Comments on Steve's Pictures

Surveyor T93. 2000. This was modelled and rendered entirely in Bryce 4. (You can probably tell, can't you? ;-) There's no post-production, as this is going to be part of an animated film. The surveyor consists of a stretched sphere, some stretched cylinders, a cone and a stretched torus. The mothership is a Bryce mountain terrain with a mosaic applied to it, and then some domes and spikes painted in the terrain editor.

Armstrong, the first city on the Moon. 1999. I modelled and rendered this entirely in Bryce 3D. Just for once, there's no post-production, except for the URL and signature. It took about 2 1/2 hours to render with normal-quality antialiasing on a Pentium III 450MHz. This is mostly because of the refraction on the domes. I made the buildings by using the mosaic effect in the terrain editor. The craters in the foreground are partly bump mapping and partly a terrain that I made by adapting a program that produces a rendered picture of a lunar landscape.

Waiting. 1999. Another Poser 4 and Bryce 4 image. I'm quite pleased with the sky in this one: I think it looks realistic enough to be believable, yet unnatural enough to be on another planet.

I got the idea of having the sun and the stars visible at the same time from Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. In this story, Earth's sun is dying, and is no longer powerful enough to make the stars invisible at dawn and dusk. I rendered the sky twice to get this effect - once for the sun, clouds and deep blue background, and once for the stars. I then matted them together in Paint Shop Pro, using a mask derived from the brightness of the stars render.

The man is the Poser 4 default, with the superhero body morph set to -1 to make him look scrawny. His beard and moustache are by Dan Whiteside, while the chair is by HL Arledge, and can be found on Volume 1 of Chris Derochie's PoseAmation CDs. I forget where I got his bowler hat from. If you recognise it, please let me know, so I can give the creator proper credit.

Most of the textures are Poser or Bryce presets, with some tweaking. I made the texture on his trousers from scratch, using Steve Cox's UVMapper to create a template, and then painting it in Paint Shop Pro.

The Forest and the City. 1999. This is done with Poser 4 and Bryce 4, with a fair bit of post-production in Paint Shop Pro 5. The figures use the new conforming clothing in Poser. Their tops are T-shirts with the sleeves deleted. For the lacy appearance, I used the alpha channel of a texture in Bryce to control transparency.

To get the slope on the rock that they're standing on, I drew a gradient in Paint Shop Pro and blended it with the Bryce terrain. The forest has three different materials on it: the orange rock, the basic green of the forest, and a more warped version of that with more white-ish earth. I rendered that part of the picture once with each material and then matted them together in Paint Shop Pro. The mist above the waterfall is a stretched sphere, with a texture from JeanPierre Lapointe's volcano scene on the Bryce 4 CD.

The other retouching was the addition of the small moon near the top of the picture, and a heavy focal blur, using the same technique as If Only...

If Only... (new version) 1998. I drew the people in Poser 3, and the background in Bryce 2. I matted them together in Paint Shop Pro, and did a fair amount of retouching there. The main things I did in PSP were the stripes on the woman's clothes, her tears, the contrail from the aircraft, the blurring on the background, and a lot of shadows on the people, in an effort to make them look as though they really are part of the same picture as the background ;-).

The man is the standard Poser nude. The woman is a customised model from the Poser forum website: the standard nude with lots of morph targets added. The only visible effect of all them that is I moved her breasts closer together to hide her nipples behind the man's arm. (Her clothing's tight, but not that tight ;-) Her texture map started out as the Wulf texture from HL Arledge's site, but I changed most of the black to white and added a little multi-coloured noise.

This scene was one of the more difficult to pose, mainly because the people have to be close together, without parts of them going through one another. (Poser doesn't do collision detection, and is quite happy to let you put someone's arms through someone else's chest. Fine for surreal horror scenes, but otherwise...) The chances are that even if the pose looks OK from one angle, it'll look wrong from another one. The moral would seem to be: decide on your camera angle as early as you can and stick to it, unless you realise that it was a bad decision.

The background is all fairly straightforward Bryce stuff. The sky took a while to get right, but the rest all uses the supplied textures. The cityscape is made with the "spikes" feature in the terrain editor. The triangular shapes of the building weren't quite what I wanted, but I think they help it look futuristic, which was something I did want.

The blurring on the background is meant to look like the focal blur from a real camera. Bryce doesn't do this directly, but it does have something called a "distance render." This is all shades of grey, and the brightness of each pixel is proportional to its distance from the camera. The idea is that you load it into a bitmap editor and use it as a mask to control the amount of blurring on each part of the image. I couldn't get this to work in Paint Shop Pro, but I managed something similar by duplicating the background to a new layer, blurring that, and then using the depth render as a mask to control the visibility of the blurred layer. Where the blurred layer is masked out, the unblurred layer shows through. I edited the mask a little to blur the ground as well. Even though it's close to the camera, it didn't look right when it was perfectly in focus.

Uh-oh... 1998.

The woman's gun and headset are props from Ed Baumgarten's site.

