Author Archives: eric susch

Copying is not Stealing

The art website Deviant Art has started a discussion on Art Theft with eight articles on Copyright infringement and related topics that effect digital artists on the internet. Based on the comments, the articles are extremely controversial, especially the one on Stealing, where they separate the concept of stealing from copyright infringement. I’m glad to see this. Copying may be wrong or even illegal, but it’s not stealing. Stealing is taking something away from someone. When a copy is made the person still has the original. If we’re going to build a future in our changing times where artists are paid and treated fairly, then we are going to have to start by being specific about what we are talking about. Words have meanings.

About 15 years ago the music industry went bananas over Napster and started the incessant drumbeat claiming that copying and stealing are the same thing. Now there is a generation of people who can’t tell the difference and I can see a lot of that in the angry comments on Deviant Art. But the music companies didn’t want to build a future for artists. They wanted everything to stay the same so they could keep their revenue streams. They just wanted people to stop copying so they came up with a dramatic short cut to re-frame the discussion and shut it down. Copying is stealing and that’s that. Well it’s not, and the reality is much more complicated.

And change isn’t going to stop either. As artists we need to take charge of this discussion because it’s up to us to build the future for ourselves. Let’s say what we mean and mean what we say, and not fall into the trap of using language that was designed to stop the discussion and stop change.

Trembling on the Brink of Infinity

A line in the egg

Creating this piece was pretty straightforward. The only trouble I had technically was a strange shadow line on the egg ship. The front of the ship was significantly darker even though that’s where the light was coming from.

I finally realized the line was a reflection of the edge of the huge white background. The environment was simply two planes.

I had to put a huge side and top on it to solve the reflection problem.

It probably would have been easier to create a white dome over the whole scene but I was worried the horizon would be curved and ruin the grid line effect.

My constant conundrum

When I’m building a scene I usually drop cameras here and there when I find a new perspective that looks good. It’s the filmmaker in me I guess, shooting from multiple angles. When I’m finished setting the scene and lighting it’s always hard for me to decide which angle is best. My original perspective for this piece was a full body wide shot that featured the expanse of the void.

I finally settled on the medium shot because it was easier to see she was crying and I think it conveys more emotion from the character. Of course I also came up with this crazy extreme close-up which I totally love.

It was a difficult for me to pick only one. Which is your favorite? Wide, medium, or close?

Prints are available on my Deviant Art profile. CLICK HERE

Created in DAZ Studio 4.8
Rendered with 3Delight
Color Correction in Lightroom

Models used (from DAZ3D.com):
Teen Josie 6
Letizia for Lilith 6
Awesome Fantasy Eyes
Stalker Girl Hair
Sci-Fi Body Suit SF-001
Actual Tears
Nomad Module 2

Victoria 6 and 7 comparison

I Spit My Last Breath At Thee

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My wife CAT suggested the idea of a man fighting a dragon some time ago. It’s been banging around in my head but I wasn’t sure how to compose the characters in the heat of battle and still see both of their faces. I had a few false starts that really didn’t work but then DAZaholics, one of my favorite groups over on Deviant Art, announced a weekly challenge with the theme: Trial By Combat. I strapped myself to a chair Monday morning with the goal of figuring this one out. Apparently the challenge worked because by Monday evening the pieces were all fitting together quite nicely. I had the basic construction of the piece, but if I wanted to enter the contest I would have to finish and upload it by Thursday 7AM Pacific time.

Vertical Integration

That first day I focused mostly on the character poses, facial expressions, and camera position. I wanted to try a vertical frame which I had never done before. As a filmmaker I’m used to a horizontal frame and I wasn’t sure if I could make it work. I also wanted to keep the shot as close as possible for the most dramatic impact. Ultimately that meant losing the shield off the edge of frame but It felt so much more dramatic in close.

I’m spending more and more time in these pieces getting the expressions right. It’s not easy. There are hundreds of morph sliders to adjust and it’s hard to get a realistic expression on a human. Lots of tedious work with breaks to keep perspective. Much of the dragon’s expression is due to the shape of the head so I concentrated on that, and getting the eyes right. For our hero, I just kept at it over the three days.

