Archive for the ‘3D’ Category

Caught Between Heaven and Hell

Thursday, December 27th, 2018

I know this couple’s story.

The guy is really nice, despite his appearance – responsible, a hard worker, kind to children and animals. He and the girl hang out and have lighthearted innocent fun together, watching movies and dancing around in the clouds. However, there are religious differences and the girl’s stepmother seizes on them. The woman is increasingly unhappy in her marriage, so she takes her frustration out on the girl. She asks obnoxious questions about the guy’s sexual history, says nasty, angry things about him, and tries her best to break the couple up. When the guy brings the girl roses, the stepmother accuses the girl of sleeping with him, because of course no guy would give a girl flowers unless she’d done that. 

In the end, the woman wears the girl down, and the girl’s father doesn’t do a damned thing to stop her. Who knows; maybe he’s just happy because his daughter is being targeted, not him. The girl has a breakdown, dumps the guy, and does some idiotic things things to escape “home”. She regrets all of it for years, and doesn’t feel whole until she and the guy get back together. He’s turned out great and is much respected in his career jabbing people with pitchforks. He even stepped in as a surrogate father to put a nephew through pitchfork-jabbing school.

When the girl’s stepmother finds out, she shows signs of wanting a second go at busting them up, but this time the girl has wised up. She won’t put up with it. When things escalate some more, this time targeting  her young mutant spawn, she realizes the price of staying in contact with her family is too high.

Oh. Wait. That isn’t the couple in the picture. That’s my story.

The picture was actually inspired by an Artuš Scheiner illustration published in a 1901 edition of the magazine Lustige Blätter. One can see a facsimile of the magazine in online archives hosted by the University of Heidelberg, along with enough grotesque racial stereotypes to make a Klansman get a hate boner.

I think the picture is titled The Fugitive Saint, but I can’t swear to that. I also know nothing about the backstory of the drawing or the events Scheiner was trying to illustrate. However, I found the juxtaposition of opposites intriguing, inspiring enough to want to rip it off create my own version.

I began by posing some digital models on my computer, more or less reproducing Scheiner’s composition. I soon found the positioning of the tail unsatisfactory. In Scheiner’s picture the tail wraps around the angel, embracing her as effectively as his arms. That was the object of merriment and ribaldry in an online group I follow, with commenters identifying the tail as a symbolic phallus. I don’t think they were wrong.

Four or five work versions later I elected to go full circle – or spiral, rather – posing the tail in front of the demon’s personal area so that it would form a more obvious symbolic phallus. Thanks to the lighting, we can’t actually tell the nature of his real anatomy. Given the fallout from the movie The Shape of Water, which involved some wag marketing a personal aid inspired by the sea creature’s privates, perhaps that’s just as well.

I didn’t care for the color of the angel’s dress, so I made a new texture. White is probably traditional for angels, but it looked monotonous. I put her in ice blue instead.

With the major design issues squared away, my attention turned to minor issues such as the shape of the demon’s ears and facial features and the fact that his tail was so dark it could barely be seen. I also found the angel’s hair growing right through his fingers, the feathers of her wings jabbing through each other, and concluded that her halo looked dumb.

With those issues resolved, it was time to give the happy couple a backdrop. This setting is straight from the tradition of ripping off Alphonse Mucha, although someone better able to keep a straight face might call it an homage or use the phrase “inspired by”.

The phases of the moon are from NASA’s “dial a moon” utility.  The planet and the starry backdrop were created in Filter Forge. The final image uses a couple of Photoshop brushes, Ron Deviney’s clouds and Lily Fox’s halos. As usual, everything was composited and retouched in Photoshop.

And that, as they say, is that.

Sure, it’s art, but is it a quilt?

Wednesday, December 19th, 2018

This week the Quilt Show’s blog gave my Cranky Claus a mention. I have the sense that they focus on traditional or decorative techniques, so I particularly appreciate their highlighting this piece. It was created with some techniques that aren’t traditional to quilters and its subject matter has a little bite, more than some of the blog’s commenters cared for.

I’ve never gotten the feeling that Alex Anderson or Ricky Tims, the “names” behind the show and the site, are prejudiced in that sense, though. Their offerings may be more traditional or feature approachable techniques, but that’s simply a matter of knowing their target audience and how they wish to serve it.

I have fond memories of watching Alex’s show, Simply Quilts, when my son was first born. A wide variety of intriguing techniques were showcased; focussing on them helped me keep my sanity while my son was yowling. There was definitely an air of “Why not? Let’s try it!” about that show, a philosophy which has always served me well. I later met Ricky Tims for about a nanosecond when he handed me an award at one of the Houston shows, one of many he’s presented over the years.

I’m fortunate to have been born to a rich tradition of needlework. My grandmothers were accomplished quilters, thrifty souls who saved every tidbit of fabric from sewing clothes and meticulously pieced them together to keep their families warm. My paternal grandmother went a step beyond that, tatting exquisite bits of lace to adorn her dressers and tabletops. I’ve deviated from that path by pursuing art quilting rather than tatting or traditional quilting, but I like to think that my current work continues the tradition of “Why not? Let’s try it!”. 

A few years before I came on the art quilting scene, people were grappling with the notion that one could paint an image on a piece of whole cloth, stitch it, and it would be legitimately a quilt. It strikes me as a logical step: whole cloth quilts with intricate stitching already existed, so why not paint your own image on the cloth first? However, the development wasn’t universally well received. While some embraced the idea, others muttered about it darkly, even going so far as to say that those weren’t “real” quilts and they shouldn’t be accepted in shows.

Since then, I’ve witnessed similar debating each time there’s a new development. I’ve heard grumbling about art quilts whose surface was made from photos printed on fabric. Ditto for art quilts whose surface is made from fabric collage, stitched leather, quilts made from non-fabric items such as plastic fencing, and sculptures constructed from quilted cloth. Now a few of us create cloth based on images we’ve made with the assistance of a computer.

