Games, Ghosts, and More

Some of you may know about my abortive attempt to leverage Patreon to start earning some money for my more boundary-pushing adult material. But it turns out that Patreon has some very definite boundaries themselves (which I only found out about by delving down the rabbit hole of their fine print; my thanks to a fellow deviant pointing it out).

I don't like taking unnecessary risks and I especially don't like doing that with other people's money. My nightmare scenario was to receive several monthly pledges at Patreon only for their Powers That Be to shut me down, leaving my patrons without the content they'd been promised after they'd all ponied up the cash for it. I'm reluctant to trust businesses or especially web sites that can ultimately be impersonal and may be operating well outside its users' legal jurisdictions to do the right thing. Which in this case would have been issuing refunds. Furthermore just as I respect individual's boundaries when it comes to adult material, I feel obliged to extend that respect to web sites too (however reluctant I may feel about it).

So long story short for the time being this blog lives on! I am developing an adult comic that continues the Indigo Dynamo story you can find at D.A. and here; that may end up somewhere like HipComix. But for now, my more risqué one-offs will see the light of day here.

Speaking of which, here are a couple of images that I was going to post at Patreon. Their loss is your gain! First up is another image to promote my latest superheroine-in-peril novel, Game Theory.

As much as I enjoy writing these scenes it was fun this time to be able to bring some of them to life visually as well. Of course I am somewhat limited by my digital content and my own skills with it (though sometimes I made minor modifications to the prose in such a manner that I knew I'd be able to illustrate it in Daz Studio). I was going to go back and create a bunch of illustrations of my other novels and story collections for Patreon. That still may happen, but with less frequency. You can see some previous attempts at this in the sub-folders of my "Duster by DG" folder at D.A.

Below is an image that continues the brief series featuring Duster and voodoo master Monsieur Mort. Part 1 is at D.A. and Part 2 is here on the blog.

(Side note: I delayed creating this image until I could buy the content responsible for those creepy floating spirits. I think they turned out great! Of course I always try to justify buying content by using it more than once, but these guys look so amazing they'll be sure to reappear in some form or another in future images.)

Could this image have been posted at D.A.? Probably. I have seen plenty of limp dicks in illustrations there (way more often than I really wanted to, truth be told). But as I've said before, why take chances? Frankly D.A. is rapidly going from a site for R-rated to PG material for me, especially as a lot of the content my commissioners ask for tends to be much "softer". I have no problem with that; in fact that's why I write superheroine fiction rather than just straight porn. I like the action, the peril, and, yes, the character development too.

Speaking of commissions, and creating digital art in general, I thought I'd share some more process info for those who are interested. Recently, Tuckerverse commissioned me to create a series featuring his Arcader Agency beauties. Since those girls use time-freezing powers and/or technologies to capture supervillains, I had to work out a way to display that in images where everything is already frozen in time—because, after all, it's a still image. A discussion with Tuckerverse led to my using monochrome for this. However that complicated the rendering process because part of the image would now be black and white and part of it in colour. Here's how I accomplished it, demonstrated with an image from a new Arcader Agency series that Tuckerverse has commissioned.

First off I create the complete image. I usually render a smaller, lower-quality version of an image I'm working on. It only takes a few minutes compared to the hours (yes, hours!) required for a large, HQ version. That way I can check things like shadows which don't appear in the Daz Studio workspace. Sometimes little mistakes are more obvious in a render too, so if I spot any I go back and fix those. In fact shadows often make mistakes for obvious—for example, if someone's feet don't quite connect with the floor. And like a writing draft, sometimes I just see things that could be improved.

Once I'm happy with the full image it's time to separate the elements that will appear in colour from those that will appear in black and white. I actually have to plan this when creating the image as this means there will be at least two images, one layered on top of the other (almost always the mono image over top of the colour one). 

So for example in the image above I moved Tasia Spiro (the sexy blonde with the plunging neckline) so she didn't overlap with the figures on the cart (Mistress Winter and Min Yin). Of course I could have overlapped them provided she was behind them. Or if I wanted her in front that would mean I'd have to perform three renders, one of Tasia, one of the cart and the two figures on it, and one of the room by itself. 