One Light (or six)

The light was tricky. It’s outdoors so it’s basically just one light, the Sun. I wanted to dramatically rake the light across the guy’s chest but at the same time I needed to get the light in his eyes and illuminate the dragon’s face as well. I found a position that worked but it took some doing including adjusting the characters a bit. Unfortunately that left the sword arm in darkness under the wing. To bring it out a bit I shot a warm spotlight up from below simulating a reflection from the ground. I set another cool spotlight from the left to simulate skylight. That highlighted the ribbing on the dragon’s wing and added a nice rim light on the side of the guy’s chest.

The dragon’s eyes are very deep set. It was impossible to get the sun in there so I also aimed two spotlights at just the eyeballs. I’ve been doing this for awhile now, especially with robots. It gives the eyes a nice glow.

What the hell is a Cucoloris?

Another first for me in this piece was the use of a “cookie.” I added a dapply light grayscale image I found to the Opacity Strength of a plane primitive (in the surfaces tab) and used it to break up the light on the dragon’s torso. This darkened the area behind the guy’s left shoulder and side making him pop forward. A few other “flags” and “nets” (semi-transparent planes) took care of other hot spots on the dragon.

Battle Damage

The body scars and blood smears were several separate add on products I bought at DAZ. They had a lot of customization in terms of the types of injuries, color and size, but not much when it came to placement. I would have liked some scratches on the right thigh and I needed more at the belt line where the dragon was grabbing him. Maybe there’s a way to move the scratches but I think that would end up being a huge manual slider nightmare. Anyway they worked for the most part.

I also used a Vascularity product to make it look like our hero was straining and his veins were popping out. It caused a lot of problems though. The veins kept popping through the clothing, especially the right arm and leg straps. The veins screwed up the scratches and blood smears too. Lots of fiddling with tons of sliders eventually fixed all that up. It was worth it though, the veins really sell it.

Left-wing Decisions

I spent a lot of time debating the dragon’s wing at the top right. I set it there to look like our hero was surrounded. I think it also works moved out of the way with a clear sky above, with our hero looking for a path to heaven, if you will. It’s certainly simpler that way… I don’t know. I’m still second-guessing my decision to leave it. I just hope the wing isn’t too distracting hanging up there.

The End of the Line

I eventually stayed up all Wednesday night fiddling with details. It was starting to look quite good and I didn’t want to upload it before I had smoothed out all the problem areas. I managed to render it out of DAZ Studio, color correct it quickly in Lightroom, and upload it to Deviant Art an hour before the deadline! What do you think?

Created in DAZ Studio 4.8
Rendered with 3Delight
Color Correction in Lightroom

Models used (from DAZ3D.com):
Gianni 6
DAZ Dragon 3
Peter for G2M
Dry Mud Desert
Body Scars for G2
Dirt and Blood for genesis and G2
Fantasy Weapons collection 3

The Creation of ATOM (hands)

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After Man destroys the planet Earth with nuclear weapons, God creates machine life to take his place.

In light of the close up experiment I did last week, this one was a no-brainier. Once again I didn’t just crop the original image. I went back into the 3D space, set another camera in the exact position, and composed a new shot with a longer focal length. That allowed me to create a new 10K render and also control the focus on the mountains in the background.

As I was color correcting this piece I noticed that you could see a reflection of God’s face in the machine-man’s middle finger. Not sure what that means but it’s obviously important.

Created in DAZ Studio 4.8 beta
Rendered with 3Delight
Color Correction in Lightroom

Figures used:
bot Genesis
Lilith 6
Dry Mud Desert

I Was Fluid, Like Water (close up)

A Collection of Rusty Robots

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Can six rusty robots fight crime without driving each other crazy?

This one was complicated. Six characters and twenty-five lights.

I was trying to emulate a team freeze frame at the end of an anime intro. I wanted to capture the uniqueness of each character. I even wrote out a short description of each robot to help me differentiate them. Looking at this piece now though, I think it ended up a little too “characters just standing there.” It could do with a few more action poses, but it’s done now so here it is.

I’m going to post my usual more in depth behind-the-scenes info but that will have to wait a few days since this piece is so complicated. It’ll probably end up as multiple posts. For now I’ll leave you with the character descriptions I wrote. Let me know what you think!

Meet the team!

(from left to right)

Gomer is a wise guy. He always has an opinion and he doesn’t take lip from anybody. He thinks he’s the leader but nobody else listens to him. When attacking a bad guy’s hideout the others always make him crawl in thru the air ducts which pisses him off. He thinks Brigitte is “hot stuff.”

