What and Why for Genre or Theme (Sci-fi, Fantasy, real world etc)?
Griffin Avid
Posts: 3,837
Simple question today got me curious. I see some excitement over the fantasy category- being the switch over from Sci-Fi.
I loved Lord of the Rings, never watched Game of Thrones, but I understand how powerful and meaningful that show is...
Hell, you escape the memes, alone.
So why are some of us, those that do, choosing our particular genre to focus on and spend so much time rendering from?
I loved Sci-fi because it had very few rules. It can ridiculously implausible one moment and the next delve into hard science.
It gives us a glimpse of our future, while the vision is always mapped from our present.
1940s had flying zeppelins everywhere
50s gave us the UFO phenomenon.
60s Had everything to do with visiting other planets
I can't remember the 70s and the 80s gave us plastic clothes and virtual reality.
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On a personal level, it always felt like things could get better- and whatever stupid ideas we hold and have as humans, we'll grow beyond.The future can be whatever you imagine and you could be whatever you wanted. That was the promise and that's one of the heavy pulls towards science fiction.
Why are you where you are?
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I'm a fantasy nerd from way back. From the dungeon crawler Treasure of Tarmin on Intellivision, to reading Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman's Dragon Lance series in highs school while all me fiends were reading romance novels. All these same friends who now swear they are die hard George RR Martin fans, and are NOW reading the books because of the movies - ummmm hello, remember making fun of me back when I read the 1st book in 1996..... and they are complaining about the wait between books - try waiting 6 years!!!
Anyway, I came to Daz for the dragons, they are a little camera shy in real life. :D
I used read a little science fiction too, Orson Scott Card, Piers Anthony - who mixes science fiction with fantasy fiction in his adept series. and am currently reading a little urban fantasy, others that I can't remember - but high epic fantasy will always be my 1st obsession. :)
A. Lee Martinez, if you enjoy Urban Fantasy...and humor. I've been rereading most of his books lately. :) I was a huge fan of Terry Pratchett...I love chewy satire with a crunchy fantasy shell.
But yeah, I grew up reading Piers Anthony until he just kept repeating the same book over and over...Still, he got me for at least 20-30 books. I read a bunch of Terry Brooks, Asimov, Heinlein (sp?) and lots of others.
Daz does seem like a natural extension, a way to bring fantasy and scifi characters to life.
I read Terry Brooks too, the 1st couple of Landover series, I think everyone in both genre has read at least one Issac Asimov, how can you not, he dominates the industry :) I'll have to check out Martinez that sounds like a fun "listen" lol I tend to audio book now - that way I can multi task. :) you should check out Kevin Hearne, Iron Druid Chronicles - very funny urban fantasy - twice as funny in audio because Luke Daniels does such a fantastic job reading it.
Ok, now I'm wanting to do an urban fantasy render.....
Like the Mercy Thompson book covers. :)
I'm 53 now... read Tolkein in 8th grade, and everything else was considered sci-fi until the early 80's when fantasy finally split out. I read old pulp and Burroughs, most of the things listed above if it was before 1988. I started playing Dungeons and Dragons in 1978 and before that doing models of war and ships and creating dioramas with friends.
While some of the sci-fi was/can be quite wacky, I tend to render what might be considered more main stream scenes. I am not very "artsy" and hate post work. I do like the toon stuff and some super heroes for a bit of a break. Fantasy is my number one, but I am working on a sci-fi spec project for an upcoming KickStarter so that is almost all I have done in the last few weeks.
I liked fantasy, elves, fairies, and sword and sorcery most of my life. Then at around 40 I lost interest. I am now really only interested in contemporary or sci-fi art.
I also have lost interest in vampires, werewolves and the like. I was really into that too, until it became so popular I couldn't crack a novel without a vampire character wangsting around.
I like sci-fi because I like the possibilites of the future. I think I'm done with fantasy for good though.
Thanks... I'm a huge audiobook listener as well. I travel for work and audiobooks are the best. I will definitely pick up Kevin hearne.
I loved the first couple of Landover books too...Until Brooks ran out of ideas. Most authors seem to reach that point when writing a series. His "Incarnations of Immortality" series was like that too. The first was brilliant, but lost steam in the later books.
