in for no reason, and the hair went "wrong" at one side. Took me an hour and a half to rescue that one, too!

Mmmm. Experiments complete. I shall now quit bellyaching about AI, and go back to painting, which is what I like best in any case! I'll try to post more often, too ... I've been neglecting this blog terribly -- 2022 did a number on me (don't even ask), but this is 2023, and almost through to the end of Q1. Time to drive on. So -- here we go. 

Willow Creek -- now, this was a challenge!

 

Stonemason's Willow Creek set is enormous ... so huge, it gave me a major challenge. The first time I rendered it, I saw something I haven't seen yet on this PC. The GPU "choked" before the render was complete. Say, what?! That shouldn't happen. So I took the scene apart and figured out what was eating up the GPU space ... swapped out the water shader and changed the lighting model. Phew! With that done the set renders in something like a quarter of an hour. So it was time to get creative! 

The boat was a prop from Cornucopia, back in the days when I dabbled fleetingly in Vue; new shaders and so forth -- it renders nicely in Iray. Our elven hero is CC Foster, slightly tweaked as an elf; and having designed the character specifically for this scene --

Now, that's nice. I like this character a lot. The planes and angles of his face suit the role so well ... must come back to him again soon!

Moonbeams and flutterflies ... this was fun!

 

This is the old Garden of Galahad set, which actually works quite well in Iray without any pushing and pulling on the surfaces and textures (it's odd; some things work fine, others barely work at all). That's Flink's Tree #6 (from Renderosity) on the left, imported as a simple OBJ; and the old GlowMoon prop, which works like magic in 3Delight, but doesn't work so well in Iray, so I painted it in Photoshop, after the fact. To get this effect, I parked a spotlight, very, very powerful, in direct line-of-sight with the moon, and turned on raytraced shadows. It worked! And also --

That's the right hand of Georgia for Genesis 8 Female, with nail polish switched out for (!) a car paint shader. I have two lights set, and loads of power in the Photometrics. The background is a photo I took many years ago at Mount Lofty Botanic Gardens, and the butterfly is lifted out of a 2D photo. The lens flare was added later in Photoshop, using Ron's Bokeh Brushes, from the DAZ Marketplace. This was fun!

And speaking of Georgia for G8 Female ... that's the Shaded Haven set, same lights, I just added the character and switched the shaders on the fabrics, to get a new dress. I really, really need to buy some wardrobe props for the females to wear. This took about fifteen minutes, because I rendered it BIG. In fact, at 3000 pixels wide, I was able to go in and crop a whole different picture out of the middle of it, which gives you a good look at the model and the shaders on the dress:

More soon, as work permits. I have a zillion experiments to run. Rendering happily!

Happy New Camera, 2020!

So -- where's the art? Is this a 3D art blog, or what? Yes it is ... or was ... and will be again; but first comes the new computer. And before that comes about $2,500 in "spare cash." It'll happen at the end of the year, and then -- yep, art. Now? No can do. The desktop that handles DAZ, Terragen. Bryce and all the rest is staggering. You can't do 3D art without a powerful computer! We'll get there, but we're not there yet, guys. Patience.

But what I could do was replace the old camera!

After a year or more of bemoaning the fact that my Fuji HS50 has almost completely given up the ghost, well ... it was time to get a new camera. I've been researching them, looking at reviews, trying to figure out where the "sweet spot" lay, between needing something good, not having unlimited dollars to invest, and also needing to buy something that was light to carry about. So --

All things taken into consideration, I wound up with the Lumix TZ90, from Panasonic ... at at $438, it was an absolutely amazing deal. Then, there's its Leica optics, and its bells and whistles --

Ahem! Suffice to say, I'm having a lot of fun. More fun than I've had with photography for well over a year, because I knew that most of the shots I wanted to get, the HS50 would spoil. (Almost everything had stopped working on it: light metering was off by a mile, and I'm sure its focusing system was way off too: you'd pull focus "here," with your chosen object right in the crosshairs, and it would focus about ten degrees of arc away. Not fun. Not fun at all.)

So, in the last year or so I haven't done very much with photography; and I've missed it. The hobby gives you a reason to get out there and hike around, go the extra "nine yards" in order to come back with superb pictures. What's the point, if the camera is only going to spoil them? So --

The biggest step was making the decision to set down a great wad of cash. With that decision out of the way, the next was to work out which camera to buy ... and you really are spoiled for choice these days, no matter your price bracket. I think I spent about ten hours, hunting down individual cameras, reading reviews, comparing features.

And it all came down to a choice between a Canon PowerShot, and the Lumix TZ90. They are comparable; but the Lumix does a great deal more. It has those Leica optics, and a 3" touch screen display, plus a 'finder ... which the PowerShot doesn't have. The decision turned out to be the right one for me...

...I know, I demand a lot of a camera. I've used Fuji for well over ten years now -- had four of them; but the last one was surprisingly fragile, and I was honestly shocked when it started to break down in just a couple of years. I think I noticed the first "hmmm" moments after the second year. This time around, I've made the promise to myself, to be ultra-careful with the new Lumix, and deliberately NOT take liberties with it. Don't knock it. Don't let it hit anything.

Sooo I've just got myself a spare battery plus charger (there's another hundred bucks!), and have also ordered a camera bag, which will fit the Lumix snugly, not let it move about, and damage itself...

With any luck the camera bag will arrive before Dave and I take off for the Limestone Coast at the end of this month. If not, I'll have to MacGyver something to protect the camera on the road. I'm looking forward enormously to the trip. We haven't been to Mount Gambier in eight years. Hoping to get good weather for this one ... the last trip (our second to the Grampians), we had rotten luck with the weather for most of the time. On that trip, the HS50 misbehaved so much, I ended up using the phone for almost everything -- and every image in that blog post I just linked to was done with the phone -- an UmiDigi something or other, with 14MP and a lot of bells and whistles. Okay, I was impressed with it. But I still need a proper, functioning camera...

My other hope is that my health picks up a bit before we leave. I'm basically going one day at a time right now, and while I know I need to see a doctor and find out what's wrong ... I also know what the tests are going to be like. I'm putting them off as long as possible, because I just don't want to go there. Not ready yet. I'll know when I am. So --

There you have it! Happy New Camera, 2020! This is going to be big fun ... in fact, the fun has already begun. Pictures here were taken at Belair NP, Punchbowl Lookout, and in the back garden right here at home. Monday, we went to Onkaparinga Wetlands, and although the sky was far from blue and the sun far from bright, I got lovely pictures, which you can see on another post, on my travel blog, right here!