SilverGirl's art soup

SilverGirl · April 12

IceDragonArt said:

I love kitbashing! You did a great job! Sometimes its a bit of a pain though!

Thank you!

SilverGirl · April 12

This post's a twofer.

First up: the manticore battle.

I was having a heck of a week with governmental administrative nonsense trying to iron out disability supports for my younger kid, and absolutely nothing was going well or intelligently. So I admit when the Easter weekend freebie codes netted me this fabulous manticore, a little art therapy was first to mind.

Because Grace is about how I felt about that whole thing, and it really would've been nice to have an Ethan come launch himself off a meaphorical fire escape and at least ground the darned problem for me. (It could just as easily have been Kira, except I didn't have the patience for getting her hair right. So Ethan it was.)

I'm not in love with Grace's pose, but I was getting frustrated with trying to fix it as everything I did seemed to make it worse. For the number of winged foes and the amount of armor in the store, you'd think there'd be more pose packs for brave warriors going up against flighted dragons, at the very least, but no.

Second picture just kind of... happened.

I was going to do something with Grace in the Graffiti Vignette I just picked up, so I was looking for a good walking pose.

And then I found that one, which in the picture has the cat in it.

And then I went "oh, well if there's a cat, I really need to get Kira in here."

But once Kira showed up, the entire composition changed. I still really liked what I had, though, so I ported it over to Grace's bedroom and gave her a homey moment with her cat as a sort of apology for the manticore thing. And also because it was finally a chance to show off that half of her bedroom, which I worked stinking hard on.

Elor · April 12

SilverGirl said:

I'm not in love with Grace's pose, but I was getting frustrated with trying to fix it as everything I did seemed to make it worse. For the number of winged foes and the amount of armor in the store, you'd think there'd be more pose packs for brave warriors going up against flighted dragons, at the very least, but no.

Not a heroic fight against a dragon poses set, and maybe you already have it, but I got this one for the 'chicken' pose (I have yet to use though):

https://www.daz3d.com/sbibb-insulting-the-dragon-poses-for-angharad-8-and-dragon-3

And also because it was finally a chance to show off that half of her bedroom, which I worked stinking hard on.

You likely spent more time placing everything in this virtual room that you would doing the same in a real room (at least you don't fight with the camera in the real world ) but the result looks great: what you're showing feels like a place lived in.

Did you use this recently released script by Totte, or did you placed everything manually?

https://www.daz3d.com/c66-drop-collide

SilverGirl · April 12

Elor said:

SilverGirl said:

I'm not in love with Grace's pose, but I was getting frustrated with trying to fix it as everything I did seemed to make it worse. For the number of winged foes and the amount of armor in the store, you'd think there'd be more pose packs for brave warriors going up against flighted dragons, at the very least, but no.

Not a heroic fight against a dragon poses set, and maybe you already have it, but I got this one for the 'chicken' pose (I have yet to use though):

https://www.daz3d.com/sbibb-insulting-the-dragon-poses-for-angharad-8-and-dragon-3

It is great.... I've got that one on my WL but nothing in it's anything I need yet.

And also because it was finally a chance to show off that half of her bedroom, which I worked stinking hard on.

You likely spent more time placing everything in this virtual room that you would doing the same in a real room (at least you don't fight with the camera in the real world ) but the result looks great: what you're showing feels like a place lived in.

Did you use this recently released script by Totte, or did you placed everything manually?

https://www.daz3d.com/c66-drop-collide

Oh I made this thing months ago, so yeah, everything was manual. I do have that script WL'ed for when it fits into my budget!

I'm glad it got the result I was after, though. My rule is that everything in their living space has to be there for a reason and have a story behind it. Like the ducks... Kira won them for her at a school fair when they were kids. Grace is not lucky at carnival games, but Kira is freakishly good at them. And Grace likes silly little fun things like that, so Kira decided she was going to have an ENTIRE RAINBOW of ducks. And also a grey one, because Minnesota is the only state that plays "Duck, Duck, Grey Duck" instead of "Duck, Duck, Goose" -- and Grace's House colors are grey and black -- so at this point it's a running joke.

SilverGirl · April 21

Okay, so here's the picture I was trying to do that led to the one in the previous post.

"Hold my coffee. I need to pet the cat."

SilverGirl · July 9

Playing around a bit with some new ingredients to my Daz "kitchen".... going for a more artsy/cinematic look than I usually do.

