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Do Cyber-Chickens Dream of Electric Sheep?
  • I wanna touch his fur.... since he is of elven heritage, I assume the fur to be softer that human body hair...
  • I got into 3D after M4 was released, so I don't have a lot of clothes for him.  I Have him somewhere in my runtime, but never got around to using him.  This one looks good.. very pretty, but definitely a guy!  And I'm a cat person.. so Awwwww!  You got me there.  :)

    I did this one last weekend.. and then went back and fixed the wings to a more appropriate pose after some critique.  M4 with one of Mstene's characters.

    image
  • That's really nice DA!  Hah, angel in heavy boots. :D
    * A child of five could understand this. Fetch me a child of five!
    * Isn't it wonderful how cute weapons of mass distraction can be?
    * Those are my principles. And if you don't like them, I have others.
  • Yeah, my kind of angel for sure! 
  • Yeah, I love a guy in jeans and boots.. just something clicks with that.  

    Of course leather ranger gear, armor or well nothing at all works too.  I just love men.  sue me!  LOL

  • DAGrant said:

    Yeah, I love a guy in jeans and boots.. just something clicks with that.  


    Of course leather ranger gear, armor or well nothing at all works too.  I just love men.  sue me!  LOL


    And just as I read this my husband walks in with essentials like tea and treats... So I go mmmm...yes. And some more than others.
    Suspiro ergo sum.
  • That dark angel is gorgeous. I love his eyes/expression. I just want to keep staring into them....

    I can please ask which bird model you've used? I need a raven/crow for an image I'm working on and can't decide which one to go for, but the one you've used looks really good.

  • Looks like noggins crows.
  • Thanks Raet. I can't decide between noggins or one of the songbird remix sets which have crows/ravens in them plus a few other birds as well that I might but probably will never use. Even price is not helping since they are all pretty much the same. Think I'll work on the piece a bit more and then decide.
  • da, (i don't know your name, sorry) he's nice. i have winged chars in my
    story similar to that. vigillante justice hero types, mostly vampiric good :)
    ~^..^~ ladyfur
  • Not sure if I actually posted this one already, I certainly meant to.
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  • If you did it's certainly worth re-posting. :)
  • Yes, it is. We missed your pics.
    Suspiro ergo sum.
  • Thanks guys. Just having a bit of dry spell when it comes to finished presentable stuff, that's all. Plus my laptop needs cleaned out and overhauled I think. these days it gets very warm and is not exactly multitasking readily. So once I've got the finances in place, I'll start looking around for a decent alternative that is a proper tower, but that also requires setting up a workspace in the house, which isn't going to be easy as Frank's pc is tugged away in an alcove and mine would just be on show like a horrid alien as we live in a one bedroom flat.
  • Uhoh. Well, even aliens have to live somewhere.
    * A child of five could understand this. Fetch me a child of five!
    * Isn't it wonderful how cute weapons of mass distraction can be?
    * Those are my principles. And if you don't like them, I have others.
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  • Schweet! Nice ones, Raet.
    * A child of five could understand this. Fetch me a child of five!
    * Isn't it wonderful how cute weapons of mass distraction can be?
    * Those are my principles. And if you don't like them, I have others.
  • Nanobot said:

    Schweet! Nice ones, Raet.




    Thanks, Nan. The second oe actually is the raw render. I didn't do anything to it in post work whatsoever.
  • Those are really great. The first one has a wonderful perspective and I love the focus that comes with the blur... the second one has great expressions!
  • Latest picture of Zeke and Co. For those who don't have access to read the full chapter on DevArt http://dylazuna.deviantart.com/favourites/47874134#/d4w4qmw
    Zeke has taken Yasmin into the underground city, to ask his old friend Ko for help in rescuing Kyle. Whilst walking through the city, Zeke has picked up an old skeleton key with a rose patterned top, the 'Black Rose' sign of Ko.

