A few years ago, I started using an application called Daz Studio.  I had commissioned a portrait of an RPG character and it was taking longer than I had wanted due to the artist’s illness, so I poked around looking for something for the Artistically-challenged to use.  I had heard of Poser when it first came out a long time ago and was looking for reviews and such when I came across someone suggesting Daz instead.  I looked into it, found out they had started by making content for Poser, then put out their own software.  It was free, and that was a good price for me, so I downloaded it and started looking into tutorials and such.

It works basically like a paper doll.  You have a figure and you can mold it (morph it) and put a different skin on it, then put hair and clothes, pose it and then basically take a picture (the actual rendering).  It’s considered 3D because you can move your vantage point all around the figure.  People who are far more informed about this stuff have created all kinds of creatures and clothes and characters and poses and props and settings to use.  As I said, I started using the application for creating images for our various role-playing games.

Back in December, the external hard drive I had all my content and all my projects stored on went belly up.  And don’t you know that I, in one of my dopier moves, never backed it up.  I had it in my head that I would get to it, but since I keep buying more content, I kept thinking my content library wasn’t ready to be backed up yet.  And now I am paying the price for that by having to re-download and reinstall everything I ever bought — about 250 GB of data.  At least I learned my lesson and now have subscribed to a back-up plan.

Even as I am slowly rebuilding my library, I do a render here or there.  One of the good things about this situation is I get to reacquaint myself with older content I haven’t used in awhile.  So there’s that.

Here are two versions of a render I did of the woman one of my characters is courting.  One is plain, right out of the render software (3Delight) except for adding my copyright.  The other has had some post-work done in Photoshop — a couple of layers with different blending modes and a little bit of a blur.  I can’t decide if keeping the detail is better or the layers are better.

This has no filters or layers added to it.

This one has a few layers added to it.

Feel free to let me know if you have a preference.

Tagged: back-ups, courtship, elf, female, lady, render, woman