Native American beauty ... and how to turn photos into paintings

Art is one side of the coin and photographic realism is the other, and 3D art can go either way. In DAZ Studio 3 you have the ability to configure the camera to decide the aperture, depth of field, point of focus and so on, which can give an amazingly "photographic" flavor to your pictures. But the question is, do you want to try to imitate reality, or would you prefer to ... well, paint? The beauty of 3D is, it's your call. You can actually do either.

Getting 3D renders to have the appearance of paintings is actually a lot easier than doing battle with the camera configurations! The painted "look" is in the lighting ... how you manage shadows and also the color of the lights. It's a lot of fun figuring out how to do it.

Today's render was done exactly the same way as the horse yesterday: a background digital painting, the model, and foreground environment props, plus some creative lighting. nice!

On the subject of art ... actually, turning photographic images into art ... I've been asked to go through the process step by step, take the mystery out of it! So here goes.

Click on these images to see them full size -- the instructions are on each image:



Trust me, it works! There's a couple more tricks you can do, but most pictures won't need them. You can "overcook," or "oversaturate" the color, which imitates how an artist's colors are usually a bit less subtle than reality. You can also "decrease the color depth" of the image, from 16 million (JPEG) to 16 (!), like this:

What this does is to dump even more information out of the image. The results get closer and closer to impressionism. Again, know when enough is enough, and the final image can be (should be!) gorgeous.

Jade, March 6

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

3D art meets photographic realism

2014 Edit: Nope ... in the fourteen years since this was posted, the image is gone. The thumbnail I have is too small to be useful, so ... I'll fill in with some other horse renders. Sigh. If the original shows up on some hard drive somewhere, I'll return to this post and update it again, but for now...

Back to the original post, text-wise...

3D fantasy meets photo realism ... it would almost fool the eye into believing that this was your actual, genuine photo -- except that the "Garden of Eden" setting couldn't possibly be real, so you know it has to be artwork...

[snip -- image gone]

And here's where you start, with all the environment props you can get your hands on, as well as the Millennium Horse himself, and the CWRW pro textures. This one is a glorious bay ... he's just superb. The ground under his feet is the "floor" from the Easy Backgrounds kit (just click the icon to make the wall and edge invisible), with the "dirt" texture applied. Then, everything else ... every flower and leaf and blade of grass, plus the fallen logs and the boulder, are all added in as "environment props." Even the trees in the background are props ... then the whole thing goes out to a background image of a waterfall in a forest. One thing is missing in the above image: shadows! It's a nice shot, but there are no shadows underfoot...

[snip -- image gone]

Here's the same shot with the deep shadow maps turned on for all three distant lights. And suddenly our horse is casting shadows ... which, for me, takes a lot of sheer luck, because every time I turn on shadows, there is an excellent chance DAZ Studio will crash the PC to the desktop, and ... it's over.

There's only one major difference between this artistic rendering and the top picture, which is photo realistic. Depth of field. In a photo, if you focus on the horse with a 50mm lens and a medium- to large-size aperture (which you'll need, because you're in a woodland setting and the light isn't too bright), you get limited depth of field, so you couldn't have the flowers in the foreground and the horse and the trees all in focus. So if you were to fix this in your final render, you'd have the photo rather than the painting.

I leave it up to you to decide which you prefer!

Jade, 5 March

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

Vampires. In church. Right.

The vampire goes to church ... or at least strolls through the place after dark, when there isn't a human in at least half a mile! There's something deliciously wicked about vampires in church, and this one in particular! Yep ... something convinced Amadeus he ought to check out the venue, admire the architecture, listen to the acoustics.

The set is something called Silence ... it's a fantastic set, with one exception. I'm still trying to figure out how to light it. It's an interior for an old, old church, highly detailed, amazing to look at. Now, the cloister set (the one with the big 'Charles Bronson' superhero with the looooong burgundy hair ... whoa), that one is so simple to light. You literally can't do anything wrong in there. But the Silence set? Exactly the opposite. It looks amazing, fantastic, but lighting it is less of a tough job than a mystery. No matter where I put the lights, they, uh, don't render the way they're supposed to. And immediately that you turn on a deep shadow map for any light at all, the whole picture goes into a complete blackout.

I know I'm just not getting it right yet, so I chickened out, and in order to a couple of nice renders today, I used the kit's own default lights. This is something I NEVER do, but this time around, I just blew off half an hour trying to get my MY lights work -- no joy! -- so, default lights it is, for today.

Also, as promised...

The magicians from the last couple of days -- making magic. And by the looks of things, they're making it work!

Jade, 4 March

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

Making Storm Magic!

Magic, storm magic, whatever you want to call it ... just a couple of beauty shots today, guys, because I'm busy beyond anything you can imagine -- or, if you can imagine it, I'll bet you wish you couldn't! I could use a time machine. I need a TARDIS. If anyone knows how to get in touch with Doctor Who (or Captain Jack ... woo hoo!) let me know, and I'll make the call. If I could jam three days' work into a single day, I'd be caught up...

So please enjoy these beauty shots -- and visit again tomorrow when, with any luck at all, I'll show you the other half of this partnership. Two gorgeous guys are working magic by the light of a storm ... now, what kind of magic?!

Jade, 2 March

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