Tag Archives: female

Am I Awake or Lost in Old Dreams?

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Need to do all the creepy hand portraits now.  AI art is advancing so fast the creepy hands will soon become a nostalgic moment in the past like pet rocks and bell bottoms.

#Art I made with #Midjourney #AI

Is Electronic Love to Blame? (16×9)

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I’ve worked on this CGI scene longer than any other.  I’ve spent years obsessing about every detail.  I’m sure I’ve sucked the life out of it many times.  I hope there’s still something good left in it but I can’t tell anymore.  The only thing I can do is to let it go and put it out there hoping there’s still some life in it.

This is the second iteration of this piece.  The first one, which you can read all about here, was square, with a grey background, and a different dress.  I also added a pierced heart necklace to this new wide version.  Those are the big differences.  There are tons of other small changes.

So, why a new version?  Because I wasn’t satisfied with the old one.  (Actually I grew to hate it.)  For some reason this piece is an ongoing obsession.  Even now I’m looking at the image above and wondering if the background is too dark, contemplating changing it again before posting this blog post.  But I’m not going to.  I have to let this one go and be done with it.  Next step is to print it on metal like I’ve done with several of my other pieces and see how it comes out.  If it needs tweaking after that, then I will, but for now, it’s done!

Color correction this time is in Capture One.  I abandoned Lightroom a few years ago.  I’m not interested in paying a subscription for my professional software.  Buying a perpetual license for Capture One is actually more money but it’s worth it.  If at some point I decide I can’t afford to upgrade anymore I won’t lose access to all my images and all the work I’ve done on them.  Don’t ever let a company and their tools act as gatekeeper to your work.  — I’m also liking the color correction controls a bit better in Capture One, thought Lightroom wasn’t bad.

Created in DAZ Studio 4.22
Rendered with Iray
Color Correction in Capture One

The Horror

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I finished two versions of this piece because I wasn’t sure which one was better.  This is the closer version:

The closer version would probably work better on social media, but I really like the wider version a lot better, especially since I’m trying to design my artwork to be printed big (poster size and larger.)

Part of me resents feeling like I have to constantly cater to people looking at stuff on the internet aka on their phones.  It really messes with my head when I’m trying to make creative decisions.  I think I have to actively resist the temptation to reduce everything to the least common denominator of what will get the most likes when viewed on a small screen.  It’s extremely limiting, not just because of the composition but also the subject matter.  What will get an immediate reaction so you get the most likes?  Subtly is lost and everything starts to look the same.

Social media really messes with your head.

#Art I made with #Midjourney #AI

Robot Romantic Getaway Goes Wrong

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It’s not easy getting the art machine to do what you want. It’s like it has a mind of its own…

I’m trying to create a video with Stable Diffusion and Deforum.  Doing lots of experiments.  It’s becoming more and more clear that storytelling is next to impossible because there are just too many variables with AI art.  The machine is constantly throwing curve balls that derail the story.  The scene above was originally part of a Spaceship Hibernation story line.  It went something like this:

EXT. SPACE spaceship, stars, perhaps a nebula
INT. SHIP Wide shot, pipes, hibernation chambers
CU. Woman sleeping in a hibernation chamber
EXT. EARTH sunset, beautiful, idyllic
EXT. EARTH Woman and Man holding hands
EXT. EARTH sunset, man and woman kissing in love, sunset
EXT. SPACE spaceship flys into the distance

All kinds of things happened.  I couldn’t get the machine to give me a single spaceship in outer space.  At first there was a robot standing on the ground.  I tried a slew of negative prompts but always ended up with a fleet of ships, or planets, or no spaceship.

Also, the girl sleeping in the hibernation chamber always had her eyes opened.  Adjusting the prompt didn’t change this.

So I gave up on the spaceship-hibernation part of it and tried concentrating on the dream in the middle.  Still having trouble, but continuing with the tests.

#Art I made with #StableDiffusion #AI

All of Us 002

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The second piece of a new image series that deals with anxiety and confusion.  It’s about all those different voices inside our head that distract us from where we are, and where we’re going.

#Art I made with #Midjourney #AI

White Ring

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After creating my Red Ring CGI piece and having trouble with it being quite dim, I went back and changed a few things in the original project and re-rendered with a white ring of light.  I wanted this version to be different, not in silhouette, so I added an extra light to shine on the robot as well.

The robot is actually the same color as in the Red Ring image, except that I made the surface less glossy.  I also added a robot head with one circular eye.

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

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