Adventures in Bryce, and a digital barbarian

click to see at large size...

This one really is a Bryce landscape! I'm still at the stage where, when something goes very right in Bryce 7 Pro, it's usually purely by accident. Well ... not really. But I've only scratched the surface, and am just starting to get the hang of little bits of it. Bryce is not for the faint hearted. It's, um, complicated. If I have a bone to pick with it, it's that Bryce trees are not very realistic -- nowhere near on a par with the trees you see in Vue renders. To put it simply, the results you get (or can get ... there's a difference) in Vue are so realistic, you can't tell they're digital. Can you squeeze these results out of Bryce? I honestly don't think so -- but Bryce has a charm all its own. It makes art, pictures that fall into that curious "middle zone" where art and photorealism merge. By contrast, Vue was used in Pirates of the Caribbean, and I think Avatar was also one of their collaborative projects. 'Nuff said.

The other piece today is a (!) digital barbarian. Give me a reason why not! That's Michael 4 and the Millennium Horse; Michael is wearing the Samson skinmap, and a face by me. The horse is wearing one of the CWRW Pro Pack skinmaps, and the saddle from the Dragon Lord set. Add a couple of gnarly trees from the Gnarly Old Trees set, and the standing stone from DM's Elven Stone. The problem with the Elven Stone model is that they forgot to ship the textures along with it. It unpacks as so much white plastic, so the first thing I do is slap all my own textures onto it. Then, a bit of terrain to stand on, and another bit in the background -- textures and displacement maps on both ... upwards of 60 test renders, including two raytaced ones, to get it all pretty right; then into Photoshop for loads of painting. (And here's the magic: now I can do 60+ test renders to get it all right -- no more copromises, or flawed shots that have to be called "Finished" because there's just no more time. Gotta love that new PC!)

What's been painted? The horse's mane; the grass; the birds. The sky, though, is a digital image. I keep my eyes open for fantastic skies, and then Dave and I shoot down to the beach or up to the top of the hill, and I'll photograph the sky from every angle, at every zoom. The images show up in a lot of my backgrounds.

I was shopping for odds and sods at DAZ the other day, and got a couple of new items to play with, so I'll be back in a day or two with some stuff you never saw before. (Is it me, or is DAZ getting expensive? I haven't had the chance to rummage around at Renderosity for a long while ... hmmm. Must go back there and check prices.)

Jade, 9 January

A bit of SF today...

In a bit of an SF mood today ... have been reading a lot of NARC and Hellgate! ... so here's a 3D model I got a couple of months ago and never got around to playing with. A real, genuine aircar, which reminds me of a Tactical "squaddie," as Mel Keegan describes them.

(Tactical was the law enforcement body which replaced the Police when the system kind of skewed itself into extinction in the 22nd Century ... if you know your NARC and Hellgate lore, you'll know about all this. Speaking of which, if you have no bloomin' idea what Jade is rabbiting on about now, click here to find out! Word of caution, first: there's glbt content in these books. They're not "gay books" as such, because gay content/focus is waaaaay secondary or tertiary to the kind of plots that would have happened if Tom Clancy co-wrote a million-word series with Greg Bear! Which never happened, of course ... they appear to have left it to Mel Keegan to do this, and I have to say, Mel rose to the occasion with a will. And/but in true SF spirit, MK runs the ultimate experiment of doing everything differently in the futuristic setting ... including the romantic aspect. Trust me: it's a heck of a ride!)

Anyway -- sorry about that digressive ramble! -- just a single image from me today, to touch base here. I have a massive headache, halfway to a migraine, and I have to nurse it tenderly, or I'll pay a nasty price...

This piece features the Skyrider aircar from DAZ , which was one of four freebies given away on the cover CD in ImagineFX magazine a few months ago. I made up a new skinmap for it, because the bright red supplied didn't suit the overall moodiness of this piece, and the alternative "distressed" texture is a kind of bare metal and rust job. Fine and dandy, but on a dirty, snowy night (Christmastime in the city about 100 years from now, in a Blade Runner type future) like this, the bare metal version just vanished into the background...

Speaking of which, the background is not a backdrop. That's the Dystopia City Blocks prop, complete with its skydome ... but I did loads of work with the lights, windows and whatnot. The atmospherics were done in DAZ Studio 3 with planes (primitives) which were fitted up with opacity maps to look like, well, smog! Then the whole thing was rendered and shipped into Photoshop. The windows, beacons, halos around the beacons, and of course the  snow, were all digitally painted as overlays, using a variety of brushes including Ron's Magical Snow!

Must go and take care of this headache now. It's juuuust starting to get the bit between its teeth...

