update: 100,000 views in 90 days on YouTube! Not bad. Lots of comments on the video though. Here are answers to some of the most common questions:
The car is dual motor (AWD) with the extend range battery, auto pilot, and 19 inch wheels.
We stopped in Binghamton twice to charge up. It took about twenty minutes each time. The first time was when the battery was lower the cost was $8.64. The second time on the way back it was $3.60. (When your battery is relatively full the charging goes much slower.) You don’t need a credit card. The charger recognizes your car and bills your Tesla account directly. The price shows up on the screen inside the car. 6:47
We were following the Roscoe super charger construction for a long time. The only information on the Tesla page for completion was “forth quarter 2018.” Since it was the end of the year and we were stopping anyway we gave it a shot.
The video was mostly shot with a sony a6000 with a sony ecm-xyst1m mic on top. Some of it was shot with a GoPro when the sony batteries died.
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
As you already know, my previous attempt to make the perfect social media avatar didn’t work out too well. Facebook was the biggest problem because sometimes their avatars are really, really tiny and the “man with no face” concept didn’t read. Also, shortly after I started using the side-view no-face avatar every single social media site changed their avatars from a square to a circle. Twitter, facebook, instagram, artstation, flicker… Everywhere. Aaaaarrrrrrgggggg!
OK, I needed something new, something simpler to understand and centered so it would look good in a circle. Enter Generic Man:
I kept things as simple as possible, centered face, no color, plain background. Getting the light right took time. Usually I like to set my own lights but this time I tried lighting exclusively with an HDRI dome. I tried many different light patterns until I got the glossy highlights and the deep set eye shadows just right. I didn’t want the light to be too flat but I also didn’t want it to be too shadowy either. This particular light pattern worked the best.
I also had to spend quite some time working on the white porcelain “skin” material too, especially since the neck of the original model was a different material. Finally I dialed in a slight asymmetrical facial expression just to give it a little something.
When I first rendered it out I kept the contrast very low. I liked the way it emphasized the eyes but it didn’t read well online at smaller sizes so I upped the contrast in Lightroom. This is the original render.
I’ve been using this avatar for several months now. It seems to work well at all sizes, even really small. It works in a square or a circle too. On Halloween I made an alternate and posted it for a day on facebook.
Here’s a few screenshot examples on social media. Facebook (so tiny!):
Twitter:
Deviant Art:
Tumblr:
It looks good in a square or circle, even very teeny-tiny on facebook. I think this one is going to last me for quite awhile.
Created in DAZ Studio 4.9
Rendered with Iray
Color Correction in Lightroom
Figures used:
HP Prototype YC-7 for Genesis 3 Male
iRadiance – Studio HDRIs for Iray
I caught the Star Trek Discovery pilot on CBS this past weekend. …And I do mean caught because CBS allowed a highly anticipated series premiere of the biggest entertainment franchise in the world to be delayed by this week’s sports event. Fortunately I anticipated their priorities and set my DVR to record the show after Discovery as well, and was able to see the second half of the show.
So here’s what a life long Star Trek fan and filmmaker thought of the Star Trek Discovery pilot. (Obviously this is all a spoiler if you haven’t seen the show.)
It’s a Prequel
This is going to be the main problem with the show. It has to fit in to a narrow slot a few years before The Original Series and that’s going to limit the stories that they can tell. It will ultimately be their undoing as they make more and more episodes. The continuity police are already having a field day. The badges aren’t right. The Klingons have a cloaking device before Kirk stole it from the Romulans. Bla, bla, bla… I’m not going to talk about any of that. It’s a fatal flaw baked into the premise. I’m only concerned with the characters and story of the pilot. How well have they set up this new adventure? Is it interesting? How dramatic is it?
The Story
The story is slow, especially for something that seems like it’s trying to be a battle show. What’s up with the first scene on the desert planet walking and talking with tons of exposition? That’s how you start the pilot? How about “Show Don’t Tell,” a basic rule of screenwriting?
Oh yea, and next time Star Fleet has to fix a water well, beam down right next to it so you don’t have to outrun a storm on foot. Also, teach your first officers how to make a signal if you want to be rescued. Who wrote this show?
In spite of the slow plot there still was very little character development on anyone other than the first officer and a little for the science officer. That’s it. The Captain is an enigma. She’s an experienced officer who is not afraid walking in the desert, then she doesn’t want to explore the asteroid field. No reason given for either. Who the heck are these people on this ship? What is their mission? What is the show about?
The Klingons
OK. So the Klingons look like the Drazi now. I don’t care. I care about the story and the characters. There’s a lot of ceremony, posturing, and yelling – which is expected from Klingons – but what is going on? One has a black face and one has a white face. OK. Who are these characters? What do they care about? We never really find out. They’re just mysterious, angry, generic bad guys. More chance for character development that was missed.
