TabascoJack's House of Hot Sauce and Art
TabascoJack
Posts: 865
I've been here a few months now and decided it was time to start my own thread in the Art Studio.
I've had limited experience as an artist - many, many years ago I dabbled in ceramics and also in photography, but never really dove into it. But at some point last year, something (I can't even recall what) pointed me at Daz and I haven't looked back. Maybe it's the ease of use, or the fact that I can stop in the middle to deal with something else, or just the simple joy of being surprised everytime a new render writes to the screen. Maybe it's the experimentation, trying out new techniques or bringing an idea to fruition. Whatever it is, I'm enjoying it and I'm also enjoying the welcoming community here.
All that said, I'm still very much a novice and finding my artistic voice. My renders reflect that. They range from vehicles to pinups to the occasional story; from contemporary to sci-fi and fantasy. Some images are simple iray renders, others suffer the indignities of my attempts to learn photoshop. But I enjoy making each and every one of them.
All of that was a long and winding way of saying: I'm still new at this, trying to learn as much as I can about all aspects of digital art. The results may be good or they may be horrible. If it's the former, I'll consider myself lucky. If it's the latter, then, well, as Knittingmommy said in her thread, I apologize in advance to any and all PAs in advance for anything I've done to your products. Any and all feedback is welcome, and I look forward to sharing my work with you.
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Comments
I recently purchased "Victoria 4 for Genesis 2 Female" and thought I'd test it out against V4 Cuore di Moda.
I'm happy with it; the clothes auto-fit perfectly and I think the result worked well.
Parrotdolphin's Iray Shader Kit 1 was used on the outfit to get an organza blouse and silk vest and pants.
Rendered with Iray, Color adjustment and vignetting in Photoshop.
One of my recent renders - not thrilled with it Its lacking something, but I'm just not sure where to go with it.
Tower Light
A lone traveler, a rainy night, a light high in a tower.
What would you do?
Nice to see you with your own thread, TabascoJack! I really like your first image posted. Nice effect. The posing is great and I really like the lighting and camera angle. Your second image is a nice start. I think the problem might possibly be that you need some lighting focused on something, whether the girl in your image or something else. Just something small to highlight a something in the foreground of your image might help. Maybe a small highlight on the back of the girl's hair?
I have images on my hard drive all the time that I like, but something seems to be missing. I'll be darned if I can figure out what that something might be. :) It is always harder to figure that out on our own sometimes. Hopefully, you'll get some good tips to try out! Good luck. I'll be watching!
I wonder if maybe you changed the angle a bit.... I have this issue as well. Maybe take it over to the composition thread Knittingmommy and I started and see if you can get some ideas there... I like it but I understand wanting to push it just that little bit further.
And I like the pose on the first one as well. I look forward to seeing more of your work!
Crossposting from the Iray Renders thread:
I like the way this one came out. It was much more of a photoshop learning exercise than it was Daz, but the more I use PS the easier it gets to understand.
I really like Ron's Flames, btw.
Interesting image. I think you did a good job with it. I like the lighting and the postwork you did. Overall, it is a very dramatic piece and the colors seem to work well. Keep up the good work.
Thanks!
Wow those are Rons flame brushes? That turned out really well. This is honestly my favorite kind of art (high fantasy) and I really like the elements you brought together for this.
Yes, that's Ron's flame brushes. Just a single stamp, rotated and clipped. Then it's just Photoshop blending to get the colors. Luckily, Ron provides a brief tutorial on how to do it.
Thanks for the compliment on the render too!
Yes I bought those brushes (along with another 20 or so lol) and knew there was a tutorial but haven't had a chance to try anything yet.You did a great job with it.
So she is making hot sauce? Nice perspective!
You've discovered the secret ingredient....Magic!
Hi TJ. I'm just here for the hot sauce, heh-heh.
Nice renders. Great start so far. Many principles from photography and ceramics will serve you well in this digital world. The best part is, no clean time up at the end of the day.
Small suggestion on the Tower Light render, you might want to put some sort of light on the figure. I get that it is night time, and the focus of the picture is the glowing tower windows, but maybe she is standing by a yellowish gas lamp or something which is casting a yellow light on her back? Humans like to have other humans in the pictures in the pictures to relate to them on some level. Just a thought. Keep at it.
cheers!
Picked up Cath's Physically Based Shaders Vol 2 set and wanted to play with it.
Updated an old V4 outfit with new leather and metal shaders. Did the geometry shell / ivy thing for the back stone wall, and used the volumetric murky water for the river.
I absolutely love her shaders.
I just picked up volume 1 & 2 of her shaders. Can't wait to try them out. This looks great!