Jade, 7 January 

The Gatekeeper

Click to see these at full size ... 1000 pixels high.

The other day I was looking through some fantasy calendars ... actually, the 2011 calendars that have just come down off the walls and and are being consigned to the cupboard. I was thinking to myself, "I need to sit down and do something gloriously complex, filled with textures and -- and --

Dragons. Now, Dave is the one who works with dragons all he time. He loves his dragons. I've been after him to do a guest post on my blog here about them, but so far, no joy.  His stuff is very, very different from my work -- refreshingly offbeat, surprisingly "left field," full of potential ... and I wish he'd do more of it.

This critter here isn't actually a dragon at all. The model is called the Dinokonda, and you can do a lot with it. In fact, the original Dinokonda is green, but I wanted him to be red and gold, so ... job #1: get in there and make a whole new skinmap for him. Then change out all the textures on his horns and teeth ... and give him blue eyes.

Next? The hero. Create a dude who looks like he just walked right out of a fantasy calendar! No problem. Then ... paint the backdrops. Import a standing set ... I used DM's Circular Shrine, but even Danie and Maforno, the designers, would have to look twice to recognize this, because every texture is changed, every map, the lot. The shrine has become The Gate, and the Dinokonda is the Gatekeeper -- keeping people out, or keeping them in? Good question! The scenes were raytraced, and then shipped into Photoshop to be heavily overpainted. I'm very pleased with the way these turned out.

Meanwhile, I took an hour or so out and installed DAZ Studio 4, took it for a test drive...

Well, I'm grateful for two things: 1) The Uninstall button. 2) I didn't pay money for this.

To be fair to it, I was very impressed with the Genesis mesh -- this is the new fundamental "substance" underlying the human figures you work with in Studio 4. You can indeed bend and stretch the figure, and his/her joints don't crumple and buckle. However, after I was done posing the Genesis figure, I rotated it to see how it looked from the other side ... it left its eyeballs and teeth floating in space!! It did this twice, on two restarts of the program. I suspect a bug in the works --

And the Genesis mesh is the only thing that Studio 4 does, that's a useful "plus" over Studio 3. The other new features are very subtle -- for instance, a new kind of light, the linear point light. These features are likely quite useful, but --

They're heavily outweighed by the downsides. And there are several. First, there's the interface. The old interface was dead simple, understated, positively professional in its linear appearance. The Studio 4 interface is loud and "in your face." Dave took one look and said "They've cartoonified it." This is pretty accurate. The new interface is pure Tom and Jerry in its huge-icon-driven approach. Gods help the people who're trying to use this on a laptop with a small(ish) screen. The enormous panels full of whopping great icons and cascading graphical menus fill up my 22" monitor! And the only reason my system is handling all this is because it would just about run the space program ... if you've been following this blog at all, you'll know that this new machine was under the Christmas tree a couple of weeks ago, and since then -- well, my art has exploded. My old system would have turned belly-up soon after starting Studio 4.

Suffice to say, I don't have much time for the new interface. I could get used to it, if I were forced to, but it's a visual clutter ... added to which, if you're used to Studio 3, you spend your time hunting high and low for where they've put the tools. Some tools seem to have utterly vanished, and doing things which used to be simple is now a big issue. It's very confusing to one who's used to the old studio ... so much so that you would really have to have a solid reason for climbing this learning curve. (If you come to Studio 4 brand new, never having  used the simple old interface, the story will be different, I guess. It's what you're used to!)

Next thing that's problematical: if you're "upgrading" to 3 from 4, it stands to reason that you have a large library of 3D models and resources already installed, yes? I have 23 GIGS of these, ready installed and at my fingertips. Studio 4 cannot seem to get a-hold of them. Any of them. They would have to be reinstalled to suit the new program's directory structure ... in other words, I'd spend days installing models. Urk. Studio 4 would have to be the bees' knees to inspire me to do this.

Next problem: I have a lot of money invested in wigs and costumes for Michael 4 and Victoria 4.2 ... none of them fit the Genesis model, without me dropping another $75 to buy the Genesis Morphs pack, plus the Generation X plugin, which drops the Michael and Victoria morphs right onto Genesis. With them in place everything ought to fit, and the figures should bend and stretch without buckling. But I'm not, at least not right now, in the mood to spend the bucks, because Studio 4 doesn't offer enough incentive to make it a "must have, must do" thing.

One reason to get into it would be if Studio 4 were stuffed full of things that Studio 3 doesn't do ... but the fact is, it's not. Once you get past the Daffy Duck interface, and start dropping down menus, the infrastructure -- what the program does, and how it does it -- is sooooo familiar. All the old functions are there; and precious few new ones, so that you're left with the question: I have to learn this whole Bugs Bunny routine, just to keep on doing what I was doing yesterday, without any problem whatsoever --? Hmmm.