Wasn't Incarnations of Immortality … (oh, ask Uncle Google… yep) Piers Anthony. He has overplayed a lot of series, for that matter. It is quite difficult, I think, for series authors to avoid falling into formula. Or even non-series authors, I suppose, if they write long enough.
I like to blend genres. I just hope I do not blend too much for it to be not likeable by anyone.
I'm an illustrator, mainly. Well, technically, I'm a publisher. My hobby is designing books.
Since this is totally non-commercial, what I mainly publish is fanficition. I get authors' permission to base a project on one of their stories (which are already "published" since they are posted on the internet) work up a graphicly based .pdf and submit it for approval. I work with the author if they are willing to. Once they give me the go-ahead I post it on my site, since fanfic archives don't take .pdf.
So far, most of the fanfics that I've worked up projects for have been fantasy. If I ran across some SF or other genre stuff that I relly liked, I'd ask about doing projects based on those. But so far I haven't, and haven't gone looking for them.
I used to really like the fantasy and elvish stuff. Not so much now that I'm older. These days it's scifi, post apocolyptic and horror. Once in a great I'll throw a more mundane image in for variation, but mostly it's the genres mentioned :) Most days I just go with what I'm feeling like, which isn't the same all the time.
Laurie
I try to do a little of everything. I cant really say that I favor one genre over another.
I'm surprised at the overall mix. Seems to be close to TV and film, but maybe this is an older person's hobby- with younger eyes.
There's light- true WW2 or civil war-based products. In games (strategy and online) those genres were king for a while.
Fantasy and superhero should enjoy the strong boost- along with zombie stuff (Walking Dead) still going strong.
The sexy vampire, I guess that's fantasy, should have been strong and now all of TV is flooded with regular people with special powers or the other angle is a person with a special destiny....all that magic stuff. THE CHOSEN TEEN.
I never understood the angel/demon thing- but I completely missed the Biblic context and how those images and props SHOULD be extremely popular. It has so many contexts for illustrations - and documentation and commercial uses. Wedding artwork...etc
Peanuts is superb fantasy. It features children who struggle with difficult issues of life and can do things like patting birds on the head or playing Beethoven on a toy piano, plus animals who possesses human intelligence, one of the said animals being a dog with telepathic powers who loves to role-play and can even fly with his ears. Above all Peanuts is funny and has no blood in it; compare Star Wars, LOTR and all those superhero movies around. And Peanuts has none of the used-to-death tropes like good guys saving the planet or galaxy or whatever from the bad guys (yawn), or the farm boy with special gifts who gets picked up by a mentor (snore). Give me Peanuts anytime; Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus and Lucy are way more endearing characters to me than Luke or Frodo. Well, that's me. (Shrugs.)
Pity there aren't any rigged and poseable 3D Peanuts figures available like the ones one sees in the Peanuts Movie. Or are there?
well mostly I'm fantasy and pinup. Grew up watching mostly British stuff comedy like the Carry On movies, Goodies, the various comedians Benny Hill, Dave Allen and British Pinup/Glamour/Cheesecake photography/art. Big fan of the Brits Sci Fi such as Doctor Who and their horror and sci fi comics. Watched a lot of the old Hammer Horror/Universal horror and sci fi and Japanese monster movies like the Godzilla and Gamera movies. Cartoons of course oh and dinosaurs, unexplained/supernatural/weird stuff/alien so much more and I'm still into all this stuff as well as newer stuff too as well as well as gaming. and various pinup and fantasy artists. Used to sculpt creatures and draw fantasy pinup and what I wanted to try and do was create fantasy photos with people dressed up in outfits along with creatures sculpted and enhanced on computer For ages and still do do photo manipulations face swaps body part swaps adding clothing pieces but now I do most of it using daz models so I'm doing something I always wanted to do and thanks to daz made it a whole lot easier
As far as what media I prefer, I stick mostly to Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Urban Horror. Most of my renders fall into those categories, with a large helping of cheescake thrown in on top. Gotta have that desert dontcha know? :D
From the media I consume, most is sci-fi/superheroes and fantasy (more like Harry Potter than Lord of the Rings). My renders are mainly real world / real life.
