Sunset in a monastery garden: lighting sets in DAZ 3D

Lighting effects in DAZ Studio 3 ... and a bit of Photoshop, nudge, wink ... what more can you say?! Here, I took the Cloisters set and the Garden of Galahad set -- loaded 'em both up ... took the wall out of the garden and set the cloister there, opening into it, so you have, um, a monastery garden. Then, add a Bryce sunset skyscape -- and the fun begins. Now the trick is to light the foreground to match the sky.

The lights are pink and gold, and set quite low, to mimic the sun angle. It's all a question of patience ... moving the camera around and resetting the lights to get exactly what you want. There's no especial trick to it; but you do have to know how to navigate in the x,y,z coordinate universe. You don't move the models around ... they stay right where they are. You drive the camera ... look up, look down, go in any direction, spin around on the spot. It's actually a lot of fun.

No news on the computer front today: Avast have not responded with so much as a squeaking noise, so I've alerted PayPal and started a dispute. (If you're tuning in late: the computer I use to do the artwork has a virus ... it needs a powerful anti-virus program ... we bought and downloaded Avast ... it won't install ... and they're not replying to emails. That's The Story So Far in a thimble.)

So there's no guy-candy, eye-candy today ... just images from my archives. I've been intending to use this set as the background for some renders that should be amazing, but since things are not working out so well computer-wise ... here are the backgrounds!

Jade, March 31

Character creation ... new in the NARC 'verse: Petrov!

If you know your NARC books, you'll know that along with the gay science fiction icons who have propelled these novels to the status of cult classics, there's also "the man you love to hate." He's in charge of the ops room aboard the NARC-Athena ... Mischa Petrov. And this is him, exactly as described in the books, down to the buzz cut and the big muscles, and the permanent scowl. He's been hunting for a command of his own since the first novel, Death's Head ... and at the end of Aphelion, he just got it. He's partnered with Gene Cantrell, and NARC just launched the new carrier, the Huntress.

I did these designs last week, never got the chance to upload them, so they're in my cache of "spares." It's a good thing I have a few, so I can keep blogging, because my computer is still in limbo, pending brain surgery. We're still waiting for a response from Avast (the anti virus software company), and if they can't get their product to install ... and if AVG continues to refuse to install ... this machine has to be brought back to factory specs. That's a whisker short of a reformat.

Whimper.

Anyway, Mel Keegan is very pleased indeed with the design work for Mischa Petrov -- Raven 8.6. Call him Captain Petrov now. (How'd you like Petrov as your commanding officer?! Good thing he has Cantrell as a partner...)

If you have no idea what all of this is about, and if you enjoy a great gay science fiction romp, you can catch up right here. I wish I could tell you there was a major motion picture in the works, but alas, there's not! Maybe one day!

Jade, 29 March

Good news, bad news ...

There's good news and there's bad news. The good news first: the computer should be salvageable, and I haven't lost any data (yet). The bad news: the system that's gone down with a rotten, lousy, insidious virus that's been lurking in the background is the quad core which handles the big, powerful programs ... like DAZ, Bryce, Serif and so on.

So, at this moment I don't have any real access to the system that does the artwork, and it's driving me batty!!!! Things just stop working for no apparent reason. First webpages are unreachable. Then browsers crash on startup. Then the windows clipboard won't allow anything to be copied to it. Then every link on a Google search results page,when clicked, results in a page redirect ... to a BAND on MYSPACE!!!!! And on and on and on.

It's a virus, nothing else it can be to produce this weirdness. AVG missed it utterly, so we uninstalled that and bought Avast. Here's the problem: Avast won't install. The virus again??? So I tried to reinstall AVG ... and it won't reinstall. Now I have no virus protection whatsoever on the quad core, so it's quarantined from that swamp of infection and infestation otherwise known as the WWW.

Next, we did a lot of work on my laptop to bring it up to date, and I was going to switch over to that for emails etc. And now, darned if I can get it to go online. So I'm on borrowing Dave's computer (we're starting to run low on available systems here: only two left after this one, and one of them is unavailable, and the other is ooooold and slow).

