[Rocket Sheep]

Yes, well... 14 beer kegs will make you feel a bit seedy in the morning...

Needs, litter, grafitti, smashed windows, shoes on the wire and someone to steal those beer kegs.

[Radthorne]

I thought it might be fun to show the steps involved in creating one of these images that I've been doing. All this talk of “3D models” and “meshes” and “morphs” otherwise can be a tad confusing. I’m going to illustrate how I created the “Rogue White” image, which is the left-most of the three thumbnails I posted a few messages back.

http://www.sff.net/people/radthorne/graphics/Rogue Steps/18.jpghttp://www.sff.net/people/radthorne/graphics/Rogue Steps/A.jpg

First thing to do is select a figure to work with. This one is Stephanie Petite 3, from DAZ3D (I’ve blanked out the private bits for propriety; all these models are anatomically correct). The figures are very complex 3D models, with internal joint structures that mimic the human body, allowing you to pose them realistically. They also are deformable, so that you can make them skinny or fat, with large noses or small, Vulcan ears, whatever. Finally, you can texture them with different skin colors.

http://www.sff.net/people/radthorne/graphics/Rogue Steps/17.jpg

As you can see, the default model is not terribly good looking. So the first thing I want to do is select some character morphs and textures. A “morph” is something that changes the structure of the model to something else. In this case, I’ve chosen the Irina morph created by Blackhearted. It alters the base Stephanie model into one with a lot more muscle tone. It’s a little hard to see the change here, at this size and with no texture yet, but our Stephanie has now become quite buff.

http://www.sff.net/people/radthorne/graphics/Rogue Steps/16.jpg

Let’s add the Irina texture. Ah, that’s better. Now she looks like a person, and you can see the muscles a bit better.

(Hang on, more coming; I have to submit them in batches...)

[Radthorne]

http://www.sff.net/people/radthorne/graphics/Rogue Steps/15.jpg http://www.sff.net/people/radthorne/graphics/Rogue Steps/14.jpg

Next step is the face. The Irina character comes with both head and body morphs, but I don’t care for the head morph so much. So now I’m adding to it another morph, this one just a head morph called Morgana by Thorne and Sarsa. At this point I can also change things: the eye color, the lip color, and change the makeup as well.

http://www.sff.net/people/radthorne/graphics/Rogue Steps/13.jpg

She’s a bit bald at this point, so let’s add some hair. This is also a model, with it’s own set of controls for moving and layering the hair. This one is call Leah, by DAZ3D. The default appearance has the right side hanging down in front of her face, but I moved it back (how does anybody see where they’re going with their hair in front of their eyes like that?)

http://www.sff.net/people/radthorne/graphics/Rogue Steps/11.jpg

I’m also going to make a subtle change to her expression now. I have full control over her face: eyebrows, cheeks, mouth, etc. In this case I’ve just tweaked her mouth to give a half-smile on the right side, just to give her a slightly confident look.

[Radthorne]

http://www.sff.net/people/radthorne/graphics/Rogue Steps/10.jpg

She’s been standing here very patiently, getting cold, while I mess around. Let’s give her some clothes. These are the parts of the Rogue Red outfit by Frances Coffill. Each of these is also a model, designed to conform to the base Stephanie figure. By “conforming,” it means that the clothes will move with Stephanie when she’s posed.

http://www.sff.net/people/radthorne/graphics/Rogue Steps/09.jpg

Here are the clothes attached to the figure. Since the clothes are designed for the base figure, if you modify the figure (as I did with the Irina morph) you may have to adjust things. Since Irina has some pretty big muscles (and a slightly larger chest), all of those body parts “poke through” the clothing models. One way to adjust that is to “turn off” those body parts that will be hidden by the clothes anyway, which is what I did here. You can also adjust the clothes themselves, which frequently have their own adjustments like “muscular” or “voluptuous” to fit different body shapes.

http://www.sff.net/people/radthorne/graphics/Rogue Steps/08.jpg

Next I wanted to change the textures of the clothes. Frances Coffill had created a set of several additional textures for the outfit, and it was this white one that prompted me to want to do this picture. I’ve applied the revised texture to each clothing bit here. The clothing set also comes with its own sword prop, which I’ve included. Note that there were no pants with the clothing set – what Frances did was provide a texture that actually changed the color of Stephanie’s legs to look like leggings.

[Radthorne]

http://www.sff.net/people/radthorne/graphics/Rogue Steps/07.jpg

Now, about that sword. It’s been “parented” to her right hand, which means that when she’s posed the sword will stay with her hand. But at the moment it’s just floating beneath her fingers. Get a grip, girl!

http://www.sff.net/people/radthorne/graphics/Rogue Steps/06.jpg

Each of the fingers has all of the joints of a real hand, so you can manipulate them to do whatever you want. Posing each finger manually can be tedious, but fortunately I have a set of canned hand poses for all occasions. Here I’ve used a 10% torus grip, and then adjusted the angle of the sword to match the grip.

http://www.sff.net/people/radthorne/graphics/Rogue Steps/05.jpghttp://www.sff.net/people/radthorne/graphics/Rogue Steps/04.jpghttp://www.sff.net/people/radthorne/graphics/Rogue Steps/03.jpg

Time for some action. Typically I run through a number of pre-defined poses, looking for something interesting. I settled on this last one, which originally had her right arm pointing down. I bent her arm to bring the sword up to over her shoulder. This pose gave the air of confidence that I was looking for.

[Radthorne]

http://www.sff.net/people/radthorne/graphics/Rogue Steps/02.jpg

Standing on a grid is boring, so let’s make up a scene. The gate and the walls are individual models by SkyGirl. I’ve imported them and started moving them around, using different perspectives as shown here to get things lined up while checking the result from my original camera position.


http://www.sff.net/people/radthorne/graphics/Rogue Steps/01.jpg

Almost there. I’ve added one of SkyGirls’ ground terrains, and a sky backdrop by Ayla. Last thing to mess with is the lights. Lighting can make all the difference in how something looks. This set of lights by Ayla goes with her backdrop, and really set off the character nicely. You’ll note that the right hand wall, though, is too washed out. So what I did was to render the whole scene as is; then I turned off most of the lights and re-rendered it with just that wall. I then cut and pasted that portion of the wall in Photoshop over the original.

And that's it! That's pretty much how I create all of the pictures, with some easier and some a lot more complex.

[Radthorne]

Just so you don't have to go all the way over to my site to look at it, here's the finished image.

http://www.sff.net/people/radthorne/Rogue White 2.jpg

[alison]

Kevin, thanks for that little walk-through - it looks like a lot of fun! The sort of thing that would have me pecking at a screen for hours (as if I didn't do enough of that already...)

[KatG]

You're taking all the mystery out of it, dude! You're suppose to make it all very mysterious and difficult-sounding. And of course, you're leaving out the eye for color, form and design stuff.

[Radthorne]

Well, I thought it would be good to show which bits are "me" and which bits are "others". I certainly don't want to take credit, for example, for the design of the people's clothes. But I will accept the credit (or blame!) for the "color, form and design stuff". :)

There's also a great deal of tweaking going on here too, of course; it's not quite such a slam dunk as the way I laid it out up above. Each of the scenes I've done took a couple of hours or so to do - various experiments with this and that until things all come together.

However, if you prefer to keep it mysterious - consider that I could have also made all those screen shots up, by hand, to make it look like there was a program at work underneath... (I'd have to not have a day job to spend that much time at it, but it's possible...)