BlueKnot

Illustration – Image of Aiko 3 in Poser

Take a gander at the above… I hope you can see there’s more to this ‘3D thing’ than just “buying a figure and sticking it in the scene.” You’ll also find a few links there that show what that particular figure can look like with a little work.

The image you see here is a 3D model called ‘Aiko 3’, purchased at DAZ3d.com. The window is part of the Poser 7 interface; currently made by Smith Micro. “She” is one of my most frequently used models.

Aiko is standing in the “T-Pose” that most human figures load as. Nekkid as the day she was modelled. Among the things that need to be done to her:

• Morphing
  The default ‘shape’ of her would get boring, but there are a variety of morphs to modify the body and head shape. There are further morphs for muscled definition, facial characteristics and expression. The artist chooses which to use and how much of each to apply.

• Posing
  Unless you want her to stand around looking like the kid who plays the tree in the annual school play; you’ll want to change her pose. Some poses can be pre-bought as well, most need some tweaking, and few are ever exactly what you need. Posing a 3D model is effectively deciding for each joint in the body which way it will bend and twist, and exactly how much in each direction. Freeze yourself in place right now and do a mental inventory of every place in your body that bends and what angle it is currently.

• Texture
  Her current color resembles the digital putty that she is… so realistic skin would be good here (unless you’re setting up a ‘toon’ render; but that has it’s own level of complexity!) Likewise clothes also have to have texture so they don’t look like they’re made of plastic when rendered, etc. Texture is a combination of color patterns and bump/displacement, which give a texture its… well… ‘texture’

• Clothes!!
  Granted there are some forms of art where this is optional; but for the most part you wanna cover up at least a little… Clothes are additional models that are purchased or made; loaded into the scene and ‘Conformed’ to the human figure. Clothes have their own textures and morphs—sometimes it ‘just fits’; most of the time it needs tweaking to look right. And shirts and pants bought separately often need adjustment so nothing ‘pokes through’: no belt lines through the bottom of the blouse; and no ‘naughty bits’ through the top!

At this point you may have a somewhat realistic looking human figure in your scene, dressed and in some interesting pose. Now repeat for the other figures, objects and buildings in your scene.

Once you do that, it’s time for:

• Lights
  3D artists have an advantage over photographers in that they can change the position and intensity of the sun and put light sources between camera and subject without blocking anything. But as Spidey says, “with great power comes great complexity” ... or something. Lights are complicated to get right, personally I find them the hardest part of the process!

• Camera position
  In truth you probably worked on this as you built your scene, but there are always tweaks to be made… your average rendering ‘camera’ has more bells and whistles than a $3000 Nikon. From angle to focal length and everything in between.

• Render Options
  How much detail? How to handle reflections? How to handle shadows? Those and a slew of other questions like this govern how your final image looks as well (of course) as how big it is and what DPI it has.

Enjoy your scene!

What? Not what you expected? Well… go back, tweak those settings and try again. Repeat as necessary…