Fallen angel ... Aphelion, Stopover ... and Vue!

Click to see all images at large size -- 1000 pixels wide, or more...

Progress reports and updates ... yes!! Two pieces of news ... one: the last of the NARC books has been finished, it's ready to be packaged, and the upload is bang on schedule, set for Thursday. Phew! This has been an enormous job, but the the last two covers were composited yesterday and today, and I am really pleased with them:

... and that's the whole NARC series rejacketed. These are also among the best covers on any of the Mel Keegan books (in fact, I would say they are the best covers). What can I tell you? I love these characters, and the universe they play in. Doing this art has been a great joy ... "down and dirty" science fiction, with the heaviest of heavy industry, the angst and politics and highjinx of the big thrillers ... vast starships, strange worlds, the corruption of old cities and new human cultures -- and on top of all this, a couple of gay heroes who just make your mouth water! What's not to love, right?

The answer to an obvious question: no, we're not going to be publishing a new edition of the paperbacks you can get at Amazon. We've reached an age when 85% of all books sold through are sold in ebook format. So we don't see a need to reissue the paperbacks ... but we can certainly make a range of luscious products available at Zazzle! Get your NARC fix on goodies carrying oodles of the artwork. I'll be organizing that shortly ... stay tuned to this blog for news.

Speaking of which -- here, have some more Jarrat and Stone pictures before I sign out for today. Yawning. Must go put head down in about five minutes, or do face plant into keyboard...

click to see these at large size, of course...

And the other piece of news is that Vue 10 Esprit should have finished downloading by the time I'm doing typing this. Dave has been doing the most amazing things with the free "pilot" version, and it was simply time to get the full version when we noticed, Eon is having a sale -- Vue is forty bucks cheaper if you get it right now. So it's been got. I'm looking at Dave's images and I am drooling over the render engine! You just don't believe what you're seeing ... and here's the thing of it: Vue 10 has compatibility with Poser ... and I have Poser Pro in the mail right now, halfway to Australia. All being well, I should be able to put together a scene in Poser, export it as a Collada file, which is the "bridge" to Vue, and then render it in the Vue engine. Whooo! This is going to be amazing. 

The first couple of images in today's post, I call "Fallen Angel," or perhaps "Angel with Broken Wings." He's hit the deck in the middle of an industrial complex, and I guess the imagery is pretty obvious: spirituality is going down in the teeth of technology. If you've been following this blog for a long time you might recognize the character: the Seraph in a Bottle ... the heavenly creature captured by the alchemist. I did those images about 18 months ago.

The Bryce landscape -- or seascape -- is another exercise in me hunting for a way to make Bryce to realistic stormy seas. I haven't found a way yet. It's defying me. I'll keep hunting -- but in the meantime, this one is so pretty, with the beautiful skyscape and the "stairway to heaven" effect of the light on the water.

Back in a couple of days, with more, but for now ... there's a pillow with my name on it!

Jade, 6 February

***Posted by MK because the internet just ... isn't there right now. No connection.

The leap of faith has been taken...

click to see all images at large size...

An assortment of things today, reflecting what I'm working on. The Bryce landscape, I call "Red Sky at Evening," and its not at all what I set out to create. I wanted a stormy scene. I'm trying everything I know to make Bryce 7 pro make WAVES, but -- no joy yet. The waves you think you see here are basically optical illusions, mostly created in Photoshop!

Meanwhile, Dave is romping Vue Pioneer. I haven't yet talked him into getting Esprit, but it can't be long in the future. He's doing astonishing things -- and I'm amazed by the difference in the way Vue tackles the same job as Bryce. Example: I put down a patch of grass and wind up with a file that's close to a quarter of a Gig in size, and crashes Bryce before I can even finish the scene, right? Dave builds massive forests with over forty billion polygons; the file size is about 10MB and the scene renders in half an hour. I use one tree with 640k polygons, and Bryce takes seven hours to render. Say, what?! Not fair!

The top three pictures are the result of an experiment in lighting. I'm playing around with "black light," to see if a numerous very, very dark lights of various colors will combine to stop skintones turning "muddy" in the DAZ Studio render engine. I'm getting various degrees of success, and this experiment was prompted by the amount of painting I had to do, to get nice skintones in one of the shots I did the other day. You know the one of the two guys standing at the window, in the rain --? That one. The guy on the right, with his shirt off ... even on the raytrace, the skintones were so muddy, you'd think he was covered in freckles! Took a lot of painting to bring that under control...

All of which got me aggravated enough for me to get on Google and start researching Poser. Now, I can't afford Poser Pro 2012, at $500 -- in addition to the which, it only came out a few weeks ago, and is reportedly buggy. But I started looking at the other versions of Poser, like Poser 9 (which is $250), and whaddaya know? Serendipity struck.

I blundered into the traders in the slightly-older versions of Poser, which are going for a song now that Pro 2012 has launched. Back a very short ways, just before Pro 2012 was unveiled, Pro 2010 was state of the art. It was the best in the business, on the desktop end of the industry. So imagine my surprise when I found that it's going for $50-$70 now, because everyone is in such a rush to get the (buggy) new version!

