o_0 < - "This is bizzarro"
0_o <- "Yep, still strange"
=_0 <- "Let's try with one eye to see if it looks any better"
0_= <- "Maybe close the other eye?"
=_= <- *squint* or, "I take a dim view of this"
0_0 <- "Yikes!"
>_< <- "Godammit"
8_8 <- "Aliens clearly invented this"
@_@ <- "Holy cow!" or big puppy-dog eyes
9_9 <- "There they go again", eyes rolling
Q_Q <- "Uh oh"
*_* <- "I. Want. That."
6_9 <- "I've gone completely nuts!"
T_T <- *sniffle*
^_^ <- smile
n_n <- even smilier
>.> <- “Do you think they noticed?”
<.< <- “Nope, don’t think they did”
.__. <- “Bored now. Can I leave?”
x_X <- “Kill me now, please” i.e., Friday afternoons and early Monday mornings
~_^ = *wink!*

* * *
You may now return to your regularly scheduled serious business.

It was drizzly and wet when we got there and for the next day as well. However, on Sunday and Monday the weather cleared for some classic mountain/fall foliage, a last hurrah for the season. Monday found us on our way to see both of the local Frank Lloyd Wright houses, Kentuck Knob and Falling Water. So much to take in! And so wonderful to see.

Most often heard comment: “Was FLW really short?” The houses tended to very cramped spaces compared to what modern builders think people prefer. On the other hand, being very short, myself, I thought: “Hey! Someone built houses to my scale!” Which is about 3/4 of average.

Another thing you’ll notice is that you don’t see the insides of the houses, either Kentuck Knob or Fallingwater. This is because the foundation that owns the houses keeps very tight control over photography and allows NO photography inside. You either buy the books (which are everywhere) or remember the experience all the more keenly for it being so brief.

So, is there really a tardis masquerading as a sculpture in the Kentuck Knob sculpture garden? You be the judge.

First comes the Inn, then some shots of little Cumberland, MD nearby, which had a wonderful old train station and some nifty old buildings. Then Fallingwater and then Kentuck Knob. Pix are annotated.

Herewith the gallery:

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

123►

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 Captive Water Fae

I was writing to a younger friend who is trying to wrestle inspiration to the ground and get it to spit out a story that is hanging around. We’ve chatted about various issues over the year; amongst them is the on-again, off-again nature of her muse. Myself, I struggled through a ten-year dry spell, and did Julia Cameron’s course twice–lots of good tools there.
But this is what I figured out this morning about getting it jump-started, and I wanted to share:

I was thinking about your story-work this morning earlier and I thought perhaps you might like to take a different tack, one that lets you have more of a dialog with your Self (your muse, if you like).

Start with the thing that your heart goes to right off, the elf & the human together, yes? Then ask questions and wait for a reply (or a picture, which is a reply).

Example (not telling you what should happen, just trying to show what it might feel like):

Your muse: My elf and my human are sitting together in a sunny place.

You: What does it look like?

They’re on a stone bench in front of an old, old building, looking out over the overgrown ruins of high-tech city.

Why is it overgrown and in ruins?

They found it together while looking for something.

What were they looking for?

<muses dodges a bit> The human has a map in his hand.

Were they there because of the map?

Yes…

…and so forth.

It’s like playing interactive fiction with yourself. Just wait on the answers patiently. If the muse dodges, it’s because you’re supposed to follow it and go in a different direction. Eventually, it will get to telling you stories on its own, or showing you movies in your head—and then you have to write fast enough to keep up with them!

If you keep editing before you get the pictures or story out, you’re telling your muse that you don’t like what it’s saying and it will shut up.

If you consciously decide you want to go in a certain direction for…well, an ego reason, say (like wanting to be unique), and that’s not the story it has for you, it will shut up.

You have to trust it to tell you a story and let it have its head. Follow it. It won’t lead you astray, no matter how weird or mundane the stuff that comes out. What comes out is what you need to hear or be doing.

After all, your muse is not different from you. It’s still you, just a part that has learned to be quiet. Unfortunately, you have silenced the gatekeeper to your soul. You have to undo that in order to truly live.

And I gotta say, this is all related to the issues of trying to fit into a mold that isn’t yours, as opposed to seeing what kind of unique creature you really are. You won’t be all that weird or unsociable or unlovable if you let go and grow the way your supposed to. (If you were really *wrong* inside, you’d already be having major psychological problems and breaks—so I’m not worried.) In fact, you might be a little miffed that you’re really pretty normal, sane, and well-adjusted. Be glad for that!

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

Bank robber: “Put the money in the bag, dear. NOW. And wipe the tomato sauce off your chin. Thank you!”

Crooked Accountant: “Nobody will suspect that we’re laundering money through  minority educational funds and  homes for stray cats.”

Embezzler: “Who will miss that 1/4 cent per Macy’s charge account? …about 5 zillion of them… And some nice shoes…ooooh, cute shoes…”

Computer fraud: Security officer: “Who is this ‘AntiSarah’ and how did she manage to divert an entire train car of fudge sauce to Cincinnati?”

Carjacking: *Pulls .45 out of large handbag* “Out of the car, dear. NOW. Here’s cab fare.” *buckles seat belt* *vanishes in a squeal of burning rubber*

Drug lord: Competition says, “Who dat bitch selling train car full of hot fudge sauce to diabetics? Dey puttin’ me outta bidness!”

Prostitution: Prostitute B:  “How come you not freezin yo titties out here?” Prostitute A: “She make me wear dis sweater wit’ da hotpants.”

Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net