Some are intrigued by these techniques. Some find them repellent and state that they aren’t “valid” compared to traditional techniques such as piecing, applique, or stitching over a whole piece of unornamented cloth. Still others have concerns about subject matter, protesting that certain topics shouldn’t be depicted in fiber.

I hope that aspiring artists, craftsmen, and art quilters won’t be put off by the naysayers and will celebrate their creativity in whatever ways they see fit. It’s a big planet. There’s room for people to work traditionally or to push the margins. I shall continue to do the latter. 

One of my current projects involves a baby dragon who’s gotten up to great mischief. To bring his story to life, I have to create or otherwise obtain models, pose them, texture them, and light them. Even after the scene has been rendered, there’ll be more work to do, hand editing the render. Then I’ll decide whether the image would benefit from being printed out on fabric and stitched. Not everything does. While some images become quilts, others become book covers or have other uses. In a previous life, these would have included advertising or product marketing art.

There’s no “make art” button on my computer, you see. Regardless of the medium or techniques one uses, whether it’s painting or piecing or collage, it takes time and care to create. It’s a laborious process but I love doing it. Creating my own worlds and bringing them to life is intoxicating.

I invite others to try it themselves. All of the resources below are powerful and free:

Give me a sphere with hair

Monday, November 26th, 2018

My quest began with a case of hives. Thanksgiving night, I awoke with raised, itchy red areas splashed across my body and ferocious itchiness on the soles of my feet. Okay, whatever. Something I ate nailed me – yes, I know the likely culprit. I got up, popped an antihistamine, and got out an ice pack. No biggie, except for the fact that I knew I’d be wasted the next morning and I’d probably have to beg off walking the dogs, which isn’t fair to my husband.

Sure enough, the next day I was doing a good imitation of a character from Walking Dead. I lurched over to my computer, gagged down some coffee, and poked at links on YouTube. Maybe a music video would bring me back to life.

One link was labeled “Anthony Kiedis farts and everyone runs away (funny!)” I clicked on it. It had a promising beginning, with John Frusciante clutching a carton of milk while indulging in a vigorous round of pocket pool. Soon Anthony Kiedis grinned, said “look out, look out,” and began windmilling his arms, presumably so his intestinal joy could be shared with everyone. Frusciante and another guy evacuated. Flea, focused on generating horrible noises with a keyboard, ignored the whole thing.

Meh. It wasn’t really side-splitting but it was alright, I guess. I’ve witnessed similar savagery when boys get together at my house, with guys pointing their posteriors at each other and making sounds reminiscent of a howitzer or a duck being stepped on. On one notable occasion, the action resulted in a door being ripped off its hinges. I ended up showing a couple of boys how to reinforce screw holes with wood glue and toothpicks.

I was vaguely ashamed of myself for watching the video, though. The fact is, if you follow most people around long enough, they’re bound to do something odd or embarrassing. Most of us are just lucky that onlookers don’t have a camera so such moments aren’t recorded. Shouldn’t I be using my time a little better? For example, maybe I could tackle the problem of making fur in a 3D program, which hasn’t gone so well the last few times I’ve tried it?

That’s the thing with some of the tools I use. Many are developed by people who have a neat idea they’re pursuing, out of the goodness of their hearts or in the hope of piecing together an income. Maybe they have a background in software development and testing; maybe they don’t. Even if the application isn’t crawling with bugs like the underside of a rock, documentation can be uneven, the likes of a fellow mumbling through a video on YouTube or popping up to address users’ anguished pleas on some obscure forum. Did he just poke a button or not? What does the button with three tiny squares on it do compared to the button with four tiny squares?

Even tools sold by companies that have a reputable facade can be uneven: Say, that upgrade looks great! What the — what happened to all my custom presets? They just disappeared! What? To fix it, I have to move around some invisible files in an obscure directory? Am I going to need to dip into Unix? Fine. Fine. I’ll just have a cup of coffee and browse through commercially available 3D models while I think this through. Say, that’s an awesome model of a tarantula. And it’s on sale for forty cents and it comes with presets to grow hair! Where do I sign up? Take my forty cents, suckers! Oh yeah. Just let me download this baby and I’ll do some wicked things with it. What the … how do I make the hair grow? Did I just pay forty cents for a model of a bald spider? Argh!

What most of us want is smooth workflow, so when we set out to do something we can. When I’m in the midst of a project, I don’t want a big troubleshooting orgy. I want to know how to grow fur on my 3D tarantula and I want to know how to simulate fluids so it can ooze drool or spider juice or whatever the heck it is spiders do. 

That means that every once in awhile, I have to sit down, fiddle around, and take some notes.

The last time I messed with growing fur or fibers was in Blender. The results were comically awful.

I’d like to think it went a little better this time. I started out by growing hair from a sphere. (Hey, you never can tell when you’ll need a hairy sphere.) I only crashed the program six or ten times before reaching this point, which is about par.

Another experiment, this time growing fur from a model of a squirrel. It turned out that when I changed the squirrel’s pose after creating the fur, the fur didn’t follow the pose. That’s one of those things whose cause isn’t necessarily obvious the first time you run across it, then becomes clear.

I thought the image was amusing, though. It looks like the squirrel is having an out-of-body experience, or maybe doing something vulgar with its fur. Sometimes mistakes are fun.

This one shows fur grown on commercially available model of a wolf. I had to try this because I saw a bunch of pitiful forum posts on the topic. It worked out okay. (Except for the fact that if I look at the upper lefthand corner of the picture, the cloud texture is mirrored, which makes it clear that the whole picture is synthetic.)

No, I don’t know why the wolf has a rubber squeak bone. I just make the pictures; I don’t always understand them. Maybe the wolf got bored. Maybe it wanted to take something home to its pups. 

Regardless, many thanks to Anthony Kiedis’ intestinal rumblings for inspiring me to learn something new.

