A hunk, a horse, mist on the hills, and a golden dawn...

Images like this look great on your phone as wallpaper -- I've been playing with my 5.5" Android and am still grinning at the result! Give it a shot, see what you think. (To download to your phone, all you should need to do is press and hold on the image till a pop-up menu appears. Then select "download image," and go through the routine to set it as a wallpaper. It's dead easy in Android ... enjoy! Don't know how it works on the iThings: never owned one, sorry.)

Or, if you prefer images in the  landscape format ...

As you can tell, am having loads of fun with the horse at the moment. The model, you might remember from a few years ago. He appeared as the Hyborean Age Calendar Dude, and even before that in a couple of other places, other guises. I like this body/face morph, and he wears the SAV Atlas skinmap beautifully. (The only thing I do to adapt the Atlas map is to crank up the glossiness and specular values, because the skinmap is very, very "matte" ... so matte, the guy looks like velvet, or suede.)

Been playing in Terragen, too. I wanted to see if I could do mist or fog (atmospherics), and I found two ways to do it! Here's one of them:

That one, above, is the most natural shot. It's like you're standing on a ridge line, looking out over misty, forested hills. There's another way to do it, too, but I didn't get to that today: tomorrow. Also...

Golden Dawn. The truth is, in Terragen it's soooo easy to do sunset and dawn shots. The clever(ish) thing about this one is the rocky foreground. I discovered something called a "displacement shader" that allows you to lay down a bed of rocks without importing anything. It's all done with a surface texture map. Neat. I had a quick look at depth of field, but didn't bother today, because I'll be darned if I can see any way to tell the program where to pull focus. It has to be there, but I'm just not seeing it yet. Will figure it out tomorrow.

Must head for bed now: getting sooo tired.So I'll leave you with this: now, there's pretty. I didn't paint the mane and tail on the horse -- thank CWRW for that one; but I did paint the hair on the guy. Juuust starting to get good at this. (You know the line in the movie, "What is it with chicks and horses?" ...!)

Yes, the tavern scene. Plus Terragen highlands, and Amberlight dazzle

Even the faer folk take a shift off now and then ... head for the tavern and indulge in a mug! The Raven: lose the armor, switch out the textures on the shirt and pants underneath said armor; restage the whole thing in DM's Anardhouse set, which goes back about eight years but still renders up as well as anything I've ever seen. It's one of those rare sets that are detailed on the interior as well as the exterior:

Here it is from the outside, rendered in Bryce 7 Pro; actually, done in 2015, I think ... not sure I ever uploaded it. Perhaps I did ... it's about a thousand images ago, and my memory isn't going to play nice over that span! And here is the interior --

-- also rendered in Bryce 7 Pro, today. But the main image was done in DAZ Studio ... just a raytrace on the old fashioned render engine, and then some serious painting in Photoshop to take up the slack. It renders up very nicely indeed -- and so does this character. That's the Yannis dreadlocks he's wearing, and the texture mapping on the costume makes it look like soft, soft crushed velvet. Nice:

Also ... Terragen highlands ... and big experiments with the sky today:

That is a gorgeous sky! Two cloud layers to get this effect. High cirrus and low cumulus. It's another part of the same landscape I designed yesterday; I just flew the camera somewhere else in it, and dropped it down to ground level. Then, after I got this one, I flew it up onto the top of that outcrop and spun it around 180 degrees. Notice the way the shadows fall, above? Now --

Yep, you are now standing on top of the outcrop, looking back at the very place you were standing on the valley floor! And just to be outrageous, after I got this one, I decided to flood the area and see how it would look as a lake:

This is fun. Understatement. Am delighted with the way this work is turning out ... the shorelines and detail in the water -- reflections of the clouds are so on, are wonderful. Here, have a closer look:

Whoo! And to top it off, I went into Amberlight and beguiled away the time it took the other computer to do the raytrace on the tavern scene:

Amberlight also is a lot of fun. Visually dazzling abstract stuff. There's a Version 2 out now, but I have yet to even scratch the surface of Version 1, so I'm not in any rush to upgrade. Pretty!

SF, fantasy, outback flight-seeing in Terragen, eye candy ... a little of everything!

I'd forgotten how much I like this character: Guardian of the city, probably about as old as Duncan McLeod, nooowhere near human! Archangel, alien, faer -- your call. I never actually did decide his backstory, just that he's been the guardian of this particular city as long as anyone can remember, and he recruits new blood, trains them to eventually take his place.

