Dan Among Den

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October 30, 2005

Refuge

I've done a lot of simple pinups recently, and mostly that was just because, well, ok, a lot was because I'm a guy, but also because it made learning various technical aspects of the tools easier without a lot of other things getting in the way. But anyway, here's one that's a bit more complicated.

We all need a place of refuge, where we can retreat for a moment of peace, hidden away from the rest of the world. We don't go there nearly often enough.

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September 01, 2005

Calendar Girl (September)

Here's a render I prepared in advance for today, and so far it's been well received over at my Renderosity gallery. It's the second in a series of "Calendar Girls", and if it works out, I might try to put together enough to make an actual calendar out of them.

Alas, it is not work-safe.

I also have it in 1600x1200 if anyone's interested.

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August 08, 2005

Behind the Scenes of your IM client

Here's a funny little render I did a couple of weeks back.

Think about this next time you ;) in your IM client.

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July 13, 2005

Invoking Power

And lest you think I'm all about misogyny, here's another recent one:

This one started out merely as an attempt to copy a pose and hairstyle from a pinup image I found online. (Dan? Downloading porn? Say it's not so!) In the end, it became something else.

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False Hope

I've actually done several renders lately, and I haven't been posting them all here, because I didn't want to tilt the blog too heavily towards the rendering, nor did I want to incur all the bandwidth hit. (Ooooo yeah, baby, I've got like three people reading these...) Anyway, if you're interested in seeing all my stuff, check out my gallery on Renderosity. The tricky bit, though, is that they require us to flag anything with nudity, and you have to register to see any of them -- that whole "save the children" thing. Anyway, it's free registration, so you only have to give up your soul. (To be clear, I'm not associated with Renderosity. It's a large computer graphics site, and I am merely one of its thousands upon thousands of members.)

Anyway, enough with the preamble. Here's an image I did recently called "False Hope", where the first commenter in my gallery said, "Normally, Poser pictures with women being tortured are misogynistic and ill conceived, but this one works really well..."

Of course, the reviewer then went on to say, "It tells a story and really conveys a feeling of dread without being sick and twisted. Everything is suggested and not overtly stated." Which is pretty much what I was trying to get across.

The title comes from the thought that such a prisoner would hear the footsteps above and perhaps wonder if it were a rescue or just another jailer come to inflict another beating. I was hoping to capture that emotional transition as she recoils from what she'd hoped was rescue but suddenly realizes is torture.

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July 04, 2005

Happy Fourth of July

I hope everyone's having a happy Fourth of July. Over at Renderosity, it's common to work up an appropriate holiday image, so I've done one for Independence Day. Mind you, over at Renderosity, an "appropriate" image implicitly requires a naked woman, so I obliged.

After all, Stars and Stripes, a naked woman, and an M16... what more could a redneck ask for on the Fourth of July?

Some of you who are more familiar with my photography may recognize this shot from a picture I took some time ago. My best wishes go out to those involved in its production.

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July 02, 2005

There are worse ways to go...

Here's a quickie I knocked out before bed, the life and death of a lollipop.

That's what I get for listening to "Lollipop".

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June 28, 2005

The Model Talks Back

Here's just a quick one I knocked out last night while MAW was out with friends. Mostly I was just trying to play with a new lighting technique and a new skin-realism kit, but I ended up with something reminiscent of the days when I actually had time to do figure study photos. Some of the best moments back then came not in the actual shot, but in the back and forth with the model. Here's one giving me a little sass. (Not Work Safe, so think before you click.)

The image itself isn't that amazing or inventive, but I think my renders are getting more realistic. There's still some joint problems around the hip there, but that's a common problem with this particular model.

The lighting technique was really just to use multiple, parallel spotlights (5 in a big plus sign) to simulate a larger diffuse light, and then to use ray traced shadows with a large blur radius. I think the lights needed to be a little closer together, but it definitely looks less harsh than many of my other renders.

The skin effects are a new material package that I can't even begin to explain, but it takes the figure, the primary light, and then calculates a shitload of stuff to beef up the material. It goes from one texture map and one bump map to something like twenty shader nodes, ranging from Blinn to Fresnel lighting. For $12, it was well worth the purchase. The skin went from looking mannequinish to looking fairly real.

I'm making slow progress on my next "serious" project (as mentioned in "Mt. Stripmore"), but it's held up over a wardrobe issue -- something clearly not a problem in this instance.

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June 24, 2005

Mt. Stripmore

Here's a little image I worked up last night. It was really just a feasiblity test for a new landscape technique I was experimenting with. I'm actually working on another image altogether, and for that one I'll need to have a statue/monument rising out of the mountains in the background. In the final image, she will be clothed (at least partially) and holding a spear or some other exotic polearm, all still made from stone. However, for here I just needed her as a placeholder, so I didn't bother to clothe her or decorate the pole at all. As a result, she looks a bit like a pole-dancing stripper.