Another experiment, albeit unrelated to growing fur: making tattoos.

What’s that? The picture is too small to tell what the card looks like? I’ll complain to the management for you. Oh – that’s me.

It’s Christmas card time again. I make my own cards every year, even though it would be more sensible to go to the dollar store, fork over a couple of bucks, and send out a set of bland images of puppies wearing Santa hats.

This year’s card has a Santa on it. It’s one of those design-by-committee, bang-it-together in a weekend things. I grab everyone in the house, plop them down at the dining table, and glare at them until ideas come out. This year, all of my own concepts were influenced by current events and were pretty dark. My husband finally rolled his eyes and said “Santa is on a beach. His sleigh is up on blocks and he’s put a for sale sign on it.”

Fine. I could work with that. I decided that Santa was kind of a Viking surfer/biker dude under that suit, and one of the things he really needed was a full sleeve tattoo. That meant I had to do research by looking at numerous photos of shirtless, tattooed men, which was a great hardship.

I fell in love with a norse dragon tattoo from Sacred Knot. Wouldn’t something like that – exactly like that! – look great on Santa? Yeah. Unfortunately, that design belongs to them, not me, which meant I had to go draw my own.

I’d never drawn a tattoo before. Most of my drawings were awful. I comforted myself with the knowledge that on the printed card, the tattoo would only be an inch across. Also, many real-life tattoos are awful, a hodgepodge of miscellanea acquired over time rather than a cohesive design created by a tattoo artist. If the tattoo I made was ugly, I’d simply tell people that Santa got it as a bet when he was drunk. Long nights at the north pole, boredom, some elf tossing, an excess of mead … it could happen.

After some unsuccessful fiddling around with pencils and a light box, I sat down with my iPad, an Apple Pencil, and a copy of Procreate. My husband put something on the television, maybe Forever, and began waxing philosophical about the program being a metaphor for marriage. I filled a glass with spiked eggnog, grunted at his comments at the appropriate times, and opened a picture of my Santa’s chest and arm on a layer in Procreate. I began to draw, a process complicated by the fact that several glasses of eggnog had made my eyes cross and my body grow floppy. I drew a reindeer, a Vegvisir in case Santa got lost, and for good measure I threw in some random knotwork and Nordic patterns. Soon I had a design, although I couldn’t tell whether it was any good – nor did I care.

“Whaddaya think?” I grunted at my husband, holding out my iPad for inspection.

“It’s fine,” he said, not bothering to look at it.

I exported the tattoo layer as a PNG, sent it to my desktop machine, and once I was sober enough to lurch to my computer, I layered it on my Santa scene in Photoshop. “Procreate and an Apple pencil,” I crowed, “easiest drawing process ever!” Or maybe I belched and moaned about how I’d drunk too damned much eggnog. I can’t remember.

The texture on Santa’s trunks was inspired by men’s garish floral board shorts, particularly the ones plastered with hibiscus. I reasoned that Santa would wear something similar, only in a pointsettia pattern. After running a fabric simulation on the trunks to make them fall just so, I plunked a mystery drink in Santa’s hand. I also ran a fabric simulation on the clothes chucked in the sand behind his chair, so they’d sink down messily.

Details like that are important. I like to think people are subconsciously impressed by the care I put into my work in the split second before they mutter “Eh, there’s no Jesus on this card” and chuck it in the trash.

Ho ho ho.

Father of the Year

Monday, October 29th, 2018

Pizza, baby cage, grenade … the stuff of childhood. When my son saw this he shrugged and said “This is normal”. I think he was kidding.

There’s also a cup of coffee and a doglike creature, two elements which keep finding their way into my work over and over again. One might begin to suspect that I like coffee and dogs of all types.

I’m amused at the notion that a palpably evil creature, a Prince of Darkness type, can’t keep his kids in line. However, I’m a little disturbed that the violence of the outside world is creeping into my work. There are some horrifying things going on in the United States.

I live in a comparatively pleasant section of Silicon Valley. In the main, people in my neighborhood are more focussed on changing the world and making things than attacking each other over cultural or philosophical differences. But once the violence and hatred escalate, nowhere is safe. Fear and suspicion inexorably creep into everyone’s lives.

Journalists, sometimes risking their own safety to share truth with the rest of us, are reviled by the current regime. “The Fake News Media, the True Enemy of the People,” caws the regime’s leader, a man who is apparently unclear on when and how to use capitalization. Assassination attempts have made against public figures. People have been slaughtered at their places of worship, murdered or abused for being the “wrong” color, and school children have had orange-sized holes blown through their bodies with assault weapons.

Meanwhile, the person at the head of the regime preaches the religion of violence. And boy, do some people love that doctrine. I’ve seen people I used to love and respect become instruments of hatred. I’ve watched them turn their heads and pretend not to see. Some of the worst I know are the old white men who served in the armed forces during the Cold War. They really should know better when confronted with the reality of Russian collusion and propaganda concocted in Macedonian boiler rooms. But they don’t. They refuse to see it. Gosh, no; they could never be taken in by disinformation. And by the way, keep your hands off their Social Security and keep those filthy, murdering “illegals” out of their country, the one given to Christian white people by God.

Are others waking up? I don’t know. I used to believe the best about people, in the main. I thought most differences were a matter of people having diverging notions about how to improve the country. Even if I disagreed with them, I could at least respect them for having principles of some type.

Now I believe there’s a core group that lives in denial, or is so filled with hatred that setting the world on fire is just fine as long as brown people and liberals go down with it. They’ll lose their businesses due to trade wars, have crops rot in fields due to lack of immigrant labor, die due to lack of health insurance, and maybe have their children or grandchildren cut down in school by an evil, deranged gunman. But it will have been totally worth it.

The father in this image is inept and overwhelmed. But evil as he is, at least he has the decency to find the mayhem around him disturbing and not incite more of it.

It’s tragic when a man-eating demon is more humane and ethical than a prominent world leader.

