Any how, I just reviewed a particularly nice green tea for Teavanna.com (self-submitted, nothing special) and thought I’d share that:

Gyokuro Imperial Green

Your Rating: 5 stars

Delicate yet powerful

Tea Body : Medium
Tea Flavor : Earthy, Vegetal
Pros : High Quality, Soothing, Aromatic, Fresh Best
Uses : Anytime
Describe Yourself : High-End Shopper, Tea Enthusiast

I find that green teas can be most soothing–excellent when you’re feeling a bit peaked. This one has an intense green-tea aroma–a wonderfully earthy snap to it, even–something I really love about green teas, that growing-things aroma. There is an oddly sweet aftertaste that’s quite charming, too.

 Be VERY sure to follow the directions. 1 tsp per 8 oz. water, make sure the water is off the boil, and ONLY 45 seconds steeping time. That sounded too short to me the first time, because I generally drink a lot of black tea, English-style, but man, if you don’t follow the direction, it’s too bitter and strong. If you DO follow the directions, it’s a cup of heaven.

 Really, for this tea, you should use a nice tetsubin pot JUST for green teas and a pretty cup, too. Makes it that much more of a treat.

Here’s a list of what he thinks are his most useful ones, for posterity:

Jim’s Character Rigging Tutorial
http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?p=2478213#2478213

Jims Character-To-Clothing Morph Transfer Tutorial
http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?p=2395126#2395126

Jim’s Conforming-To-Dynamic Conversion Tutorial
http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?p=2273997#2273997

Jim’s DOF Tutorial
http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?p=2284317#2284317

Jim’s Dynamic Clothing Tutorial (Including converting the MFD to Dynamic)
http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?p=1386503#1386503

Jim’s Easy-Pose Dial Tutorial
http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?p=2413094#2413094

Jim’s Lighting Tutorial
http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?p=2271532#2271532

Jim’s Quick and Dirty IBL Tutorial, Part One
http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?p=2286905#2286905

Jim’s Quick and Dirty IBL Tutorial, Part Two
http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?p=2286993#2286993

I do not use all of his techniques, myself, but they’re good. An excellent place to start!

THANK YOU,  JIM!

Thanks, Nano.

Using Semidieu’s Advanced Render Setting script, I got the normal render, a depth cue render (alpha), and two alpha mats done in under 3 hours. …

Aha, I believe you mentioned Semidieu’s script in an earlier thread. Do you recommend getting the whole package or just the alpha’s? (They sell the alpha’s script separately as well and, given the March Madness, my budget is pretty much maxed.)

If you have the $20, I’d get the Advanced Render Settings, which gets you a whole slew of tools in one go. Tools you will use. Especially if you have Poser 7 Pro.

Or you can spend $10 and get passes and alphas (you’ll want both) and spend a lot more time fiddling with them. This don’t work *quite* as satisfactorily as the bigger kit, for me.

The motion blur was done and then composited so that it didn’t rub out the Oni’s details too much.

Also, I may be a bit thick this morning, but did you do the motion blur in postwork as well or in poser? If it is done in poser and I know it can be done, can somebody explain how? If it was done in postwork, then also, how?
I feel like such a tube/newbie. (Which in fairness I still am, have only really done this for a year now.)

Depth cue is from the Render Passes script.

Motion blur…in Poser, but again, not as easy to control, and things like depth cue and blur slow your render down dramatically if you have your render set for high/final quality. I have Photoshop and have used it for many years, so I’m quite comfortable with doing postwork…your experience my differ.

How I do motion blur in Photoshop varies. In this case, I recall this was about what I did:

1. Use alpha mat for the Oni figure to create a selection and copy of him out of the render layer.
2. Save that as new layer directly above.
3. Use motion blur filter on that new layer. Hmm, can’t see his face that well now, details too blurred.
4. With the blur layer still selected, used alpha mat to create a selection and this time feathered the selection some.
5. Deleted within that selection. Now I can see him better!
6. May have fiddled with blur layer opacity and blend mode after that.

Addendum about alphas masks:

These are black and white images that are put into the Channels palette below the usual R, G, B & composite channels. White is “show” and black is “hide”. The Alpha mask renders that you get out of Poser are about 1 pixel too large (you get ugly edges unless you contract them by 1 pixel), but they are far, far more accurate and time-saving than trying to make a selection yourself.

You click the selection icon in the Channels palette and the white parts become a selection. The beauty of this lies in the use of grayscale in these channels, and that you can paint or modify them the way you do layers to a large degree, thereby giving you a LOT of control over your selections and masks. Want soft edges? Apply a Gaussian blur. Need something to fade gently? Apply a gradient.

