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.
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.
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.
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.
Nanoworld: a Mandelbulb fractal and a sphere primitive
I finally tried the animation feature of the Madelbulber2 fractal surfaces software. From the "View" menu, if you select "Show animation dock" then you are provided with the following controls:
animation controls
For my first animation I set the lower drop-down menu (speed control) to "constant".
"primitives" settings
To create a fractal surface for the animation, I started with a "primitive", a sphere, in the default position (0,0,0) and with the default radius (1). See the "primitives" controls shown to the left. When combined using the union(or) function, this sphere "covered up" part of the default-sized Mandelbulb fractal surface so only the "high altitude" parts of the fractal surface were visible. See the "Nanoworld" image above.
I used the default material, but selected the image shown to the right for use as a "color texture". You can see that humanoid face "looking out" from the surface of Nanoworld.
In order to make a fractal surface with some interesting features such as tunnels, I combined the following four fractal surfaces (using the "union(or)" method) with the sphere primitive:
To render this fractal surface, I used the "Delta DE" method for estimating distances from the camera to the fractal surface.
As a starting point for my animation, I zoomed in on the surface of Nanoworld, just in front to the arched entryway that can be seen "from above" in the image to the left. Some of the images that I show here have been modified in Photoshop so as to include characters from the Grean's Hack series.
Looking through the first archway,
another archway is seen beyond.
For creating the path that would be followed by the moving camera in order to create the animation, I used a low image resolution (half of the smallest preset resolution: 360 x 240 pixels) and a value of 1.0 for the "raymarching" render quality parameter. I clicked on the "record flight path" button and used the mouse cursor to guide the camera through the archway. Each frame for the animation took just a few seconds to render on these low-resolution settings. Then I switched to a larger image size (720 x 480) and 0.1 for the raymarching parameter before clicking "render flight animation". I generally make still renderings at my computer's screen resolution (1920 x 1080 pixels).
The video above shows a raw animation made with Mandelbulber2 and the default Mandelbulb fractal only. Shown below is a longer video, made by combining several animation sequences into tunnels present in the more complex fractal surface described above. The second video (below) was made with iMovie and includes some transition scenes that were made with Photoshop. This second video has an audio track supplied by YouTube: "The Quantum Realm". For some of the animation sequences, there were 180 degree turns. The default animation settings in Mandelbulber2 for camera momentum and maximum rate of camera movement make it hard to turn the camera quick enough, so I changed those settings at the risk of making the camera a little wobbly as I went through the series of tunnels.
Shown below is a single rendered frame close to the second archway and processed with Photoshop to insert Artep into the scene.
The second archway is cluttered with "alien lifeforms". Artep was added to the scene with Photoshop.
looking back towards the first archway
According to the instructions for Mandelbulber2, I thought that holding down the "shift" key would stop the camera from advancing forward and allow me to turn the camera. However, I could not get that to work.
The image to the right shows the view looking back towards the first archway from the second archway. This image was modified in Photoshop to add some lighting and to add in the two story characters. Without the added lighting, the inside of the archway was rather dark.
Sadly, the instruction manual for Mandelbulber2 does not have a section describing how to use the keyframes feature for animations. At six hours of rendering for a 5 second animation I'm afraid that I'm reaching the limits of this old computer.
