Grand Central Arena - Character Images
Oct. 6th, 2009 09:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marydellSo I've been quietly beetling away on a little project for the past couple of months - Ryk Spoor (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
seawasp ) mentioned that he wanted to do some kind of a trailer for his upcoming Baen book, Grand Central Arena. It sounded like fun so I volunteered to do some images, and lo and behold it was fun! He's working on making something cool out of the resulting imagery--I did character images and Keith Morrison did ship images and also a character image or two. The book is a fun adventure and I had a good time visualizing the characters with Ryk's guidance.
Captain Ariane Austin
Simon Sandrisson
Marc DuQuesne
Trio - Simon, Ariane, Marc
Ariane in casual wear
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(Larger versions are in my gallery, if you want 'em)
How I made these images:
These images were rendered in a 3d posing-and-rendering app called Daz Studio. You may have heard of another app in the same line, Poser. I use both apps, having recently made the jump to DS after about 10 years of Poser-ing. They're both good apps but Daz Studio has, in its newest version anyway, a pretty standard 3d-app interface, and the basic app is free over at www.daz3d.com. Poser has a more creative, right-brainy sort of interface which is good if you're a total beginner but can be annoying once you're not, particularly if your right brain mostly spends its time cowering in fear of your overgrown, HGH-enhanced left brain. Um, not that I know anyone with that problem.
Anyway. What these apps do is allow you to take a pre-made human figure, load pre-made skin textures onto it, load pre-made clothing, props, hair, etc onto it, and then pose, customize, and render it. To pose it you either move each body part into position individually, or you load a pre-made pose onto it. Also you have dials you can twiddle to change the shape of the face and the body - for example, the two dudes shown up above are the same base figure, "morphed" into different body and face types. And you can change the colors of the models - for example, Ariane's shirt with the butterfly on it is black by default, but I created a blue texture with a butterfly in photoshop, and applied it to the shirt. Also you can see that her red boots and her blue boots are the same boot model, rendered in different colors.
To render it you place lights in the scene (or load a pre-made set...you get the idea) and position your camera, set your render parameters (how detailed; how many shadows, that kind of stuff) and hit the render button. A high-quality render of a single figure that's big enough to make a nice wallpaper takes an hour or two on my system (4 gb memory); with several figures in the scene I hit the render button and then go to bed and check it in the morning. Rendering is where it calculates all of the lights and other information and creates the final image. Anyway most of this pre-made stuff costs money, so this is a hobby that can become expensive; on the other hand if you learn how to create the pre-made stuff yourself (most of which will require other apps) you can earn money. I generally make enough off of my models to pay for the pre-made stuff I want to buy from other people. I was doing 3d for about 3 years before I made any money off of it though...the learning curve for modeling (making objects or figures that is) is kinda steep.
Some people use these apps as reference points for drawing (in which case all you need is the free Daz Studio app and the free figures that come with it--they're very nice free figures, quite high-quality), others use them for stereotypical fantasy art, and some use the finished renders as a starting point for digital painting, ending up with some really beautiful pieces. Oh and then there is the porn, which ranges from hilariously bad to hilariously good. Did I mention the figures can be modified, stretched, etc? All in all, it's an interesting hobby, and I've enjoyed it quite a lot over the years. My main interest is in modeling stuff, as well as a bit of digital painting, so I don't feel bad about mainly working with pre-made stuff...I think of it as just another kind of doll collecting, as addictive as the physical kind of doll collecting, but a little cheaper.