The woman's texture map is the "Black Leather" texture from HL Arledge's Texture Map Archive. I tweaked the colours and added some grime and blood.

The monster's horns (believe it or not) are the model of a worm that Bushi made. It came in at just the right size (that's a big worm!), and was coiled in just the right way, too. I tried to mirror its pose for the other horn, but I made rather a mess of it, so that ended up as the horn whose shadow you can't see as clearly. The monster himself is just the standard Poser businessman. To get his shadow right, without having any of him showing in the picture, I scaled him to 200% and moved him back from the woman.

Much respect to all of these people. Take away their contributions and you wouldn't have much of a picture!

The inspiration for this image took a rather unlikely route. I'd just got hold of the black leather texture map and one or two others. (Well, actually, I downloaded the lot. When I find a resources site that I like, I tend to grab everything which I think will be remotely useful.) I thought: "OK, let's see if I can do something interesting with this."

I had a look through the pose library for a suitable starting point and came across the guitar player. (I'd been trying to pose a guy playing a guitar recently, for another project.) So I applied this pose to the woman. Having looked at her from a few angles, I thought her head should be more bowed. (That's the way I play guitar, anyway - I can't even strum properly unless I can see where my fingers are supposed to be going. This is just one of the reasons why my main instrument is the synthesiser.) So I grabbed her head and tried to rotate it to the position I wanted. Without realising it, though, I'd accidentally rotated one of her eyeballs instead. When I came to look at her face, the iris of that eye was completely inside the socket, rather like in a bad horror movie. It took me a while to figure out what had happened. Until then, I hadn't realised that you could rotate the eyes. So I thought: "Let's rotate her eyes so she's looking up." I did this, and then I played around with the facial expression dials a little, and I got something which suggested she was thinking: "Uh-oh..." (Hence the title of the picture.)

What had she seen to make her think this? How about a powerful monster, which she's come across in some underground maze? Perhaps not terribly original, but enough to be going on with. Problem: I don't (yet) have the tools to model a monster that looks convincing, nor was I in a mood to go trawling the Net for one that looked vaguely right. OK, how about showing just the monster's shadow on a wall behind the woman? Many imaginary monsters look roughly human, at least in outline. That would allow me to use one of the standard Poser figures, and maybe alter its proportions or add a few props to make it look suitably threatening.

I'm not entirely sure why I went for a man with horns (aka a devil). It might have been a picture by Jeff Richardson which I saw not long after subscribing to the Poser mailing list. It might have been that I thought the goat's head from the Spare Parts disk that came with Poser 2 would look good. The goat's head was OK, but this has horns on the top, and really I wanted them on the sides. Apart from this, the big floppy ears made it look rather comical. I was then that I remembered Bushi's worm...

Vampires. 1998. I found a vampire morph target (gives characters pointy ears and teeth) on the Poser forum website. Unusually for morph targets, there are both male and female versions. (It seems to me that most of the morph targets, clothes and textures people have made for Poser are only for the female figure. The great majority of people on the net are still young men...) Remembering my story idea, I thought "let's try a picture with a male and a female vampire in it, then." The vampires' poses and expressions started from Poser presets, but I've changed almost everything about them. You have to open the character's mouth quite a lot to see the pointy teeth from a distance, which is OK for the male, but not so good for the female. Of course, her hair hides her pointy ears too. Symbolic?

The female's top and skirt are from Adam Smith's Poser fashion page (Those specific models are no longer available, having been replaced by improved ones.) You would not believe how long I spent tweaking the colours and highlight parameters trying to get the highlight to look right while still having the texture visible. And then I spent almost as long moving the lights a degree at a time to help that, while still having the vampires' faces mainly in shadow and keeping a strong light on the face of the other woman... In the end I cheated and lightened the clothing highlights in Paint Shop Pro. The texture on her bracelets is one called "Geod," which comes with Moray.

The male vampire's texture is the standard nude male, with some blood (other peoples', obviously) added in Paint Shop Pro.

The woman on the right is the standard Poser businesswoman, with a "Asian" facial morph, also from the Poser forum website. She doesn't look obviously Asian from this angle, and it's pretty subtle in any case, but it makes her look just different enough from the female vampire to hide the fact that they're basically the same person. I tapered her head a bit, which also helps her to look different. I scaled her down a bit to make her look more threatened by the vampires. This character is labelled "Detective" in my Poser source file. Don't read too much into that, though. There is, however, a good reason for her to be looking at the female vampire, even though the male appears to present the more immediate threat. I'm afraid I don't know what the reason is yet. Her texture is the standard one, with some dirt added in PSP, and with lots of tweaking of colours and highlight parameters.

