I decided it was time to come up with a new render to use as my avatar on sites.
miika's new avatar - June 2010
Rendered in Poser, postwork in Photoshop.
Popularity: 6% [?]
… all it takes is a good scritch behind one ear and he’s putty in your hands!
I’m just amazed no-one’s ever thought of this way to deal with werewolves (or other lycanthropes for that matter).
Of course, there’s a few technical details to work out with the technique – such as how to get within range to scritch to begin with. I’m thinking a good chunk of steak, myself.
To soothe the savage beast
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Popularity: 5% [?]
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: 4% [?]
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.
Popularity: 4% [?]
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: 8% [?]
When this render came into mind, I’d been doing various doodles for a few days but none of them was really grabbing my attention. I knew I wanted to get back to the more fantasy-oriented themes and start building more tagging packs, but the question was, with what?
So instead of starting yet another doodle, it was off to Picasa to see what other doodles I’ve started but never quite clicked in the past, and this one sprang out at me. It was originally for the Red Witch series, but it never really looked quite right – her established armor/clothing and tattoos never fit the concept I had in mind for the image.
I recently added new skin textures to my collection though, and one in particular seemed to go perfectly with it. The combination of such thick tattoos plus sparkling body jewels brought the image more into life.
I changed the original’s contents of the goblet from liquid to a sparkling powder-like substance, generating the initial flow in-camera. As much as I tried to change the camera angles, I wasn’t able to completely cover all the genitalia, and so had to break the idea a little by adding a thong, but the upper body coverage worked perfectly. A different hairstyle rounded off the image.
This took a lot more passes than I usually make for a render to take into Photoshop for postwork. In addition to the color, ambient occlusion, shadow, and displacement passes of the past, I needed to break the image down into several alpha mats. These were needed for the additional effects I knew would be needed to add kick to the result.
The hair was made less “artificial looking”, and the sparkles in the air separate from the golden ones falling from the goblet were added using brushes. Some tidying up was needed for the overlaps between various layers as well.
The title and signature feather were added inside Photoshop as well, then the whole thing was saved and taken into Picasa for the watermark. All told, this image took the whole day to produce, but the results seem worth it!
That Hit The Spot
Popularity: 3% [?]
I decided it was time for a new avatar for my social media presences – Facebook and Twitter at least.
I still wanted to keep to my favourite themes, primarily tattoos and redheads. Normally I render images of me with braided or dreadlocked hair, but I wanted to continue the theme I explored with “A New Look“.
The extreme short redhaired bob has its own stark yet sharp appearance, as the Red Witch series proved, and it’s kind of interesting to change my “look” so radically.
Avatar alpha
I liked this first version, but after uploading it into Twitter, I decided that it was too dark to be able to display properly in the Twitter thumbnails. So I went back to it and zoomed in on the head alone. The end result looks much nicer at the small resolution Twitter (and others such as Microsoft Live! and Yahoo) use.
Avatar bravo
Rendered in Poser, postwork done in Photoshop.
Popularity: 4% [?]
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
Popularity: 3% [?]
(Originally posted on my personal blog)
Another render of some of the characters from Yasmine Galenorn’s Otherworld series of novels. This time it’s of Delilah, another of the D’Artigo sisters.
Delilah’s kind of complicated. Like her sisters, she’s half-fae/half-human – but she’s also a were-cat.
Now most people hear “were-cat” and they immediately think “Oh, were-lion” or similar, but no – Delilah’s shape-shifted form is … a tabby cat.
*Waits for the snickers to die down*
That all changed in the past though, when Delilah was volunteered to be one of the Autumn Lord’s Death Maidens (and, the only living one at that!). Delilah acquired a second form in the process – A were-puma.
All those who snickered, please wait, I’m sure you’ll get harvested soon enough 
However to add a new twist, Delilah’s discovered that she’s not exactly alone – she had a twin sister, Ariel, who died at birth, but has been watching over her “all her life” and now appears to her in the form of a leopard.
Yeesh, just when you thought your life was getting complicated, you get snagged by an Elemental Lord and discover you have a twin you never knew!
So, it only stood to reason that they should have a picture together.
Delilah and Ariel
Rendered in Poser, postwork done in Photoshop.
Popularity: 2% [?]
The next image in the Gleaming Graphite series – Graphite Angel.
This one has much more postwork added than usual, mostly to clean up the wings.
Staged and rendered in Poser, postwork in Photoshop
Graphite Angel
Again, do people think the Gleaming Graphite series qualifies as “naked”? Let me know what you think!
Popularity: 3% [?]
Originally posted to my personal site as a birthday present for Yasmin Galenorn.
Covert-art style render of Menolly and Delilah, two of the characters in the Otherworld series of novels.
Rendered in Poser, postwork done in Photoshop.
Image after the fold, click for full size.
Popularity: 1% [?]