Barney is a “can do” fella. He can fix just about anything. Knows how to make explosives too. He gets the job done while the rest are goofing around. Currently he’s in a romantic relationship with Alice.

Alice is a fighter. She can swiftly and silently take out a whole gang of bad guys. She’s a bit fussy though and, unlike the others, she likes to stay clean. She avoids the general dirt and grime of crime fighting. She’s in love with Barney even though he always seems to be a bit dirty. It’s OK though because she’s confident she can change him.

Jim is the leader of the team. He’s a powerful warrior but is totally lost trying to get the rest of the team to work together. He thinks Alice is his girlfriend even though she wants nothing to do with him. Alice thinks Jim is too full of himself.

Brigitte is a master of disguise and can wear a rubber mask to look human. She doesn’t really enjoy fighting crime but she hangs around because she likes Jim. Gomer is in love with Bridget but she can’t stand him.

Gronk (AKA “Five”) has a powerful Plasma Death Ray to blast holes in buildings and blow up cars. He wants to do more but doesn’t really have the ability. He trys.

Buy a print here –> http://www.deviantart.com/print/38109712/

Welcome to DAZneyland

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After walking for ages, our hero finds a curious place with two dimensional beings.

I put this image together mainly as my first test of the new nVidia Iray rendering engine in the just released DAZ Studio 4.8 beta. The changes at first glance seem a bit like re-inventing the wheel but I’ve just started working with it and I’m still finding my way around.

I was initially attracted to DAZ Studio because of it’s simplicity. Throw some twenty dollar models in a scene, light it properly, hit render, and it looks fantastic. This new render engine seems much more complicated and I’m not sure what you get for all that extra work. I’ve seen others rave that the renders look more “real” but so far I haven’t seen any comparisons where the Iray version is significantly better. In fact in many comparisons I’ve seen the Iray version is significantly worse but it’s still early days and people are still learning.

One problem I’m seeing immediately with this new engine is the render time. The very simple 3D scene above took about an hour to render at 4K (4000 x 2667) which is quite long for my relatively powerful system. For comparison some of my previous (more complicated) scenes took anywhere from fifteen to thirty minutes to render at 10K. Maybe I’m doing something wrong but I don’t see how. This piece has only three elements: one character (with no clothes,) a sky dome, and two flats with photos on them. This needs more testing but these types of render times just won’t work for me, especially when I get into animation.

I also had trouble with the sky dome. I had to work quite hard in Lightroom to eliminate significant color banding across the sky in the picture above. Everything was set to the default so I’m not sure how I could have avoided this.

As far as the rest of the picture quality, we’ll have to see. The rendering technology is different and for a fair comparison I’ll need to get more proficient with all the new settings. I’d like to see the best this new technology can do and compare it to the best of the old engine. That’s the only true comparison and that’s going to take some time. The old 3Delight render engine is still available in the new version of DAZ Studio so I’ll probably keep using that for my serious pieces while I continue further testing of the Iray engine.

Created in DAZ Studio 4.8 beta
Rendered with nVidia Iray
Color Correction in Lightroom

Figures used:
Infernal Behemoth
DAZneyland

The Creation of ATOM

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Prints of this image are available on my Deviant Art page:
http://ericsusch.deviantart.com/art/The-Creation-of-ATOM-516835191

After Man destroys the planet Earth with nuclear weapons, God creates machine life to take his place.

This CGI piece took me awhile. It’s based on the The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo, from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican. CAT and I were recently in Rome and were able to spend five minutes in the Sistine Chapel admiring all the artwork. You couldn’t take any pictures of course, since the Japanese own the copyright. (The Vatican is a strange place.) So when we got back I decided to make my own creation imagery to hang on the wall.

I used this project to learn how to pose characters manually. The poses were iconic and predetermined so I didn’t have to worry what was going to look good, just how to get the characters into position. In the end It took some doing to get everything adjusted in three dimensions and looking correct for the camera.

