An early test before I give it up for the night: Meanwhile, as I rework this earlier art for better effects, I see I’m going to wind up falling back on the “superhero flame” for sword work for the time being. …So I’m going to put that tool aside for the moment, and wait for someone to pop out a volumetric flame tool for the new version of Daz. As per this further test in a generic medieval setting– It also doesn’t distribute the light around itself particularly sensitively. But its reaction to having its opacity turned down is half-hearted at best. It took me no more than an hour to edit the color-and-texture file from orange to blue. (sigh) The underlying texture, I think, is the problem: it looks grainy somehow. Unfortunately, the effect itself leaves Khávrinen looking like it’s somehow gotten itself involved with a sheet of Tattoine-sourced cottage cheese. The sweep of the “flame” in this particular pose of Herewiss’s and the sword’s is nice. Verdict: easily suborned to use with swords besides the simplistic ones the flames come with… but not terribly adjustable, and the results not really that great looking. But since we’ve got a nontrivial number of flaming swords and similar weapons lying around in this series, I thought I might as well give these a try and see if they might offer a less labor-intensive way to deal with this visual trope. Granted, these suffer from that earlier-described SFX problem: they’re way too blatant. Whlle working on this I remembered that I had another tool in the box that was meant to do semi-volumetric flames around swords. That said, some of us are gluttons for punishment. And settings that work on one flame, in one situation, won’t always work on another. To make these flames look at all natural, you have to turn the opacity of the flames waaaaaaaaaay down, and balance against that change the flames’ color settings, their color tones and hues, and their brightness against the ambient lighting. Special effects items like these routinely come to you with the effect turned up too high. Once this shaping-and-positioning stage of the process is over, there’ll be much more fine-tuning still to be done. (Because what’s perseverance for?…) The next image shows Sunspark’s makeover in the earliest stages of progress. And when you move them away from the human character, they then become INCREDIBLY badly behaved and frustrating to work with. This becomes interesting because the props sometimes (not always, don’t ask me why…) insist on being attached to a human character first. Which is why I more or less immediately wanted to redo Sunspark’s mane and tail. The amount of trouble you have to go to in dealing with these props is nicely offset by the high quality of the flame effect as compared to what we’ve had to work with before. As a result, adjusting them to work correctly with objects in your image can be a pleasure, or a long descent into digital hell, or both. They’re rigged even more intricately than human characters’ hands, with a number of “fingers” of flame consisting of easily fifteen joints each and all those joints have a very wide range of motions, far more involved than something as comparatively simple as a hand. This I initially did by experimenting on (from The Door Into Fire’s end of the timeline) the most likely suspect. When those came out I immediately grabbed them and started testing them with an eye to figuring out how to bend them to my own purposes. Additionally, some new tools that provide three-dimensional takes on older two-dimensional decals and props have become available: like this one, made for work with superheroes. Lately Daz 3D has rolled out a new version of the Daz Studio platform that features so-called volumetric graphics: cloud and smoke imagery that can be generated and managed in three dimensions. But when 2D tools are all you’ve got to work with, you work with them and push their limits as far as they’ll go. This early concept image of our local Middle Kingdoms-based fire elemental, Sunspark, would have been typical. (Theoretically…)Ī little background: For a good while now the Daz Studio digital graphics platform has featured cloud, mist and fire effects that were based on two-dimensional props that looked fairly realistic… as long as you knew how to point them exactly at the camera, or touch up your images in post so as to heighten the reality of the image and conceal what was going on. This time, looking at replacing the old blue Flame graphics at the site with better ones. …Over the course of the afternoon and evening: playing with fire again.
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