The idea of 3D art has interested me for a long time and I first came across Poser in the 90s. However, in those days it seemed so crude and unsatisfying, and I was much to involved in creating music on computers to pursue computer art, so I forgot about it for quite a few years. About five years ago I got into computer games—of the kind that can be "modded", principally Morrowind. I then learned how to use Blender so that I could do some modding myself.
One day, one of my favourite modders started putting up these things called "renders" on her website; as she is such a talented artist I was amazed by them and I didn't relate them to that old Poser stuff from the 90s at all—it couldn't be mistaken for photography but it was real art. She said they were made with something called "DAZ Studio". I looked this program up on the web, saw the site and thought "too complicated—I could never do anything like that" and forgot about it (I seem to have a bad memory!).
Although I still played games and used other people's mods, I very suddenly lost my appetite for 3D modelling and it was only last year (September 2011) that something—I don't know what—made me look up DAZ Studio again and I noticed it was free. There was also a big sale on, so I was able to afford a reasonable collection of content to get me started. I've seriously had the bug ever since and it also go be back into Blender, which I use mainly to remake clothing, do a few morphs and create one or two fairly simple objects. Nearly all the clothing items in my renders have gone through Blender for one reason or another.
The main thing that frustrated me though was rendering. I know that it's possible to make fabulous renders in DAZ and Poser using their built in rendering engines, but I was struggling. It seemed necessary to use so many tricks (and postwork) and the lights and shaders seemed to work in such counter-intuitive ways. That's where Reality and Luxrender comes in, of course. With this type of "physically based" rendering, light works very much like it does in the real world and realistic renders can be produced with relative ease. I say "relative"—there is no "make reality" button, and it does take some familiarity with lighting and material shaders to get the best out of it.
I've always been interested in photography, and photographers' skills are very useful for getting the best out of Reality/Luxrender. Speaking of photography, I don't do much now, but I was interested in it as a kid and had an SLR at a fairly early age, back when SLRs were a bigger deal than they are now. My first two cameras didn't have built in metering and I had to learn how to use a light meter. My first SLR was a Russian Zenit, allegedly made out of old tanks. I don't know if this is true, but it was about as user-friendly as a tank and I remember getting sore fingers turning the dials. I fairly quickly moved on to a Pentax and later to the classic Olympus OM1 (internal metering at last!). I now use an Olympus E510 digital SLR.
Well, that's enough about me! I'm very please to have joined Renderosity, which is a great place to show your renders, and of course buy fantastic content. I hope you enjoy my renders!
FyraNyanser
By the way, fyra nyanser means "four shades" (as in colours) in Swedish. I'm a big fan of Swedish cinema, and Fyra Nyanser av Brunt ("Four Shades of Brown") is one of my favourite comedy films—although it takes some stamina, as it is over three hours long!