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Apr 17, 2021

Humanoid Aliens

Four hybrids with blue skin. Only the first in daylight.
 I've been experimenting with Daz Studio as a tool for making illustrations featuring the human-alien hybrids who are characters in my science fiction story "Meet the Phari". I first created a character (Typly) with blue skin who I imagine to be a human-Plesypy hybrid from the planet Ottengla (shown here). 

Alien hybrids.
I then wanted to create a scene with low light levels, but with less light, it was hard to tell that my hybrid from Ottengla had blue skin (see the middle two panels in the image, above). I eventually found a VERY blue skin that worked under low light.

Then I began experimenting with redish-skin tones that would be suitable for a character named Hyng who is a Phyphy. In general, I don't enjoy green skin, but I also made an additional character with green tints simply because I wanted to fill in some blank space in my illustration of a pale human (her name is Xyza), Typly (the blue human-Plesypy hybrid) and Hyng (the red Phyphy, see the image to the left).

Previously, I made an animation using Daz Studio for a scene with relatively high light levels. Probably the most alarming discovery that I made while creating that first animation was that the Daz Studio software is only concerned about the visual appearances of objects and does not treat its models as solid physical objects. 

Figure A. Typly goes through the mirror.
I wondered what the 3Delight rendering engine would do when a human figure passed through a mirror. In the image shown to the right, Typly has dived into the mirror. The back of Xyza's head is in the lower left corner. Standing in front of Xyza is the reddish Hyng. In blue, at the center of the image, is the left hand of Typly and you can also see her glutes and right thigh. You can see the reflection of Typly's hand in the mirror and everything else visible to the upper right is reflected light, as is all of the green character. I don't understand why we see Typly's back at the upper right which seems to have come through to us from the far side of the mirror.

Boost brightness and contrast: more green reflections in the upper right.
Below on this page is a video showing this scene set in motion, but first I'll explain what is going on here. To create this scene, I used the four differently colored human figures and three reflective surfaces. 

Movie frame #1; the view from above. The reflective floor appears black.
The reflective surface walls (Planes) and the reflective sphere are shaded yellow here.
Camera 1 was used for the most of the movie, but there was another camera for views behind Plane.

Movie frame 151. Camera #2 is "behind" the mirror.
Hyng and Typly are closest to one mirror (Plane), but there us another mirror ("Plane (2)") positioned close behind the green character and Xyza. I set the ray tracing depth to 5 for this render, so the left most copy of the green character is a reflected image (in Figure A, above). The second smaller copy of the green figure must be light that began at the character (not directly in the camera's view; she is standing to the left of Xyza), bounced off the mirror behind her and then bounced off the mirror that Typly is passing through and then finally entered the camera. By playing with the image brightness and contrast, you can see additional reflections of the green figure at the upper right of the image. The right most one may be a five reflection image.

floating sphere
There is one rather weak "distant" light source used in this scene and eight spotlights. I wanted the scene to look like a dark dance floor setting. Besides the two reflective walls, there is also a reflective sphere that can be seen in the middle right of the video, below. The sphere is magically floating in front of Xyza's knees ( see image to the left). For the most elaborate version of the video, I added a reflective floor, making a total of 4 reflective surfaces.

Typly has mostly passed
through the mirror (camera 2)
I don't understand why light can go through these mirrors rather than simply reflect off. The image to the left is the "preview" image for camera #2 showing most of Typly's body having passed through the mirror at the time of Figure A.

mirror surface settings
When that view (from camera 2) is rendered, Hyng and Xyza can still be seen on the other side of the mirror (see Figure B, below). I've seen other people talk about having to put in multiple planes in order to prevent this kind of light transmission going right through supposedly solid objects. Maybe one of the many "surface" settings (shown to the right) could stop this transmission of light through the mirror surface.

Figure B. Frame 151. Camera #2 rendered image.


For the movie, I combined several rendered animation sequences using iMovie. Sadly, by the time iMovie and YouTube are done messing with the video created by Daz Studio, the quality has been reduced. At the very end of this blog post is a short video sequence uploaded directly into Blogger.

At the start of the movie are two establishment shots, both showing the scene from above. At movie frame 1:

movie frame #1, view from above


At movie frame 151, after Typly has gone through the mirror:

movie frame 151, view from above


The view from above at frame #151 (above) shows most of Typly's body having passed through the mirror. Her left arm is seen reflecting from the mirrored floor.

iMovie to YouTube (music by Kevin MacLeod):



Direct upload movie just to show off the green hybrid's sparkling necklace:

Typly being teleported (see animation, below).

In "Meet the Phari", Delpha and Grean make use of teleportation technology. I wanted to experiment with using Daz Studio to create a teleportation animation. In this rendered scene, Daz Studio lost the ability to control the eye color of Hyng the Phyphy. However, I has been wanting to experiment with white eyes for Typly and this experience with Hyng served the purpose. I think it is best to just leave Typly with blue eyes. I made my experimental teleportation animation (below) for 1080p video, but the default for Blogger video seems to be 720p. 😢

right click for options
select full screen view
Strangely, conventional video formats like 1080p (1920x1080 pixels) are not listed among the available options for Daz Studio animations. However, the video (below this paragraph) looks okay when viewed in full screen mode and right-clicking on the movie allows you to turn on looping.


YouTube video thumbnails
Next: a "Meet the Phari" comic strip.

Related: too hot for YouTube...

When a video is uploaded to YouTube, they automatically select three frames from the video as "thumbnails". You can pick one of those to be the "cover image" for the video or you can upload your own image.

Too hot for YouTube.
To the left is the image that I tried to use as a "thumbnail" for the "Recruit Telepaths" video on YouTube. However, YouTube removed that thumbnail and told me that it violates their sex and nudity policy. I guess fake (Daz Studio-rendered) girls in swimsuits are too hot for YouTube.

I really do not understand why the thumbnail was removed, but they left the video on display. I wonder if the word "recruiting" triggers their software to flag an image for review. I got a nice email from YouTube saying "our team reviewed your content", but I wonder if there were no humans involved in this decision.

more videos


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