Attached Link: Dodger's Gallery

Hey, on day two of reposting things, this time with thumbnails for them. As I said in my last message to this effect, I'm hoping to get as many comments and suggestions as possible to get a better feel for which of my work people like best. I know the drill, it should be what I likebest, of course -- but I like all my pics, so that's not fair, and I would eventually like to actually be a professional artist (again, I guess) so I'm trying to draw in as many comments and maybe rankings to see which ones people like best comparatively and so on. The reason I'm not just editing the images to add the thumbnails is that most of these are a year old or older and since no one saw them the first time -- they didn't have thumbnails -- no one would ever see them now, either because they would be zibbly-billion pages deep. Anyway, please take a look if you're interested in the sort of stuff I do. I'd like as much in the way of comments and critique as possible and I promise to try to take all critue well (I mean, if you say stuff just to be mean don't expect me to take that well, but you know what I mean, right?) Thanks! -- Dodger

Your angels are Amazing! This must have taken you forever to Poser. Pure Poser Perfection! ladynimue

Well, it took about an hour in Poser to adjust everything just right, and about two hours of standard postwork, and then about five hours in photoshop of doing a single very tedious technique to it that I call a reality filter and involves running almost every filter on it to a very small degree. Basically, I do this: Load image. Hide background layer. Copy background layer. Run the first filter in the menu. Reduce opacity to 1%. Repeat for all filters in the first section. Merge visible. Repeat entire process for every 'batch' of filters in Photoshop except silly ones like ditherbox. And since I have the Microsoft Impressionist filter (comes with ImageStudio which comes with FrontPage 98) I also use each of its presets this way. Once all the layers are combined the opacity is 100%. The result is that the whole finished thing is almost identical (very little difference shows up in a difference compare) except it has a more 'natural' feel. I call it a reality filter because by combining so many filtered images, most of which look nothing like the original after filtering, the 'average' of them all comes out very close to the original, much like reality is filtered through our senses and while we don't know objective truth, the combination of so many impressions of it comes close to the real thing.

ohh that is very kewl. Hmmm Do I see a Tutorial here???? ;] Thanks so much for letting us in our your secrets ... I will have to try this method out on my next creation :) ladynimue

Thought I'd post a few pics for those who might doubt the Poserness of some of the pics. This was the original render postworked to create the 'Two Swords' image before anything was done to it.

I don't remember where the reference swords came from but I'm sure LD knows B^)

This was the raw render for 'Edge'

This is Two Swords in a half finished state, only the 'pencil-ised' layers including the pencilified render skin and the hand drawn bits that were done at that stage.

This one's Blue partway through

And for the one that draws the most doubt (mostly because on 'Two Swords,' Posette's mouth is a dead giveaway)... Heeeeere's spyke!

I only did half his tattoo on the texture because it was easier to postwork it than to try and match the bloody seams. Right down the side of the arm is the worst place for a seam if you ever want to do tattoos, which are most likely to go right there..

I didn't keep any of the Cartoon-style images, though (except the finished piece) -- sorry.

The postworked Spyke is great. I long for the day that we can get renders like that "out of the box", without need of postwork.

LD, I think that would be cool (and Illustrate! does a good job of getting close in Max), but at the same time the more the computer does the less humanity is in it. I think that the work artists do whether postworking or texturing allows for the flaws that actually make a work of art look more real than a computer would ever be able to do it. On the other hand, if AI is invented and thinks like a human (goddess forbid), it could do this, but then you have the problem of who owns the copyright on the finished piece -- you or your copy of Poser 12 with DAZ's Eccentric Personality plugins?