Wait! by micsteel
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Description
I left slowly; I wasn't sure if she meant for me to leave her forever, or just leave her alone for a while. She'd been strangely moody lately. I felt like kicking the water bucket as I dragged my feet past her dohyou, but I restrained myself: Too symbolic of how she'd made me feel. Best leave suicide to Disney's lemmings.
I gathered some of my things and headed for the street. As I passed the garden torii, I heard running footsteps. I looked up and saw her coming.
"Wait!" she called. A bitter-sweet pang filled my heart as hope warred with gloom, intense enough to bring a tear to my eyes. She'd taken the time to slip into sandals and jeans. Her skin still glowed from her exercise, and her hair streamed behind her. Her beauty just added to the ache in my heart as I wondered if she had changed her mind, or just wanted to make a deeper wound.
I just upgraded the RAM in my Mac mini to its maximum of a pitiful gigabyte; twice what I had, but I re-rendered my last post and it promptly ran out of RAM anyway! :) So of course I added to it. Lots to it! I don't believe I could have built this scene as quickly in 512MB, though; MenuMeters shows that the computer used over 700MB for this scene, and although less than 100MB is wired, there would have been a lot of disk-thrashing. As it is, I quit all other applications, including the Finder, leaving just D|S and MemoryStick by Matt Neuberg running. And when I was done, I couldn't re-open the scene file. Rendering with shadow maps took 40 minutes, and she looked like she was floating--she didn't get a shadow! So I tried ray-tracing. It estimated 20 hours, but it was over half done after 5, and I wanted to get on with my life, so I, um, postworked it. GASP! :) Overlapped it with the shadow-mapped version, is all. This time I used pwRender's "sweaty skin" shader pre-set; it seems I shouldn't have done it to her eyes... :) Pose based on a pose by... "Hush! Don't tell!" someone who wishes to remain anonymous. Hmm. From a set for fighting, but full of useful action poses. I've used the set in half a dozen posts by now, and haven't had any fighting yet! The set comes with cameras and lights, too, but my scenes wiggle too much. :) Aiko3, Mitsu hair, Lost Garden, Mighty Oak, DM Garden Corner Terrace, DTW Cazual sandals and Aikiyu skin texture from DAZ; Chinese Leotard (limited release) and BD Low-rise jeans by BatLabs. Mitsu Color & Movement (hair pose only) by MaskimXul in the RR store. Sumo arena (dohyou, teoke, and hisyaku) freebies by "A man pursuing manliness uses this!" Kousuke Siro-Guma. Background photo by me. Pretend you don't see the difference in light: The sun is a lot brighter in Texas! ;) I could've fixed it in PhotoShop, but I'm trying to do it all in DAZ. Okay, I'm too lazy! (So lazy I'll wait fifteen hours for a render rather than do postwork shadows! LOL!)
I just upgraded the RAM in my Mac mini to its maximum of a pitiful gigabyte; twice what I had, but I re-rendered my last post and it promptly ran out of RAM anyway! :) So of course I added to it. Lots to it! I don't believe I could have built this scene as quickly in 512MB, though; MenuMeters shows that the computer used over 700MB for this scene, and although less than 100MB is wired, there would have been a lot of disk-thrashing. As it is, I quit all other applications, including the Finder, leaving just D|S and MemoryStick by Matt Neuberg running. And when I was done, I couldn't re-open the scene file. Rendering with shadow maps took 40 minutes, and she looked like she was floating--she didn't get a shadow! So I tried ray-tracing. It estimated 20 hours, but it was over half done after 5, and I wanted to get on with my life, so I, um, postworked it. GASP! :) Overlapped it with the shadow-mapped version, is all. This time I used pwRender's "sweaty skin" shader pre-set; it seems I shouldn't have done it to her eyes... :) Pose based on a pose by... "Hush! Don't tell!" someone who wishes to remain anonymous. Hmm. From a set for fighting, but full of useful action poses. I've used the set in half a dozen posts by now, and haven't had any fighting yet! The set comes with cameras and lights, too, but my scenes wiggle too much. :) Aiko3, Mitsu hair, Lost Garden, Mighty Oak, DM Garden Corner Terrace, DTW Cazual sandals and Aikiyu skin texture from DAZ; Chinese Leotard (limited release) and BD Low-rise jeans by BatLabs. Mitsu Color & Movement (hair pose only) by MaskimXul in the RR store. Sumo arena (dohyou, teoke, and hisyaku) freebies by "A man pursuing manliness uses this!" Kousuke Siro-Guma. Background photo by me. Pretend you don't see the difference in light: The sun is a lot brighter in Texas! ;) I could've fixed it in PhotoShop, but I'm trying to do it all in DAZ. Okay, I'm too lazy! (So lazy I'll wait fifteen hours for a render rather than do postwork shadows! LOL!)