It's been a wonderful day (sound of sarcasm there), with about 6-7 hours blown off trying to install things that didn't want to be installed, and get computers online when they have no intention of complying. I guess I'll surrender for today and try again tomorrow.

Sigh.

Jade, 28 March

The Halfling, the Moon ... and Salvador Dali strikes back!

Sorry guys -- this one, above, is all that survives from the original 2010 series of renders. I'll pop a couple of other pics in here, "in the spirit," to fill in for the two missing ones. What can I say? Fourteen years have gone by, and the site from which these pics were remote-loaded has gone...

Changing body geometry in DAZ 3D is a lot of fun, and you van do almost anything, from make a character's head shrink to the size of a peanut (don't you wish you could do that with some people in real life?!) to taking the feet and making them ... hobbit size. And adding the pointed ears of the halfling, and so on. You might have to see these renders at larger size (click on them) to see those pointed ears. They really are lovely!

The moon in the background is also a model: Moon Glow ... the effect is quite good but it's not perfect. It gives you a place to start rather than a final destination. The renders show a distinct "crop line" around the outside of the transparency planes, which had to be airbrushed out in post production. But that's okay, because the model itself is very cool.

Today's adventures in Bryce 5.5 are -- different, to say the least! I call this one "Salvador Dali Strikes Back" ...

The picture is deliberately off-balance, with a weird structure halfway out of the shot, and a hypnotic waterscape under an astonishing sky that disappears into the mist. These pictures were designed to throw you off balance, stop you, make you think. I hate to confess this, but in Bryce this was so easy I feel, um, guilty! The skies are the easy part. Then you make a ground plane and apply a picture-texture ... pebbles. Then you make a water plane and tell it to be very reflective and highly transparent. Then crank up a bit of mist. Make some simple objects and half-submerge them. Hit render and go for a cup of tea...!

The second Bryce render for today is intended to simulate an actual painting ... and it works! This looks like a watercolor! You'd lay the sky on as four or five washes, then do the trees as three or four layers of greens and blues ... the greens continue into the foreground, and you finish off with a partial yellow wash. Then, last of all, you hook up the airbrush and lay down a fine mist of Gauche white...

Either that, or you play with Bryce for half an hour! The sky ... easy. The trees are Foleypro Trees plus a couple of genuine 3D trees. The foreground is a small ground plane with a single diffuse-channel material added, so there's no detail and an "arty" feel, and then I cranked up the fog level. Yep ... I found the fog controls -- BUT extra fog was added in post, in Photoshop, like the grass. Why? Because if I tried to render this whole thing in Bryce, it would still be rendering at Christmas!!!

And now, back to work. I have two jobs to get through before I can call it a day, and for some reason I'm yawning my head off here! So, here goes nothing...

Jade, 27 March

Guest blogging with Terragen

G'day all, Dave here. Don't worry, Jade's not going anywhere! In fact I think her post for today will be up soon.

She asked me to guest blog about a new program I just got called Terragen. Terragen Basic is FREE --gotta like that!

I really like Terragen. Why? Well I've been doing 3d work for 8 years now and this is by far the most easy to use, intuitive, simple program out there. It does one certain thing, and it does it VERY well.

What does it do? It makes landscapes. Really nice ones, I must say. I can even export the terrains as a .lwo and import them into Bryce for use there. Handy.

It generates the terrains very quickly, sculpting and modifying tools are easy to use also. You also have control over the cloudscapes, sun, atmospheric conditions, and water.

The very first landscape I made I used default values for the water, sun, clouds, and atmosphere. I just concentrated on the surface mapping, camera placement, and terrain mapping.

This first one took about 2 minutes to make. It then took about 30 minutes to render at high quality on an old P4 with only 1/2 gig of ram. I like to render my 3d images with a fairly high gamma so all the detail comes through and then use Irfanview for the post-production clean-up. Quick, easy, and... FREE!