Excursions 2

Thursday, October 25th, 2018

This is one of my 3D renders which I edited extensively, trying to give it a painterly quality.

I spent last night trying to do that with Procreate on my iPad. It didn’t go well. Today I beat on it a different way. I’m happier with this result. Mind you, I may change my mind in a couple of days when I look at it again – that often happens – but for now I’m happy.

Why is the lady hanging out stark naked around flower bushes? Uh, I don’t know. Maybe it’s a classical image in the style of ______? Her washing machine broke and she ran out of clothes?

When I was posing the figure, I just liked the the play of light against her bare skin. If my extended family can spend their hours shooting up derelict cars with machine guns and crashing airplanes into power lines, I can jolly well pose naked women next to flowers.

 

Closeup showing the brush strokes on the flowers. I did considerably less brush work on the woman, since I want her to “pop” against the background.

Feet. Again, the feet themselves aren’t as heavily modified as the plants around them.

 

For the sake of contrast, here’s what the same area looked like before editing it.

Stuff I’ve been listening to while working:

Enjoyed the song and the visual homage to Raymond Pettibon. Also appreciate the way Anthony Kiedis has that mildly stern look that comes with parenting, the “I was up at six a.m. throwing damned eggs in a frying pan, trying to find clean underwear for my kid, and extracting chewed-up homework from the mouth of a dog” look.

 

Thank you, Red Hot Chili Peppers.

The subject matter of those songs has nothing to do with my digital painting, but I’ve been enjoying catching up on their music. I particularly admire the creativity of their videos.

Excursions

Tuesday, October 23rd, 2018

Placing this here for posterity. Not sure whether I’ll take it any further.

“Oh, how sweet,” some might say. No. That dachshund may look as though he has a friendly grin on his face, but this is a scene of unparalleled viciousness and peril. The dog is part of the neighborhood doggie mafia. At night he shakes down the locals for protection bones. Anyone who fails to hand them over risks having their pumpkin rolled – or worse.

A couple of weeks back, I went to a quilt show with a mutual friend of Kathy Nida’s. She isn’t fond of social media (or, as I prefer to describe it, antisocial media, since using it means I don’t have to interact with people face-to-face) so I’ll just call her “V” to preserve her anonymity. That works. James Bond had an M and a Q, so I can jolly well have a V.

“Your work is too nice,” she said, or words to that effect. Maybe she described it as sweet. She was referring to the distinct lack of angst or strong themes of any type in the work I had on display, as opposed to Kathy’s work, which tackles all manner of social, environmental, and other ills.

I tried to explain to her that Kathy is a machine and I’m not. I don’t mean that as an insult to Kathy, but it’s true. She can knock out a drawing, enlarge it, trace it onto Wonder Under, cut out five jillion pieces of fabric, and make a piece of fiber art in the amount of time it takes me to stroll to the bathroom and inspect the blackheads in the creases of my nose. If I create an art quilt, I’m usually with it for at least a couple of months, depending on its size and complexity.

I do create more serious work, but it usually isn’t related to me, personally. I function better when there’s some distance between me and serious topics, particularly if I’m going to spend much time with them. A couple of such pieces will be public in a couple of weeks.

 

An experiment. Sometimes I muck around with facial simulation. I’ve found that I can make someone who’s interesting-looking fairly easily, but I find simulating a specific person much more challenging.

I haven’t posted any of the experiments with my son’s face. That’s probably for the best. Imagine coming home from a rough day at school and there’s this thing on your mother’s computer screen, something that looks as though your skin and your features were removed from your skull and laid out flat.

“Hi sweetie! How was your day?” I sing out. “Say, I’m about to wrap this skin texture around a model I made of your head. Do you want to see?”

No. The answer is no. No one wants to see that.

 

My friend V mixes liqueurs, which she donates to various fundraising efforts. Sometimes she lets me sample her efforts. I may have been doing some, um, sampling when I worked on this.

No, I don’t know why a guy in leather underwear is hanging out on an alien planet. He should just be happy that I didn’t decapitate him, plunk him in front of a star field, or pair him with a woman who’s in mid-swoon/experiencing severe gas pains. Such is the state of certain genre book covers, which I’ve created a few too many of.

 

No, I don’t know why his monster is so unhappy. Hungry, maybe? Doesn’t like the color of his human’s wig? Or perhaps his self-respect is suffering because he’s been plunked in this scene.

It’s fantasy. Anything is possible.

Eos and the Anemoi

Saturday, September 29th, 2018

My latest, Eos and the Anemoi, is named for characters from Greek mythology. Eos is the goddess of the dawn and the Anemoi are wind gods.

I have my friend Susan in Central Victoria, AU to think for that title. When I’m creating an image, it usually has a descriptive working title such as Fairy Puffing Cigar or Demon With Coffee. Once the picture is done, I try to devise a title that’s more thoughtful. I didn’t know what to call this one until Susan came to the rescue, mentioning Eos and the Anemoi. I owe her. It came dangerously close to being titled Dame Hanging Out With Weird Dog While Knocking Back Coffee.

I created the bulk of this picture in a 3D program. Texture creation, compositing, and edits were done in Photoshop. I don’t know if that’s it for this image or whether I’ll have it printed on fabric and turn it into a stitched piece. Either way, I’m glad for the adventure.

Here are some production notes.

 

Composition

Eos and the Anemoi had its genesis in an exhibit I saw over the summer, Truth and Beauty: The Pre-Raphaelites and the Old Masters.

That exhibit made me remember the works of Lawrence Alma-Tadema, a 19th century painter. I don’t know how historically accurate his paintings are – I’m guessing not very – but I find his use of detail and texture very satisfying. His pictures often have a romantic flair, depicting the likes of sheet-clad women lounging around on marble lawn furniture while nursing headaches or counting pomegranate seeds.

