Gray Lady - Lighting Variation

And for contrast, a different IBL setup:

Gray Lady

As hinted in my previous image post, here's a Gray Lady skin texture with better detail:

It's based on the bump map textures that were included with the Girl 4 variant of Victoria 4. The conventional wisdom is that you're NOT supposed to make a bump map by desaturating a skin texture to black and white, but that's apparently exactly what they did. Worked out well for my purposes, though. And it has more details-- freckles, etc.-- than the final Girl 4 skintone maps did. Yay!

A fisheye shot of the wacky environment emulated by the image-based lighting used above:

Future Shot

I encountered an old lighting test scene from about three years ago, and decided to tidy it up for a post. I'm not sure why Robust Future Lady is standing in front of those curved sheets of plastic, or what the floaty heat lamp is for, but evidently she's just made a prediction regarding the trajectory of that shot she's holding in her right hand.

This is also an early version of a fairly neutral gray complexion, suitable for receiving illumination effects. I've since found a nifty alternative hidden within one of the first characters I obtained from DAZ...

2013 Noir Jam

Stumpy

Jaxtraw was trying to figure out what was going on with the proportions in his sketch of two wrestlers, so I called in two lightly-customized Vicki 4 figures (one-quarter The Girl 4, mostly) and attempted to recreate the poses-- an interesting, but also slow and painstaking process. The conversation came around to what constitutes "stumpy" proportions, so naturally this joke came to mind:

Click on the image to zoom in (960x1440.)

And here's a different camera angle, to show more of the story. These are standard DAZ Studio renders, using the 3Delight engine. One distant light for the setting sun, with UberEnvironment providing the ambient occlusion illumination. There's also an area light behind the big drumhead thing, emulating the light that would be expected to bounce off it in this setup.

Click on the image to zoom in (960x1440.)

Two freebie props used here deserve special mention. The Super Torus from Morphography appears three times-- a wonderfully adaptable item. And the out-of-focus blob in the background (covering the seam between the sky backdrop and the ground plane) is an instance of the aptly-named Versatile Tentacle by Tempest.

A Peppermint Scheme

The pinup trend continues...

Click on the image to zoom in (1000x1600.)

A remarkably standard Victoria 4, with AprilYSH's Portia hair in a peppermint-candy color scheme. While this hairstyle didn't work well for the previous character, it looked too darned cute here not to render.

WIP: Another Angle

A view from another camera angle. I'm not sure why Blochi sometimes includes individually recognizable humans in his backgrounds, but to be on the safe side, I went Magritte on the skateboarder. Also a bit Vandaleyes, if you zoom in (800x1600.)

Again, the background & lighting are derived from Blochi's "Etnies Skatepark" Smart IBL set.

WIP: New Character

Work-In-Progress: a study of a new character.
Click on the image to zoom in (600x1600.)

Background & lighting are derived from Blochi's "Etnies Skatepark" Smart IBL set.

Susan and her Herdbeast

Susan and her trusty companion relax in the sunshine.
Click on the image to zoom in (1500x1500.)

Gold [detail]

Here's a closeup of the previous image, with somewhat more SFW costuming.
Click on the image for an EXTREME closeup (1500x1500.)

Gold

A demo of a "gold" surface setting, using just a "DAZ Studio Default" shader:

This uses a fairly simple recipe:

• Diffuse Color: [ 153, 94, 51 ] at 100% strength. When you use gold paint on a stage prop, a brown undercoat helps it "pop" better, so I figured it might be a good base color here. 8^D*
• Glossiness: 75% -- a medium-sized specular highlight.
• Specular Color: [ 238, 221, 102 ] at 95% strength.  A slightly greenish, desaturated yellow.
• Ambient Color is zeroed out -- don't need any glow-in-the-dark effect here.
• Bump is 100% of a -0.015 to 0.015 range -- fairly gentle. I use a sandy/gritty texture, such as TarmacTiled.jpg by Fran Baker, from her gallery at ShareCG.
• No Displacement or Normal Map.
• Reflection Color: 255, 238, 136 at 91.7% strength.  A desaturated orange-yellow.

Everything else is left at default values.

Lighting for this scene consists of only two lights: one spotlight at 75% intensity, creamy off-white in color, with raytraced shadows, and an UberEnvironment light, for simulated ambient illumination with non-directional occlusion shadows.  A suitable topic for a future post....

Tracy times Three

Just a bit of foolishness with Tracy...

Line-up Tracy isn't so sure about her doppelgangers bursting through the set. And where did that weird lamp come from?

Thirty Day-- Finale

In under the deadline...!

Something You Don't Like

Someone You Love [Note that the Gnabbist Witness Protection Program is still in effect...]

Anything You'd Like

A Place You Want To Go

A Congratulations Banner for Finishing the Challenge

Thirty Day, Continued

A few more...