    A man, well, she thought it was a man, came forward.  He was shorter than Zeke by a good six inches.  He was wearing blue jeans and a black t-shirt.  He held out his hand for the thing Zeke was holding. "Let me see it," he said softly with a very thick accent.

    Zeke held it out but would not let go of it.  "Not this time, Chou.  I'm not letting it out of my hands."

    Lighting is not my strong point, and I experimented with this one a little, so let me know what you think.

    For good or ill, all of the characters are morphed from Genesis/M5. Thanks to Nan for Ko's and Yasmin's jewellry. I made Ko's fishnet shirt in Marvellous Designer. Skeleton key is actually a pair of freebie earrings from inception8.

    Sign of the Black Rose

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  • The lighting is spot on! Well done!
    * A child of five could understand this. Fetch me a child of five!
    * Isn't it wonderful how cute weapons of mass distraction can be?
    * Those are my principles. And if you don't like them, I have others.
  • Nanobot said:

    The lighting is spot on! Well done!



    Thank you. I watched some of the tutorial videos on this site http://www.lightsfilmschool.com/blog/ and tried out some of the techniques.
  • Oooh...off to check out that link! :D
    * A child of five could understand this. Fetch me a child of five!
    * Isn't it wonderful how cute weapons of mass distraction can be?
    * Those are my principles. And if you don't like them, I have others.
  • Moved the video to Welcome to the (Concrete) Jungle so more folks will catch it!
    * A child of five could understand this. Fetch me a child of five!
    * Isn't it wonderful how cute weapons of mass distraction can be?
    * Those are my principles. And if you don't like them, I have others.
  • A new one from Team Triptych. Rendered this using HDR settings and then played a bit in PS to make it look more like an old-fashioned comic book.
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  • Raet wants comments on his latest, folks. So, er, here goes.

    Is that really a grenade with a jack o'lantern face? Neat!

    So, three people are scantily dressed, and the dwarf, who appears to be wearing shades and not much beside his smile, is going to blow up whom?  While naked and in the same room with them? This seems less than smart.

    The composition is pretty good--nice flow through the picture with my eye taken over his shoulder the way he's turning his head--and lands right on the guy's head and the woman's ass. (Is this important?) The diagonal is quite energetic, and I like the contributions of the repeating elements of the set. There's conflict coming!

    Is he going to stuff that thing up...? Yowch.

    The high pass filter overload doesn't do the black-and-white comic so much, and it lacks the half-toning of the old printed comics and its grayscale gradients are too fine. If you used solarization in 2 or three tones, that might have done it for B/W. How about doing one render in a 'toon style and compositing it with the original and adding half-tones?

    However--The textures in the scene are so busy that black-and-white would have to be greatly simplified to work there. If you look at the thumbnail version, above, you see exactly what kind of detail you'd have to lose for it to work.

    The lighting, by the way, is excellent, if a little lacking in contrast--but that may also be an artifact of the post-procesing.
    * A child of five could understand this. Fetch me a child of five!
    * Isn't it wonderful how cute weapons of mass distraction can be?
    * Those are my principles. And if you don't like them, I have others.
  • Thanks , Nan.
    Yes that is a Jack'o Lantern grenade. And you had me up to "yowch". After that you may as well have spoken Suaheli. Baby steps, please.
    As for the lack of sense. The shot is probably framed too tightly, but it is one of those kitting out sequences. Should have added some dialogue in, I guess. The dwarf is actually asking whether DaddyDeadshot is serious about packing that explosive.
  • I think I agree that it's a little busy for B&W. With the lines of the beaded curtain particularly conflicting with the lines of the building windows.

    In an odd sort of way, it kind of works though as it's holding my interest and I keep looking and spotting more details.

    I'm curious as to what the hallowe'en grenade thingy is and does that elf have laced piercings down her back???  Ouch !!
  • Oops Sorry Raet. You posted whilst I was still staring and  writing :)
  • Raetjor said:

    Thanks , Nan.
    Yes that is a Jack'o Lantern grenade. And you had me up to "yowch". After that you may as well have spoken Suaheli. Baby steps, please.
    As for the lack of sense. The shot is probably framed too tightly, but it is one of those kitting out sequences. Should have added some dialogue in, I guess. The dwarf is actually asking whether DaddyDeadshot is serious about packing that explosive.



