The Firewitch: Julian in his garden

Meet another of my figments, Bureau for Paranormal Affairs (a department in DHS) agent Julian Machliec. Being a Witch (the hereditary preternatural race type) he has a fabulous garden. He also has a prediliction for fire—handy, that.

Originally posted at Renderosity, March 3, 2009.

[As a Poser character, Julian's been through a lot of changes as I've tried to get the renders close to my mental image of hi without resorting to creating my own texture for him. This early M3 version is pretty close, face-wise, although I hated the M3 body pretty much for its weird shoulders.]

Production Notes: This is M3 with my own dial-twiddling face/body. His earrings and piercings are my own freebies (for YOU). Texture is Daniel from PoserAddicts (sweet, huh?) Hair painted in post. The clothing/guns are Lone Wolf from DAZ with Lone Wow! textures by RoMan, Rendo MP. The fence is part of Talca (Danie-Marforno/DAZ) and those are Lisa’s Botannicals flowers (DAZ). Whew! Oh yeah, Render Studio lights, somewhat tweaked.

The Contractor: Mike Kaminski

Meet Mike Kaminski, nice Jewish boy from the Washington, D.C. ‘burbs…once upon a time. Now, as code name “Archangel,” one of the Agency’s “dirty works” department’s most valued contractors. Mike likes rendering architectural ornament in pen and ink, extremely hot curry, and silent killing. Oh yes, and a good top.

Well, sometimes things get out of hand, and you need something that goes boom for those occasions. He keeps some of those things around, too.

Production Notes: M4 Enhanced, my own dialed up character. Coflek-Gnorg’s great carbon-cutter gun, knife from Mock’s zombie-killing set. Powerage’s Lord of the Road Jacket and Marv shirt; BillyT’s Real Jeans. Iluusion3d’s Mitchell skin. Stonemason’s Tin Pan Alley set. Hair and eyebrows painted in postwork, plus a little overall color-fiddling.

What Eats the Monsters?

I had said: 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. …

The response was: 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 and use Poser 7 or 8, Pro or Pro2010, I’d get the Advanced Render Settings from Runtime DNA, which gets you a whole slew of good tools in one go. Tools you will use. Especially if you have Poser 7 Pro or Pro2010. There is a version especially for the latter.

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

I then said about this picture: The motion blur was done and then composited so that it didn’t rub out the Oni’s details too much.

The reply: 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.)

Motion blur in postwork:

You can do motion blur in Poser, but it’s not as easy to control and things like rendering depth of field and motion 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, I used the 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:

In Photoshop, these are grayscale 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.

(Pro2010 will render you a Z-depth mask as a standard option–this is HUGE! and os useful! The depth cue image is grayscale, however you get it—the Render Passes script will also do it for you if you are working with Poser 7. In Pro2010, it comes in as a layer above your rendered layer when you save your render as a Photoshop document. Grab that layer and paste it into a fresh channel in your Photoshop doc and label it “Z-depth.”)

Now, 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 real-time. 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