Just click on the picture to embiggin it to 1200 by 900 and feel free to use it as wallpaper, no worries. It also holds its integrity if you have a widescreen monitor so go ahead and stretch it to whatever dimensions you need.

If anyone is interested in Terragen Basic version 0.9.43 you can download the free version right here and they have both PC and MAC versions. Then have fun and impress your friends with your new, cool landscapes!

Morning on the Great River Anduin ... in Bryce 5.5!

Here's a fantasy come to life! It's not so much a scene from The Lord of the Rings as from something like The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (and I confess, I can't remember how to spell that). Weirdstone takes place on and around and under moorland, which is how some of today's Bryce work came out. The landscape got me to thinking, and I got into a fantasy mood, which sent me right back to amazing realms when I did a bit more in Bryce later on. This is the first time I've "flooded a landscape" in Bryce:

I call this "Morning on the Great River Anduin." I guess it's where the Brandywine meets the sea, as all rivers do, sooner or later.

There's two ways to work in Bryce: you can start out with the ocean, then make a mountain-scape and submerge part of it, till you wind up with an island about the size and shape you wanted. Or you can start out with a "model" terrain and then add a water plane ... in other words, design the landscape -- including the river bed! -- and then flood it. I think I like flooding a landscape, rather than submerging a mountain in an existing ocean. This, I must pursue!

Again, these landscapes have no trees, but that has been fixed!! Thanks to the incredible generosity of a genuine patron of the arts, I was able to go to DAZ 3D this morning, and I got two things. One, the Bryce Content Pack, which is 250MB of textures and maps and stuff, and two, the Foleypro Trees pack, which is going to be fantastic --

I just had to learn how to use them! I gave myself a minor panic when I unpacked the materials and everything arrived as OBP files. What in the (deleted expletive) is an OBP file, and what do you open it with?! Took me a leeetle bit of research and head scratching to get that worked out, and if you're just starting Bryce, and are in a similar fix, join me tomorrow and I'll share the answer!

Make a note to come back tomorrow: "How do I apply an OBP file in Bryce?" All shall be revealed. Turned out to be easy in principle. Just, um complex to set up! By the time I learned how to use the trees, there wasn't enough time to do a proper render ... the River Anduin render took well over an hour to finish up. So -- tomorrow!

Jade, 25 March

3D science fiction: Mel Keegan's Hellgate comes alive!

3D art hits its absolute peak in science fiction and fantasy. Using 3D to simulate everyday reality is a bit of a puzzler ... why would you simulate something you can walk outside and see, and photograph? (Unless you're specifically a 3D artist, and you don't paint or drawn, and 3D is your art form, in which case -- go for it, because 3D is the way you depict all things.) But for most digital artists, 3D is basically one more string to your bow, and it's often (almost always!) easier to work with existing images of real things rather than start juggling 3D models. For instance: you need a picture of a garden, a bench in the garden, and a couple sitting on it? Then, dragoon a couple of your friends into posing on a bench, and do composite work to put the cutout of the figures on the bench into the spot you need in a high-rez image of just the right garden ... and then start painting. The actual appearance of the figures will be very different by the time you're done; your friends won't recognize themselves...

But if you need a series of images of a couple of guys in futuristic costumes, having an argument as they walk out of an airlock ...! It's not as easy to dragoon your pals to go and pose in anything remotely similar to this environment! So 3D comes to the rescue.

This is actually a scene from the next of the HELLGATE books (by Mel Keegan). #5, Flashpoint, is well along now. And in it -- without dropping any plot spoilers!! -- Richard Vaurien and Sergei van Donne find themselves weirdly on the same side for a time. Richard doesn't want a bar of it and reads Sergei the riot act as he comes aboard ... "Hey, man, chill," van Donne says, "would I shaft you?" "Yeah, at your first damn' opportunity," Richard says. And he's probably right!

