Tag Archives: blue

Is This The Life We Really Want?

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I’m still trying to make some of my CGI art look like it’s from a motion picture.  What makes something look cinematic?  Color?  Framing?  I’m still not sure.  That’s what I was experimenting with in this portrait – a real person, in a real location, in a movie…  A simple moment from a larger scene.

The setup was simple: face, hair, jacket, background.  I set the camera lens at 100mm, 16×9 aspect ratio and found a good closeup.  I messed with the depth of field quite a bit to get the background soft but not too soft (this isn’t a DSLR movie.)

The green line in this screenshot shows how the camera (on the left) is focused precisely on the nearest eye and the two planes show the narrow depth of field on the face.  The other eye is slightly out f focus.

The blue in the background is the soft blue backlight. I used only three lights, a key light on the face, the back light, and a light in the window.  (And the eyes light up too.)  No fill light.

This screenshot shows how the initial render looked before color correction. It’s quite dark which means it takes longer to render but I liked the quality of light so I went for it.  It took about five and a half hours to render the final file at 10800 x 6075.    I stopped it at 4277 samples and 92 percent convergence even though my minimum is usually 95 percent and/or 5000 samples.  It didn’t look like baking it any more would make a difference.

The whites of the eyes ended up quite dark in the render so I brightened them up in post.  The eyes are a really old product and I don’t think I updated the reflectivity on the sclera quite right to render properly in iray.

I also pulled the background completely black because I thought the muddy dark shapes distracted from the face.

This is the part of the post that I feel I really should evaluate the final result… then I decide not to say anything because I can only see the mistakes.  After a few months not looking at it, I’m sure I’ll be able to figure out if I love it or hate it, but not now…

Created in DAZ Studio 4.21
Rendered with Iray
Color Correction in Capture One

Robotic Romance – A Colossal Story of Forbidden Affection

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This is another image where I tried to get something in the style of a 1930s SciFi pulp magazine cover.  It looks like the 30s especially with the orange background, but I think the robot looks more 70s.  I like it anyway…

#Art I made with #Midjourney #AI

We Are the Dreamers of the Dream

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Building the Metaverse to match the real world.

I made this CGI image about a year ago when the Metaverse was the shiny new tech thing.  Most people probably won’t get what it’s about so I’ll explain it, even though David Lynch would probably scold me for doing that.

The grey and chrome sphere are tools that special effects artists use to match 3D computer graphics to real world photography.  If you are shooting a film for example, and part of the scene will be CGI, you shoot a few extra feet of the environment with someone holding a grey and chrome sphere.  The chrome sphere reflects the entire environment and that reflected image can be “unwrapped” and placed as a dome over the CGI so the same light and colors shine on the computer generated elements as in the real scene.  (The chrome ball is actually an old fashioned “poor man’s” way of doing this.  There are 360 degree cameras now that can actually just take a picture of the entire environment right on the set.)

The grey sphere shows the quality of light shining on a specific place in the shot.

This image is about building a computer generated Metaverse that people can walk around in, just like real life.  It’s the dream of constructing a Metaverse as well as the Metaverse as a dreamscape… the birth of a new alternate world.

OK, enough of that…

The main difficulty I had in creating this image stems from the fact that the reflection in the chrome ball is actually the real reflection of the CGI environment.  It’s not a composite.  The mountains actually go all the way around the environment.  The grid floor goes out in all directions.  The “planet” and the “sun” seen in the ball are on the HRDI dome over the scene that is creating the ambient light.  The dome had to be lined up so the “planet” reflected in the sphere correctly.  The mountains had to be rotated in such a way that the peaks behind her and the ones in the chrome ball both looked good.  The main light in the scene is the keylight on the character which can be seen in the chrome sphere as a bright rectangle in the upper left of the sphere.  I could have removed that in post but I left it in because that’s the point.

The metaverse was supposed to be the future of everything.  Facebook even changed their name to Meta.  Now AI is the new thing.  Will the metaverse be created?  Will AI create the metaverse for us?  Who knows…

Created in DAZ Studio 4.20
Rendered with Iray
Color Correction in Capture One

Invasion!

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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

Wesley Crusher riding a unicorn into battle

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Wesley Crusher riding a unicorn into battleThis one is just for fun.

Last month actor and writer Wil Wheaton who played Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: the Next Generation, got a rare Dall-E invite, and used “Wesley Crusher riding a unicorn into battle” as his first prompt, “because OBVIOUSLY.”  You can see what he got here on his tumbler.

I decided to see if the Midjourney art machine was up to the same challenge.  After several tries with the Beta –test renderer that weren’t very good, I tried the good ol’ V3 engine and finally got this image.  It almost looks like a Star Trek uniform. It almost looks like Wesley Crusher.  …And he almost has legs.  It’s wonkey and creepy but we like that, ‘cuz that’s the way AI art should be.  A few years from now when AI art is perfectly realistic, artists will attempt to re-create this wonky style just like Instagram filters today try to make your digital pictures look like old fashioned faded film prints.  Because realism is nice but interesting is better…