But it's best when doing this to render and combine as few different images as possible. The reason is that the Iray render engine I use tries to realistically depict the way light works, which means it takes account of the fact that light bounces around off of practically everything that isn't absolute black. This is why you can see under your desk even though there's no light shining directly in there. For digital art his means that if you combine different renders together, the result almost always looks a little off because the light and shadows don't look quite right because they didn't get a chance to bounce light off each other and/or create proper shadows when rendering. The more elements you're combining, the more obvious this becomes, and the less realistic the image looks. 

(One image where I had to compensate for this was the first Duster vs Monsieur Mort picture I mentioned above. With that one Duster wouldn't render properly unless I put her off on her own, but that meant her feet and their shadows (or lack thereof) didn't look right when I combined her into the image with the villain and the environment. I got around that by adding some eerie fog to the bottom of the picture. Clever, eh? 😎)

I also have to consider how light sources will project into the scene. For example a light to the left will project a shadow from Mistress Winter onto Min Yin, but that shadow will not appear on either Tasia or the floor because they'll be rendered without Winter in the scene. 

So once all that's considered I create two new files, one with the colour elements...

...and another one with the elements destined to become monochromatic. It's very important not to move the camera in either file!

You might notice I cheated a little and put the cart in twice. That's so that it casts shadows onto the floor in the first image and so that Winter and Min Yin cast shadows onto it in the second. Fortunately it's predominantly grey so it's pretty much unnoticeable in the final result.

The graphic software I use to combine the images is GIMP, which is very flexible, powerful, and, most important of all to someone of Scottish heritage like me, free. (If I used Photoshop the process would be similar.) Each image is opened as a different layer in GIMP with the B&W one on top. I then select that layer and use GIMP's Color/Desaturate option to turn the colours in the second image into shades of grey. Fortunately the Desaturate dialog has a preview option which allows me to experiment and discover which of its three settings (Lightness, Luminosity, or Average) will give the best result.

I save the combined image as its own .PNG file then I reopen that and proceed with my usual postwork to enhance the brightness, contrast, sharpness, and so on. Then I export that to a "Postwork" image.

After that I import the file into Comic Life 3 and add the text boxes, word bubbles, sound effects, my logo, and what have you.

In this case, however, there was one more element to render and add. To further underline the notion that this is an instructional video being narrated by Arcader agents Tasia Spiro and Petra Wolf, I placed small images of them in the upper left corner beside the narration text box. To get those inserts I loaded the figure (Petra in this case) into a separate Daz Studio file and rendered her alone.

Yeah, I thought you'd enjoy a larger version of that image. 😉

Because these single-figure images will be so small in the final result I don't bother with things like lights; I just use the "dome" lighting in Daz Studio which comes from an unseen image that wraps around the 3D environment and its figures. In addition I don't bother with any postwork. The resulting render is a .PNG file without a background which means that aside from the figure it's transparent. On a related note, while my final version of an image is always a .JPG file, my working images are always .PNGs mainly because I find that any transparency in the image works better with that file type.

Once all the elements are in place I have Comic Life export it as a .JPG image file. That leaves one final step before posting it. I almost always render images one "size" larger than their final version. So for example this image is 1920x1440 in its final form, but the working files (.PNGs again) are 2560x1920. I load the .JPG into GIMP one last time and scale the image down. Why? Because one of the first pieces of advice I received was to always render larger and then reduce the resolution. This helps improve the visual quality of the image by eliminating a lot of the "fireflies". These are the one-off bright pixels you sometimes see in a dark area that look out of place (results of Iray trying to bounce light around "realistically" again). There are other ways to get rid of them, granted, but reducing the file often does a nice job because it will usually look at the "average" brightness of the pixels in an area and adjust them accordingly when reducing the resolution. I have chosen an image width of 1920 pixels as my standard because it makes for a reasonable .JPG file size for storing, posting, uploading, and emailing. It's also the width of my PC monitor which means when I max out the size of the image it fits perfectly... well, horizontally, at least.

The final image resulting from all of this:

And that's all for now!