One of the things I have been doing to combat writer’s block is to shift my attentions to other forms of creativity such as creating 3D images and scenes. This has been doubly productive as I can use the images on my website. I thought I would share a few, some finding their way to the site and others that did not.

I am using a free program called Daz Studio, also called Daz3D. It allows for three dimensional objects created in programs such as 3D Studiomax to be imported, morphed, posed and skinned in order to create a scene. It gives the creator full control over camera angles and adjustments and lighting.

It is great fun with something of a shallow learning curve. I created many, many images just to figure out how adjusting sliders affected the final rendered scene. Here are some images I did early on with different lighting models. This was my version of Gabriella from my book Gabriella and Dr Duggan’s Secret Dimensional Transport Machine. Cleary shifting the lighting makes a huge difference and can take a cartoonish looking model and give it some pop and perhaps make it look a little more life-like.




I took the image and, using Photoshop, put it in front of the background image from my book cover. The final version below.



Here is another series of images that show what a difference lighting makes. This is Leonna, an apprentice wizard of the creature-kind who can control birds. She is something of a naughty girl and a seductress. If you want to read about her, look for The Worthy Apprentice in 2016.




In the Gabriella and Dr Duggan’s Secret Dimensional Transport Machine two-book series, one of the very cool things that happens is that people using the dimensional transport machine can reach different dimensions (obviously). One of those reached is a place of bright-white light where Gabriella meets the Void-man, a character who looks exactly like her dead father. For this image I turned the lighting up very high for the render.

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I took that image and placed it over a white background then drew a hazy shadow in the distance. It was really easy to do, but I think the technique gives a great effect in displaying one of the pivotal moments in the book.



I also have been experimenting with adding multiple characters to a scene and adjusting the focal length and F-stop of the camera to blur out the background and make the foreground images pop. This is something that I am already very familiar with from portrait photography (you’ve probably noticed I like to do this a lot in my family pictures that I post on facebook).





The pictures above are from scenes in the yet unreleased book, The Dragon’s Castle. The book is with my editor and scheduled for publication on December 1st, 2015. As you can see in the one image, there is overhead lighting that casts shadows of the characters down on the ground and highlights different portions of their bodies. Additionally, the front of the scene is in focus while the rear of the building and soldiers standing in the rear are slightly out of focus. This image took me about 12 hours of playing, rendering, adjusting, re-rendering, etc, etc, to get right. I used iray for it instead of 3delight as the render engine, since that is supposed to generate more life-like skin, but still I would have liked the characters to look less like they were in a video game. It was good progress considering some of the earlier images I produced. I had been using the program for about 1 month at this point.



Above is a scene from The Worthy Apprentice, the third book from the apprentice series. It adds characters to the series that use magic to control birds and cats. This picture is of Felicia and her cougar and leopard. It is one of my favorite images that I’ve done so far. I repainted portions of the texture map for her face in order to create her character and make her more cat-like. I used the male Viking hair for her and some jungle clothing. I really like her menacing yet nonchalant poise. The book should be published in the first quarter of 2016, but as yet I don’t have a firm date for release.


Below are a few images that I created for the website of ghoul-kind coming through the forest for my book, Under The Shadow Of Darkness, in which a tear to the underworld is opened and blood-thirsty dead stream out and feed on the living.





You can see volumetric fog in the background of the one picture. This is still something that I haven’t quite mastered and I have been playing around with a lot. Unlike some other 3D modeling programs such as Poser, Daz3D doesn’t have a particle engine, so in order to do things like fog, magical electric sparks and the like, the program has to be tricked using primitives and lighting to approximate the effect. It can be frustrating since render times can sometimes be long, but it is very rewarding when the image comes out right.

Speaking of magic, below is one of my early images when I still hadn’t gotten a handle on how to do magic. It looks pretty good, but is not perfect to my eyes. The magical balls at Bel’s hands are actually flat 2D images. I rotated the flat magical swirls on their y and z axis before the render. The flare coming out was added in photoshop and is also a flat image. Not the best method, but I think it looks okay.




Below is a more recent attempt. Shireen, a character from The Dragon’s Castle, battles soldiers in the wood around the city of Sha’mont. The red magical orbs are three-dimensional objects that have translucent portions, thus allowing the background to come through. Again, these are not particles but one large solid mesh, only the map wrapped on the mesh has some see-through spots thus tricking the program into looking like particles. It fools the program and the eye into thinking there are particles instead of one fluffy cloud. I like working with 3D objects much more than adding effects in post, since the objects do not have to be on the surface but can be deeply layered into the scene and even float around other objects such as Shireen’s hands.





Okay, so that’s all for now. As far as the images, I am hoping to soon get the volumetric fog mastered then it’s on to learning how to do godrays which are those very cool-looking, streaming fingers of sun light. I am really excited about making a few scenes with those. If I get good at this I might even attempt to create my own book covers—we’ll see.

And by the way, don’t fret! I’m still writing too. The fourth installment of the apprentice series, Into Darkness, is in my mind at the moment. Look for the release of Community 17 on November 1st and The Dragon’s Castle on December 1st. Happy reading!