And who put the sub-titles in all caps? Any graphic designer will tell you that all caps makes text much harder to read. Subtitles should always be in sentence case because you have to read it fast. Every filmmaker knows that.
Production design
Serviceable but meh. The ship looks like every SciFi space ship we’ve seen in every modern video game we’ve ever played. The same generic SciFi architecture, costumes, space suits, control panels, that we’ve seen a million times before. The Original Series, The Motion Picture, The Wrath of Kahn, The Next Generation, and Enterprise, all went in bold new directions in regards to the production design. The concepts were different form previous Star Trek and different form other SciFi design at the time. Discovery looks like generic SciFi circa 2017.
Cinematography
Lots of eye candy, movement, flares etc. but is it really serving the drama? I found it hard to focus on the people on the bridge. We need to see their faces. That’s where the drama is, not whipping around the back of their heads with the camera. And what’s with the “Batman” tilt-o-vision every once in awhile? Personally I LOVE tilt-o-vision, but it’s just thrown in for no reason in very brief shots. It’s there and then it’s gone. More eye candy for eye candy sake. The bottom line is the cinematography is pretty but it ends up obscuring the very thin story even more.
Music
The intro music is nice. Much better than that “modern” abomination from Enterprise.
The music in the body of the show is plain and unassuming, which is what Star Trek music has been for some time. I would like to see the show dive back into the exciting adventure themes like in the Original Series but given the bland state of modern film music these days, I think that is unlikely.
Dialog Recording
Normally I wouldn’t even comment on this but the dialog recording seemed distant and echoey in some of the scenes on the ship. That’s OK for a fan film but not for a professional production. Intimate scenes recorded on a sound stage, especially on the standing sets, should be perfect. The dialog should be immediate and present to powerfully deliver the actor’s performance. I think the set walls are the problem, though I think Star Trek has been in production for long enough that they should know how to build the sets for sound.
The Ending
It seems like the pilot episode was constructed to simply be a prelude to the second episode where the real story begins. It’s a contrived cliff hanger to convince everyone to purchase CBS All Access. The problem is a cliff hanger doesn’t work if you don’t care about the characters. There’s a lot of heavy lifting that needs to be done story wise and the Star Trek Discovery pilot doesn’t do any of the work. We’re left not really knowing the characters and not knowing at all what the show is about. Yea, there might be a battle in the second episode, but who cares? I don’t.
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 piece started out as a test for some new models that I purchased but I liked the way it looked so I finished it into something a bit more than a test. Unfortunately it ended up as a character just standing there, which I try to avoid. I like more of a story, more action, but this is what it is. I do like the curve of the ship in the background. I suppose that’s something.
This is an early version with different hair and environment. You can also see that the stomach panal on the suit is a lighter color. In the final composition I thought it distracted from the face so I darkened the texture map so that it was closer to the rest of the suit.
I eventually decided she was a pilot so I put her in a hanger bay with a shuttle. I spent a tremendous amount of time going back and forth deciding if the shuttle doors should be open or closed. I even thought of putting another character inside the ship at one point but I wasn’t able to made that work.
I don’t have much to say about this wire frame screen shot other than it looks cool!
I think I left the bottom too dark when I initially did the color correction. I went back later and brightened it up a bit. The original render is 8000×8000 and the light on the skin looks fabulous at native resolution. Very pleased with how the face came out. (click to embiggen)
Created in DAZ Studio 4.9
Rendered with Iray
Color Correction in Lightroom
Figures used:
Aiko 7
StarSlayer outfit for G3F
Shuttlestar
Sci-Fi Hanger A
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
I started a facebook page for my artistic work several years ago. Ever since then I’ve wondered how to separate what I post to my personal profile, which I keep essentially public, and what I post to my page. After years I still haven’t figured it out. The page is reserved for my work and general SciFi culture, but I also post that stuff to my personal profile too, so I end up cross sharing a lot which I hate.
It’s easy to get confused between the profiles so I make sure they at least have different avatars. I created this one similar to my new personal avatar but with an alien. I won’t know what to post where, but at least I’ll know who I am when I’m posting!
Eye Light
I had to light this differently from my personal avatar. Usually I go for the control of spotlights but for this I needed something to reflect in the big black eyes. I lit this image solely with a skydome that surrounded the entire scene. Since that put too much light on the back panel, I then modified the surface and made it darker, so it would look similar to the original background.
Created in DAZ Studio 4.9
Rendered with Iray
Color Correction in Lightroom