Rounding up the Sushi  Silver Favorites, by Lawrence Alma-Tadema

Naturally, when I came home from the exhibit I had to rip off Alma-Tadema’s sheet-clad dames, marble columns, and blue Mediterranean sea and sky. To those I added some touches of my own, thus creating my own warped take on Greek mythology. No doubt he’s spinning in his grave.

 

Cerberus

One of the first additions to my scene was a cerberus, a three-headed dog. These creatures are a staple of Greek mythology. They’re supposed to be the gatekeepers of Hades and are usually depicted as fierce, snarling creatures. I thought it would be a nice change of pace to have one which is a peaceful yet alert-looking puppy, complete with an octopus chew toy.

Each time I work with a 3D program, I have to choose between making the models myself or finding some readymade. Making them from scratch is more satisfying in many ways. It may also be necessary if my vision is so peculiar or unique that a model doesn’t exist. However, it can be very time consuming.

I didn’t see a commercially available cerberus model I liked, so I overlapped three dogs, posed them, and selectively hid any components I didn’t want. I did end up with some ugly seam lines and bumps in the render, but removed them with Photoshop.

The image above shows the three dogs with all of their limbs visible, the view we would’ve had if I hadn’t hidden most of them.

 

Coffee

Coffee didn’t appear in Greece until the Ottoman empire, so it isn’t a feature of Greek mythology. Nevertheless, I felt that my goddess deserved steaming hot cup of the stuff.

The cup is based on the Anthora to-go cups used in New York City. It’s just a simple lathe object made in Blender with a custom texture applied. Alas, the render of the cup is distorted, a result of my camera setting. If I was a good person I’d go back and fix that.

The steam is the same steam texture I put in every one of my 3D pictures, available from textures.com.

 

Airship

Fun fact: the airship is staffed by a crew of tiny naked men. I could have clothed them, but I didn’t bother. They’re the size of gnats in the picture and every piece of geometry I put in chews up memory and increases render times. Those with delicate sensibilities needn’t fret, though; the tiny men are every bit as anatomically correct as Barbie’s boyfriend, Ken.

I created the ship with some kit-bashing, much the way one would take pieces of plastic from two different car or airplane models and glue them together.

Here’s the way the airship originally appeared. It’s a commercially available steampunk dirigible, the Spirit of Punk Airship. I deleted or hid the cabin and some other details. I also created textures more in keeping with my theme.

The new “cabin” is the hull from a model of an ancient Greek boat. At first I didn’t know which end of the hull was the prow; I had the hull turned the wrong way with respect to the airship.

Of course, when your ship is powered by a group of naked men rowing through air, perhaps accuracy isn’t that essential.

 

Wind simulation

Eos’s gown is pretty but too static. It’s time to put a little physics to work and do a wind simulation.

 

Here’s a simulation with settings of one Earth gravity and a breeze of one mile per hour. I thought those sounded quite moderate and … um, yeah. That’s exactly the look I was going for. Just like that, with her breasts and one of her hips popping out.

This is typical when I run simulations, whether they’re cloth or fluid or particles. I read the documentation, if there is any, set things up in what seems a reasonable fashion, and whee! There goes her dress! That’s when I laugh, take some notes, and try some different settings.

Some of the simulations were hilariously awful. I ended up with the dress on the opposite side of her body at one point, and at other times it drooped off and tried to slither down her body.

 

Here’s the setting I ended up with, zero gravity and 1 mph wind. I also duplicated her body, increased its size, and made it invisible so the wind could interact with that instead of her “real” body. That helped eliminate an issue with her breasts and hip poking through.

Sometimes it isn’t a matter of one adjustment fixing things. Often I have to tweak several things.

 

Lighting

I used a couple of different light sources in this image. One was an artificial “sun” whose intensity and position I adjusted. I also used an HDRI projected inside a gigantic dome, surrounding the scene. The images above show the “sun” turned off and the dome rotated in a couple of different ways. This lets us see how the dome environment affects the lighting.

 

Geometry issues

There’s always something wrong in one of these renders. No matter how much I inspect the scene in the 3D program, when I look at the resulting render on a pixel by pixel basis, I find problems. The question then is whether to address it in the 3D program and do another render or fix it with Photoshop.

Here’s a typical surprise. This commercially available model of a flower had its blossoms floating above its stems. That might not matter for a picture the size of a postcard, but for something several feet across it’s unacceptable. Should I go back, edit the 3D model, and do another render? That could take several hours. Or should I simply splice in some more stem in Photoshop, a matter of about five minutes? I opted for the latter.

 

Another unwelcome surprise, the woman’s hair going right through her arm. Her arm was supposed to act as a collision object and have the hair wrap around it, but that obviously didn’t work out. Once again, Photoshop to the rescue.

 

Lovely. Her chain is going right through her dress. Yet another Photoshop edit.

 

The final version, with edits listed above. On to the next adventure.

Be grateful for the good problems/Art Nouveau Cyborg

Wednesday, May 2nd, 2018

This post is dedicated to my dishwasher, which has decided that it’s going to run continuously without actually washing or rinsing dishes. That’s what I call a “good” problem. It’s annoying but fixable. In the meantime, I have soap and a sponge and I can wash dishes by hand.

It’s so much better than having the furnace or the clothes washer break. I really don’t want to burn books or furniture to keep the house warm, and I don’t have a river handy so I can go beat my clothes clean on a rock.

Broken dishwasher. Good problem.

Also, as it happens, broken sewing machine = good problem. That chip I replaced has done wonders; my Bernina thinks it’s brand new now. I wish I’d made the repair sooner. However, that’s hindsight. When you have deadlines to meet, you tell yourself that it’s better to have a machine that sort of works part of the time than a machine that doesn’t work at all. It feels scary to jam a soldering iron up your machine’s delicate parts and risk breaking it even more.

Now, of course, I can slap myself on the back and chortle “Hey! It worked out fine!” But I didn’t know that at the time.