The background for today's renders is another tiny snippet from the Station 3000 model. You're looking at about 5% of the model here -- maybe less. It's a fantastic resource if you need to generate loads and loads of backgrounds:

But I confess that I did chicken out ... I rendered the background I wanted, stripped it in as backdrop image, and added a floor for the characters to stand/walk on. I did this because I'm short of time ... aren't I always? ... and lighting a huge model like Station 3000 (or even a tiny bit of it) is a challenge. I already had 3 lights set up on Richard and Sergei, and being able to generate exactly the right background and just bring it in as a backdrop image, got me through the work of creating these renders in no time.

Richard Vaurien was created by me from the ground up ... Sergei is actually the Remendado character with a few tweaks. They're both wearing Mon Chevalier hair, one set to dark red, the other set to blond. The costuming is a mighty mish-mash from many different clothing sets. The effect is great ... I couldn't be happier, and will be sending these renders to Mel Keegan this afternoon. What's really amazing is that both these models (in fact, everybody you see on the blog) started out as Michael 4.

(And in answer to the person who recently chewed on me for "ripping off Mel Keegan characters," let me just say that Mel is my good friend, these images are done with permission and approval ... I'm MK's long-time cover artist, and nothing on this blog is a ripoff of anything!" If you have any doubts, you know where to find Mel ... go "report me" and ask if this blog is kosher!)

Jade, 24 March

The elven archer -- classic fantasy in DAZ 3D

The elven archer is a staple of fantasy -- I'm not even sure it was Tolkien who created the archetype. I think it might have go back to Lord Dunsany ... but don't quote me on that! I'm not sure, but wherever the tradition began, it goes back a loooong way.

It's the way fantasy and 3D art blend together that constantly surprises and delights me. Today I had very little time to do anything except wrestle with work, so art was shoehorned into a few minutes. I've wanted to play "mix and match" for a while. The eleven archer character you see here is the exact same Michael 4 re-design I did for a post back in December, with two differences...

I swapped out the skin map. This elven arches is wearing the Jagger skin map, and the Mon Chevalier hair is set to platinum, which picks up the lights beautifully. Also, I added the jacket, necklace and arm bands from the Hunter costume I got just the other day. The result is really great. I like this a lot.

The other thing I added in is the quiver, with arrows, from the Horizon Redux prop set ... which is actually intended to go along with Victoria 4, but with a lot of pushing and shoving you can just about make it fit Michael 4! And it looks very good.

In fact, I like this version of the elven archer better than the earlier one. I might just come back to this character and do more with him. If you think you recognize the background, you're not going mad -- you're right. I used this in the shots of the Native American too, a few weeks ago. But the lighting is completely different in these images ... believe it or not, I only have two lights set ... both distant lights, one green, one gold, with the deep shadow maps turned on for both. The results were so nice, I stopped right there!

Jade, 23 March

Pure fantasy ... and a hybrid background

Male fantasy ... what do those words mean to you? A drop-dead gorgeous hunk lying nekkid on a rug? The same hunk in a fantasy setting, exotic as all get-out --? Both?! Join the club: I think, both. And this character is one of my favorites...

A few posts ago he acquired a name: Leon. He's actually named after Richard Leon, in a Mel Keegan story called Breakheart, but that really is another story! This here character is a creation of my own, so it could be Leon Smith, or Leon Jones --! And since he's acquired a name and a backstory (in the previous post), he ought to have a horse, too. And here he is.

Actually, I hadn't intended working with this character again today ... to be perfectly honest, I didn't know what I'd be rendering till I got halfway there! I started in Bryce (I always spend a half hour learning Bryce before returning to the familiar ground of DAZ Studio 3), and I ran an experiment I've been thinking about for a few days...

What sort of results do you get if you marry one of the amazing Bryce skies with a real landscape? The product is always going to be a hybrid, but working with 3D stuff it's almost always the other way around: you tinker with 3D models and then strip in an image as the backdrop ... say, woodland, a hillside, the beach, whatever.