Creación_de_Adám

I don’t think a man can actually lean back in the real world the way Adam does in the original, at least an android can’t. I have several of the robot joints pushed way beyond their limit and still he isn’t really in the same position. It’s close enough to get the idea though. The posing process was long and tedious but ultimately rewarding. I’m especially happy with the hands in the center.I had problems again with kinky hair. The short style I chose was an older mesh and didn’t have the smoothing control I used in the last piece. I then discovered that the smoothing controls can be added to any object by selecting it and accessing the DAZ Studio menu in the upper right of the scene tab. Select Edit / Apply Smoothing Modifier and then the smoothing controls will appear in the object’s Parameters tab. This fixed the kinks but I still had hair shadow trouble. Some of the underlying shadows were ending abruptly probably because some of the hair was poking into the skull. Adjusting the hair didn’t resolve the problem.

To fix the funky shadows I rendered the hair again without shadows. I then layered this underneath the head and used a matte in Photoshop to erase only the parts of the hair where I wanted to remove the shadows. This left the shadows at the edges and bottom of the hair but eliminated the distracting ones deep within.

The biggest problem I had was the horrible, horrible dress. I purchased and tried several Greek/Roman toga-esque dresses which were similar to what God is wearing in the original piece. I really liked a dress that had one long sleeve but unfortunately it covered the wrong arm and I couldn’t figure out how to flip it. This next best alternative was nice looking but turned out to be a disaster. It had a million shaping controls but I couldn’t get it to fit correctly without the mesh bunching, tearing, and dripping all along the chest. It was the only dress I had that looked right so I grit my teeth and fixed it with the spot healing brush in Photoshop. That kind of fix isn’t going to work when I get into animation.

I struggled with the background again too. The original idea was a destroyed city like after an earthquake or a nuclear attack. It was way too busy and difficult to separate the characters, especially the chrome of the android, from the background. There was just too much detail in the rubble.

CAT suggested I try a desert background. I wasn’t sure. I didn’t want it to look like an unrelated background photo. After I tried it I changed my mind because the background became a metaphor to me. It suggests nuclear testing, or maybe a Mad Max type social collapse. What do you think?

Created in DAZ Studio
Postwork (fixing hair and dress) in Photoshop
Color Correction in Lightroom

Figures used:
bot Genesis
Lilith 6
City Ruins: Vehicles
Dry Mud Desert

Prints of this image are available on my Deviant Art page:
http://ericsusch.deviantart.com/art/The-Creation-of-ATOM-516835191

The Space Between Us

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Prints of this image are available on my Deviant Art page.

I’ve started working on a few CGI images with multiple characters but this is the first one I’ve been able to finish. Right now I have five or six projects that are stuck at various stages. One thing I’ve realized is I’m having tremendous difficulty with backgrounds. I’m consciously starting my scenes with character ideas first because I see that as the most important element in the image. I then end up trying eight or nine “sets” for the background and nothing seems to fit. It’s easy to move entire sets in and out in virtual space and try different things but I guess my brain just doesn’t work that way since it’s not how you make movies in the real world. All my creative experience starts with the location first, then the actors come in to block the scene, and finally the camera positions are locked down. I think I’m going to have to change my workflow and do it the way I know.

I originally envisioned this scene as an exterior, but that didn’t work so I tried several interiors including this space bedroom complete with professional video tape rack.

I eventually settled on the interior of a shuttle type spaceship.

You may have noticed I originally had a different character for the boy.

He was anime style but a bit too realistic for skinny toon/anime girl (Keiko 6.) Modifying a straight up toon style boy character (Animated Shapes for G2M) with a different skin texture and bigger eyes created a figure more in line with the anime style of the girl.

I had that kinky hair problem that I’ve mentioned before. You can see it here above the right eye.

I asked about it on a DAZ facebook group and there is a fix! There’s a hidden control in the hair parameters called “smoothing iterations.” Increase it a bit and the kinkiness goes away. I found that you should only increase the smoothing just enough to solve the problem because higher numbers thin out the hair considerably making your character look like a post-apocalyptic radiation victim! (…which, come to think of it, may be a hair style I need some day.)

While working on this piece I started using the new Aux viewport in DAZ Studio 4.7. You can set it to continuously render so that, as you are working it will keep updating. It sort of works. My processors and fans were churning hard as it was trying to keep up with the changes. It’s usable for lighting, only re-rendering the area of the picture effected when you move a light. For moving models around the space it’s not as good. The screen update gets slow and you end up waiting a lot.

All in all I’m very happy with this piece. It’s my first with two characters interacting in a two shot which is more like a movie and less like a character just standing there.

Prints of this image are available on my Deviant Art page:
http://ericsusch.deviantart.com/art/The-Space-Between-Us-513716053