Pirates!

R3 Jam: Pirates!

Enough to get the idea across, anyway. The rest of my week is booked solid; I wanted to get in on the first wave of this jam; and, as you can see, this design would allow for an indeterminate timespan of fidgeting with details. Hence the sketchy b&w sandwich with scrumptious gradient filling. 8^D*

Gnabbist
-- calling for a ration of grog all around for the ARRR3 Army

That's Some Giant Glowstick

And another render. This one was triggered by a brief thread in Chup's Poser Art Blog touching upon a technical lighting problem. Hey, an art-tech research question? How was I supposed to resist that? 8^D* So, about a week later... (!)

I'm not sure how useful this would be to Chup, unfortunately, as this is (again) a DAZ Studio render, and I don't know if Poser has equivalent weird lighting gadgets. But anyway-- this was rendered using omnifreaker's UberAreaLight and UberEnvironment2. The former, to provide a tube-shaped light source, and the latter, some general ambient lighting. I'm not sure if it's something I did wrong, or if it's a feature-- but having an UberAreaLight in the scene seems to disable shadowcasting on distant lights (i.e., a light source that emits parallel rays, like sunlight.) Specifically, if I try to toggle on their shadowcasting, they go out entirely! But I figured the same author's ambient lighting (and more) gadget would probably be compatible-- and it was. =Whew!=

I also added a couple of point-source lights, parented to the giant glowstick, to light up the inside of her hands and the ground surface near the tip. For whatever reason, the area light seems to illuminate only past some minimum distance, and I couldn't puzzle out a setting that affected that behavior.

Victoria 4.2 is still from DAZ3D, of course, and the other visible objects (apart from the UberAreaLight giant glowstick) are my usual motley crew of Gnabbist-built geometrics. Including that odd helmet-like thing on her head.

Gnabbist
-- "That's some bad hat, Harry."

Blaze

A foray into a new medium. I've been immersed in the learning curves for DAZ Studio and Blender for a while (and, to some extent, SketchUp, although I got addicted to that years ago)-- so, when an art jam over on the R3 board sparked an interesting idea, it ended up falling into that workflow.

It's in keeping with my personal tradition of pretty much ignoring the character, and instead indulging in hokey wordplay. Which explains why there's a blaze here, and a tidge of modesty...

Traditional 3D Renderer's Acknowledgments:
- Kozaburo built the "Messy" hair (and the "Allback" hair, which I pressed into service as a bun.)
- Adam Thwaites provided the unworn bra and the fire texture. (From the incredible wealth of freebies at his most-digital-creations.com site.)
- The Victoria 4.2 figure, what little she IS wearing, and the rendering application are from DAZ3D.
- Blender and UVMapper allowed me to convert my Sketchup models (a couple of geodesics, and the little miscellaneous scenery-filler standup that's carrying the fire) into a format that DAZ Studio could import.

All of the above being (astonishingly) free for the downloading...! A boon for impecunious artists-- provided, of course, that you can afford the massive timesuck of learning this stuff.

Educational Value: Pretty much the lighting.

The fill lighting comes from three "distant" lights, arranged at "random" angles to each other, to avoid having two soft shadow lines combining and painting a bold stripe across the model's skin. Or, to quote Dr. Spengler: "Don't cross the streams. It would be bad."

The firelight is simulated by three point-source lights of varying hues sprinkled into the vicinity of the fire prop. Which, like the sky dome, is completely lit by its own ambient light-- everything else is zeroed out. Including shadows, cuz it looks silly when your fire casts a shadow. 8^j*

One moderate spotlight provides the overall key light, revealing contours and casting shadows.

Gnabbist