The skeleton is the remains of some poor soul who was suspended by his wrists to starve to death. One of his hands slipped out of the manacle, so he's just hanging by the other one. It's Poser's "hanging by a thread" pose, straightened out to make everything hang as near as possible to vertical. Originally, the whole of the skeleton was visible, but I moved him partly out of the picture to make him more a part of the background, suggesting that such horrible things are part of the scenery around here. (As well as that, I couldn't be bothered posing his hand and positioning it properly in a manacle ;-)

The stairs and pillars are standard Poser props. The bump mapping on them is just noise, generated in Flamingo. The texture on the stairs is the same as on the female vampire's bracelets (tiled with PSP, and then pushed around and recoloured in Flamingo). The texture on the pillars is the same as on her clothes, but with a lighter base colour, so more of it shows. (And is promptly obscured by the bump mapping!)

The trees are a model from Brian Hitney's website (one's a mirror image of the other). I imported this into Extreme 3D, removed the leaves and rendered it completely black.

The background is a Bryce 2 sky. It's one of the presets ("Brooding," I think it's called), but with most of the parameters tweaked a bit.

All of that lot is put together as 7 layers in Paint Shop Pro. I rendered the figures separately from the stairs and pillars. Poser's anti-aliasing generally improves the picture, but I prefered the aliased version for the texture of the stairs and pillars. I didn't like the jagged edges on them, though. So I rendered them twice, once with anti-aliasing on and once with it off, and matted them together. The edges use the anti-aliased version, and the interiors use the other one. The same technique is used on the texture for the female vampire's bracelets, and on the highlights on her clothes and hair. (Are those red highlights the effect of the red light that's shining into the scene, an avant garde haircare product, or fresh blood? You decide...)

Unfinished Business. 1998. The statue is the Poser "Hero" model from the Poser forum website. The dragon's head (barely visible on the wall of the far room) is from Ed Baumgarten's site. Everything else is modelled in Moray, using a lot of lathes and superellipsoids. (With apologies to mathematicians, a superellipsoid is basically a box or cylinder with rounded edges - for example, the head of the mallet on the base of the statue, and the easel which is resting against the wall.)

Most of the textures are ones supplied with Moray, but I've tweaked some of them quite a lot. For the sketches on the easel, I put the character in Poser's "David" pose and rendered him in the sketch shading mode from various angles. The parchment is a bicubic patch, rather than a simple plane or box. That allowed me to curl the edges and corners a little.

Test renders at about 320*240 pixels had been taking about 6 minutes without antialiasing. (This is on my new Pentium II 333MHz - I hate to think how long it would have taken on my old Pentium 133...) For the final render, I decided to try using POV-Ray's focal blur. Test renders to find the best settings for this took 30 to 60 minutes. Strange how the renderer has to do so much extra computation to reduce its normal infinite depth of field to the finite depth you get with a real camera... Even stranger how so many of us want our synthetic images to look as though they were taken with a real camera that we're prepared to wait for it...

Anyway, after a bit of experimentation, I settled on a fairly sharp apeture setting and (of course) the highest quality. The render at the size you see here (768*576 pixels) took just over 10 hours. The reason for this isn't entirely the focal blur; the soft shadows also cause POV-Ray a lot of work. I wasn't convinced that the result was actually better than normal antialiasing, so I did another render was focal blur switched off (another hour and a half). After a long hard look at both of them, I decided that the one with focal blur was better, because you could see the statue's expression more clearly. And after all, his expression was the main reason for doing the picture, so the focal blur version is what's here. (And no, it's not because it took nearly seven times as long to render as the other one, so it must be better...)

Serenity. 1998. I created the model for this picture with Moray and rendered it with POV-Ray. The body of the ship is a cubic spline lathe, the fins are bicubic patches, and the ring is the difference of two cylinders. (It was originally a torus, but I got some nasty artifacts when I rendered it. Torii in POV-Ray are apparently prone to this, and the documentation suggests some solutions, but these didn't work.) The lights are spheres, squashed and stretched and filled with a halo texture. This image took about 28 minutes to render at 512*384 pixels with some anti-aliasing on a Pentium 133, with the Windows 95 build of POV-Ray 3.02. (POV-Ray users are quite keen to know how long pictures take to render, probably because raytracing is quite a slow method of rendering. The body of the ship is what takes most of the time.)

There should be a planet in the background of this, but I haven't figured out how to do a decent-looking one in POV-Ray yet. Most of my attempts look like overgrown marbles.

Shuttle. 1998. Like Serenity, this is modelled with Moray and rendered with POV-Ray. Most of it's made with bicubic patches. The blue and grey is a Mandelbrot texture, although most of the fractal parts are hidden by the orange stripes. The bump mapping is POV-Ray's brick pattern. The splotches and smudges are adapted from the "abused metal" texture in the POV-Ray manual. This took about 12.5 minutes to render, on the same hardware as the Serenity picture.

Reason inlay card. 1994. The picture of me is hand-copied from a photo. (I didn't have a scanner at the time.) I drew the outlines in Microsoft Draw (a basic vector program that comes bundled with various applications), and then added details in Paintbrush. I used Serif's PagePlus to put it all together. I remember writing some BASIC programs to do various cheesy things with bitmaps, but I'm not sure if any of their output found its way into the final version.

Tell me what you love or hate about these pictures.

Last update: 25/7/2020 17:09