So here, I had a Bryce SKY ... fully designed by me. Now, what? It needed a landscape. Okay ... what kind? I lucked out with a scan of a 4x6 print of one of Mel's photos -- taken in 1997. (The old prints are being digitized to save them. They're literally fading away). So I got this scan into Micrographx and stripped out the boring, boring sky. A gray overcast is pretty typical of the sky in Alaska ... you do get glorious blue-sky days -- trust me, they happen! -- but not that often. So, I took out the sky and combined the rest of the image ... tundra highlands running away to the Alaska Ranges. (Taking out the overcast sky and replacing it with a bright sky also meant I had to re-saturate the colors and turn up the contrast -- otherwise the land would have looked dull and lifeless.)

This is what I got:

Stampede Trail, Denali NP, in 1997

And the color of the foreground reminded me strongly of a series of renders I did back in February. Those pictures were staged against another shot of Mel's, featuring Stampede Trail. So it didn't take any battle of logic to go back to the same idea. But this time around it's the sky that makes the renders extraordinary ... and that's a Bryce sky.

And here's where I am in Bryce today:

More questions answered, more problems solved. I'm getting good at the skies and the oceans. I juuuuust starting to really understand what I'm doing with the terrain models. I figured out how to get veryveryveryvery fine detail on the terrains: make them 20x larger! You make a mountainside and it usually measures about 100x100x100 pixels. Well, get into the parameters editor and change those numbers to 2000x2000x2000 and see what happens. Kazoom! The terrain is suddenly the size of the Himalayas.

In the picture above -- which I call "Last Snows of Spring" -- you're looking at an area about 1%, of half a percent, of the whole terrain. And the fine detail is now pretty acceptable. What I need to figure out now is how to build up layers and layers of materials on a terrain and have them stick, and stay, instead of replacing each other. That's my next assignment...

Jade, 21 March (the Equinox of Autumn)

Bryce meets DAZ: love at first byte!

Sorry guys -- all I have left of the original renders is a couple of thumbnails, which I'll include here for the sake of interest. The rest have vamoosed. A website from which they were remote loaded isn't there anymore, or an account was discontinued, or some ruddy thing. I don't even know ... it's been fourteen years. Argh. I'll pop in some other "guy candy in the spirit of," to fill the blanks -- and/but I'll stay with Michael 4 here rather than digress into Genesis. At the time I was doing this stuff (learning, learning -- making every mistake in the book, but having a load of fun at the same time!) Genesis hadn't even been thought of. M4 was state of the art. In fact, some folks were still playing with M3 and V3. So let's stay with Mike 4, and fill in the blank here before I return you to the original post!

Bryce 5.5 meets DAZ Studio 3 ... and I like the results! Picking up today where I left off yesterday: it's 10,000 BCE, it's the short arctic summer of the ice age, and a young hunter has gone out to find something to skewer for dinner. The big difference today is that the background in these renders was generated in Bryce...

I worked out how to design skies ... kind of clouds, how many clouds, direction of them, color of them. And how to change the whole color tone of the image. Then I designed two geographical objects -- a range of hills in the distance and a mossy, rocky tundra type surface -- and plunked them right where I wanted them, under that gorgeous sky.

You might be interested to see the actual Bryce landscape, before 3D props and characters were set into/onto it...

[snip .... nope. Image gone. Rats. Sorry about that...]

Not too shabby for a few days' learning -- but I have a hell of a lot to learn yet before these landscapes are seriously up to snuff. They're better as looooong distance shots. If you have a look at this one, above, at full size (click the pic to get the big version) you'll see that as the terrain gets into closeup (what would be right in front of your feet in real life) you kind of "run out of detail." It gets blocky and geometric. And I knoooow there is a way to set the level of detail, or whatever it's called in Bryce. I just haven't found it yet. Gimme time!

