Tag Archives: DAZ3D

The Space Between Us

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Prints of this image are available on my Deviant Art page.The Space Between Us

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.

the space between us BTS extI 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.

the space between us BTS space bedroomI eventually settled on the interior of a shuttle type spaceship.

the space between us BTS vanguardYou may have noticed I originally had a different character for the boy.

the space between us BTS space bedroom2He 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.

kinky hair detail

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.)

the space between us BTS aux viewerWhile 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.The Space Between Us

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

This World is MINE!

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Prints of this image are available on my Deviant Art page.This World is MINE!

In keeping with my goal of making my images look like stills from a motion picture, I set the camera on this piece low with a long lens.  If I were shooting this as a film that’s what I would do.  Unfortunately that makes the background environment flatten and, in this particular image, I think it makes it look like a layered composite over a still.  I spent a lot of time trying to adjust the depth of field and the camera angle to make it look “whole” but I think I was ultimately unsuccessful.  There may be several reasons for this but I think it may be partially psychological.  In a film this style is common and accepted without question, but here we know beforehand that the image is synthetic and therefore our eye is on the lookout for signs of fakery.

One thing I learned from my early experience with actual physical model making is that a shallow depth of field will make the model look small, regardless of how well it’s done.  You always need everything in focus to fool the eye and make it look bigger, otherwise the eye will notice other cues and the actual scale will be revealed.

I really don’t want to be limited in that way with my CGI work.  I need to find a way to use a shallow depth of field and make it look right, especially on medium and close shots.

Rendered in DAZ Studio
Color correction in Lightroom

Prints are available on my Deviant Art page.  Hang one on your wall today!

I Do the Job, and Then I Get Paid!

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I do the job, and then I get paid!

This is my newest CGI creation. It was a long road to get to this final image and I almost abandoned it. Here’s what happened.

My initial idea was to do something similar to this famous pose from the TV show Firefly.

firefly - Mal points

I’m starting to manually pose my characters and relying less on presets.  Could I capture the drama in this screen capture?  Well, I worked on it for a while and thought either I was still too inexperienced to capture the dynamics or maybe I picked the wrong image to emulate.   My version was just so meh.   There wasn’t any dramatic focus. Here’s what it looked like at that point:

I had put the character in a large futuristic Gothic chamber to add some drama and I had sunlight streaming through the windows.  It was clear that the complexity of the architecture and the shadows made the background a mess.  I re-lit the scene for night.

Better but still busy in the background especially when I put anything outside the windows. I didn’t know what to do so I played around with the gun surface for a few hours and made it shiny.  That just put more emphasis on the gun and less on his face.

So I trashed the “location” and tried some others. I was fun to turn off the visibility of the “set” and load new environments just to see if they would work with the exact same character pose and camera shot.

alt location kitchen

I tried a futuristic kitchen set…

alt location asylum

…a run down insane asylum…

alt location mars

…and even the surface of the planet Mars.  The Mars landscape was the simplest and in keeping with the source inspiration but I really wanted to have more than a plain color as a background.

Finally I settled on simply rotating my original set so the character would be backed by the wall instead of the entire gothic chamber. This simplified the background while still keeping some of the look I was going for.  I also tried to make the windows look like lights on the wall, you know, like in the death star?  But I felt that was too bright and finally decided to just make them black. Anything else was too distracting.

Another element that I think didn’t work was the red light I put in the barrel of the laser pistol. I loved the effect but I thought it pulled the viewer’s eye away from his face. It took me an hour to get that light in the gun just right and I like it!  So to balance the red in the image I made the characters hair the same color.  I’m not sure but I think that works.

I do the job, and then I get paid!

This is probably not one of my best images but on the long road to its completion I learned plenty.  What do you think?

Love Is Not Enough

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love is not enoughAdvanced lighting class!  A black suit against a dark background and forties film noir style glamor lighting on the face.  I’m now comfortable setting lights, well the spotlight at least, which is the most like a real Fresnel movie light.  Still not too sure about some of the other style lights available in the program.  I tried using a point light as a fill light and it was a disaster, very unrealistic looking.  I’m going to stick to spotlights for interior lighting.  Wish they had barn doors to make a quick slash on the wall.  I made a “flag” with a flattened solid primitive cube though and that worked.

The background is actually a scifi medical bay set with diagnostic beds and everything.  I spent hours trying different background lights but eventually settled on leaving it dark with only the computer monitors lit.  It just seems more mysterious that way.  It’s the same on a movie set.  If the lighting isn’t working you’re probably using too many lights.  Turn some off and see what it looks like.  Chances are it will be better.