It's, uh, been shipped already, and is winging its way to Australia on a DVD-Rom, in a box. Your actual physical copy, not the OEM Download. The practical upshot of this is that I get to learn the program on the previous version, and when they've dug the bugs out of Pro 2012 -- in about six months or so -- I'll be ready to upgrade; and the upgrade price is $199, so in the end, by cultivating a little bit of patience and learning on the pony before you swing a leg over the racehorse, you also save a lot of money.

Wee-hoo! We could be on our way to the kind of luminous renders I've been drooling over in other artists' work ... renders that are luminous with their ambient occlusion and sub-surface scattering, and ... all that stuff.

The thing I don't know for sure is if I'll be able to get any of my own characters into Poser -- the Hellgate characters, and the guys from NARC. There's no way to open a DAZ scene, or any kind of file, in Poser, so whatever happens, it'll be about file conversion (.dsb to .cz2 or something ... I don't know a heck of a lot about this yet), or else it'll be about manually entering the "dial numbers" one at a time into the appropriate places in Poser's "Face Room."

Speaking of NARC, here's where I've been today: 

This is the third of the five covers -- I did Death's Head and Equinox late last year (those are on-site links to the new covers, not to any pages about the books, incidentally). Scorpio, here, uses the floating sky cities I designed a few days ago for just this purpose. The project was composited in Photoshop, and if you're wondering, I did the characters like this:

Digital actors standing in front of the equivalent of a green screen. Hey, what's good enough to Jim Cameron and Sam Worthington is good enough for Jarrat and Stone! The technique worked well. There were ten different ways to do this, but the green screen method was by far the fastest, and I'll definitely be using it again. The guys were originally rendered with the gunship in the background, in the hangar or launch bay, but the composition of the shot just worked better without the backgrounding. The lights were a bear, mind you -- but well worth it, because I got an almost photographic result here, especially on Jarrat.

Just before I go ... here, take a squiz at this, at full size:

No way could I get photorealism out of this render, but it's still a knockout. (This is one of my own characters. You might not recognize him, but this is the guy I designed for the cover of The Deceivers! This is very close to the best that can be achieved with the DAZ Studio engine, and I'm going to be sooooo fascinated to see what can be squeezed out of the Firefly engine in Poser (always reminds me of the Joss Whedon show, which I used to love). I've seen the most fantastic quality renders off that engine, and I admit, I have high hopes!

Jade, February 3

A little romance, between punch ups and chases --

click to see at large size, 1000 pixels or more...

A little romance -- gay romance at that! -- I couldn't resist, since the characters are back "out of the box" and I'm working with them every day, while I get the series prepped to go to Kindle. A lot of you will be looking for a progress report, so here goes:

Scorpio is just about finished. The last one of the NARC novels to be fully packaged, ready for Kindle, will be the cult classic itself -- Death's Head. And the date for uploading is February 9th. The Kindle "process" takes a day or two, so ... second weekend in February, you'll be able to download all five novels direct from Amazon itself. Jarrat and Stone on your Kindle at last!

Speaking of which, did you know that Kindle has an app, "Kindle for Android" --?? In other words, you can shop Kindle to feed your smart phone or your android tablet. I was at the Kindle store just the other day, basically taking a look to see what it looked like on the phone. On the Samsung Galaxy, which has a 4" screen, the store looks very good. I browsed the lists of our writers and was impressed. So you can be on your smart phone, and buy/download Kindle books right there. Now, that's handy.

Anyway --! As I said, I couldn't resist these shots: a little (gay) romance between the punch ups, shootouts and chases. Here's Jarrat and Stone in a romantic setting for a change. Sub-text on the images? Well ... take a good look. Time has passed between the two shots ... it's raining out now. Missing shirt; Jarrat's barefoot. Hey, enjoy the daydream, right?

These shots were so complex, they had to be done in three stages. The characters were posed in one file; the set was built in another file, then they were combined. Then a huge amount of Photoshop work was done after the renders were complete. I think I spent more time painting in Photoshop than I did on the renders! What made it complex was the details: so many props, lights, shadows, reflections. Originally, I'd wanted to do the background -- the city outside the windows -- as a separate scene, and just put it in as a backdrop, but life never works out the way you hope or plan! So, instead, those buildings are actually part of the 3D scene, in DAZ Studio; and making them look realistic -- blurred with distance -- is something I organized it in Photoshop. Take a look at this:

It's, uh, raining out there. You're looking at about five Photoshop effects stacked one on top of the other. The whole scene was painted in about 12 layers. Oddly enough, it didn't take as long as you might think -- and it was huge fun.

The other shot today, I call "Launch to Orbit." This was done n Bryce 7 Pro and Photoshop. Am very proud of this piece -- it's well worth seeing at large size (it's uploaded at 1100 pixels wide). The raw render was done in Bryce, incorporating the sky, land, buildings, water, moon and ships. Then the fun began. That one took a load of painting. When your eye gets used to the finished version, and you look back at the raw render, it looks oddly plain, or empty.