    LOL - sorry. You make it look like you know Photoshop backwards and forwards. ^_^ 

    Kitting out? I thought he was about to blow those folks up after seducing them. Er, so I guess that says the image misfired. You shouldn't have to caption a picture to understand it properly.

    Regarding the Swahili bits: I had to guess at what you did to get that effect and what you were aiming at. On this page--quick Google search--I found a large number of examples of comic styles, and none of your grayscale appears there. http://psd.tutsplus.com/articles/web/20-insane-comic-book-style-photoshop-effects/

    LT probably has more chops with comics, but I'll soldier on in his absence.

    To get the curious gray appearance, it looks like you used a High-Pass filter in Photoshop. This would not have been my choice. There are other ways to get a Sin-City style really chiaroscuro effect.



    Halftoning is the dots that you can see on older color or black and white comics. Heck, we used to buy sheets of halftone and use it for shading. It's a reprographic technique, as Wikipedia will tell you. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halftone ) There is both color and grayscale halftoning.

    Here's another from Google...Color halftoning. http://planetphotoshop.com/stylized-comic-book-effect-tut.html  Actually, this one is very good. I'd try it.
    * A child of five could understand this. Fetch me a child of five!
    * Isn't it wonderful how cute weapons of mass distraction can be?
    * Those are my principles. And if you don't like them, I have others.
  • * A child of five could understand this. Fetch me a child of five!
    * Isn't it wonderful how cute weapons of mass distraction can be?
    * Those are my principles. And if you don't like them, I have others.
  • More: Blambot for comic lettering and fonts. http://www.blambot.com/
    * A child of five could understand this. Fetch me a child of five!
    * Isn't it wonderful how cute weapons of mass distraction can be?
    * Those are my principles. And if you don't like them, I have others.
  • More! You should never have gotten me started.

    Blambot has Photoshop files that you can use to reproduce classic halftoning!

    http://www.blambot.com/blamtone.shtml
    * A child of five could understand this. Fetch me a child of five!
    * Isn't it wonderful how cute weapons of mass distraction can be?
    * Those are my principles. And if you don't like them, I have others.
  • Nanobot said:

    Raet wants comments on his latest, folks.



    Okay, one moment.
    Jim Farris, Author, Science Fiction and Fantasy
    Jim Farris, Author, Science Fiction and Fantasy
  • dylazuna said:

    Oops Sorry Raet. You posted whilst I was still staring and  writing :)




    no worries, part of the reason why the shot is framed like it is is that I wanted to play with the close-up while at the sometime avoiding having to bring in a half open tote bag/ sports bag a model of which I simply don't possess.
    As for knowing Photoshop back to front, I wish. My sister works with it professionally (she is a photographer) and she can do insane things, that's for sure. I dabble that's all. Wish I knew more of the programme to get better use of it.

    Oh, and yes, the elf girl has a piercing corset on.
  • Okay, apparently more than a moment, this render is taking forever. =P
    Jim Farris, Author, Science Fiction and Fantasy
    Jim Farris, Author, Science Fiction and Fantasy
  • Transmapped leaves.  Hundreds of transmapped leaves.  Why did I think this was a good idea?
    Jim Farris, Author, Science Fiction and Fantasy
    Jim Farris, Author, Science Fiction and Fantasy
  • Xaa said:

    Transmapped leaves.  Hundreds of transmapped leaves.  Why did I think this was a good idea?




    We all make that mistake at some point. It's the reason I prefer setting things in towns these days. Less foliage to worry about. By the same token, though, to realistically clutter up an indoor or urban scene means it will be poly heavy, so swings and roundabouts, I'd say.
  • Okay, got it.

