Ken St Andre asked for another image for one of his Tunnels and Trolls adventures, I was glad to oblige.
I Bet You Wish ...
Entire image rendered in-camera using Vue, text added in postwork.
Popularity: 3% [?]
DC ParaTransit Info is a site that monitors and reports on transportation facilities for people with disabilities in the Metro DC area.
After a recent site design, a new avatar was needed for their Twitter account, as well as for use with Gravatars and other media.
Given the subject matter, I decided to create a Steampunk-based image to use as the base for the avatar(s), with a combination of railroad and road imagery. For larger image use, I included a city skyline, with mist atmosphere so the distant objects would degrade softly into obscurity at lower image sizes.
DC ParaTransit Info Avatar
Steampunk engine is the SGM Explorer, originally setup in Poser then imported into Vue. Atmosphere, mist, roadbed, and city skyline all done within Vue.
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Eudemonia has a novel punishment for non-violent criminals – Banishment.
Those who choose this way of shortening their sentences are shunned from society, encased in a second skin of flexible black rubber, sealed for the duration behind a steel helmet, all of it controlled by their Custodian – a neural AI connected directly into their very brains that monitors their every thought and punishes for the slightest infraction.
The citizens call these outcasts Banes, their banesuit becomes their prison, their Custodian the Warden. Unable to communicate with the outside world, all senses muted, incapable of even feeling their surroundings, banes are a common sight on the streets as they watch a world go by that they can no longer participate in – ignored by most, cruelly persecuted by a sadistic few “bane-bashers”.
Katrina Nichols is a young reporter determined to expose the cruelty of the Banishment Project, and embarks on a journey into banishment to discover the truth about the Banes – but they have a secret of their own they want to keep hidden from the society that cast them out.
Katrina’s path takes her closer to discovering the truth the banes are hiding, a mystery that could lead to her liberation – or her destruction.
Katrina/WInter's Isle
One of my more technically challenging renders. I don’t really classify this as a combination render of Poser and Vue – it does use the base Victoria 4 figure from Poser, but the only time it saw the inside of poser was for … well, posing.
Once it was imported into Vue, I went to work on texturizing it with a black latex material. A lot of node editing later, and I finally found the right balance to give it the shiny and ultra-reflective black latex feel I wanted to bring across from the story.
I wanted to recreate the island Katrina calls home in the story, the snowy ground (and the title) being a play on a major arc within the story. Trying to get it to look right on the screen wasn’t as easy, but I had perfect reference material for snowy ground and trees just by looking outside my window at the remains of the snowstorms at the start of the month!
To wrap it all up, I added a second plane of procedurally-generated city blocks behind the camera so they’d show in the reflections on the banesuit, and threw in some basic global radiosity atmosphere for the lighting, dark clouds to go with the feel of it snowing can just be seen above the city skyline in the distance, and reflected on the helmet.
Postwork needed was minimal, and was done using Photoshop.
Popularity: 5% [?]
This ended up the result of just doodling to see what I could come up with for ecosystem painting within Vue, but it grew to have a life of its own once I started adding the dead trees. In the end, I started thinking of Indiana Jones-style ruins in the middle of jungles, and so came the mauseleum.
Once that was in place, it obviously had to have a night sky atmosphere added, this one with global radiosity in it, but it also had some basic lights brought in closer to the mauseleum. A light behind the building with softness and volumetric turned on gave it the strange light-beams effect coming from inside the dome area.
When I brought the resulting image into Photoshop for postwork, it really had some problems with the definition, the lights had almost washed out a lot of the mauseleum itself, so I used the alpha mask I’d created for the building on its own to remove the surrounding terrain from a copy of the background layer, and made that layer overlay at about 40%. That brought the building nicely into darker focus.
All in all, a fun doodle.
Rendered in Vue, postwork in Photoshop. Total time to setup including hand-painting the forest ecosystem, 3 hours. Total render time, 2 hours. Postwork time, 30 minutes.
Dark Forest Mauseleum
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An entry I did for the Halloween contest in 2008 at Renderosity.
Figures created and posed using Poser, then imported into Vue for the ocean-bed landscape and final render.
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Another combined render, doing the initial human figure building and posing in Poser, building the landscape in Vue, then taking the Poser scene across to Vue to for the final rendering.
The magic effects were added using Photoshop in post. The resulting image is after the fold.
Popularity: 2% [?]
Composed entirely in Vue, a nice, simple, seascape render – a lonely outpost high above the ocean, dark angry skies in the distance.
A different test version I did had a little metablob space-ship sat on the landing pad, but I decided against it in the end.
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After the successful results of the Hitch-Hiker render, I wanted to play around more with lights.
For the most part, up until then my concern with lighting was getting the overall scene lights right. I’d used the point-lights when I rendered the Tumbler from the Batman movies as well, but I wanted to see what else I could do.
So back to Vue, but this time with an entirely Vue-based setup for a castle at night style scene.
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Some more mythological creatures, this time Dragons – a mother and child.
It gave me another opportunity to add “human” like qualities to a non-human critter – in this case, to mimic a human baby sucking its thumb, with a (very) protective mother hovering over it.
This is another combination render, with the figures being taken into Poser at first to set up and pose, then brought across into Vue for the landscape and final renders.
Image after the fold.
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Even though I’m not using the super-duper humongous level kit that a major animation studio for the movies uses (donations would be gratefully accepted though 
), it’s still possible for me to use the same level of effects for single-frame images.
An example of the dilemma this causes is after the fold.
I’ve been reading Darth Mojo’s blog, and in it he once discussed how the Battlestar Galactica FX crew had lit up one of the ships they rendered/animated for the series. I decided to give the methods he discussed a try.
The first image was the one I had in mind right from the start, a simple steampunk vehicle trundling along a barren alien landscape at night, that had picked up an unwanted alien hitch-hiker.
The scene as envisioned would give me a chance to practice the self-lighting techniques I’d been reading about.
Hitch Hiker (Unlit)
Looks pretty good, I think?
Enter the dilemma. I also tried to do the same render, with mostly the same lighting, but turned on volumetric lighting to the render.
It actually came out pretty good the first time, but the haze and smoke “flared” too brightly with some of the lights from the original scene, so back into the lighting settings I went, as well as adding some extra external lights to try and bring the shadows into better focus.
This was the result of the tweaks with volumetrics enabled.
Hitch Hiker (Lit)
I’m not sure which one of these I’d call the “better” one. The first one has some of the feel, and is a lot clearer, but the one with volumetric has a more atmospheric, dusty dark planet feel to it – and the line of shadow coming from one of the alien’s fins towards the right is a cool effect.
So, which one would you choose?
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