Two guys for the price of one...!

So I sez to him, "Okay, so I go stamp on Jabba's tail. But what do I get out of it?" And he sez to me, "You get to keep your head on your shoulders, kiddo ... what, you want more?" And I look him up and down in his fancy-smantzy green jacket that cost a fortune, same as this suite at the High Five is costin' him an arm and a leg, and I sez, "Yeah, maybe I do."

And I guess this constitutes Episode Five! It's a bit of a thrill to see to see how you can get the characters to interact. In fact, you can probably track this "story" back to Episode Zero: http://3d-adventures.blogspot.com/2009/10/got-new-toys-today.html -- I called that render "In the Land of Fire," and at the time our gunfighter was blond. If I was going to seriously pursue this as a story, I'd go back to the project which was rendered as "Land of Fire," and I'd adjust the character. (I did actually change the model too. Land of Fire was a different face as well as being blond:

And this is one of the Very Best things about the DAZ work ... you can mix and match everything, save the characters, change the backgrounds, and literally put together a story in pictures. Gunfighter arrives insystem, meets a contact who tells him, "You gotta get up to the spaceport." Next thing you know, you're rendering Leather clad hunk makes dangerous rendezvous at spaceport ... then you're into interior shots. Have a look at the last few days.

I'm actually getting the itch to tell a story here. Anyway ... it's all a blast. I can't recommend the DAZ studio highly enough. You do also need a good eye for backgrounds -- either creating them or photographing them, unless you want to get into the 3D "environments." These are absolutely incredible, but they do tend to be a bit expensive. You could drop a couple of hundred bucks to get the sets and a couple of props, to tell a scene. Which is chicken feed, when you remember how much work was put in by the designers, to MAKE the sets and props.

However, me being on a budget, I'm doing it mostly with photographics, and am going to try my hand at making models in Hexagon ... when the disk gets here. The mail is infuriatingly slow.

Oh yes ... and both the characters in the top scene are Michael 4 "takes," as designed by me. Like I said -- two guys for the price of one. And you gotta like that.

Jade, 8 November

Encounter at the High Five Hotel

Aha ... at last we get the reverse view and see the guy our hero came up to the spaceport to meet. The story so far:

Leather clad hunk makes dangerous rendezvous at spaceport
Hunk out trawling for the right kind of trouble...!
Dangerous liaisons

And here we are face to face with the guy who just handed over the gin martini with the hell stirred out of it. For the last couple of weeks we've been messing about, trying to get a really good 3D "face" for the character of Neil Travers in Hellgate, because a project close to the hearts of Mel Keegan and self is to bring Hellgate and NARC to life in 3D images, if not animations.

With the character above, were 80% of the way to Neil Travers, so he can join the "rep company of my characters and start doing a little acting...!

I wanted a background with a viewport with a stunning view of an earth-like planet. Well, when you want this kind of specific thing, you're probably on your own, so I knocked up this background image myself, in Serif ... it's not 3D. It's "just" the drawing tools in Serif X3 and a shot of Earth from orbit, from NASA. You'd actually be surprised what you can achieve in terms of drawing -- in a very short time -- with Serif. I only had a window of a few minutes to do this, so it's fairly simple, but even so, it's made of 26 elements (27, if you count in the NASA jpeg), plus object fills, drop shadows, pillow embosses and multiple transparencies. It's still a very simple image, but it's good enough to do for now, and ... I just ran out of time.

Now, if the guy in the green leather saying, "Hand over the gun, and we'll talk." Or is he saying, "Come to me arms, you bundle o' charms, and stick to me heart like chewie" ...? (Does anybody in the world still call chewing gum chewie?? Or are we back to wookies, wet or otherwise, whom we met in Chapter Two...)

Perhaps tomorrow all will be revealed. And if 'all' is revealed, I'd probably better upload it somewhere else and give a link to it, before somebody sends Blogger a message, "There's nekkid uys neckin' over there!" Well ... we'll see.

Jade, 7 November

Dangerous liaisons

And he sez to me, "Keep your hands right where I can see 'em ... lose the gun, drop the jacket. I don't trust you as far as I could throw a wet wookie." And I sez to him, "What the hell is a wookie, and what's so bad about them when they're wet, and why can't you toss them far?"

Seriously ... Continuing on with the theme of the "leather clad hunk" who arrived on the spaceport platform in "episode one," and went looking for trouble in "episode two" ... well, looks like he found it right here in episode three!

Of course, there's many different kinds of trouble. I couldn't resist rendering another kind:

There you are, you see ... until the camera pulled back, you had no idea he'd not only gotten rid of the jacket, but the leather pants and boots as well. And was offered a martini (a gin martini with the hell stirred out of it), and is now reaching out to take the drink before sprawling on the couch in this ten-thousand-credits-a-night hotel suite in the High Five orbiting hotel and giving a sultry look to whoever just handed him the martini...

It's an interesting scenario, and you could go a looooong way with this. [grin]

The background is a real hotel interior, just not the hotel in Abu Dabhi which provided the spaceport exterior the other day. This one is a hotel somewhere in eastern Europe. I think. I can't actually remember! But no, it's not a 3D model, and even if it were, I didn't model it. That will come along later, when I've gotten into Hexagon and learned how to do this stuff. For the moment I'm more than happy learning the ropes about lighting, matching model and background colors so the model and the pasted in image look like they belong together rather than being different entities. Because if you don't match the model to the background, or the background to the model, you don't get a "scene," you get a photo montage.

The color matching is done by either jinking the color of the background in red, green and blue till it "comes good" (and the best prog I know for doing this is the free one, Irfanview!), or else setting up lights on the model and changing the color of them to ... well, change the color of the model.

The model we've been following from the spaceport to the boudoir is DAZ's Michael 4, wearing a face and hairdo designed by me, and the high-rez skin map (which you buy separately).

You know, I might just follow this scenario along and see how much trouble this particular hunk can get his luscious self into. Mind you, if I did, I'd be uploading the images someplace else! I swore up and down I'd keep the contents of this blog "general" enough not to have to slap a warning on it ... and this scenario could get, uh, real steamy, real fast!

Jade, 6 November

Trawling for the right kind of trouble...!

Later that same night ... the hunk who showed up at the spaceport looking for trouble ... found it. Now, what kind of trouble is a different question ...! There's the good kind, right? Wink, nudge.

 

You might not believe this, but the gunfighter model here is exactly the same DAZ 3D model I designed to portray Greg Farris for the cover of Ice, Wind & Fire ... all I did was give him black hair with red highlights, and dress him in leathers instead of Speedos. The rest of this image is an exercise in "camera position" rather than lighting or anything else. You can do fantastic things by flying the camera around your model ...

One other thing worthy of mention: check out the boots! By playing with the surfaces and textures, you can achieve anything from suede to polished leather. Is this cool, or what?

Jade, 5 November