OT: From mind to screen, or: when it simply does not work
XoechZ
Posts: 1,102
Hello!
I am sure that some of you also know this annoying problem:
You have an idea for an image in your mind. You close your eyes and you can really see it. It looks great and brilliant, one of your best ideas so far.
Then you start DAZ Studio, set up the scene, try to re-create the image from your mind on the screen. You fiddle around for hours, work on the shapes, the surfaces, lights, camera angle. But nothing works, nothing. The image on the screen is not even close to the one in your mind. You feel sad. Everything you have learned seems to be useless...
What now?
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Simple - junk the idea (for now), add something really wierd to the scene and make something new and unexpected! :)
I usually save the scene and work on another scene, and when i feel like it i go back to the other scene :P
Here are a couple of things I try when this happens:
1) Try to write an explanation of what's missing in the render, or a description of what you saw in your mind's eye. Sometimes that helps you figure out what you need to do.
2) Ask someone what they like or dislike about the scene -- you might try this with or without the details you wrote about in step 1, or first without and then with.
3) Put it aside for a while. If you have other scenes related to it, eg. same story or themes, work on those for a while then come back to it.
4) Sometimes it doesn't work in the medium you had planned -- in your vision you saw it as a single image, but for it to work in reality it needs to be an animation, or a series of images. Maybe there are elements of the scene that require a closeup while other elements need a long shot, and you need to restructure it to get what you want.
5) Sketch out what you're trying to do, or take the render, and mark it up, e.g.. these are the lines of sight for each character.
Thank you very much for your suggestions. I will keep them in mind.
Another thing that could be part of those problems is that I am simply overrating my own skills and that I am still not ready to do what I want to do.
Most of my inspirations and the "ideas in my mind" come from watching other artists images. Really brilliant images like these: http://www.daz3d.com/gallery/galleries/1759/
So the "images in my mind" are most of the time in the same style and quality and I am simply not able to do that. But on the other side one should always set his goals high enough :-)
It is obvious that images like the ones I linked above are not done with a single render. They are heavily postworked. And this leads to another problem:
I love postworking and my postworking skills are getting better all the time. But it is really hard for me to judge which parts and details of the scene should be rendered and which should be done in postwork.
yep, the postwork is the issue as I see it. When I was a traditional artist i always carried a sketchbook with me and would draw all kinds of things and like you, i always had an image in my mind, but could rarely come close to reproducing it on paper. Then came CGI and I found that it unlocked lots of opportunities that traditional medium didn't for me and combined with my photography background I found a new creative outlet.
the heavily postworked images you linked to are to me a whole other area to explore other than rendering since even more time is spent on the postwork side of things. I would also say that the primary app for these types of images is photoshop/gimp/etc instead of DS or poser. My postwork skills are terrible also, every time i try to reproduce all the shading, shadows, highlights, etc I tend to second guess the results to much. It is so much easier for me using an unbiased rendering engine to just set up the surface materials and have the lighting engine do all this for me and I know it is closer to real than what my eye and mind think.
no image i have ever done has turned out like i intended. I think this is one of the reason's artists are so critical of their own work. When we look at what we do we are always comparing it to our mental image of what we wanted the image to look like. The thing is when others view our work, they are not mind readers, to them the way the image turned out must be exactly what we intended.
I think some times that if an image turned out exactly like we wanted it to it would be a bad thing. I have had many fortunate "happy accidents" as Bob Ross used to call them.
If you are leaning more towards the images to linked to, you might be trying too hard on the DS end of things. Poser was created by Larry Weingberg as an artists tool. One that could give him the basic human form and pose that he couldn't achieve through traditional media.
Many of the old Poser tutorial sites are gone but back in the days of P3 and P4, postwork was a necessity. I learned to paint hair, clothing with folds, even eye lights and reflections.
Rough out your scene. Place your main elements. Get your lighting to something workable. If you are taking it into a paint program to postwork that much, you can adjust your lighting both with the apps own lighting filters and through painting itself.
Ever try recreating even one Thomas Kincaid's simpler paintings in DS? Should be simple but it isn't. I actually found CG much harder than traditional media. In traditional media, I have control of everything. In CG, you don't.
How much time and practice to you put into improving your digital painting? Render a simple bald Vicki. Take the render into your paint app. Paint the hair using just the brushes that come with app (no hair brushes) and just the colors that come with app (no texture sets or hair painting sets). Go for light, shadows, thick hair, wisps, and fly away.
I know the feeling. It used to frustrate me. It's nothing to do with the limitations of DS or the lack of assets. It just is what it is. I'm sure I'd have the same problem with a blank canvas and paint. I stopped being upset about it.
Most of the final renders I end up with where attempts at capturing what was in my head. Most of the time I have an idea, and end up with something totally different. So rather than try and replicate what's in my head 100%, I simply just use it as a starting point and keep on experimenting until I have something cool. Then I take it from there.