I started using Studio/Poser originally to make pretty pictures of my RP characters from my MMO gaming. So my genre and images would be centered around the game I was currently playing. It was nice every year or two to change genres completely, like from the urban fantasy of The Secret World to the viking-like Nords of The Elder Scrolls Online. And I'd have to go on a shopping spree to buy everything I'd need to make the change (weeeee!). But my default is post apoc. I can't explain why, but it's where I always go back to.
I haven't been MMO gaming since my dog died about two years ago and took my heart with him. And now when I'm ready I can't find an upcoming sandbox title I want to play. Not that hubby's complaning about my lack of gaming. lol
I'm mostly after two things. First is WW2 stuff for the long-delayed webcomic I want to do (with a tiny bit of present-day). The second is characters for my Pathfinder games (fantasy). But sometimes sci-fi stuff comes along that's just so darn cool!
Only in their dragon form... Only in their dragon form. :)
Double Post
Dali was my childhood crush; then Philip K. Dick and Vonnegut got me early in my youth, the former for his existential paradox/conundrums and the latter for his satirical social commentary (in fact, our present world is more implausible than a Vonnegut story). It seems to me that as material reality and theoretical physics take us further and further, we shall have to accept the legitimacy of mysticism. Thus, fantasy and scifi become inextricable. Daz and Photoshop raise my ceiling of what can be shown, although my vision still outpaces my ability to bring it to screen.
In a sense this is where I'm at. I use in many cases non-human critters (even robots) who portray human foibles and dreams. I'm not into epic themes or violence or evil creatures really. I actually think I did better during my old Bryce days than now which too often involves more 'test' images trying to better technical skills.
What setting (sci-fi, fantasy, etc) doesn't really matter.
I started with Science Fiction and that is still my favourite reading, but Fantasy is a close second. I've read a few A. Lee Martinez books and liked them a lot. Another fantasy author I like a lot is Jasper Fforde. His Thursday Next books are set in a rather surreal altenate version of Britain around 1970ish and the main character can travel into books. For Science Fiction my favourite authors are Ian M. Banks, Vernor Vinge and Peter F. Hamilton and I think The Culture from the Ian M. Banks books would be the best fictional world to actually live in.
I went off epic fantasy neverending series books for a while, but I picked up the first book of Luke Scull's Grim Company trilogy in a Kindle sale and after reading it I just had to get the others. I've just started reading the second one.
When it comes to making pictures I probably do more Fantasy than Science Fiction, and some mainstream stuff. I've dabbled a bit trying to do surrealism, I like surrealist paintings.
I have alway been a sci-fi nerd, particularly the space based genre,
I also prefer future society themes with clean futuristic clothing
For that reason I became a content developer to produce my own Daz clothig content as I was not seeing the types of clothing I prefer being sold here.
edited because tl;dr
Good to know we see eye-to-eye on a couple things. ;)
I do stuff that fits my sense of cool. As such, thereis a realy odd mix, but I like it, so I works hard at it. Could I do what other people suggest? yeah. Burned out on it a while ago and then found genre I not only liked, but was good at and other people started seeing the cool I saw.
Be your own biggest advocare and critic.
Oops...Yep, mixed that one up....Been awhile since I read those books.
Brooks had similar issues with the later Shannara books. Although, I did enjoy the Elf Stones, and the prequel.
What I use daz for... Character creation and illustration. I recently needed a mock up of an office for a documentary because no old photos existed. I used daz to render what it might have looked like. I did the same to create a photo of a person who never existed, for the film.
Otherwise I also like to visualize my fantasy writing. The writing and illustration feed off each other.
I use Studio for new uses everyday! character / scene visual aids for writing, to create portraits for crpg avatars, illustration-style pics for sci-fi and fantasy renders as the mood takes me - I enjoy both genres equally; icon creation for custom programs (scripts really, but I enjoy making custom icons for them all the same) superhero style comic rendering, fanfic renders, classic sword and sorcery style fantasy renders (Kwapisz, Boris, Frazetta are some of my heroes) I'm even using Studio to make sprite sheets to mod some old classic games to try and update the old pixelated graphics looks. There's so much you can do...