This is my first try at AI animation. I rendered it with Stable Diffusion and the Deforum plugin. I’m trying to see if I can create interesting shapes that morph from one object to another over time. There are a lot of amazing things going on in this short sequence, including a bit around 30 – 40 seconds where the objects at the bottom of the screen morph into a bizarre split screen. I love that kind of stuff.
It took about two hours to render out all the frames for this one minute video. I also rendered out six versions, changing the prompt and the render settings each time to get this one which was the best. That’s a lot of tedious rendering but I’m learning quite a bit.
It’s been some time since I’ve posted any of my 3D creations. This is actually something I started several years ago but never finished. I had trouble with the lighting but it all came together recently when I decided to make it a night invasion.
Created in DAZ Studio 4.21
Rendered with Iray
Color Correction in Capture One
After George Floyd was killed and a week of protesting around the world, this was how I felt. I created a TikTok video where the camera cranes down from a fire escape and eventually tilts up on this character. You can see the video here: Despair on TikTok
After a bit of re-adjusting in DAZ Studio I came up with this high rez still version of the final frame. I rendered it at 10000 x 7500 pixels so I could print it out big and hang it on the wall.
Shadow areas take a long time to render in Iray, especially if the canvas is large. With two Titan RTX graphic cards continuously screaming at 79 degrees Celsius, this image took fourteen hours to render. Not the longest render I’ve ever done (that would be 48 hours) but still a good exercise for my new computer workstation.
Color correction in lightroom was relatively simple, essentially just brightening up everything so it pops and so all the shadow areas don’t print out too dark.
Created in DAZ Studio 4.12
Rendered with Iray
Color Correction in Lightroom
It’s the future and everyone is bald (of course.) Heads are bigger because brains are smarter and dreams are infinite. This is a simple portrait from the day after tomorrow.
A girl, a camera, and a wall were all I needed to create this piece. …and lights. I needed lights too.
I threw a blue/green spot on the back wall to match her costume and eyes. The limited color pallet made her face pop.
At one point I tried changing the background and put her on the bridge of a spaceship but it ended up too busy so I scrapped it.
All it needed was minor color correction in lightroom. Not much at all. The final is essentially what was rendered out of DAZ studio.
What do you think? Is this our future?
Science Remembers
Created in DAZ Studio 4.11
Rendered with Iray
Color Correction in Lightroom
Figures used:
Brenna for Ophelia 7
Sci-Fi Lieutenant Outfit for G3F
Wicked Fantasy Morphs for G3F
My eternal quest for the perfect CGI avatar continues. I’ve grown tired of my current avatar artwork. People think it’s a picture of me and I have to explain that it’s CGI. I need something that doesn’t look human. Perhaps something creepy…
What to do?
Mannequins and faceless people have always freaked me out ever since I was young. I attribute that to this scene from Star Trek…
…and the Anything People on Sesame Street.
A freaky “no face” avatar would be cool and no one would think it was supposed to be me. Perfect!
Building a Mannequin
I started with a faceless character model I had and I replaced the skin like surface with a different shader. I experimented with many, many different surfaces trying to find something cool.
I tried cloth, wood, metal, rock, plastic, glass, grunge, paint, rubber, wax, anything I could think of.
I tried to avoid chrome because I had done that several times in the past but in the end I caved, because I really liked this particular dusty anodized aluminum surface.
I posed the figure tipping his hat with a 1960s fedora. I wanted him to be creepy and friendly at the same time. A sloppy overcoat and loose necktie seemed to fit so I added that too.
Give that man a hand
The fingers of the alien no-face character were creepy long, which looks OK but I like to make everything difficult so I decided to try and replace the hand with one that was human sized.
To do that I had to add another entire human sized figure and position the hand in the same place, grabbing the hat. It took awhile but I got it into position. Then I “turned off” (made invisible) the rest of that human character. For the no-face character I turned off the hand. The sleeve of the jacket was just long enough to hide the fact that the arm and hand didn’t meet exactly correctly. Everything came together when I layered the same aluminum shader on the human hand.
Dramatic Light
The lighting was difficult because of the reflective metal on the face. I ended up with a lot more spotlights than usual for a simple head shot just to get the reflections right. There are seven spot lights on the character and one blue spot on the background, which is just a gray wall panel.
After rendering it out I pumped up the color a little in Lightroom…
…and uploaded the avatar to Facebook.
Unfortunately I saw almost immediately that you couldn’t tell what the picture was at very small sizes. It was the high contrast lighting, the same problem I had before on my first CGI avatar. It looked fine at larger sizes but when it was super tiny the bright shine of the face looked like an unrecognizable white blob on a blue background.
Flat Light
I went back into DAZ Studio and tried to even out the lighting. The best way was to set up a few more lights to fill in the dark spots. I didn’t like it as much when I was done but I rendered it out anyway just to test it on facebook. This is the “flat light” version.It worked better at small sizes as you can see but still not as well as other avatars I’ve created. Humans are programed to recognize faces easily, which is why facebook can make their avatars so small. I’m asking people to recognize “no face” so I guess that’s more difficult.