Today I sent this off to be printed on fabric. I’d been holding off on some projects because of the sewing machine issue, but now that seems to be resolved.

Its working title is Art Nouveau Cyborg, although Art Nouveau Android would be more accurate. I need a better title, something which highlights the fact that the only living thing, in some sense the only “real” thing in the picture, is the hummingbird.

This piece harks back to Art Nouveau, which is a style inspired by natural forms and structures, such as the curved lines of plants and flowers. (Paraphrasing/ripping off the Wikipedia entry on Art Nouveau.) However, my subject matter is quite the opposite of natural, an artificial creature against a background of circuitry. I thought the contrast would be interesting.

The composition is  a blatant ripoff of inspired by the works of Alphonse Mucha, particularly his use of ornate circular frames.

Image provided by Art Renewal Center Museum, image 4417, Public Domain

This piece, Dance, was a particularly helpful reference.

As the lines in green show, I traced right over key portions of Mucha’s composition in order to come up with the layout for my own. I used circuit lines as design embellishments rather than butterflies and flowers, but the arrangement of the background is substantially the same.

The foreground figure is a purchased model, Pix-Synx, whose geometry was created by Pixeluna. I posed and rendered her in a 3D program.

Here she is, rendered and ready to layer in with the rest of the elements of the design.

I fiddled around with several poses before arriving at one that seemed decent.

This pose reminded me of something I saw at the Louvre the week before last, only not as classy.

Mmm. No. I’m not trying to make android porn.

This just worked for me somehow. There was something a little awkward and innocent about it, and when I introduced a focal point, the hummingbird, the picture began to come together.

Ah, that hummingbird. I think I bought the geometry for this thing for about $1 on sale. It’s posable, and it’s one of my favorite models.

Since I’m working in 3D, I can change the texture on objects. I seriously considered making the hummingbird out of chrome or brushed metal. I really liked the way it looked and the way it popped against the background. Unfortunately, having a metal bird would change the message of the picture, which is about the hummingbird being the only natural thing there.

This is the texture I ended up using. Not my favorite, but it contrasted with the background nicely.

When I began drafting the picture, I had no idea what kind of background texture to use. This is one of my false starts, tread plate. I think I made this with Filter Forge. Have I mentioned before how much I love Filter Forge? Yeah. Only about a thousand times.

Here’s another Filter Forge-generated texture. For a brief instant in time, I thought about giving the picture a steampunk flavor.

How about a nice steampunk porthole? (Also created in Filter Forge) That would automatically create the circles one sees in a Mucha composition.

Filter Forge gears. Yeah, no. Interesting but too cluttered.

In the end I referred to photos of blue circuit boards. I sampled dark and light hues from a photo, made a cloud texture in Photoshop, then motion blurred it to create these streaks. That gave it a nice subtle texture.

All the circuit board ornamentation in the picture is made with Photoshop brushes, the Cyber Circuit Brushes by Orestes Graphics. I applied them in separate layers, tinkering with opacity to emphasize or deemphasize them. It’s a delicate balancing act. If the circuit designs have too much contrast, they’ll fight with the foreground for attention and the whole picture will look cluttered. However, if they lack contrast or they’re too dark, they’ll fade away during printing.

Now I wait and see what comes back from the printer. It’s always a surprise, and it always changes some more after I sew on it.

 

“Coffee Break”, part one

Friday, March 30th, 2018

This entry walks through the creation of this image, “Coffee Break”, which will be printed on fabric and transmogrified into an art quilt. As usual, click on images to enlarge if desired. (One of these days I’ll get around to fixing the site’s style sheets and layout. One of these days. Probably about the time I get my sewing machine repaired.)

 

As with much of my work these days, Coffee Break was created with a combination of 3D graphics and Photoshop. Here’s the layout in wireframe mode, showing the models in the scene.

 

Assets

If you work in 3D, you either have to make your own models or find them readymade. I did the latter in this case, using purchased models of a fairy, wings, hair, and the forest in which she’s relaxing.

The fairy model is the digital equivalent of a posable doll. I like to credit those who provide or create the assets I use. Alas, this model is merely credited as a “Daz Original”, so I have no idea who made it. It might have been created by a Bulgarian artist working in a shed, a corporate slave at Daz headquarters in Salt Lake City, or someone else entirely.

Regardless, I appreciate it. When I need to make a specific figure, I do, but otherwise the process is so time-consuming that it’s nice to be able to get figures “off the shelf”.

 

This fallen tree is part of a construction kit that includes trees, vines, and little chunks of terrain. The pieces can be arranged as one pleases to create a custom environment. It was created by Stonemason, aka Stefan Morrell, an artist whose models and scenes are much beloved. He’s an interesting person to read about in his own right:

 

Arranging the scene

I began by arranging the fallen jungle tree in a sunny field, then plunking my creepy bald fairy on top of it. The resulting image is mildly disturbing. It’s a good example of the adage “you have to start somewhere”.

One of the nice things about working in 3D is that we can rapidly try out different lighting, figure poses, models, and camera setups. We can keep the elements that have potential, such as the tree and the fairy, and change the things which aren’t working.

 

The second iteration of work. The fairy’s pose looks more natural; I’ve moved her left hand so that it’s draped across her thigh instead of stiffly hovering above the tree.

She now has hair and wings and her eyes no longer have a hideous staring quality. I’ve added some trees in the background, so we have a sense of place. The scene now feels more natural than having a fallen tree sitting out in the middle of a meadow.

However, we’re not done. The lighting is poor and the waterfall background behind the trees isn’t a good addition to the scene.

 

I’ve added a light source in the upper lefthand corner of the scene, beyond the edge of the picture so we can’t see it. The light gives the scene some contrast and dimension.

Her hair shows up better beneath the light, but the color is uninteresting.

A tree in the foreground gives the scene some depth. I’ve also turned on the depth of field setting for our virtual camera. Our fairy and the tree she’s sitting on are in focus. However, the trees in the foreground and background aren’t. This helps draw us into the scene.