Comments (7)
pops
wonderful scene & image
Wolfspirit
Hi Mike, I like this work. From this perspective it looks like your improving all the time, although I know you look for constructive critics' to help you improve even more. However, at this point I am not sure telling you all the things I see that could use improvement would be truly beneficial to you, seeing how you waited so long to pull this creation off, along with the fact I do not work in Daz and know absolutely nothing about it. Nevertheless, in the name of I am guessing that is what you might want. I will just say, the over hanging tree does not look real, neither dose the steps and railing, and as a matter of fact I think the steps appear almost as if they are not connected to the ground. As for the rest of it, it really looks fine other then her arms, they appear either as though she has a sever case of edema due to the glowing skin, or her arms are plastic. Ok, now that is over, going back to being more me to express the positives I see in this. By the way I loved the story, gave life to the work as it was meant to do. Her face is right on the money as far as I am concerned with the realism effect other then she does not appear as though she is desiring to catch you for one last kiss, but rather, a smack just because I can't think of a reason. We women can be strange sometimes. Maybe it is the lightening the way a shadow crossed the center of her face that gives her that look of anger, or rather, it is I, and my skewed perception as much of this day has been crummy. Anyhow, her hair seems nicely done and most of the shadows as lighting are great too other than, she appears to have been spotlighted in the light, not sure, if that was you aimDid you say something about that? I seem to recall you did, my apologies if you did, goodness let this day end! If I am off on any of this, it is normal, as my thought process seems to disturb people sometimes, others enjoy it, and some wonder about me. Anyhow, Mike, it is good to see you again and keep up the wonderful hard work! Oh yeah, and get some sleep, speaking of that, sounds like a great idea to me.
micsteel
Robbin! You're alive! Um, I'll message ya, girl. Your comments are correct, and you caught everything I worried about! :) The steps, um, are in the air; there's not even any ground beneath them at the far end and they're above the ground closer, and I was too lazy to fix it. :) You can even see my backdrop image between the steps and the hill ("Lost Garden" squashed). Her skin glow is exaggerated by pwRender's default shader, and I, again, was too lazy to tweak it. (Takes too long to render!) DAZ|Studio has gone through some back-steps with its recent updates, and I may actually re-install version 1.0, or switch to Carrara for rendering. Or Poser. :P The tree seems to have been programmatically generated, and the leaves could use a displacement map to curl them. Lazy, again! :) The angry look probably comes from her red eyes: I applied the skin shader to her whole body, not just skin. Her skin WAS greenish; look back at my other images with Aikiyu in them (e.g., Aikiyu Plays the Harp). The shader completely overwhelmed it. The spotlight effect looked kinda cool to me, so I left it; it's from overlaying an incomplete render that rendered from the center in a circle, on top of a complete render. It's always good to hear from you!
BBarbs
Well it looks really great to me. From what I can see there is an amazing improvement in your work steadily as you go. Really impressive. I really agree with Wolfspirit on this image. Excellent work my friend.
aliensprog
I like it regardless of your self crits. Nothing wrong with a bit of post to finishe off an image. Nicely done!!!
Star4mation
Nice one Mic! Ray Traced Shadows take forever to render and I would only use them on portrait work where you have lots of fine details that you want to make as natural as possable. For general scenes, Deep shadow maps are, in my experiance, quite adaquate.
Unicornst
Good writing with an interesting storyline and a perfect image to go with it.