Thus, I give you:

For those of you interested in such things, the technique was amazingly simple. In fact, it was so simple I was pretty sure it wasn't going to work well or perhaps not at all. On top of that, I'd seen no mention of it in any of my newsgroup search queries. But nonetheless, I think it worked very well.

I positioned several cylinders of varying height in my scene, and then draped a large cloth over them. I altered the cloth properties to make it extra stretchy, and it draped down fairly convincingly. The rest of the effect is just bump maps and color ramps driven by a combination of the Z value (i.e. elevation) and the face normal (i.e. slope). Thus, the high steep areas got a brownish-white color and a very harsh turbulence bump map, while the lower and flatter areas got a greenish color with a softer bump map.

The green still doesn't have the vegetation look I'm after, but it's probably good enough for the eventual image. Remember, this is really just going to be in the background. On the other hand, I can be a bit of a perfectionist on these trivial details. I won't even tell you how long I spent working out a starfield texture once. But here, I think the key is to switch more fully to a more convicing soft bump map when I get to the green, and I just now realized that one good way to do that would be drive the switch not off the elevation and slope, but to drive it off of the color change itself which was driven off those things. It would be very similar, but I could make the change much more sharply just by measuring the green component of the color ramp. I'll have to try that one over the weekend.

I might also play with turning the bump map into a displacement map. It would make for a longer render, but I think it would make the ridge lines look better. (For the unitiated, bump maps give the appearance of bumps via false self-shadowing while displacement maps really do make bumps which then cast real shadows.)

The statue got a little bit of the bump map further down, but then it transitions into another bump map I'd develped before: stucco. From a distance, it looks just like a pocked/weathered stone. (Though in the future, I'll probably want to tone down the specular channel.) I also have some ideas for making the mountain-to-statue transition areas a bit better.

The clouds in the background are the only bitmap texture in the entire scene. Everything else is procedural. That's important to me, because when I render something hi-res for printing, bitmaps that are good enough for screen rendering sometimes show artifacts at 300 dpi. Plus, with some of my hi-res renders, I'm having a hard enough time keeping the whole mess under the 2GB application memory limit as it is without adding a lot of unnecessary bitmap textures to the mix.

Anyway, it was just a feasibility study, but I thought it came out well enough to share.

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June 08, 2005

Playing with the new version of Poser

I upgraded from Poser version 5 to version 6 in March, but I didn't actually install it until this week when service release 1 was available. Here's my first render with it. It's not really NWS, but it's a little risque.

What I really wanted to test here was a new lighting technique that lets you render things as if they were glowing fairly well. You just turn off all the lights, crank up the ambient light value on the glowing object, and then set all the other objects to "gather" light. Unfortunately, the gathering is very weak and somewhat spotty, so it wouldn't come out right. I ended up using a couple of point-source lights (also new) and fudging a few things. I'm still not quite happy with how the lighting turned out, but I'm going to set it aside for now, maybe to return later to fiddle with it some more.

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May 22, 2005

I Am Not a Number!

Just a little bit of humor in defiance of all the numbers I've had to memorize, i.e. SSN, phone, credit card, driver's license...

I thought this would also look good on a t-shirt, but CafePress doesn't do as well with printing light on dark, so I did style Photoshop stylizing to get something that I think will work:

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May 17, 2005

Sorrow... a work in progress

Here's a little piece I worked up over the weekend. I don't really consider it finished because it just feels like there's something missing, but I don't know what it is. So, I'm putting it on the shelf for a while to see if time works it out for me.

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May 13, 2005

Have I given up writing for rendering?

Another render... two in one week, but no, I haven't given up writing in favor of rendering stuff. It's just that lately work has been lots of reading docs, writing proposals, etc. At the end of the day, I'm pretty much "written out", so working on visual rendering projects has been more relaxing. I suspect that will slack off once the heavy coding gets going again since that tends to engage my right brain much more.

So anyway, here's my latest offering...

I'd been thinking of some kind of crucifix pose for a few weeks, and this is what I ended up with.

Originally, the figure was going to be holding two katanas, stretched out like that, their blades arcing downwards, but once I got the draft of that, I found that it looked far too martial, as if the figure were preparing to attack.

Plus, it threw off the vertical aspect ratio of the cross, and I couldn't find a good way to lengthen the central line. Then, when comparing the sword-draft with an earlier rough-draft, I found that I like the open hands better. The open, relaxed hands give it much more a feeling of surrender and release that was closer to my original intent.

In other news, I've given MAW the weekend off. She hasn't had a real break from the kids for almost two years for various reasons. But this weekend, she's off in a hotel, reading a book and ordering room service. I would have done it last weekend for Mother's Day, but I was out of town.

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May 10, 2005

Tuesday Night Performance

Given that the rendering technology I use seems crafted almost specifically for porn, it's no surprise that there's a lot of it made. In fact, there's an entire community site dedicated to it. There's everything from mildly sensuous mood pieces to hardcore transgender porn and extreme S&M. (Note: there's no kiddie porn, because we all know that such virtual kiddie porn would be evidence of the crime of virtual child abuse. Help stop the rampage of virtual child abuse in this country!) Of course, following Sturgeon's Law, 90% of it is crap, but applying Ron Jeremy's Law tells us that even bad porn is still pretty good.