Thus, the depth cue image is grayscale…and if you go back to the layers palette, make a new layer of your render (saving the old one, just in case) and use the Lens Blur filter, you would identify that depth cue channel as your mask. Now you can adjust how much blur, how much noise and such in realtime. Awesome! It’s like fixing the F-stop on the fly. How good is that? That’s why I do that. No need to take forever re-rendering because the depth cue wasn’t what you wanted.

Earlier Discussions:

• Artistic Depth of Field
• Masks and Render Passes

And why the heck won’t they tell us when a set is not made for closeups? Are closeups only made for interiors? GRRR.

With those requirements in mind, I have a huge beef here: a lot of interesting sets available for Poser and Studio (and even Carrara) are actually NOT made to be used up close or even in the mid distance. What makes this the case?

• low resolution textures for the surface covered: nastily blurry and artifact-y when rendered at medium distance (within about 12 Poser feet)
• edges that are too sharp and too clean on old or worn buildings
• textures that are too regular or have moire patterns
• lack of mesh detail and general boxiness

These lists will be updated periodically. I’m not finished by a long shot with this!

The Roll Call of Crummy Sets

I’m not going to bag on the freebies—you get what you pay for.

Roll Call of Good Sets

None of them are perfect, but these are pretty darned good.

Fox Demon: Chusont'rai Shen-ro

My revelation with regards to lighting in Poser (I use 7 pro) began with the purchase of Blackhearted’s BH Pro Studio, over at Rendo. The tutorial alone in that product is worth the price, as I’m sure we’ve said here a bunch over the past year. Smile But the main thing I took away was using an IBL as a bit of fill light, and a different use of point and spot lights than most people start out with.

Point Lights

I used to think “Point lights = candles” or some other such specific point source. Well, that’s still true, but what I discovered is that you can get your textures to really sing if you use point lights and set a falloff range, like DistEnd = 6 (feet). Or whatever. (At least I think that’s close to the name of the parameter.) Rolling Eyes The trick is to position a light so the figure is near the edge of its falloff zone. Not for every light in the scene–that depends on the logic of the scene itself. And how bright the scene is supposed to be. And if the falloff is right but the light too dark, set it to over 100%. I will often set falloffs to just past the distance between the light and the main figure, with 120% brightness.

Set shadows to 0.77 to 0.88 or even lower, sometimes – not to 1.0. A 1.0 setting makes them not so much dark as just smudgy. They should be mysterious and transparent, not *black*–a sensibility I acquired as a painter. But I *always* use raytraced shadows on every light except IBLs (of course).

I do not put ambient occlusion on the lights–it tends to give you that X-files black-oil-eyes look with the effects of soot caught in the creases of everything. Yuck.

Spot Lights

I also discovered that you can do similar things with spot lights and get some wonderful looming-out-of-the-dark effects. Use a point light for the main light, set up an IBL (at about 40% brightness for starters), and then, if you need some more illumination with directionality, create a spot light with a very narrow End Angle, such as 20 to 45 degrees, and put it far away–like 20 poser-feet, so the light is spreading a lot by the time it hits your main figure, and use a falloff to just cover the back of the visible scene. Again, put shadows to 0.88.

Also, set all shadow biases to 0.333 or even 0.222. The default 0.888 comes out too grainy. I never use shadow maps.

I also use some helper scripts for lighting by SemiDieu over at RDNA to more easily create and delete lights. His IBL creation script will make what is called “Olivier’s IBL”, which lets you specify six colors for the IBL regions to match your scene! Very worthwhile. I generally love SemiDieu’s utility scripts.

And every time I add or adjust a light, I do a ray-traced test render at screen portal size and fairly low-quality settings, just to check things out. The thing that lets me know if the lights are doing their job, most specifically, is if the shadows give a proper feeling of shape, or “modeling” as it is used in painting. FYI, I will almost never, ever, have a main light straight face on, full face to the camera, either, for this reason–it comes out looking like a bad flash photograph and flat as hell, both in terms of modeling and texture response to the lights.

In the pic below, I used points, spot, and IBL as described. While it’s not the most compelling image in the world, the lighting works fairly well.

Clicky for larger…

Sorrows' Soldiers: Kerry

Mind you, I still do postwork. Poser lights may, even with a lot of effort, still not come out with a sufficient dynamic range of light and dark in the image, so some small adjustment in Photoshop may be required to get a more dramatic effect. I will also add a subtle color cast and pump up the saturation a little–not a whole lot, mind you–using Mystical Tone Tint & Color 2 filters, which have been worth every penny. The point of doing any of that is to hone in on the picture’s focal point and give unity to the image, using light, shadow, and overall tone.

