I've been putting back up several of my older gallery images that I had originally put up without thumbnails. I had added thumbs to most of them but what with being buried seventy godzilion pages deep, they never truly had a chance to be seen. This is the third day of these efforts. I'm mostly trying to get a feel for what's liked best and what people like to see the most without devolving to the obvious NVIT and PP pics. People always say 'draw what you like' (or render or whatever -- my techniques use as much drawing as rendering anyway) but the thing is, if I don't like 'em, I will never put 'em up. Anyway, I'm hoping for as much feedback and critique as possible, plus of those who are willing, ranking so I can compare the results between them statistically to see where I want to go with things. I've been modelling mostly lately but I'd like to get back into doing some renders again and I'm hoping to get an idea of which way to go. Of those who have given suggestions and critiques, thanks very much and I am definitely taking those suggestions into account for the next stuff I do. I'm also going to use this thread to post the 'pre' versions of the pieces I put up today so you can see what things looked like before any postwork (and to convince, in some cases, that there really is a render under all of that postwork!) B^)

this is the original render of Gun Grrl. The finished product was created as follows: After rendering, I opened the work in Photoshop and shrunk it to about 3.25 inches tall but kept the resolution independent so it didn't lose any image quality. Then I printed it out. Next I stuck it under my projector. It's a crappy projector because my old one, an Artograph Tracer, got ripped off and we couldn't find a decent one for a reasonable price. The Artograph Tracers, if you can find them, are the best cheap ones on the market. Avoid all the other cheap ones as I have discovered. Next I turned off all the lights and projected it onto a sheet of watercolour paper. I usually don't watercolour on watercolour paper because I hate the bumps, but I decided to leave them for this one. Next I traced the projection (quickly, as this projector sucks and settles and moves really quickly) and tok it down and finished it in in pencil whilst looking at the screen. Next I finished the whole piece in watercolour, limiting myself to only blue for the hell of it. Finally, once it was dry, I scanned it in and fixed the lens distortion the projector caused using both a spherise filter at a low negative value and by slightly distorting and warping the image until it fit closely with the original render. Then I saved it and the results are int he gallery!

This is a pre-version of Bondage Elf, as it came out of Poser. Aside from fixes on the texure and finishing in some bits, most of the postwork was the use of the Reality Filter technique that I used on Angels and described in Whaddya Like Part 2, posted yesterday. I'm not one to worry about perfection in a render usualy, as I expect to be doing a lot of postwork anyway.

Attached Link: My Gallery

You know, I forgot to pyut up the link to my gallery. Doh.

Here's the original render for Rune.

This pic is my Wife, Audrey's (_Audrey on Renderosity's) original drawing that Bondage Elf was done from. Part of the challengs was matching her poser and look as much as possiblw while injecting the level of realism that rendered works provide. (Used with permission)

This one is the original piece by Audrey on which Angels (which I posted yesterday) was done.

And this was Audrey's original *Blue* drawing. Interestingly enough, Audrey recently stumbled across the Maeve character and made me buy it -- if you've seen the character, I'm sure you can figure out why B^)

The really big hard part in those pieces I have done based on Audrey's drawings is that sometimes you can easily draw something in pencil and pen that, because of perspective errors or inaccurate anatomy and proportion that doesn't get noticed, looks really good -- but just try and get a real figure to do it and you have plenty of hair-pulling!

ohhh I understand the hair-pulling very well. been trying to actually make poser renders from my scetches, yikes it's a major pain sometimes. After 4 hours the other night I realized I could postwork something I was trying to do in poser, took me 5 minutes in PSP. Sometimes looking at polys for so long I forget the 9x12 tablet is something more than just a paper weight. Nice to see your before n afters.

Thanks. I usually import the scanned image as the image background (which also sets the aspect ratio locking int he composition pretty much) This helps with the posing to match.