Now ... guarding the city against what?! That's the smart question! Hmm. Let me think about that. Just a raytrace ... I do intend to get back into LuxRender very soon, but this ain't it ... just me being clever with the old, old render engine built into DAZ Studio ten years ago. Yes, it's very limited, I know. But you can squeeze a lot out of it, if you also fall back on Photoshop for post work. Yep, there's a lot of painting in this. 

Project 25 in Terragen is the most complex "terrain" I've done yet: a "power fractal" with a kind of landform pattern called "Vodonoi billows" applied, and almost every trick I know to date. There's one or two more than I could have added, but they wouldn't work in this picture, so ... nice:

On the downside, I ran the little experiment and added a wee patch of plain grass to the simplest render imaginable. Uh huh. What would have been a 20 second preview turned into a two and a half minute preview, because of a few strands of semi-invisible grass. Nope. I think we'll leave the grass and trees and plants alone on this little computer! Let me learn everything I can about terrains, shaders, atmospheres, water, clouds, then we'll move on into vegetation after I get the desktop upgrades. That's the only thing that makes sense. Sooo...

On into Bryce 7 Pro for a science fiction scene:

No way in the world can I get Bryce to give me anything vaguely like a realistic earthly scene, but it's pretty darned good at conjuring alien worlds, and weird, weird skies ... and it's dead easy to chuck a spacecraft into Bryce. The only thing is, for some reason they leave their textures behind. You have to re-do all the textures inside of Bryce. [rolls eyes] Anyway, the result is very nice, so ... what the hey? This turned out well, with the mirror-like skins on the fighter ships reflecting the pink dawn light. I call it Dawn Patrol. 

I'll leave you with a detail -- eye candy -- shot from the character study, and promise to come back to this character very soon. He really is a knockout:

Vows of knighthood, and a wild horse

Just two pictures today ... because each raw render took over an hour, and then there was the painting, and -- well, try that with a splitting headache! I always loved the "Knighthood" fantasy, with the winged Guardian (aka Raven) and the squire ... and this is the third time I've reworked it. The old, old render (2012) is already a nice picture, and a very good idea, but it could be so much more. I staged it again for LuxRender, and it's one of those very few images that don't look as good in Lux as they do in the original raytrace! So, I thought -- what the heck, let's have another go at it and see what I can do now, in 2019. So --

Left: the raw raytrace, ready for painting (you'll need to see it at large size, of course), and right (duh), the painted version. The painted details are everywhere, on everything, including --

-- the young squire who's taking his vows and getting his weapons has freckles! The skinmap is very nice, but very flat. Everyone in the 3D 'verse seems to have utterly perfect skin. I couldn't resist getting in there and painting freckles while I was in Photoshop, doing the candle glows and smoke, and shadows and what have you. Neat!

In fact, there's a lot of painting on all the really good pictures you're seeing now. The horse shots are done very differently, as I was saying yesterday, and it's worth sharing this:

As you see, the horse (it's the Millennium Horse, from DAZ) is rendered without the mane and tail. Then those are added in, in Photoshop, using 2D digital magic from CWRW, and an awful lot of jiggery pokery from yours truly!

In order to get a black horse to light and render properly, the foreground wound up too bright, so I painted that down too, and we were good to go. If I do say so myself, that's a heck of a nice picture. I also find myself looking at the two shots -- the Raven with the young knight just taking his vows, and the wild horse ... are these images from the same story? Hmmm.

There's a new(ish) horse model on the 3D market too: the Hivewire Horse:

I look at this, and I drool. To say it's generations better than the old Millennium Horse it putting it mildly. US$29.95 for the model ... which needs DAZ Studio 4.9+. Uh huh. I am going to have to bite that bullet and get Studio 4 eventually. Mind you, I've been looking at the forums lately, and it turns out that after 4.6 (or is it 4.8??) this is virtually the same as having a Studio 5. It's not at all the same, apparently, as the absolute turkey I tried -- and loathed -- all those years ago. And since I do have an NVIDIA video card, I can use IRay. Nice when something works out. 😏

Anyway ... just the two pictures, because a LOT of work went into them, and I've been nursing this splitting headache all day. And the back. And the foot. And ... urg. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: being disabled sucks. On the positive side of it, I have all the time in the world to do art, though, so -- silver linings and all that.