#short king spring

[carbon-ate]

[wicked-lucky]

[ragemuffin]

It’s Short King Spring and I’m here for it.

[dduane]

Render afterthought(s)...

A tweaked, higher-resolution version of the render from that previous post...

“Short King” take 2. (With a slightly different/better camera, and a few corrections of positioning.) Along with a couple of the comments on the earlier one:

(via herald0fgojira) Is that Daniel Radcliffe on the left?

...You know, that’s not a thought that would’ve occurred to me. But looking at it, I do kind of see it. The figure’s face when in profile definitely resembles him a bit. (It’s more obvious when enlarged/cropped...)

...Also:

faewrite this looks like a photo my brain does not know what to make of this

...It really does, doesn’t it? Sometimes the lighting settings/conditions just come together perfectly to produce this kind of effect. (Sometimes they even do it when you want them to, which is nice. If a shade too rare.) You may not always want photorealism for everything, but it’s nice to be sure how to achieve it when you do want it.

The joke is that I have no real idea how I did this. I ran across the original tweet, it made me laugh, I had to go look up what Short King Spring was (never having heard the term before), and chuckled a little (because @petermorwood falls either just barely inside or barely outside of the criteria, depending on who you’re listening to: so in my case it’s been sort of Short King Summer, Winter and Fall as well, for thirty years plus). .... And then I thought Well, I’ve got a perfectly good actual king here, or, okay, be that way, actual fictional king, who happens to be short. So let’s imagine a moment when his husband’s teasing him about it...

As a result, while I was watching some of the new season of Bridgerton last night I pulled the characters into an already-dressed set, and posed them, and turned the render loose. When it was done I edited out a couple of rendering errors, and posted the thing, and then went to bed.

...So much of working in Daz Studio is about getting the lighting right...and you may spend hours and hours on it, and then regardless of that  completely forget what you spent all that time doing when at last you turn to another project. Now I’m going to have to have a closer look at that set and analyze all the light sources squirreled away in there. ...And it may take a while, because the set isn’t small.

...There were a lot of weird light sources hung around the set in the last render I used it for -- this one, nicknamed “Research”, over at Sunspark’s page on the MK dot com site --

...and I swear I thought I’d gotten rid of all the unnecessary ones. All I was looking for, really, in the Short King shot, was bright lighting from on top -- because my experience up to this point has been that all these figures look better with lighting that emphasizes strong modeling on their features. This one’s a lot more illuminated than I expected -- especially from the front -- and too often that washes characters out and makes them look flat. Yet this time, it heightened the realism considerably.

(sigh) Now I get to pull the set apart and see what made this happen. Ah well. Onward into the unknown...  :)

(...Also: for some reason the Lion medallion on the top of the Throne isn’t rendering, and I need to figure out what’s going on with that and fix it. [eyeroll] No rest for the weary...)

ETA: So an investigation of the lighting situation didn’t take long. While I knew the light from overhead was coming from having removed the roof panels directly over the Throne dais, I hadn’t thought through what that removal was doing to other materials in the space besides the principals.

When I looked at the set through a camera hung at the other end of it, this is what I saw:

. ...All that light falling onto a material that’s been told to act like highly polished marble is obviously going to splash back more than amply onto Dusty and Lorn. So that answers my question about where all the light was coming from. I mean, I knew there was a lot there... but I’d lost track of just HOW much. :)

...So. On to other business...

[seancosy]

country weddings 🥰😍

(mosquito bites not pictured)

[gothbachira]

what do u think about kiryu

i think he is so pookie meow meow and good with his fingers

[peaches-and-cannibalism]

Pocket Prince emerging from the aether after ghosting me for literal months to tell me he knows we'll be together one day???????

What the actual fuck is going on in my life

[dduane]

...So, just now finished with the first of a number of digital re-renders made possible by having finally managed to redesign the deeply annoying but canonically necessary piece of regalia Freelorn's holding.

Meanwhile, as there's been a lot of royalty in the news lately, the only piece of advice on the subject I've got for you this late at night is the following: If you've got to be a king, strive to be the kind whose husband looks at him the way this one's does.