At the moment, though, I'm getting a bit better with configuring skies and oceans:

So that's where I am in Bryce today ... and I was actually about to imagine a landscape and then go into Bryce and make it, for today's render... however. It was NOT imported into DAZ 3D as an OBJ and used as an object. There's more to learn about that, apparently, before I get there. I can export the terrain object as an OBJ file -- no problem. I can also import it into DAZ, no problem. Better yet, it arrives with its materials already applied. But the scale is off, and I need to work out ratios and values and parameters and all that good stuff. Then, I ought to be able to bring the terrain object right into DAZ.

In the meantime, this one is an artistic fake. The backdrop is the Bryce render. The foreground is the "floor" from the Fairy Tale Story cyclorama set. You turn OFF the sky dome and the cyclorama, and the cloud plane, and all the pre-set plants. Then you import your logs, boulders, pebbles, grasses, and get everything arranged to artfully hide the fact the scene's been "staged" rather than "shot on location." Actually, it works out fine, and it is so much easier than fiddling around with the full-on terrain OBJ. Whew!

I love that overcast sky with the low cloudbase and the sun glow...

Jade, 20 March

3D 10,000 BC

This is a great fantasy consume ... on sale for less the $2 the other day! It makes me think of early humans around the time of the last ice age ... so I put it on Michael 4 and then added the Elite texture known as Lee, which is Asian. Then added the Midnight Prince hair set to raven-black ... all of which looked fantastic. But what do you do for a background?

Well, a lot of the southern lands suffering the ice age did actually have a summer. It was just a short one -- and the same thing happens in Alaska too, even today. Summer there can be 12 weeks long, when breakup came late and the first snows came early. So, instead of having the character prancing around in the snow dressed like this (!) I thought, how about the brief summer of the arctic?

Lush growth... waterfalls as all that ice melts off ... green everywhere, arctic flowers ... also mosquitoes the size of floatplanes, but we won't depict those today!

Turns out, there's a really nice DAZ environment that'll do the trick: the Fairy Tale background, cycloramas and props! They surely weren't trying to model a summer's day in 12,000 BCE, but they did a pretty good job of it!

Staying on the theme of Arctic and ice ages, here's where I am with Bryce today:

I call this Sunrise on Svalbard. And the best thing is ... all this was done deliberately, and I know what I'm doing to get this effect, meaning I can do it again at whim. The lens flare was added in Micrographx, to get the sunrise effect, and ... done. Nice!

Jade, 19 March

Tinkering with 3D models ... and yikes, Bryce!

Today I really am just tinkering with 3D models, so it's a grab-bag without any specific theme. I've been getting a few nice models on sale at DAZ 3D, and there's only one problem: getting the time to play with them!

So I tend to grab ten minutes here and five minutes there, while I'm on a break from the boring, boring jobs that keep the bills paid and dinner on the table. (By which I mean wrangling html and javascript code. I hate code. I'm just good at it, so I get the joy of working with it too often.)

One of the neatest models I've acquired lately is called Station 3000, and I got it for about $6 (it's usually four times that price). It's ostensibly a power station in the middle of an alien planet ... but what you actually have is miles and miles of SF sets, which the designers have zipped into a tower by connecting everything up back to back through 360 degrees. Aha, thought I -- how close can you get to the model and have it hold its resolution?

So I created a camera and zoomed, and zoomed, and then zoomed some more ... heck, take a look at the results! You're see a super-closeup on an area about 1% of the model here!! And then I was able to take trusty old Michael 4, dress him in the M4 Air Crew costume, complete with the helmet, and stand him in there. There are scores of potential SF sets ranged all over the Station 3000 model. Amazing!

The hardest thing about it is lighting it. I've got it flooded with lights in the above renders. It's HUGE! It's amazing: 5 out of 5 stars.

My wobbly adventures in Bryce are off to a promising start! I've learned how to sculpt a landscape ... starting with the jagged mountains of Mordor (In which I basically decided on the lie of the land, and the color and texture, not the degree of jagginess ... because if Mordor is anything, it's jaggy!) and sculpting away a little but at a time, to end up with a pleasant kind of "coastal sierra sandstone" landscape:

In Bryce, all terrains start out the same: you click "make mountain," and you get a stock model which looks like the Himalayas from Hell. What you do with this standard model is up to you ... and you can do anything at all.