So, given such a technological predisposition towards pornography, we shouldn't ask why I've decided to sink to such depths. Instead, we should ask how I held out for so long?

The following is mild but NOT work safe.

Click on the thumbnail for the full-size image.

I guess the real reason I held off so long is that most porn, while titilating, is boring. <Beavis>Heh... he said "tit"!</Beavis>

I got this idea from a piece of erotic fiction on the web where a bunch of anonymous couples would take turns watching each other perform via telescopes. By unspoken agreement, this couple performs every second Tuesday of the month.

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April 30, 2005

Fire and Water

Here's an image I've been working with on and off this week. It's not work safe, so think before you click.

Click the image for a higher resolution copy.

I was starting to think ahead towards this year's Flipside, and I wanted to do a mixed image (like "Two Sides" below) that showed a blend of the fire as well as the cool water. Doing the blend at the water's surface seemed to work best. I'm also contemplating a similar image with two male figures, but I haven't really thought about it much.

If I can work it out, though, I'd like to get this printed onto some kind of a banner to hang on my tent as both art and a marker. If I do and if I also do the male image, I'd try to do one side of the banner male and the other female. [Quick technical note: I know I can get it printed on "Tyvec" (sp?), and while that is weather resistant, it's too flimsy to hang in any kind of wind. So, I'm thinking of trying to attach the tyvec print(s) to a piece of canvas somehow. Any suggestions would be helpful.]

That's it for art for a bit. I'm off to the California offices for a week, and I'm not taking my software with me.

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April 25, 2005

AggieCon and my Secret Project

I spent the weekend in College Station for AggieCon 35(?), and this time I entered the art show. That was my secret project sucking up all my free time. I entered five pieces but only sold one. Still, it was enough encouragement to try again in the future.

Here are the five pieces I entered. Click the image to see a high resolution version:

Two Sides This is the first piece I did, and I posted it here before when I did it. This is also the one that sold.

Homesick I travel for business a lot, and what I miss most are my kids. Yes, even more than MAW. . The Day Her Replacement Arrived This one originated with a family in the background and the robot being all left out, but I ended up with this somewhat bleaker and sinister (and a little more humorous) take. A long time ago in a bedroom far, far away... I've always had my suspicions about Anakin's immaculate conception. Guardian Someone crossed the wrong guardian angel.

You can look at some of my other stuff at my Renderosity gallery.

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April 12, 2005

Bad mood image

I wasn't really in a bad mood when I did this (quite the opposite), but I have felt like this before:

It's also available on a variety of apparel at my store.

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March 17, 2005

Two Sides, final

Here's the final version of that earlier rendering: Two Sides. Click the thumbnail for a larger resolution.

I actually have it at 4000 pixels wide, and I think I'm going to try and get a print of it made. I'm pretty pleased with this one. It's the first render I've done that I've really considered as more than a demo or experiment in using the software.

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March 15, 2005

Two Sides, a work in progress

I've fiddled with a new rendering image the last couple of evenings. It's one that I tried to do years ago w/ an earlier version of the software and was never satisfied with it. This time I'm much closer. Click the thumbnail to see it at full resolution.

I've still got work to do. The eye-corners aren't the right color IMO, and I think I want the eye on the left to be a little more bloodshot. I'm also considering a few other elements and some bordering beyond the hair on the right and left. Still, it was a good stopping point, so I figured I'd post what I had.

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February 21, 2005

That was a looooong render...

And here's what I look like afterwards:

Well, not really. Actually, it's just been a long time since I've done any rendering, but since I had the day off, I thought I'd play around with some of the extra tools in my rendering toolbox. This was mostly the result of some face morphing stuff, though I did spend a little time adding the hair and touching up the eyebrow texture. This essentially pure-render, i.e. the only postwork was to fix an error down around the shirt collar.

For comparison, this is the same model and essentially the same texture as I used in this previous side-by-side render.

As I've mentioned, I'm thinking about doing a comic strip using these rendering tools to generate my graphics for me. This guy is the prototype for one of my characters.

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August 23, 2004

More muppet porn... and a stab at a comic strip

MAW was ragging on me about all the muppet-porn, so I figured I'd really show her. Besides, it gave me the impetus to at least try to prototype a comic strip. It doesn't have the characters I want to eventually use, but I just wanted to see if it was feasible. I didn't size it quite right, so it's a little too wide for my blog-format. As a result, I've done it as a pop-up here:

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August 01, 2004

Tweaking the values

Some of you may remember some of my earlier renderings. Here's a new one where I'm mostly just tweaking various paramaters, both to morph the face/hair and to modify the materials. I've included the default for a side-by-side comparison. Both were rendered in production mode with the same overall render settings. Mine is on the right.

This is also the first time I've really started from scratch on the hair. I don't like the curliness on the top, but I couldn't figure out how to straighten that out. Just having a bad hair day I guess.

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