So it sort of works at the tiny sizes and doesn’t look as good as it could at larger sizes. I guess that makes this avatar attempt a bit of a failure. I still like it though, so I’m going to keep it for a time before I try again. I can also upload the first version to other sites that don’t have such small avatars. What do you think?
Created in DAZ Studio 4.9
Rendered with Iray
Color Correction in Lightroom
Figures used:
The Slim Man for Genesis 3 Male
Mec4d PBS Shaders vol.3 for Iray
Amazing Hat
Eldritch Seeker
I’ve been wanting to do an abstract piece for some time. I love the way this came out. I’ll definitely be doing more art like this in the future.
There’s not much to say about this piece. It’s pretty straight forward. The light is from the HDMI which is essentially a gradient with a bright spot that becomes the “sun.” The gradient did create a very slight banding across the sky and I had to bring the piece into photoshop to add some noise to try and smooth it out. That was the only postwork I did in Photoshop. You can still see the banding a bit but it’s much better than it was. You can see the grain actual size behind the mountain in the color correction image if you click to embiggen it.
I tried to make the ground look like ice by playing with the Metallic Flakes Weight setting in the Surfaces tab. All in all I’m very happy with this one.
Created in DAZ Studio 4.9
Rendered with Iray
Minor post in Photoshop
Color Correction in Lightroom
Figures used:
Blank Boi
Planet X-3
Mec4d PBS Shaders vol.2 for Iray
Wireframe and Hologram Shaders
This is an update of the first CGI image I ever completed in DAZ Studio. Back then I didn’t know how to do lighting so I moved the character into the lights that were already pre-built into the set. This is the original:
It took me days to place the character properly and learn how to aim a camera and render. The image is dark and I’ve grown to hate it as I’ve become more experienced. And so, like George Lucas, I decided to go back and change my earlier work to add new characters and “make it better.”
Back to the Beginning
I loaded up the old project and continued right where I left off. As I re-familiarized myself with everything it became obvious how little I knew at the time. It was interesting to see how I solved problems back then. I’m really deep into all the technical details now and the way I work today isn’t necessarily better, just more complicated. It was surprising.
I knew I wanted to add more light and make everything brighter, but what else? I hate pieces where people just stand there so I added another character for the girl to react to. She’s looking out a doorway so I put a little alien guy there who is startled by her.
I tried many camera angles to get the best interaction of the two characters but eventually decided to keep it wide and head on similar to the original. You need to see the distance between them for it to work. These are some of the test angles.
The last one isn’t bad but you can’t tell the alien is a tiny guy. I think you need to see that to understand he is scared. The middle one’s good too but you don’t get the sense of him coming around the corner.
Straight on wide shot seems the best but I still think it’s boring and too far away. Will have to work on that in another piece. For now it will have to do.
A Brighter Future
If I knew how to use an ambient light back when I originally rendered this scene it would have looked much better. I’m a big fan of the Advanced Ambient Light by Age of Armour. It’s the easiest fill light I’ve ever used and it renders fast. While I was playing around with it, I tried something new. I set three ambient lights in the scene. One was set to light everything overall like I usually do. The other two were placed very close to the characters with the light limited to their immediate area. That gave me the ability to adjust the brightness of each character and the background separately.
It worked out very well. The light from the stairs and the blue back light from the windows were still the main lights but the ambient lights in this configuration allowed for very fine brightness adjustment during the final tweaking. I’m going to use this technique whenever I work in 3Delight.
The Small Stuff Is Always the Hardest
The most difficult part of this re-imagining was actually the back wall. The set had a window that looked like a portal or hatch right where the lines on the floor converge at the back. It drew your eye right past the two characters to the window. I had to eliminate that panel and take a different wall from another part of the set and replace it. The other wall had a larger window that extended behind the corner so it wasn’t as distracting. Finding the right panel to use took some time. Adjusting the glossiness of the window and darkening it with a semi-transparent black plane helped too.
Know Yourself
After struggling with the complexity of Iray for the past year it was a joy to build something in 3Delight again. You forget how simple it is. And that’s the key, isn’t it. Simplicity. Working in this old project, I was surprised how much I was able to do originally with how little I knew. I didn’t have a lot of options – not a lot of knowledge about surfaces, materials, render settings, shaders, UV maps, morphs, or even lights. I didn’t have all those things in my head slowing down my creative process. I just did it whatever way I could figure out in the moment. I’ve forgotten what that’s like.
I encourage everyone to do this at least once. Open up a really old project and see how you used to work. See how you used to think. You may learn something from yourself.
Created in DAZ Studio 4.5 and 4.9
Rendered with 3Delight
Color Correction in Lightroom
Figures used:
Victoria 6
Liquid Halo On Sky 16 for Genesis
Grey Alien for Genesis 3 Female
Sci-Fi Corridor 2013