The good news is, Studio 4 installs separately from Studio 3 so that, theoretically, you could run them back to back and make the transition gradually (the way I merged over from Micrografx to Photoshop, without much real pain at all). In practice, it's not such good news. Studio 4 hijacks your file association, and nothing, repeat nothing you can do will change it back. I went through the file association process three times, with three restarts, to be sure of this. Worse yet, shutting down Studio 4 when it has fired itself up without being wanted, makes the program crash. It hangs up and take some time to get out of.

Bottom line: I think the program still has a swarm of bugs; the pluses don't warrant the awful new interface, or the time it would take to reinstall everything, or the money I'd need to spend on the plugins, just to end up right back in the same place ... and it's damned annoying to have your file association irrevocably hijacked.

For myself ... I'm probably going to stick with Studio 3 and wait for Studio 5, which will almost certainly come around in a big circle and fix a lot of the things people didn't like about 4. If it doesn't ... well, obviously, eventually we'll all have to make the change to the new "cartoonified" interface, or else change to another program! Now I understand why people on various forums are saying, "I would become a Poser user before I'll change to Studio 4 ... and I've been a DAZaholic since Version 1.2!"

Well, I'd been curious -- and now the questions have been answered. I do like the Genesis mesh! But that's the only thing I like. The rest is a rather large nuisance, so I hit the "uninstall" about 90 minutes after I'd installed it. Back to Studio 3 -- and loving it.

Jade, 6 January 

CG art: Warriors of the Apocalypse

Here's something new: the armor on the Millennium Horse is a knockout.  Then I thought, why not take the Raven character, with the black raven's wings, and put the two together in a Gothic setting -- and have the winged avenger in armor too?

The horse armor is known as the Dragon Lord armor -- why, I have no idea, because it doesn't involve Michael 4 or the Millennium Dragon. But it's a cool name. To get it to look like this, I cranked the bump map settings out to max, and then added a "positive" value of 2. This gets all the ridges and delves and engraving to stand up. Looks marvelous.

The armor on Michael 4 is Powerage's Supreme Armor -- you've actually seen it before, but not in eons. Again, I cranked the bump map settings, and played with the specularity (ie., the glossiness of the surfaces) and the reflectivity.

The set is the Cloisters standing set, from DAZ (both the armor sets are from DAZ, too). You've also seen this, but I think it's been about a year since I used it! Golly, how time flies. The backdrop is a Bryce sky with lightning added in using Photoshop brushes...

The wings on the winged warrior are the Feathered Wings (ditto the market source), and again I did a lot of work on them to bring them up with this effect. I rather like the "mystic avenger" character ... making him anything but European or Caucasian, also adds a dimension.

There's about six lights on the warhorse scene, and about ten lights on the cloister scene ... and both of these renders were raytraced and then heavily painted in Photoshop ... but the painting is so subtle, you're not going to actually see it. I was basically painting with "inks," to bring up the contrast, shine, reflection, etc., in the armor. When you do this, you're using the brushes that lighten and darken parts of the image ... if you pick your airbrush setting just right, and load it up with the right color of ink, you can have it darken the dark tones and leave the light tones alone. Then you can do the reverse. Working across the same area of the canvas multiple times, you can get fantastic effects with this. It's also great practice for me, getting my brain wired up to use a really good mouse pen...

Have been looking at the lately, and drooling. Have you ever visited the Wacom site? Hmmm. Well, the one everyone talks about is Wacom Bamboo -- and this is the one I knew, myself, a couple of weeks ago. However, if you're dead serious about this, you'd be looking at their other range, the Intuos4. They're fantastic. They're expensive. Like I said, am drooling, but I don't know if I can afford the Intuos4! Will more likely stick with the Bamboo range -- and they really are the next generation up from graphics tablets like Genius, Kanvus and Digitizer. Right now I'm using a strange hybrid setup -- Digitizer tablet that has to be 6 years old, and a new Kanvus stylus -- but the Kanvus drivers won't work, for some reason, even with the Kanvus tablet ... so the tablet went back in the box, I pulled out the old Digitizer one, and fell back on the Windows plug-'n-play drivers. Hey presto. Perhaps not the ideal solution, but hey, it works.

The other thing I downloaded from DAZ, when I got the Feathered Wings and the Dragon Lord horse armor was Studio 4 -- free on the day; I understand it's usually fifty bucks or so. Have been dying to get the chance to load this up and play, but (whinge; whine; whimper) there's been work to be done, and there still is! Gimme a few days to get things straightened out, and then I'll be back, and tell you what I think.

Jade, 5 January