The fairy now has a book, a fancy-looking volume bound in leather with gilt embellishment. This helps develop the story behind the picture a little. We aren’t just looking at a random bored fairy who’s sitting on a log; we’ve caught her in the midst of doing something.

The type of book tells us something about the fairy: she appreciates classics. Perhaps she’s even reading a volume of fairy tales. If she had a stack of magazines or a trashy-looking paperback with a studly bare-chested male elf on the cover, that would tell us something different about her.

 

The fairy’s hair is now red, which is a little more interesting than the blonde.

I’ve added a coffee cup, which adds to the story: we’ve interrupted a fairy who is taking a coffee break or simply trying to have a quiet moment or two to read. Perhaps she’s been trying to dig into her book for ages, but when she sits down for a break at home, her kid starts bellowing about the oh-so-stressful mission he just completed in Far Cry 5 for the ElfBox One. She feels like her head is about to split open and some not-very-dainty things are about to erupt from her delicate lips, so she’s flown off into the woods for some quiet time.

I debated with myself about what kind of cup to give her. The possibilities are limited only by what one can download or create. How about a coffee cup shaped like a cat’s head or a feminine china cup painted with roses? As with the book, each option tells us something about the fairy. However, I didn’t want the cup to become a distraction, so I opted for something simple and white.

As is often the case with this kind of work, once you fix a few problems and rough in the major parts of a scene, other issues become obvious. At this stage I noticed that her back wing was at an angle, which makes it hard to see. That got added to the list of things to fix for the next iteration.

 

Here’s the final scene in wireframe mode. As my husband puts it “No, it wasn’t faked in Photoshop. It really is a scene put together in 3D.”

 

The entire scene as viewed from the top. We can’t see the fairy, but she’s at about the middle of the picture, hiding beneath the trees.

 

Here’s the scene viewed from top with the trees turned off and some color turned on.

The essential components of the scene:

  • Camera circled in pink. This behaves much like a real-life camera, with settings including f-stop, focal length, and depth of field.
  • Fairy, book, and props circled in blue
  • Light source circled in yellow. 3D programs offer many options for lighting scenes, such spotlights and point lights (similar to a light bulb). I usually find them annoying to position and adjust, which is no doubt a character flaw on my part. Instead, I often plop a plane in the scene and make it glow as though it’s a light.

 

Our fairy scene with a very minor adjustment to back wings, so they’re more visible.

I rendered this at 6300 x 5400 pixels, 150 dpi. That’s large enough to fill a 42 x 36” piece of fabric. So I’m done now, right? I spent hours putting this scene together and I let it render for 20 hours. Surely it’s ready to send off to the printer?

Ha ha ha ha ha. No. In some ways, the fun has only begun.

 

Post production

Look for problems

Maybe other people don’t have trouble with their renders. I always do. Always. Always. Even when I inspect the scene over and over and over again before rendering, I find problems. Sometimes they’re bad enough that I make adjustments in the 3D program and do another render. Other times I address them in Photoshop.

Here’s a typical problem, stuff poking through other stuff. When I zoom in on the picture at 100% and inspect it, I see moss and a leaf poking through the book. That might not be noticeable when the entire image is the size of a postcard, but when it’s blown up large enough to go on a wall, it’s a problem.

Ideally, one would find that kind of thing before blowing a day on rendering. However, if not, one can sometimes fix it after the fact in a program such as Photoshop.

 

Brighten up the scene

The picture looked a little dim for my taste, so I brightened it up. To do that, I opened the picture in Photoshop, duplicated the layer, and set the blending mode of the duplicate to Color Dodge at an opacity of 50%.

One can try different blending modes and opacities. It’s a good experiment; sometimes there are happy or at least interesting surprises.

 

Add a background

Right now the background behind the trees is black. That’s okay, but I wanted just a little visual interest so the scene would feel more realistic. However, I didn’t want the background to be so cluttered that it would fight with the foreground for attention.

I began with a large version of this picture, which is somebody’s imagining of a jungle. (It’s part of the Heart of the Jungle background set.)

 

The jungle picture after a gaussian blur in Photoshop

 

I could get the jungle background in my picture by adding it to my 3D scene, starting a new render, and waiting another day for the computer to finish that set of calculations.

However, I’m lazy. It’s faster to mask out everything in the foreground of my picture and drop the background in with Photoshop. Using a mask such as the one above is a nice way to isolate elements and make edits after the fact. It’s often faster than rendering the scene again.

Daz users: see my entry “How to make masks in Daz Studio/Iray”.

 

Here’s the scene with the jungle background dropped in. It’s a subtle change but it adds a little life.

 

Adding steam from coffee

Our next task is to give the coffee some steam. Again, one can use props and do this directly in one’s 3D program, but I prefer to do it in post.

The steam is a graphic from Textures.com, a wonderful resource for those who do 3D or other sorts of graphic work. I’d post a photo of it, but I’m concerned about violating their terms of service. Here’s the link.

 

I’ve pasted the smoke/steam on a separate layer. Its blending mode is screen, which makes the black background of the smoke disappear without further effort.

 

Next I stretch it, rotate it, and erase the parts I don’t want in the picture. Voila. “Steam”. Only you and I know that it’s actually incense smoke which someone was kind enough to photograph and share.

 

Here’s the scene with steam added. It’s a small touch but it adds a little life.

 

Adding light rays

I want some light rays. They should come from the upper lefthand side of the screen, mimicking our light.

There are plenty of tutorials on making light rays in Photoshop. Here’s a good one.

 

I begin by making a new layer in my Photoshop document, setting my color palette to black and white, then rendering clouds (Filter -> Render -> Clouds). I then go to the menu bar and select Image -> Adjustment -> Threshold and hit “okay.” (All of this is in the tutorial I linked to above, btw.)