If you want to give it a try, head over to www.daz3d.com and have a look around and download the free app and figures, and then head to www.renderosity.com to see user forums, tutorials, galleries and so forth. There are other fora out there but Renderosity is the biggest and the longest-lived. If you want to see some really expert CGI using high-end apps and/or digital painting, cgchannel.com is the place to look...their galleries are full of beautiful things. And if you want to see more of my pics, I've got a flickr set of my CGI art over here, which includes various objects I modeled from scratch.
seawasp ) mentioned that he wanted to do some kind of a trailer for his upcoming Baen book, Grand Central Arena. It sounded like fun so I volunteered to do some images, and lo and behold it was fun! He's working on making something cool out of the resulting imagery--I did character images and Keith Morrison did ship images and also a character image or two. The book is a fun adventure and I had a good time visualizing the characters with Ryk's guidance. Captain Ariane Austin
Simon Sandrisson
Marc DuQuesne
Trio - Simon, Ariane, Marc
Ariane in casual wear
--------------------------------------
(Larger versions are in my gallery, if you want 'em)
How I made these images:
These images were rendered in a 3d posing-and-rendering app called Daz Studio. You may have heard of another app in the same line, Poser. I use both apps, having recently made the jump to DS after about 10 years of Poser-ing. They're both good apps but Daz Studio has, in its newest version anyway, a pretty standard 3d-app interface, and the basic app is free over at www.daz3d.com. Poser has a more creative, right-brainy sort of interface which is good if you're a total beginner but can be annoying once you're not, particularly if your right brain mostly spends its time cowering in fear of your overgrown, HGH-enhanced left brain. Um, not that I know anyone with that problem.
Anyway. What these apps do is allow you to take a pre-made human figure, load pre-made skin textures onto it, load pre-made clothing, props, hair, etc onto it, and then pose, customize, and render it. To pose it you either move each body part into position individually, or you load a pre-made pose onto it. Also you have dials you can twiddle to change the shape of the face and the body - for example, the two dudes shown up above are the same base figure, "morphed" into different body and face types. And you can change the colors of the models - for example, Ariane's shirt with the butterfly on it is black by default, but I created a blue texture with a butterfly in photoshop, and applied it to the shirt. Also you can see that her red boots and her blue boots are the same boot model, rendered in different colors.
To render it you place lights in the scene (or load a pre-made set...you get the idea) and position your camera, set your render parameters (how detailed; how many shadows, that kind of stuff) and hit the render button. A high-quality render of a single figure that's big enough to make a nice wallpaper takes an hour or two on my system (4 gb memory); with several figures in the scene I hit the render button and then go to bed and check it in the morning. Rendering is where it calculates all of the lights and other information and creates the final image. Anyway most of this pre-made stuff costs money, so this is a hobby that can become expensive; on the other hand if you learn how to create the pre-made stuff yourself (most of which will require other apps) you can earn money. I generally make enough off of my models to pay for the pre-made stuff I want to buy from other people. I was doing 3d for about 3 years before I made any money off of it though...the learning curve for modeling (making objects or figures that is) is kinda steep.
Some people use these apps as reference points for drawing (in which case all you need is the free Daz Studio app and the free figures that come with it--they're very nice free figures, quite high-quality), others use them for stereotypical fantasy art, and some use the finished renders as a starting point for digital painting, ending up with some really beautiful pieces. Oh and then there is the porn, which ranges from hilariously bad to hilariously good. Did I mention the figures can be modified, stretched, etc? All in all, it's an interesting hobby, and I've enjoyed it quite a lot over the years. My main interest is in modeling stuff, as well as a bit of digital painting, so I don't feel bad about mainly working with pre-made stuff...I think of it as just another kind of doll collecting, as addictive as the physical kind of doll collecting, but a little cheaper.
If you want to give it a try, head over to www.daz3d.com and have a look around and download the free app and figures, and then head to www.renderosity.com to see user forums, tutorials, galleries and so forth. There are other fora out there but Renderosity is the biggest and the longest-lived. If you want to see some really expert CGI using high-end apps and/or digital painting, cgchannel.com is the place to look...their galleries are full of beautiful things. And if you want to see more of my pics, I've got a flickr set of my CGI art over here, which includes various objects I modeled from scratch.
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Date: 2009-10-07 02:48 am (UTC)I'm on a Mac using Firefox, if that matters.
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