The Wood Goddess ... and having a ball in Bryce

click to see at full size -- 1000 pixels wide ... but I had the presence of mind to zap these guys with a bit of file compression, so they''ll download faster.

The main picture today is called The Wood Goddess ... do you remember the Spirit of Winter I uploaded for Christmas -- the one with the ice wings? I guess this would be the female equivalent. In fact, it's the antlers from the Wood God costume (they're actually attached to a goshalmighty hood, but you can easily make the hood go transparent and leave the antlers behind), and the Yaana skinmap, and the Celestial Hair. The element I like least about this image is the hair, because no matter how you render it, it looks plasticky, and the only thing you can do is paint over it in Photoshop later. I didn't have a whole lot of time to paint on this, but I did enough, I think, to "get away with this"... here's the detail shot:

The thing I like most about the shot is the way the snow came out -- that was done with a terrain created in Bryce and imported into DAZ Studio 3 as an OBJ, and then mapped to hell and back. The backdrop works well ... a digital shot which was adjusted into night colors, then had the moon zapped on with an .abr brush and the stars hand painted ... which was just the start of the fun. There are about 12 layers of additions and effects in Photoshop, to get the image to look like this. The original render was ... glaringly bright and "plastic." You wouldn't have been impressed. The final result? Me like. Muchly.

The second image is a Bryce project, which represents an experiment: this is the first time I ever imported an OBJ and used a real 3D model in a Bryce shot, rather than using Bryce's own trees. Remember the other day, I was grumbling about Bryce's trees not looking very realistic? These little spruce trees are the Rhodi-Design props, which I think I got from Content Paradise (which is SmithMicro's store). There are also some fantastic new trees appearing on the market  now -- so I can't have been the only one grumbling about the ticky-tacky appearance of so many 3 trees! These are on my wishlist at DAZ:

I'm having a ball with Bryce, now that I have the processor power to run it properly. Today's landscape, I call "Craggy Skyline" ... ooooh, I wish I could tell you that was one of my textures on the terrain (the ground), but it would be a horrible fib. It's one of David Brinnen's materials, which were shipped as Pro Materials with Bryce 7 Pro. This is such a complex material, it took only a tiny bit of post work in Photoshop to make it pass muster at any size. But I did configure that sky myself ... and the next thing I'm going to experiment with is what they call "volumetrics," which is a way to make devastatingly realistic cloouds...

It's just possible I started to learn Bryce backwards. You actually can figure out a lot if you play with abstracts first ... shapes and colors and textures. Like this:


Well ... I guess I probably did what everyone else does: jump in headfirst and start with landscapes! In fact, playing with mapping and so forth first would make it easier to learn the tricks. The problem is, it's nowhere near as interesting -- and who starts up Bryce with the idea of doodling with abstract shapes?! You want misty mountains and fjords and stormy skies, and all that good stuff. You tend to make a huge mess for the longest time, and then eventually the penny starts to drop.

There's an image rendering in the background right now, which I hope to show you tomorrow. Even on my new system, it's going to be a looooooong render, but it should be worth it. The original render settings called for a "maximum ray depth" of 12 ... which would have resulted in a 15 hour render! Hmmm. Revert to the defaults, and it comes back to a 2-3 hour render. I can live with that. And when it's done, I have another experiment to run --

Get into the advanced render settings in DAZ, and see how far the render engine can be driven. The default settings are low, and I never had the ability to go past these. In the last few days, Dave and I have been looking at every render engine from Lux to Reality to Octane ... but the problem is compatibility. Getting DAZ to shake hands properly with anything is a major issue.  As much as I love DAZ Studio, I'm facing the very real possibility (probability) of being compelled to change up to one of the more industry standard programs, in order to get access to the render engines. If you're interested, have a look at Luxology, which is a cool grand. Don't even think about AutoDesk's Maya ... it's five grand. Oomph.

Will let you know how the experiments work out ...!

Jade, 13 January (yep, it's a Friday)

***Posted by MK because the internet is AWOL. Intermittent crap.

A grab bag of digital goodies

A grab bag of pieces today ... what I've been fiddling with in the last couple of days -- and it's an eclectic mix. A bit of everything. I've uploaded these at large size, so folks who are curious can see details -- but you might need to be patient with the downloads. They're a little large, and could take a few moments.

There's a portrait of the barbarian you saw the other day -- I'm quite pleased with this face, and in the render I uploaded before, you don't really see it. Then ... an experiment in reflections, transparencies and surface textures. Exotic science fiction, complete with the next-to-naked female and the robot, which are two prerequisites -- but the real gist of it is about the surfaces! A lot is going on in the picture; it's definitely one frame out of a large story, but search me what the story is. Anyone...?

Then, Bryce landscapes ... misty mountains, trees and all ... and the second one is a re-visitation of the one I was playing with a few days ago. I went back into it, and put in cliff walls, with weathered rock formations. A... ha. I think. I do believe a couple of pennies have just dropped. Bryce is starting to make a tiny little bit of sense -- in other words, when good things happen, they're not 100% accidental. Maybe only 80%! Theres so much to learn.

Then -- simple shots, but so effective. A couple of models I knew I'd bought about five months ago, and couldn't find for love or money; they showed up while I was looking for something else. The space sphere is the key model in these last two images. It's the spherical environment in which the spaceship and space observatory are positioned. The ships are inside your actual, genuine sphere, so you can point the camera virtually anywhere. What you see here are pre-set textures -- those backgrounds. My next challenge is to paint my own textures for the sphere, and go fly around in it. The last picture of all is shot from inside the cockpit of the Vanguard spacecaft model, on approach to the space observatory...

Loads of fun, and all down to the processor power I have now. Thanks go, once again, to my husband, for sliding the new PC under the Christmas tree while I wasn't looking! 

Jade, 11 January

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