Kira, backstage at RennFaire in the morning before the show starts:

This one I was beating my head against a wall until I remembered I had https://www.daz3d.com/atmosphere-volume-2--mysterious-render-settings and wow, the "morning burnout" setting absolutely nailed the look I was going for. Going to have to play with the others, now.

Also, I really love the set I used here -- https://www.daz3d.com/silverwood-overlook -- everything looks nicely aged without going straight to dilapitated.

-----

Grace, hunting nightmares on the streets of Minneapolis:

Okay, so technically it's https://www.daz3d.com/the-streets-of-steampunk -- but turning the cutout opacity to 0 on the various pipes and gears and such gave it a reasonable look like some of the older parts of the city. Alas I discovered I do not possess any decent stoplights to kitbash in, so please forgive that absence. The new ingredient here is https://www.daz3d.com/iray-distance-fog which I hadn't played with before, but when I ran the render the first time the buildings looked kind of flat. So I threw some fog and a DOF at the thing and that fixed the issue. I generally don't like DOF, as a personal preference, but in this case I think it needed it.

Also, getting Grace properly lit gave me absolute fits. In the end, I wound up duplicating one of the streetlights, placing it off camera to the right, and lowering it so the lights were level with her head.

SilverGirl · July 20

Some lighter stuff:

That moment when you go to set up for the weekend at Renn Faire and discover last week's egg salad sandwich waiting for you...

Kira's pose is from https://www.daz3d.com/trash-the-room-poses-for-genesis-8 -- I've wanted to do something with it for a while, and then the idea for this one popped into my head. I'd initially been thinking maybe she found a yogurt container, but then as I was going through my assets I found the sandwich from https://www.daz3d.com/city-office-block-props which I'd picked up a while ago thinking "well, for sure something from this'll come in useful for something eventually." The duffel bag is from https://www.daz3d.com/travel-baggage and has a lot of great morphs.

-----

And a nice summer day's picnic, because why not:
(and also what on earth else was I going to use that set for? But it was so cool I had to use it for something...)

First shout out of course has to go to https://www.daz3d.com/dirty-dishes-fantasy-food-and-drinks for Grace's lunch because holy crud everything in that set is gorgeous. I'm sure I'll be using it for a lot more going forward, but this was its first forray. Ethan's drinking horn is from https://www.daz3d.com/drinking-horns and needed some tweaking because although the horn body showed up well enough, the metal details did not. Had to throw a new, Iray shader on it for that. The basket is from https://www.daz3d.com/basketry which I have had since shortly after I joined in fall of 2023, thinking "oh I bet a picnic basket would be a good thing to have"... well, thank you 2023-me, because I finally needed one.

The main setting is, of course, https://www.daz3d.com/the-guardian-king -- I had to tweak it a bit to make it work, though. The main area with the dias and the statue is all one thing, and I needed the steps taller to make the poses work without having to tweak them excessively. So I copied the whole thing, hid the statue & stand in one, and the steps in the other, made a new group with the gravel instances on the dias and parented them to the prop, then scaled up the Y-axis on the whole shebang for the dias and just moved the statue/stand up to sit right. Worked great. Also had to rotate the environment so the light fell better and everbody wasn't in the shade, then reduce the environmental intensity to 0.75 because it was too bright.

I also added DoF and put https://www.daz3d.com/iray-light-volume-kit behind the actual set pieces... which probably wasn't the most efficient way to get a slight haze in the background, but I'd already loaded it over the whole scene and decided it was a bit much, so rather than fart around with something else it made sense to just shove it back a bit and call it good.

SilverGirl · July 27

That feeling when you're cataloging assets in your system and come to DM's Folly and go "oh hey wait, I know what I could do with that..."

Used a bunch of stuff I hadn't yet in this one:

https://www.daz3d.com/dm-s-folly
https://www.daz3d.com/lorez-crow
https://www.daz3d.com/cityscapes-backdrops-volume-3
https://www.daz3d.com/dforce-upcycled-maxi-for-genesis-9-and-8-female

And I used a wind node for the first time! Pretty proud of myself for that one.

richardandtracy · July 27

Beautiful, evocative scene. Thanks for sharing.

Regards,

Richard

SilverGirl · August 2

richardandtracy said:

Beautiful, evocative scene. Thanks for sharing.

Regards,

Richard

Glad you enjoyed. :)

Notifications

SilverGirl's art soup

Comments

Adding to Cart…