As I type this, Dave is investigating Vue, finding his way around the interface ... and loving  it. Vue Esprit is on the shopping list for the very near future, and I look forward to playing with it myself. I could wish Vue would run on a computer that's quarantined from the Internet, as mine is; but it won't. You can set it up, but the images don't just carry the company logo, they're "watermarked" all over with obnoxious overlays. There is no way I'm going to take my month-old computer anywhere near the damn' Internet! So I'll explore Vue on Dave's system, and keep on playing with Bryce... 

...like this abstract. Now, that's a weird one, which just "happened" in the course of figuring out how shapes, transparencies, lights and reflections interact. Very cool indeed.

Jade, 31 January

Cities in the air ... Jarrat and Stone are back!

Click to see all images at 1000 pixels or more -- they're uploaded large!

If you're on the Mel Keegan mailing list, you know what's going on behind the scenes: we're working on converting all the old files for the NARC books (yep, Jarrat and Stone!) to the requirement for upload to Kindle. It's a monster of a job, because these books only exist, in electronic format, in DTP software and in the PDFs made from those files. They have to be shipped out of the desktop publisher and into Word, and then the fun begins. Three are finished (Equinox, Stopover and Aphelion), and two remain to be started on (Death's Head and Scorpio). And then, when Mel is done with the sixth and final novel in the Hellgate series, Jarrat and Stone will be back...!

(If you have no idea what Jade is rabbiting on about, go here to find out: Mel Keegan OnLine. A word of caution before you depart: these novels have glbt content. Gay heroes. Gay science fiction -- SF that will stretch your imagination, plus the most delicious gay heroes ... what a combination! Mel Keegan is best known for this work, and if you try some of the free samples, you'll soon see why. Content waring? Not for juniors. Nuff said.)  [2023 EDIT: the dot-com web address is defunct as of early this year. For some reason, the system utterly denied access to it, and it could not be renewed. Then some joker bought it as a zombie domain name, and MK would have to buy it back at significant cost. Not going to happen, but the web pages are all still there and still viable. Find MK online in the same place.]

So yes, you bet, these novels are very much on my mind, and you'll have to forgive me if I'm rendering my favorite science fiction heroes again, while I work on developing the cover elements for the new covers for these books...

The element that had me the most concerned was the floating sky-cities which are a pivot point for Scorpio. They float in the sky of a world called Aurora ... and NARC is expected to fight major battles around structures that are this fragile, this delicate?! It was a heart-stopper of a climax to a book that had already been "out of this world," and I knew I had to really, seriously, do justice to these cities.

So at last I girded the loins and grabbed the bull by the horns. These renders were done in Bryce 7 Pro. Moreover, you see the cities -- buildings, trees, domes, antigravity platforms and all ...? I built those. Also in Bryce. Now, I won't tell you that I'm up to making the buildings -- not yet. Those skills come right after I (somehow!) master the Bryce materials lab. To this point, it's starting to make sense, but there's so much more to learn. One of my new year's resolutions was to stop being a bloody grasshopper ... settle down and learn one thing at a time, learn it properly, fully, then progress to the next level.

But I lucked out and found a Bryce "scene" on sale at Renderosity -- Alien City Blocks. These scenes are packaged and sold so that you can reverse engineer them, and learn. There's all sorts of scenes, like frozen mountain lakes and forest glades. The space city was the first one I've ever actually worked with. I borrowed a few of the buildings; added a park in the middle of the city -- micro-miniaturized trees and hillocks! Then I built the decking underneath, and popped a sphere on top. The rest of my floating city scene was done with some mountaintops and a sky -- which I also designed ... I've got my head around the Bryce Skylab. It's started doing what I want it to do. At last.

While I was messing around in Bryce I also did this...

...which came to me when I was fiddling around in the materials lab and spotted a certain texture that looked like a city at night. It made me think of Death's Head, and the spaceport city, simmering under its smog blanket, while the sky lights up with the sternflares of big ships heading up for orbit. (Damn, I love these books! It's "my kind" of science fiction ... then, if you add in the most gorgeous gay heroes who ever walked on paper or celluloid ... how could you go wrong?)

So elements of that one could end up on the cover of Death's Head, and now I'm starting to play with images of the planet Earth, and massive spacecraft, because the signature "thing" of Aphelion is that the carrier NAC-Athena returns to Earth after a whole career in the rimworlds. Hmmm. Lemme think.

Anyway -- that's where I am at this moment. Before I go -- have some more Jarrat and Stone pictures. You didn't really think I stopped at two --?

And if you notice, in this last shot, I put one of the floating sky cities in the window. I need to get the camera in close to the cities themselves, and show you the parklands. The whole gist of this was that Aurora is a world which is strategically positioned for navigation and "staging" colony ships out beyond the frontier, but the world itself is cold and harsh. An engineer-architect called Leo Michiko made his fortune on constructing these cities ... or did he? What's his connection to the Angel (drug) cartel known as Scorpio --? And of course, that's where the title of the book comes from.

In fact, Scorpio is the one I'm converting next -- and sure, it's a chore. But the source material is so delicious, it makes the work a pleasure too!

Jade, 29 January