    Now, there's two ways I'd have gone about getting the "cross-hatched illustration" look, depending on my final image size.  In this case, we'll assume I'm doing this for a comic panel, and my final image size is 600x600.  To do this the way I'm about to show you, you will need a commercial program called FilterForge, available here:

    http://www.filterforge.com

    Okay:  First, the completed render:


    image

    Next, we run that through filter forge using the "Comic Book" filter (which you can download here), tweaking the settings until it looks like this:


    image

    Then, we resize it a bit larger, and run it through a cutline filter, spending time tweaking the settings until we get this:


    image

    Note, however, that this is a filter I've customized quite a bit, and the appearance varies widely based on the settings, and tweaking the settings sometimes takes hours.  But you can download a basic cutline filter for FilterForge and tweak it yourself and find out. ;-)

    Another way of doing it is to resize the first filtered image to about twice the size in Photoshop (or any other image editor), gray-scale it, drop the color depth to 16 bits using a dithering algorithm, boost the color depth back up to max, then resize it back to the original size.  You'll end up with something that looks like this:


    image

    Of course, these aren't the ONLY results you can get, nor are they the best possible results.  I'm just showing you what can be done using FilterForge and other tools. =)
    Hope this helps. =)
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    Jim Farris, Author, Science Fiction and Fantasy
    Jim Farris, Author, Science Fiction and Fantasy
  • Darn! How did I forget Filterforge? Everyone should have it!
    * A child of five could understand this. Fetch me a child of five!
    * Isn't it wonderful how cute weapons of mass distraction can be?
    * Those are my principles. And if you don't like them, I have others.
  • Thanks, Xaa. I have filterforge and have done a few trials on the above image, but I must admit that personnaly, I am not a fan of the comic book look their filters offer. I have seen other examples where people have used it, including your own pictures where it works, I just haven't been able to achieve with it the style I like. To me the dark ink dots it tries to simulate are too splodgy and uniform in distribution, particularly on rough textures like the wall in your background before you grayscaled it.

    I have a similar issue with halftone filters, although, I think the layers setup tutorial at that Nano pointed to may hold some answers at least.



    As for the image not reading right without lettering, I would say in my defence that unless an entire story is contained in one picture, the lack of contextualisation will in many cases lead to misinterpretations, something that is equally true for quotations one finds on fliers advertising films, comedy gigs or theatre shows: without the full context something like "a revelation" could mean either "must see" or the opposite as in "critics and audience were left waiting for a revelation that simply did not manifest".
  • This site has some similar free filters if you're not on 64-bit http://www.xero-graphics.co.uk/index.htm
  • Raetjor said:

    Thanks, Xaa. I have filterforge and have done a few trials on the above image, but I must admit that personnaly, I am not a fan of the comic book look their filters offer.

    That's cool - they have LOTS of others, including ones that will get closer to the original image you posted.  Plus, you can create your own filters, or tweak existing ones to do what you want.  Most of the filters I own, I've tweaked in one way or another, adding new controls, kit-bashing two filters into one, and so on.
    Jim Farris, Author, Science Fiction and Fantasy
    Jim Farris, Author, Science Fiction and Fantasy
  • Raetjor said:

    As for the image not reading right without lettering, I would say in my defence that unless an entire story is contained in one picture, the lack of contextualisation will in many cases lead to misinterpretations, something that is equally true for quotations one finds on fliers advertising films, comedy gigs or theatre shows: without the full context something like "a revelation" could mean either "must see" or the opposite as in "critics and audience were left waiting for a revelation that simply did not manifest".



    Ah. See, I didn't know it wasn't a scene all by itself. That's kind of the point.

    Here's my thinking--and you may take it or leave it, and I'll just speak for myself, not as to how anyone else *should* be: As an artist, the onus of communicating what I'm thinking via image or words lies on me, not on my audience and how they interpret it. I'm open to the audience's interpretation--a lot of times it's a real surprise, and I feel I just have to roll with it and laugh.

    So, the chap holding the happy pumpkin grenade and staring at the woman's ass was NOT thinking about stuffing it down her pants! For all I know, it wasn't a real grenade, but some sort of pranky thing that would have created a massive amount of smoke and smell.