Something New

Something Orange

Something You Miss

Something You Need

A Couple

Scenery

Thirty Day

So, there's a 30 Day Challenge running over at the R3 forum... and it finally occurred to me, about 60% of the way in, that some of these might not go too far wrong here at the blog as well.
Images are linked to their respective forum threads, for context.

Word ["Zaftig"]

Inspiration

Doodle ["Do or Die"]

Family Picture

Favorite Fairytale Faerie Tale

Candy

Turning Point

TV Show

Favorite Animated Character Animator, Caricatured

Book Character

Favorite Place

Favorite Food

Happy ArboSecreHalloMas!

TRDL thom wrote: Surprising precisely no one, this week's theme is the Holidays. Draw any character celebrating the holidays in any fashion. And if you aren't into the December holidays of any of the religious or cultural flavors, it's never too late to aim backwards and pull out a Halloween piece... or an Arbor Day special... or hell, a Secretary's Day pic wouldn't kill us!

Uhhh, okay.

Noir

"I kept a wary eye on my customer. Among my people, the cunning of the Humans is legendary. Especially their females."

This was done for the annual Noir Jam at R3, held in honor of Vlad Fiks.  Along with the Noir genre, another of his areas of expertise was retro sci-fi, so I blended a bit of both for this image.

That's Tracy again, one of my repertory company of actors.  I promise, the bobbed hair is temporary-- we only shortened it in CGI... 8^j*  Across the table is a Daz Sea Dragon, wearing a spacesuit made from a Daz Spuggles character-- perhaps an ominous sign.

The Line-Up [alternate]

Now that's what I call a Magic Mirror...

The Line-Up

Here's a line-up featuring three ladies from the Central Casting department at my studio: Magenta, Susan, and Tracy.  Although I've muddled the measurement function somewhat with the poses, hair, and camera angle, you can get a fair estimate by sighting between the top of each figure and her reflection. On the left, we have the standard Victoria 4 height of about five feet, ten-and-a-half inches. Our cheerful vehicle operator is around five foot seven, while the 1960s-esque blonde bombshell tops out at pretty much exactly five foot nuttin'.

Susan's basic proportions, although obviously dependent on some of the zaftig settings provided by the Morphs++ package, are otherwise remarkably straightforward V4 scaling tweaks.  Overall scale, 90%; hip, 102%; thighs, 87.5%; shins, 91.5%; abdomen, 90%; upper arms, 87%; forearms, 95%. Using Morphs++ again, her head was scaled up by 4 percent, while her feet and hands were scaled down by 2 percent and 4 percent, respectively. If you want to stick with freebies, Les Bentley's "Show Scale Dials V4" should provide what you need. (Just be sure to read his excellent notes.)

Wardrobe Credits:

• Magenta:
  • Evilinnocence's Bra for V4
  • The skirt from Terrymcg's Cosplay Costume 10 (I squished the waistband down a little.)
  • StudioArtVartanian's C-String (not visible from this angle, but a nifty item.)
• Susan:
  • Morphing Glasses (about halfway down that page) by Adam Thwaites
  • Marco's Tied Top for V4
  • Sunny Bikini (well, part of it, anyway) by bucketload3d
• Tracy:
  • SickleYield's Free Wrap Top
  • JoEtzold's S.H.A.D.O. Uniforms ("SD-Pant")

Hair and textures are as credited in their respective original appearances. Although I did expand the bun on Magenta's hair, given the Big Hair proclivities of her companions here...

Fab Gear

I've been rebuilding my rendering setup on a newer machine-- still obsolete, of course, but considerably faster than what I had been using.  As I gradually got the libraries transferred (and, I hope, better organized this time), the "Challenging 60's Fashion Challenge" was the first R3 jam I managed to contribute to.

I reused one of my old lighting sets and cranked it up to (ahem) period-appropriate saturation levels...

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"People, people-- listen up. We got an announcement. Stay away from the brown acid, man. It's a bad trip."

Credits, Hers:
She's an instance of DAZ3D's Victoria 4.2, customized for a 60s ingenue effect. (More on this in a follow-up post.) Her skin texture is "Isa," from a DAZ bundle (Aiko 4 Starter Pack, I believe) acquired who knows when. Definitely assists her plausibility. And their "Flip" hair, although designed for a previous generation of Vicki, matched the look well.  JoEtzold's S.H.A.D.O. uniforms and party clothes provided her outfit.

Credits, His:
He's a plain stock Michael 3, also from DAZ3D, wearing the 3 piece suit and "Flat Top" hair they designed for him. I suppose I could have customized him at least a little bit-- but he had just the right doofusy look straight out of the box.

Credits, Setting:
The Wavy Gravy floor pattern is by the brilliantly talented and staggeringly generous Nobiax, whom you can visit at his DeviantART gallery. This is but the slightest hint of the superb textures and models he's released as freebies. (!) That dome is one of my set pieces, wearing its original colors in its five material zones. Dunno if the fact that those were already period-appropriate is disturbing, or merely inevitable... 8^j*