(Oh…and please, please, do not get ultra-happy with the Photoshop filters. I swear, most of them should be tried out and forgotten. Forever. Or used very, very sparingly.)

The BPA Sent Help

Courtesy of Ed Averill of Austin, TX:

Frozen Zombie-Land (To the tune of “Winter Wonderland”)

Sirens blare, are you listening,
In a pool, blood is glistening
A horrible sight,
Surely a fright.
Screaming in a frozen zombie-land.

Gone away are the living
Lots of brains, they were giving
We’re shouting in fear
As they grow near
Screaming in a frozen zombie-land.

In the meadow we can stack the corpses,
Plenty of them all around the town
We’ll say: are they buried?
They’ll say: no man!
A zombies place just isn’t underground!

Later on, we’ll perspire
As we set them afire
We’re deathly afraid
Of the monsters we’ve made
Screaming in a frozen zombie-land.

http://www.daz3d.com/i/galleries/0?id=48082&sec=2&_m=d

Tickle-fight, close up

Vintage Beefcake

And this was the one that really started it all:

CHICKENS!

Therefore, LT, my partner in crime there, and I have come up with stamps of official approval! Mine is the basic white chicken, his is much fancier.

Official Beefcake! Seal #1

Official Beefcake Seal #2, Courtesy of LT Roberts

If you really want your render to be True Beefcake, you need a chicken in it!

Art Charts.

Along the way, I decided that I really, really wanted to be able to see my figments, and took up working with Poser, which I had put down three years ago, having been worn out by working as a merchant in the Poser community, and due also to getting a job after being laid off for 8 months. I was most grateful for the job at Real Magnet in Bethesda, but it was a very intense one and pretty much ate my life, as I was so tired after work that I did nothing creative at all for a long time, except a bit of jewelry-making.

Leaving Real Magnet for Amtrak opened up a lot of head space, apparently. In January of 2007, I believe it was, inspiration finally exploded. This is the deep, dark secret—no longer! I was playing Sims2, and having a blast. This apparently caused the figments to awaken, and some of them walked off the screens of the Sims and became far, far different from their original paper-doll forms, assuming depth, breadth, and their own voices and lives. It was like having a movie running in my head 24/7.

I let it out. It was the best thing I ever did.

And I finished the very first draft of the very first book inside of three months, I believe, about 300 pages (it’s since expanded, necessarily). Each successive one has gone slower and slower. They have not stopped, but it’s reached a steady walking pace that does allow me to do visual as well as verbal art. So, midway through book number four, in August of 2008, I went back to Poser. This time, I had some money, some energy, and the drive to depict. Again, the figments leaped off the screen of my mind an onto the computer screen.

Yesterday I posted my 101st picture on this web site, over in the 3D gallery. I have done more than that, but that’s 101 Dalmatians—I mean, images that are keepers. Now I can see my figments when I want to! And I have met new ones along the way, who are keeping me busy with book five.

I have no idea if I will ever publish the books. I have been published as an illustrator, some minor stuff including a short-lived comic, a book cover, and some gaming materials—so it’s not like I’ve never been there. The books need tidying up and a good editor. My dear AJ Savill has had a major positive impact on the first book, and helped the others mature into better works. Thank you, thank you AJ. Ms. Karen Fox has also taken up the mantle of reader, but as with other volunteers, can only do what the rest of her life permits her to do.

I have, meantime, been quite driven to depict. My dear Kay will attest to this, since I all but chase her away when I’m working. I think the point of this particular bit of autobiography is that for once in my life (a) I let the muse run away with me, (b) I’ve had enough mileage as a designer, painter, and writer (of non-fiction) that I’m no longer as bedevilled by doubts as I was when I was young, and (c) I am persistent. I think the latter is key. It’s not rocket science: you practice anything daily, and you will improve, even if you have no talent for it. (God knows, I learned how to bowl properly, and I have absolutely zero talent for that. ) If you have both talent and a desire to do the whatever-it-is, then practice will improve your work, if you are willing to learn and try even a little bit.

In the Virile Noir thread(s) on the DAZ3D forums, which LT Roberts and I host (more or less), we have had the very special joy of watching others, encouraged and helped, improve significantly in the past eleven months. And we have improved ourselves, as we were just noting the other day. I owe LT a lot, for his friendship and encouragement. Thank you.

So: KEEP TRYING, you artists. I’m watching you.