I’ve been working out with Isaac, my trainer, for nearly two years now. Not this week.
Today, Isaac will be in a hospital getting a kidney transplant. His mom was a very close match and a willing donor. This should put an end to a year of dialysis.
It’ll be great to have Isaac back and fully-functional. I wish him a speed and complete recovery this week.
I couldn’t imagine spending years on dialysis. Yet, for some people, that is – literally – their life.
This past weekend, I was encouraged to create a new scene in Carrara. I have been swimming in the LightWave pool for some time now; so I wanted to re-discover my old friend.
I love the Cheirocrates props that Jack Tomalin has created. It was one of the first models that I purchased from DAZ3D; I know that this is a set that I will return to frequently.
The idea of an oasis just outside the street scene has long been in my head. Getting the mix of greenery and desert parched sand right would be a bit tricky. My first attempt involved two terrain primitives; but getting them to blend seamlessly with each other required far too much effort for my taste. There had to be an easier way.
I ended up using a single terrain primitive using a heightfield that I created in Leveller and tweaked with Photoshop. Photoshop’s layers let me quickly create distribution maps that could control the placement of the palm trees and greenery around the oasis water. One further tweak that I would like to make in the future is another distribution map to put the papyrus plants along the water edge. The green terrain was controlled with Carrara’s terrain shader; I set a small range of altitude for the green and left the rest to be parched sand. Both the green and the sand are just procedural textures.
I owe a tip of the cap to evilproducer – one of the DAZ3D forum gurus – for the lighting. He suggested a light dome to simulate global illumination as well as the lens flare effect for the sunlight.
One of the best compliments was from a co-worker who saw the image on someone’s desktop wallpaper and asked, “Was that taken in Dubai?”
On Wednesday, the parliament of New Zealand voted to legalize marriage equality. It is the 13th country to do so and the first in the Asia-Pacific region (seriously Australia, get your act together and follow the Kiwis!).
Everyone else; you do realize that you will fall on the wrong side of history if you wait. Stop listening to the terrified, old men that run your church! The world will not end if two men or two women can express their love for each other in the same way that a man and a woman can. This is about basic human rights, not about your faith.
I spent some time on Friday night and Saturday morning playing around with a simple LightWave model and scene. The primary purpose was to experiment with nodal surfacing – specifically the Carpaint material. I also changed some of the light types (usually using an area light or a spotlight) and angles.
The Carpaint material was used on the cube with the rounded edges. I was also trying to get some caustics effects out of the gemstones.
Here are some of the results from my Flickr WIP set. There really isn’t much commentary to add about these.
A couple of days ago I finished reading Bart Ehrman’s Forged.
Powerful stuff. When combined with his other books; – Jesus, Interrupted and Misquoting Jesus – you get something much closer to real bible study than what I ever experienced inside a church. This actually is one of the most frustrating things that I face when discussing Christianity with believers – they simply cannot accept that their holy books have been altered over the centuries. The idea is completely alien to them.
Ehrman’s work is not intended to make new atheists or to trash a religion. Simply, he seeks to uncover the truth about Christianity’s history. There is so much that happened during the first few formative centuries and we only have enticing snippets of it today. The belief systems of the various sects – again, modern Christians simply cannot seem to wrap their heads around other, equally valid but now all-but-lost, ways of thinking and worshipping. This stuff is endlessly fascinating to me.
I look forward to reading more of Bart Ehrman’s books.
I have become interested in the work being done at Carrara Cafe to provide an alternative (and less censored) set of forums for Carrara users. So I began modifying my avatar image; it was nearly instantly that I thought about adding some fire to it.
Of course, this is a much higher resolution than the avatar itself. But there are some interesting details here that would be otherwise lost.
The texture on the t-shirt is one of my early lessons in UV mapping. To make it personal, I went for the RDFRS Out Campaign logo.
A friend of mine suggested that the hair should also be fiery. That is an interesting idea. It is probably one that I would want to create in Photoshop post-work because I do not think Carrara’s fire primitive is quite up to the task.
