Author: Mike

Aspiring photographer and writer.

May Contest Entry

As part of getting back into using Daz Studio more I decided to enter the May Freebie Challenge over on the Daz 3d Forums (http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewthread/21454/). I mean the theme was pulp sci-fi/world of tomorrow, how could I not.

 

The pulp sci-fi idea reminded me of a site that I had seen linked a while back, the Pulp-O-Mizer. While playing around with that to get some ideas I also checked out the Title-O-Tron. One of the titles was “The Titanium Detective”. I immediately thought of a combination of noir style detective fiction with a sci-fi setting and I had my idea.

 

After several hours prowling around to find freebie content that could be made to work and more hours building and lighting the scene followed by about 4 hours of rendering (even with 6 cores and a decent GPU rendering raytraced lighting with metallic objects takes a while) this was my entry:

TitaniumDetective 2

I’m quite happy with how it came out and I’m even happier that I got honorable mention in the contest.

Re-Launch

While I’m still working on my photography, in fact I hope to be adding another nature gallery in the near future, I’ve also started working in several other areas.

The first is jewelry making/metalsmithing.  I’ve been taking classes at the Spruill Center over the last year and I feel that some of my newest works are worth at least putting out there. I’ll be using this site to post works in progress as well as links to the Etsy shop I share with my mother-in-law, GnomicGnotions.

My second new interest is 3D modeling and rendering. In many ways this ties in with photography in that it lets me use some of those same skills to create images that I couldn’t create with a camera. It also gets me back into something I’ve enjoyed doing for almost 20 years now. I can remember using the original 3d Studio application back in the mid 90’s and I really enjoyed the Maya section of my Game Design classes. I’m currently using a program called Daz 3D for posing and rendering and Hexagon for actual 3D modeling. Both are available free from Daz Studio and if you’re at all interested in 3d art I recommend you check them out. I’ll be posting a page with links to various resources – mostly so I can find them again – as well as posts with my works in progress and finished products.

As always my “Hint of Spring” photo book is available over at Lulu.Com