Creating dawn light in DAZ Studio 3

Working with lights in DAZ 3D, and working with props, are two of the challenges that make it such big fun. When you think about it, everything in the shot is a prop, including the character! Michael 4 is a model too. It's the way lights and props interact that turn software and numbers into art. Look at the way the dawn light falls around the boy's face ... and if you have a look at the second of the two garden scenes, check out the way the shrub casts shadows on the wood, and how the icy casts shadows on the vases.

Dawn light is actually fairly easy to create. You want two distant lights, pink(ish) and blue; and position them down low, so they're pointing just about horizontally from the horizon. Then set up a third light, something like greenish or grayish, to simulate a little bit of reflected light from the ground. It all starts with the sky you're using -- that will dictate what color the lights are.

The sky for the dawn light shots was created in Bryce 5.5 (honestly, Bryce is at its most useful in creating skies. You don't often need Himalayan landscapes, but you need evokative skies all the time). I usually create the skies in widescreen, and crop out the bit I need. The skies are just about panoramic...

...for once in life something is easy to do, and very effective! I love Bryce for its skies. Used to spend ages trawling through my digital pictures, looking for skies that would crop out and modify. Now, I just take a few minutes and make exactly what I want in Bryce. And many times, the sky (or landscape) inspires the rest of the picture.

The hardest thing about working with loads of props is ... waiting for the computer to get through the work of moving or morphing something. The more props you load in, the slower and slooooower it gets. The garden scene is loaded like you wouldn't believe. The dawn light scene is just Michael 4, pants, boots, belt, shirt, toupee, helmet, staff, floor, wall, and sky. That's comparatively little, and the computer handles it fine. The top renders, though --! There must be about sixty props loaded in, plus lights. You need a lot of patience. Or a more powerful video card. Hmmm. Note to self: call Cherry Computers, and/or IT Warehouse...!

Jade, 22 April

***Posted by MK: my connection is intermittent, too slow for this.

Amadeus ... immortal -- past, present and future tense!

2014 Edit: all that remains of the original 2010 renders is a few thumbnails. The images themselves have vanished along with a deleted account from which they were called, or remote-loaded. However, I do know this character very well indeed -- Amadeus the Vampire. He's been through numerous incarnations across the years, and I can fill in here, bulk this post back out, with other images...

Past tense: in the tavern (raytrace)

Past tense: with cousin Dimitri - a castle

Contemporary: Amadeus, 2024 -- Lux Render

Contemporary again... Lux Render

Future tense: Amadeus and that android

3D fantasy ... just a few beauty shots today, because I grabbed the opportunity to take a day off, and it's been a great day but I'm really tired! So these are sort of experiments in color ... and they worked.

There's a color combo that is so impressive. You see it in movies: there's a purple sky in the background (twilight or dawn, or a storm), and they light the actors in the foreground in gold or orange. There's a shot like this in Mad Max 2, and also in Conan the Barbarian, and also (for my money, the best one) in The Vikings, which might be a classic movie -- 1958 -- but has some of the most amazing photography ever done. Still. The magic is in the juxtaposition of colors, and I've wanted to do this for ages.

The figure is the Vampire Amadeus. The background is just a quick set made of columns, a floor, a top beam. The most important items are the sky and the lights. The sky was done in Bryce and imported as a backdrop. The lights were set up soooo easily. There's only two -- an orange one and a pale yellow one, with deep shadow maps set for both.

And it really works!

Jade, 21 April

The Squire, D-formers, and render blues

The 3D hunk ... classic fantasy hero ... I like this character a lot. You saw him for the first time in yesterday's renders, and I thought I'd come back to him today...

From the artist's point of view, it would be soooo nice if the bed were to "give" under him, reflecting the fact that about 175lbs of hunk just sat down... (Back to the Deep Shadow Map here, because today, I cannot get a raytrace to save my life...)

Deep Shadow Map, sorry...

Starting to play with the D-formers a little bit. Got to figure this out, but the bed sure did dip when it was told to! 

Also, notice that all renders except the top one (back at the investiture) are NOT high-rez renders. If you click on them, see them at full size, you'll see that they're grainy. This may be a symptom of an inadequate video card. So I was on Google, looking at the price of a card that'll do the job properly. Well ... you can pay thousands for video cards, but G-Force has a decent one for a couple of hundred.

So -- I feel a new video card coming on. DAZ is pretty forgiving if you "only" have a few props in the scene, but when you start to load 'em up, you get all kinds of problems. And sometimes you can get crash-prone even with just a few items in the scene.

Was working on a job today and it took upwards of 15 reloads following 15 crashes, to get to the end of one fairly simple render. A beachgirl in a bikini and sarong. This should have taken about fifteen minutes:

...and in fact it took about two hours, and heaven knows now many new gray hairs! I mean, it's a hell of a nice render, but it's not two hours' work, and it shouldn't crash the software upwards of 15 times. Right? Right. So ... video card.

Speaking of things technical, I'm still ferreting away at the challenge of not being able to open any of my old projects after the computer reformat. And I think I just saw a glimmer of light. It's in the support files -- yes, I know. Here's the thing: the OLD projects are looking for support files called something like "support-file-abc," and the program is supposed to generate new support files with the same names. Right? Well, it's not ... it's generating new support files called "support-file-xyz," so, even though I have new support files, the old old projects can't find what they need/want, because the new files are being created with different names -!!!

So, what about if I took the new files and copied them, and changed the names over to the OLD names, so that my old projects can go looking for what they want ... and find it?!

Tune in next week for another exciting episode.

Jade, 20 April

***Posted by MK: my connection is intermittent, too slow for this.

The Investiture ... the Squire becomes the Knight

Creating characters is one of the best things about 3D artwork. Every time a new character is born in a series of images, you can't help thinking of a story. This one was a squire about three days ago. His knight is dead, there's no one to replace him, and His Lordship has decided to invest the squire. There's a big, white warhorse outside; there's a battlefield waiting for him...

And here I am again, playing mix and match! Lovely textures on the costume (it's the Lion di Castiglia costume), with a new hairdo (My Rockstar hair from Neftis), and the skinmap from Tosca's Mario -- but not Mario's face ... but those are Mario's honey-and-cream eyes:

The floor and back wall are from the Cloisters; the candlesticks are from Merlin's Medieval Tavern. The helmet is one of the set, Merlin's Medieval Helmets ... and the staff was knocked up by me when I got tired of trying to get one of the Val Fantasy Spears to behave itself in terms of the x,y,z coordinates.

There's five lights set: three distant lights (set up exactly as I outlined here), plus two point lights, one parked on each of the candles to add add a bit of illumination there. Also, all the lights have shadows turned on, so the shadows and textures are beautifully complex.

Speaking of shadows ... I think I've run out of ram, or brainpower, or processor power, on this computer. Yeah, I know, I need a bigger, better, faster video card. Because I reach a point where I can no longer render shadows:

This is actually the third or fourth time I've run into this problem, and the common denominator is always that the scene is top-heavy with props. Scores of them. Then the lights are set up. Then -- sure, I can render the scene, but not the shadows.

My solution in the short term will be to hand-paint the shadows when I need to. My solution in the long(er) term is to, uh, get a better video card. And a RAM chip while I'm there...

Jade, 19 April