It's taken me a couple of hours (spread over a couple of days) to cotton on to how to get the props to land where I want them. It's nothing like DAZ! But now I'm pretty confident that I can start with the basic mountain model and sculpt just about anything out of it, down to low hills and glacial saddlebacks ... I just stumbled over the pre-set terrain maps, to make nice-looking forested hills or snowy crags without beating your brains out with the materials editor! The surface on this sandstone bluff was done with the materials editor ... they do not tell you that you have about 50 presets at your fingertips! But now I know, so it'll be a smidgen easier from here on.

Also, I know how to set a water plane ... change everything about the water plane ... sink or rise the land mass(es) in or out of it ... and (!) I'm juuuuust starting to work with lights in Bryce. The above bluff has three lights on it to get this morning light effect. Nice.

Bryce is not really about creating close-ups of nearby ground. The trees and grasses it uses as set dressings are not that realistic ... but here's where it gets good: I just took the sandstone bluff landscape, and exported it to an OBJ complete with its accompanying materials...

And yep, you guessed: DAZ Studio 3 imports OBJ files! So the Bryce 5.5 landscape you see here can pop straight into DAZ. At least, this is the theory. And if I didn't have to go back to work as of five minutes ago, I'd be playing with it right now. Sad to say, it's going to have to wait till tomorrow. Frustrating, isn't it?

Jade, 18 March

Daydream in moonlight ... an early version of Amadeus

2024 edit: The big issue I have with the 3D trees of this era is ... the leaves. They're the size of hubcaps or dinner plates. Back in the day, this was pretty much to be expected of any 3D asset an ordinary user such as myself would be using: the smaller the leaves, the more of them you're going to need to fill out a tree, right? The more leaves, the more polys. And verrrry soon you will run right out of ram. So this effect, here, with the hubcap-sized leaves, was par for the 2010 course...

 

 

The Yaoi vampire ... the moonlight rendezvous ... the elegant courtyard ... thank you, DAZ! Looks like the Vampire Amadeus has taken a vacation, and it's a beautiful night with a clear sky ... warm and balmy. Makes you wish for a vacation yourself, doesn't it?

Seriously -- there's a trick to simulating moonlight in 3D. It's not just the colors -- though this will get you halfway there. Blues, grays and silver-greens are what you're looking for, and unless it's supposed to be a cloudy, stormy night, do turn on the deep shadow maps. But also, remember to adjust your shadows to soft, not hard. Also (and this is really important) remember to have only ONE set of shadows.

You can afford to have two or three light sources in the daylight, and cast shadows in several directions. Sunlight is strong enough that it gets bounced back from surfaces like white walls, windows, open water, and the reflected light casts a shadow too. But moonlight, now -- that's a different question. Moonlight does reflect, but it has to be bounced back off glass to be bright enough to cast much of a shadow.

The courtyard is a really nice set -- designed by me, using odds and ends from several different kits. The walls and gate are from the DM The Gate kit; the water feature and stone benches are from the BRC Cloisters kit; the tree in the planter and the vine-covered vase are from the DM Instances kit...

Amadeus is played by Michael 4, wearing the Midnight Price hair set to white, and the Jagger skin map (but not the Jagger face). He's wearing the Narquilir trousers and shirt with the colors set to deep blue, almost black.

And it looks like he went out to meet a paramour. Which inspires a whole 'nother daydream...

You might like to see the courtyard set itself, just for its own sake: 

Very nice set indeed ... except for those leaves!
But what could you do?! 

2014 edit: the tree problem would haunt me, and virtually everyone else, for about eight more years, before PC systems simply got fast enough to allow for proper foliage -- trees ad grass! Then, you could start doing it properly, like this:

Jade, 17 March