It's amazing how you can spruce up old props/outfits/scenes with these shaders.
So I've been busy with work and travelling for the past couple of weeks, so haven't had the chance to do as much as I'd like. I did find time, interspersed between projects, to work on a new render. I wanted to try something with multiple figures. At some random point, the old TV series of Charlie's Angels popped into my head as inspiration. I also had just finished a series of books that had a take no prisoners, sword-wielding heroine. All that added up to a scene with 3 women, warrior, mage, and archer, back against the wall, facing a group of unseen attackers, ready to kick some behind.
So I took Stonemason's Jungle Ruins and re-shaded it with mostly MEC4D's Physically Based Shaders and some Wood shaders from the Nature Shaders pack. Redid most of the shaders on the outfits, again using Cath's PBS. Found a set of cool Arcane Symbol Photoshop brushes at DeviantArt, and used one to create an opacity map for an emissive plane to get the glowing rune on the ground. Added the sphere in front of the mage's hand, put pointlights in the staff and sphere with a smidge of SSS, set a little bloom filter in the render engine, and off we go.
Saved the render as a TIF file with a transparent background, opened it up in Photoshop and dropped in the clouds and added the lightning bolts, did some color balancing and vignetting, and voila!
(click for the full size picture)
Aphrodite's Angels
WOW Jack you have been very busy with all these great renders!!!! Amazing work!!!
So in Monday's sale I picked up a bunch of low priced items, including Epic Wings for Genesis. Converted them to Iray and added some translucency.. I like the way they turned out!
I was working on a more complex scene adding in Praetorian Autoturrets as well, but am not happy with it yet. I'll post it in a bit.
My original concept was angels nimbly avoiding the laser fire from the autoturrets. But in one of the earlier renders I had a neat effect when the emissive beam intersected the wing. It lit up that particular section in a really interesting way. Unfortunately, I don't own the Super Save utility, and the settings for that particular render have been lost in the ether.
I tried recreating it, and discovered that I had to significantly increase the luminance on the emissive beams to get the level of lighting I wanted, but when I did so, I blew out the color of the beam itself.
Luckily, I had been wanting to try canvasses, so I did. For those that don't know, canvasses let you render the impact of an object without actually rendering the object. So in thiis case, I created a canvas that had everything except the beam, That way, I got the red lighting on the character and a transparency where the beam itself was. I then rendered the scene again, removing the character and the canvas. and dropping the luminance on the beam to a value that caused it to emit red instead of yellowish-white.
I was then able to composite the scene to get red laser beams that provide much more lighting on the character then they would otherwise.
Unfortunately, I still didn't get the effect I wanted on the wing, but I learned a fair amount about canvasses.
The canvas render is also attached. During this process I also discovered that instances don't play well with canvasses either, thus explaining the lack of continous roads in the canvas render.
Very cool! Didnt understand all of that but I am sure at some point I will be able to come back and say oh, NOW I get it lol.
As Sonja said, very cool. I haven't had a chance to try rendering out canvases yet. It is definitely something I want to try. It is rough when you get a really cool effect or lighting situation and then you can't go back and you've lost it I hate when that happens! And, yes, it happened to me recently so I know the pain! I do have the Super Save now, but don't have it installed yet. It remains to be seen if it prevents something like that to happen in the future. Only time will tell.
Poor angel, getting her wings zapped like that!
SnowSultan has an excellent tutorial on DeviantArt that explains it very well.
Fantastic renders @TabascoJack , particularly enamoured by Aphrodite's Angels!!
Just stopped in to take a look. You have some really nice renders! I especially like the camera angles you use, it adds a lot of dynamism to your art.
I had the exact same reaction, I think she needs a little light on her left shoulder and hand to pull the eye down from the window lights. Then her forearm and the building eaves will pull the eye back to the left and up to the windows, completing the loop and giving a triangular balance to the composition. You can test this out in Photoshop or GIMP if you want by adjusting the light on the shoulder and upper arm using the dodge and burn tool.
Messing around with texturing. The planet is multiple sphere primitivies with a base and cloud textures of varying opacity and bump. The rings are also a primitive with textures and and opacity maps created in photoshop. The background is pure photoshop and the ship is Marcoor and rendered with canvases.
That looks really cool, The planet and the rings work very good. The shadow of the planet on the rings looks a bit to much for me. I have the feeling that the rings being not one solid thing that shoud be less intense.
Thanks for the feedback! Regarding the shadow, at first I also thought it was too intense. But looking at real life examples, it turns out that my shadow probably isn't dark enough. I also have the light from the nebulae shining through from behind which gives it some visibility.
Haha, ok it seems I stand corrected, learned something new today