    See? You didn't intend that at all, and how I might see it is part of the fun of it and not your responsibility at all.  I've had people say the strangest things about cyberpunk art I've done. Must be that what they're seeing is really foreign to them and their brains land on crazy stuff. Who knows? Sometimes it irritates me, sometimes not.

    I learned this a looong time ago when my one cousin's husband looked at an lovingly hand-drawn and colored illustration I executed. It was an image of a cyborg woman accompanied by cyborg Doberman and a cyborg marmoset riding on her shoulder, and she's coming right in your face, marching down a street out of the Ginza. My cousin's husband, he's computer literate, but really, not very tech. He's a commercial real estate mogul; I'm a techno-geek. He said to me, "Oh my god, you're such a victim."  That kind of twisted my head and I found it quite upsetting. Victim? This was a pod of motiles attached to a group cybermind. Hardly victims, as they were clearly on their way to a beat-down, in my head. The next time I saw him, he said, "I changed my mind, you're defending yourself from vicitimization." Really, he's never gotten me. The man makes me cry almost every time I stay with them, and quite by accident, too. He wouldn't hurt anyone on purpose. But see, I totally did NOT communicate my (in my own head) awesome story to him, and he just fetched up on whatever weird spot he happened on. He was probably used to activist art that had a "Message," and was trying hard to be sensitive. Poor guy, to have his wife's relative go all boo-hoo over his valiant effort at appreciating this piece of crap.

    Anyhow, that traumatic event (I was SO proud of that hand-drawn picture) taught me that people see weird shit in my pictures, and if I can't get across what I mean, it's not their fault. So I shrug and try harder next time. Eventually, I got better at it.

    Back to you! In this case, there are free briefcases and such around if you really needed it. You *could* have just had a pile of weapons on the bed, so the happy-face grenade would have been an awesome joke, especially if it was, like pink or lime green. If the fella with the grenade had been looking AT Daddy Deadshot and his lips open as if he was speaking, it might have been less misleading. But I have to agree with you, it needs its caption at the very least. In this case, I'm not sure what the two at the balcony have to do with the caption at all, so the cropping and composition would be *all* different. Ah well, next time.

    Still, it's quite a dynamic composition and well-lit and very enjoyable with all its yummy detail.
    * A child of five could understand this. Fetch me a child of five!
    * Isn't it wonderful how cute weapons of mass distraction can be?
    * Those are my principles. And if you don't like them, I have others.
  • zaa, those effects were neat.
    ~^..^~ ladyfur
  • This is Alpha Team.  Started out just playing around with all my SAV characters and this group shot was the result.  There's a story there begging to be told but my mind is all over the place with ideas...just total chaos.   Posted this pic here for now because yanno mostly guys in the pic.

    So we have left to right:  Hector Ortiz (Yannis), Maleko Tane (Atlas), Colton Wolfe (Dante), his wife Oriana Wolfe (Sissy LeBeaux texture on the Angel V4 body/head), and Parker Collins (Eros) who is Colton/Oriana's nephew. 

    Hector, Meleko & Colton are ex Navy Seals.  Colton was security chief for Oriana's father after he got out of the service.   Parker is a tech geek.   Oriana is an intelligent rich girl who did some part-modeling during her college years.  They all work together as part of Colton/Oriana's business.  That's all the backstory I have so far.  Now I just need to figure out what type of company would need a team like this and go forth with a story.  Ideas are welcome!
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  • Interesting base. With all the storytellers we have here someone's bound to have an idea that will spark a story for you. :)
  • RE-jigging characters. Meet Olli"Oklug" Schmitt - orc talismonger and barkeep at the "Limericks", Dortmund,  Rhine-Ruhr Megaplex.

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  • My, what a fine Orc you have there!
    * A child of five could understand this. Fetch me a child of five!
    * Isn't it wonderful how cute weapons of mass distraction can be?
    * Those are my principles. And if you don't like them, I have others.

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