A dry, hot and harsh place where the weather is nice.
It might be the combination of soft shadows, radiosity and displacement rock texture, because it took for-fucking-ever to render. I’m completely mindless with resources.
Truckyard
Betty Spiker on a supply run in the abandoned territories.
It was a rainy Sunday, and for some reason I decided to give Poser another try. I soon remembered why I stayed away: it is a fucking terrible piece of software. Two thirds of the time is spent on correcting errors that pop up for no discernible reason. Under such circumstances, it’s understandable that the user community is generally occupied with different combinations of stock models (here it’s the Trader Vehicle by kalebdaark and Warehouse District by Stonemason, plus clothing props whose creator’s names have gone lost).
Making stuff in Poser is really no different from playing with dolls. So nothing in your image is yours, except the intent.
To my surprise, and after a metric ton of postwork, it happens occasionally that the resulting image is not completely repulsive. Sort of a snapshot from a story, from the borderland between inspiring circumstance and disconsolate fabrication.
In the park
Heavy greenery to stumble through towards the edge.
Smaller and bigger rocks
Originally an exercise in how to make different sized rocks disperse a bit more naturally, soon enough it turned into one of those places, far away out on the plain, where you imagine you’d dig in and hide from the enemy, the cops, the monsters, the storm. Or simply bleed to death alone.
Another testrender of The Hospital, after I managed to import the damn thing into Vue. And lord, doth thy rainbow beachball spin from the weight of polygons. But okay, I’m improving ever so slightly. Still missing: landscape terrain, plants, clouds, decision on sun placement, other hobby for the week the final image will take to render.
Birch Summit
Still struggling with these grassy knolls, so to speak. I seem to have a knack for choosing the most render-intensive options, poor me. But even so, I stay up each night, fumbling together another… landing site. For when the skytrawler is ready.
Veldt Lake
Another exercise in horribly sunny weather. The idea of being stuck in a place where… No, actually, it’s a picture of monotony. My last month, confined to the sofa with my foot in a cast. All rest and recuperation. Which, in the end, can drive you quite mad.
So here’s a beautiful peaceful spot, except you won’t get no shade if you ain’t in for a muddy swim.
Plateu Island
The inevitable Beginner’s Island. When you start out trying to learn 3D modeling, especially in the amateur variety of programs that invite you to build landscapes (sort of the opposite of the all-serious, all-professional, no-funny-stuff CAD segment), chances are you’ll make an island. A small chunk of land in a nondescript ocean that impresses almost nobody.
Still, you know, Böcklin.
Craters
Yeah, this one turned out alright. I couldn’t decide if the water should be murky, steel blue reflective or blurrily transparent. And grass doesn’t really grow like that.
The need for something else than nature-stuffs is becoming apparent. I’ll have to go back and create some buildnings, rusty pipes, telephone poles, an abandoned car. Maybe a pumping station.
Especially since that was the topic, originally: how what we call “nature” and what might be called “remnants of human presence” blend into what I perceive as my kind of nature.
But so far, these last few days, things are going well in my virtual world creating apparatus.
Gravel and grass
I was trying to learn functions in Vue and after a while I ended up with a new place to visit. Fucking hobby art. But the rendering engine is pretty nice. Dammit.
Fireweed
Not sure where I’m going with this. Hell, it looks like old paintings. I’ve been dabbling in amateur 3D modeling for several years now and it’s so damn hard to get something usable out of it.
I decided to give Vue another try. Despite the feeling of playing with dolls, that so many people enjoy in Poser, it’s… oh, I guess it’s no different than building model railroad landscapes. The moody God perspective. You spend hours upon hours prodding your way through really crappy software, and if you’re lucky you produce something that almost doesn’t look completely awful. All this instead of drawing or painting by hand. Dammit.
But it’s still fascinating. Exploring obtuse and obsolete work methods. Using apps in ways they weren’t intended to be. Laughing at violent software screw-ups. Alternating between careful adjustments and wild abandon. Gaping at the unexpected results.
And there’s still something cool about constructing almost-believable nature scenes that didn’t exist before.
My street construction project moving slowly forward. I near completely lack the natural talent for modelling, so I rely on persistance (or obstinacy).
Sketchup decided to do its darnedest to crash my computer by, instead of producing a short animation, spewing thousands of files across the desktop. Thanks, open source.
More Resident Evil: Degeneration stills, from where they clean up by throwing the entire basement into a giant bottomless hole that somebody providently dug out underneath, in case everything went to hell.
Oh, and Tumblr turning pics into a Flash slideshow still sucks, and I still haven’t found how to turn it off. [Update: Hey, I think I did. Much better now, thanks.]
For some reason, I wanted to watch Resident Evil: Regeneration again. I remember something about another giant facility where science goes awry (as it does) and the building being constructed to plunge into a bottomless shaft as a precautionary measure.
It is a very shitty movie, of course. My interest comes from playing Resident Evil 2 on Playstation many years ago, and some sort of notion that this also could be seen as a story: as inspiration. That’s even worse than harvesting ideas from James Bond movies, but still. Something about the combination of themes stuck. What little I know of Japanese pop culture, it seems that the horror genre makes great use of military/biological science gone incredibly wrong. There’s a preoccupation with bodily reconstruction. All these surrealistic, former-human creatures, this seemingly inevitable evolution into something word can not capture.
I pay no attention to the zombies, because zombies bore the living piss out of me. (I still like the Tyrant, though). No, I’m obsessed with the corridors, the elevators, the boiler rooms, the gargantuan buildings that reconfigure like mutating machines.
Source: sonypictures.com
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