I thought I would do something a little different for the description of this image and write a little bit about the thought process that went behind the making of it.

I’m not really sure where the inspiration for this image came from. The idea for a woman sitting on a throne with her legs crossed popped into my head. Then when trying to decide what to do with her arms; I put her leaning on one and with the other, laying a sword across her lap.

For the lighting: The throne scene has braziers on each side of the throne. I put a point light inside each one below the rim. I wanted the light to mimic that of burning coals, so I gave it a 2700 kelvin temperature. For the fill light I used a nighttime HDR image plugged into the environment tab of the render settings.

The camera: I wanted the eye level of the shot to appear as if below her looking up. I gave the camera a 200mm focal length to help kind of flatten out the image a little bit, so her thigh wouldn’t look drastically larger than her head. To increase the sense of her leaning to the side, I rotated the camera on it’s z-axis slightly. I then added a little depth of field and called it good.

Writing this, it sounds like it all went together pretty quick, but I spent several hours on it.

Total Rendering Time: 8 minutes 37.62 seconds. 99.02% of image converged.

Software used for scene compilation: Daz Studio 4.9.
Rendered with NVIDIA Iray.
No post-work.

In this video I go over where to find the Genesis 3 Hidden Face Bones. These bones are great for fine tuning your character’s expressions and can also be used as a morph resource kit to change their faces.

Skill Level: Beginner/Intermediate/Advanced

I thought it would be fun to do an image of Red Sonja. I mean, who doesn’t love a sexy redhead?

I’ll probably do another image of her someday; I couldn’t quite get the look I wanted for her using morphs alone. This weekend just flew by for meh, otherwise I would have fired up good ol’ ZBrush. That will have to be a project for another day.

I was hesitant to want to include her parameters tab, simply because I used so many morphs for her, I didn’t want to take the time to cut and paste the images together to build out the full list… Not really sure if people are even interested anyway lol. Thinking out loud now: Maybe I should set up Google Analytics to keep track of how many people look at them…

Total Rendering Time: 1 hours 5 minutes 29.18 seconds. 99.02% of image converged.

Software used for scene compilation: Daz Studio 4.9.
Rendered with NVIDIA Iray.
Layered over a background with Adobe Photoshop.
No post-work.

I just got this new monitor yesterday,  an ASUS PB278Q. It’s like a whole new world. Colors pop like whoa. I bought it because I wanted a monitor with 100% sRGB color and a flicker free screen. That flicker caused by pulse-width modulation (PWM) was really starting to ware me out.

I had this dope ROG Swift PG278Q Gaming Monitor, that I really liked, but it didn’t have as wide of color gamut range and suffered from PWM when the brightness is turned down. The first thing I do when I get a monitor is turn the brightness all the way down… And honestly, I know I have sensitive eyes, but I feel like they’re still too bright. I don’t know what’s the deal.

Anyway… I’m writing this because now looking back at my gallery, some of my images are darker than I intended… With my old monitor, because I had the brightness turned all the way down, I figured if it didn’t seem like washed out blackness dark to me, that it would most likely be bright enough for other people to see the details as well. Now I’m not so sure…

I’m hoping people would be willing to comment and let me know what they think? Yes, I’m talking to you 😉

“My day has come. For thousands of years I have been restrained. Today I have broken free of my chains and escaped the depths of the pit. Vengeance is not mine, but I don’t care. I have come to collect the souls of mankind and destroy all that mankind has built.

All the nations of the Earth will crumble and fall. They will bow down to me, or be destroyed.

For thousands of years I have been manipulating humankind, turning them against one another to destroy themselves. But, the era of knowledge has come. Mankind is slowly realizing they have inherited lies. For centuries they have been worshiping me and not even known it. Now I have come to destroy those who oppose me. I will shut out the light so all that remains is darkness. Hope will turn to despair, love will turn to hate, sons will turn against their fathers, daughters against their mothers. Nations will cry out for peace and all they will get is war, death, and destruction.

I go by many names, but today you will know me as, the Angel of Death!”

I thought it would be fun to write a description from the character’s point of view. That’s what that’s all about…

Software used for scene compilation: Daz Studio 4.9.
Rendered with NVIDIA Iray.
Layered over a background I created using Adobe Photoshop.
No post-work.

Well, you may or may not have noticed, I had some issues with the hosting for my website a few days ago…

This is a picture of me that was taken when I was working on a roof system a few years back. We used a crane to set those trusses. They weighed between 350 and 550lbs. The narrow ones were 42 feet wide and the wide ones were 50 feet wide. The trusses were so big, they were too tall to fit on a semi tractor trailer (over 14 feet tall) and had to come in 2 parts. The crown trusses were not yet installed in this picture.

I’m not sure how long it was going on. I think around a week, but hopefully no longer than a month… Basically, the server would get overloaded and throw out a 503, or 500 error (those are the two I saw anyway) and say something like “the site is down due to maintenance, or something else blah, blah, blah.

It took me pretty much three full days to get it all figured out, but my old web hosting wouldn’t allow you to update PHP and mySQL (I paid for 10 years of hosting about 4 years ago, I think it took me a year, or longer before I even built my site LOL, but I digress). Anyway… I think the latest version of WordPress didn’t like the old version of PHP that was running on my server and somehow some PHP script got itself into some kind of infinite loop which would use up all the server resources I pay for, and not allow visitors to my site…

So, long story long, I got a new hosting plan which is supposed to give me twice the resources (although sometimes the site feels slower to me, gotta love that) and allow me to update PHP and mySQL indefinitely. I then migrated my websites… Which like I said, all this took about 3 days of me banging my head on my keyboard.

The only good thing I can say, the few days I was doing this work were snowy and icy (which is actually not really a good thing in my opinion LOL), so I was posted up at my house anyway, but honestly, I would have rather been doing something else obviously, like rendering!

Now that that is all said and done, my goal for this year is to make more money so I can buy some real web hosting (along with a lot of other goals of course, haha).

A quick update, I’m still planning on making more videos! I’ve stumbled upon a couple little things recently that I’m excited to share, but lately it just seems like every time I’m thinking to myself, “I’m going to make a video tomorrow,” stuff like this happens. AARRGGHHH!!!