I am still working on the art gallery in LightWave and will post about that as it comes together. Honestly; I keep re-starting it as I experiment and learn more things about modeling in LightWave. I wish I had more time to be modeling during the week – but there are bills to pay!
For some reason that I do not fully understand, DAZ-3D likes to keep their cards close to their chest. They are essentially silent about what they are working on. This leads to wild and usually unfounded speculation in the support forums (here is a recent example).
Coming from Microsoft and their love of blogging and general openness about their products, I do find this to be very frustrating. There is no doubt that DAZ-3D would prefer to be a content-only company (or just stick with their own Daz|Studio product).
For the past month;,we Carraraists have been speculating about an alleged February announcement. What might it be? Carrara 8.5 is piteously overdue, is it finished? Is DAZ-3D selling Carrara? Is Carrara abandoned? On and on the theories piled upon each other without any word from DAZ all month.
Late last night, Carrara Cafe released this tantalizing bit.
Not exactly earth-shattering stuff there. But at least they announced some dates that we can try to hold them to.
While experimenting with Filter Forge, I created a rather interesting texture map that I called “crushed sapphires.” I thought it had a really neat pattern and the bluish hue made me think immediately of my birthstone, sapphire.
I started playing with the texture map in LightWave – at first, just to learn more about the different lighting options in Layout. In the picture on the right, I used two linear lights.
If you look at the base of the cylinder with the crushed sapphires texture you can a brighter line of light on the marble floor. That is the linear light in action; you specify an invisible line in three dimensional space that is emitting light in all directions.
It really did not take me very long to become curious about what the crushed sapphire texture would look like on the Victoria 4 model in Carrara! I was really pleased with how that turned out and posed Victoria on a marble-like base and in a “room” (just a vertex cube to make wall, floor and ceiling – nothing fancy).
Here is close-up angle that helps show-off the texture map.
The pose here still wasn’t quite to my liking. It looks like Victoria is almost floating above the base. I put a spotlight pointed at her but that was far too bright.
The ideas started flowing at that point and I could hardly stop trying to implement them. The vision of an art gallery appeared in my brain and I knew that I had to create it. It was like a compulsion.
In LightWave, I modeled a rather simple cylinder and base. The idea was to make a metallic, brass line queuing pole; such as what you might find in a bank. I tried to model the velvet rope to hang from the queuing poles but I simply could not easily stretch and rotate the polygons to appear like a natural draping object.
I would have to use bones and rigging. Bones are an essential concept to posing or animating a polygonal model. However; they are something that I had yet to use in either Carrara or LightWave. Fortunately, there was plenty of help from the kindred minds in the DAZ-3D forums. I owe a special note of thanks to Phil Wilkes (here is a link to Phil’s excellent Carrara training videos), Dartanbeck and evilproducer for their advice and encouragement.
Here is the art gallery scene on the right shortly before I ceased working on it.
Ceased? Yes. Sort of.
It was coming along rather nicely (Dartanbeck and evilproducer gave me permissions to use their renders as framed paintings). I discovered that as more ideas formed in my mind, I realized that I would have to start over from scratch.
The art gallery room was an after-thought. All of this started with the accidental creation of the crushed sapphires texture. If I was going to create a proper art gallery scene, I would have to plan around the room itself. I wanted a much fancier room than just a box.
So I have been back inside LightWave trying out different ideas. Currently, I am considering a t-shaped room with a vaulted ceiling. The crushed sapphire Victoria will still be a major part of the scene; but I want to display other models – either purchased from DAZ or created myself – as exhibits in the gallery.
I may write another post describing the gallery modeling work in LightWave – I’m going to start again today with attempt number three!
This story isn’t quite over yet! Carrara guru, evilproducer, made some significant tweaks to the crushed sapphires texture. He shared his knowledge with us in the forums and I am very grateful for that. The shader now has a much better gemstone-like glitter and translucency to it.
In the picture on the right, you can also see that Victoria is posed much more naturally on the base.
Thanks EP!
This whole process has been interesting and educational.