If I’m feeling wild, I’ll select a portion of the graphic with my marquee tool and resize it/expand it so it fits the screen. Different black-and-white patterns yield different results, so it’s good to experiment with them.

 

Finally, I take the layer with the black-and-white graphic and go to Filter -> Blur -> Radial Blur. I put the center of the blur near where the light source should appear, set the blur method to zoom, and fiddle around with the amount until I’m happy. There isn’t a preview mode on this blur, so sometimes one has to CMD-Z or CNTRL-Z, go back to the radial blur filter, and try a new blur amount.

This sort of looks like light rays. Sort of. But now I have a new problem – how to get the light rays in the picture without obscuring the items in the foreground.

 

Yep. It’s mask time again. This time I’ve made a mask which isolates the fairy, her props, and the foreground tree. I apply that as a layer mask on the light ray layer and set the layer blending mode to soft light. After I play around with the opacity, I end up with this:

 

Adjust brightness balance

It feels like the scene is most of the way there. However, the tree at left is bright and distracting.

I’ve muted the foreground tree out with a layer mask. But – oh, great – now the tree behind the fairy looks too bright. Shall I make another mask for that?

 

No. I’m sick of fiddling around with masks. It’s brute force time. I grabbed the burn tool and darkened the tree by hand.

 

Adjust eyes

Her eyes seem a little dark. She’s a fairy. Even if she’s having a rotten day and just wants to drink her coffee, she should have sparkly eyes.

 

Here are her eyes after using a dodge tool on the midtones. Now she looks depressed but with, you know, sparkly eyes.

 

Darkening of graphic during printing process

My goal is to print the coffee break scene on fabric. However, from sad experience, I know that when I send out images to print on fabric, they often come back dark. Here’s an example from a different project.

 

Check out that boot. That’s the boot in the file I sent to the printer, with subtle highlights and surface texture.

 

Here’s what I got back on fabric, an amorphous blob of black. Guess what? The fabric printer doesn’t do subtle highlights, at least not if they’re on the dark end of the color range.

 

Similarly, here we have a pile of rocks. They are distinct, individual rocks, happy in their grayness and individuality.

 

Aaaaand here’s what we have after printing on fabric. Another black blob. I can use thread to fix some of this, but it’s vexing.

No, it isn’t unusual for prints on paper to look different from the images one sees on screen. However, this is the most pronounced case of that I’ve ever seen. Perhaps its related to the fact that we’re printing on fabric, not glossy paper stock.

Regardless, anything at about RGB 70/70/70 or less will be black. Thus, the next step is to go through the scene with an eyedropper tool and the info box displayed. If I don’t want something to turn black, I need to adjust it so it’s brighter than 70/70/70.

 

Here’s a shrunk-down version of the file sent to the fabric printer. It’s 6300 x 5400 pixels, 150 dpi, which is large enough to print on a one yard length of “Cotton Poplin Ultra”.

 

Here’s the printed fabric. See any difference? I sure as heck do. As usual, the darkest tones in the design are even darker more after printing on fabric. In particular, the light rays I so carefully, lovingly put in are all but invisible. I’ll see if I can pep them up through my thread choices, but it’s annoying. I specifically corrected for that. However, I didn’t correct enough. Let the designer beware!

Next stop: quilting.

How to make masks in Daz Studio/Iray

Wednesday, December 13th, 2017

This is a quick note for people who use Daz Studio, in case they’re looking for a simple, lazy method for creating masks in Iray.

This question came up for me when I was watching Val Cameron’s Fantasy Art Master videos. He does quite a bit of work in post, rather than hassling over getting everything just the way he wants it in the 3D package. To do that, he frequently uses a mask to isolate whatever element he’s interested in.

However, in the videos I saw, he was using 3Delight rather than Iray. That raised the question of how to make masks in Iray. Perhaps it’s common knowledge; it turned out to be fairly simple, once I messed around with it. However, when I Googled around, I didn’t find the information I needed, so I thought I’d pass it on.

Here are the steps we’re going to go through:

  • Delete or hide the objects we don’t want in the mask
  • Delete or turn off sources of light
  • Change background color so that it contrasts with our scene elements (may not be necessary, but it’s handy)

Here’s our starting scene. Our character, Aspen, is casually hanging out by a giant sphere, wondering why she’s been plagued by premature hair loss.

We want to isolate the character and the sphere from the background. This is a simple scene so there aren’t many extra elements. However, I do need to turn off the floor.

Here we are with the floor turned off.

We now want to remove or turn off all light sources. I confess that I find this much less straightforward in Daz than in other packages I’ve used, such as Blender. Illumination can come not only from obvious lights in the scene, but from light-emitting planes, sky domes, camera head lamps, and the environment.

Note that if you want to emphasize some aspect of the scene in post, you can light it as desired and proceed with making your mask.

I’m still in perspective mode, so I’m going to create a camera, select it, then turn off its headlamp.

By the way – click on the images if you need to see them larger. I need to go revise the style sheet to make that obvious and, um, I’ll get around to that sometime. Yeah. I’ll revamp the site any day now. Probably over Christmas break, when I’m revising my latest novel, creating new artwork, and replacing the ugly-arsed light over the kitchen sink.

The environment is another possible source of illumination in this scene. To address that, I’m going to turn the environment intensity down to zero.

Looks like I was successful in turning off all sources of illumination. Unfortunately, I can’t see a silhouette of my scene. That may not be important as far as the render – the scene should render out against a transparent background regardless. However, it’s nice to be able to double check our setup.

To address that, I’m going to change the background color of my viewport from black to white.

Now I can see my figures silhouetted against a white background.

When I render this out, my scene is silhouetted against a transparent background. I save it as a png in order to retain transparency. To make a classic black/white mask, I can pop in an appropriate background color in Photoshop.

Here’s a more complex scene, first with a transparent background then with a white background. I had to turn off quite a few light sources to isolate the desired elements. However, it was still a fairly straightforward process.

Hope this helps someone. Happy rendering!