Think of a chunk of clay. You might have it in your head to start to sculpt a horse. Half way through it, you realize it looks more like a dog. So you make a dog instead. Then give it wings...and a sword. The "horse" was the inspiration, the rest was experimentation and imagination. But, if you come out with something amazing, don't be upset that it doesn't look like a horse.
Isikol made it onto the cover of Heavy Metal Magazine. He has some serious artistic talent. But he does use more than one piece of software to create his images, and Photoshop features heavily.
http://www.jurn.org/dazposer/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Heavy_Metal_268_Cover.jpg
However, the close you can get your *render* to the way you want it to look, the less work you have to do after.
But it wouldn't hurt to practice postwork in GIMP. Most of the tutorials about photomanipulation use Photoshop, but GIMP is just as capable of doing the tasks needed, even if the interface is different.
...I'm more from the "minimal" postwork school. Not so much because I cannot afford Photoshop (both Gimp and PSP have very good tools and the latest version of PSP can directly import .abr brushes) but because of lack of a steady hand due to arthritis.This is part of why I had to give up the traditional art media.
For the most part I relegate postwork to primarily using filters, different "artistic" effects, and text overlays. I also rely quite a bit on the Layered Image Editor built into Daz Studio. What actual "painting" I've done is very limited, usually only for correcting small issues I find in the final rendered work.
I'm personally from the the less post work needed the better school. I'm a comic book freak. I learned the hard way to do comics in a issue a month format calls for a basic page a day for the average 22 to 25 page comic. That leaves very little time to do page layout, text layout, speech bubbles and Effects. The more that can be set up fast and rendered in in the 6 to 12 renders needed per day the better.
I try to carry that approach over to my regular stand alone renders just so I do not get in the habit of post working Images anymore than I have too. If I start out with a image in my head I know will need post work I set out from the very first step with that in mind and often build those renders in layers to help make the post work much easier at the time I do it.
I think this is a very important point, and - for myself - a real challenge. I have learned much about lightning, the light types, placing them, shadows and so on.
But how do I light my scenes for "something workable" in postwork? I think less could be more. Maybe just one or two lights, maybe distant lights? How would you do it?
That sums up every image I ever wanted to make. Be creative and adapt.
I think this is a very important point, and - for myself - a real challenge. I have learned much about lightning, the light types, placing them, shadows and so on.
But how do I light my scenes for "something workable" in postwork? I think less could be more. Maybe just one or two lights, maybe distant lights? How would you do it?
Most paint programs have light filters as part of their package. I really haven't used GIMP do I don't know all of what it offers. I used PSP way back when I first started. I also use Photoshop, PhotoPaint and Painter.
Another way to play around is to do several renders making changes to the lighting. Anything from subtle to dramatic. Whatever you feel like. Take all of them into your image editor. Turn them all into layers and play with various blend modes. You'd be surprised what comes up.
Every render I do ends up post worked. No matter how meticulous you are, there's always something. On a deadline, we don't have time to go back and wait for a render. If a render is meant to be heavily post worked (as in hair, other effects, even background) then we use as few lights as possible. Before Poser had light emitters, it was much quicker to just use a single distance light and paint in any light effects we needed. Depending upon many factors, it still is.
There are no hard and fast rules in this.
Sometimes the tools, the interface and the DAZ workflow itself are obstacles to creation. Unless you're intimately familiar with the program, it can be a struggle and you may feel it's not worth the effort. If you can imagine something, it can be created on screen. Fortunately, the art has already been created for me. All I do is compose, arrange and light up the elements. The question you have to ask yourself is if the program makes this easy or hard to do. And you really can't answer that before you learn what the program can do. Words of wisdom: "It's only hard for the first 80 years."
Thank you very much for your answers and suggestions.
With all those technical things that DAZ Studio (and other programs) offer nowadays, it is sometimes hard to remember the primary goal - creating a piece if art! So I think I just have to take a step back and start thinking more like an artist than a technician :-) All those possibilities and options do not help much if they are not useable for what you want to achieve.
This happens to me EVERY SINGLE TIME. What I see in my head, is not what happens on the screen.
So what I do when this happens:
1. Cry.
2. Gnash my teeth.
3. Browse other artists galleries that inspire me and mutter under my breath that I'll NEVER be as good as they are, and I may as well give it up now and chuck it all in cos I am just fooling myself.
4. Stress over it for a few days.
5. Start all over again...and have it happen again. Rinse, repeat.
*grin*
...with AoA's advanced lights I have basically for the most part abandoned UE altogether except for creating mesh lights. Even with outdoor skydome lighting sets, I usually replace the UE component with an Advanced Ambient Light and just use the distant/helper lights supplied with it as the "sun". (though lately, been replacing even that with an Advanced Distant Light).
Have Reality 2.5 but day and a half render times (even on a powerful machine) and the fact it's lighting is more camera rather than stage based have put me off from using it.
With photography, I'm of the "shoot it and hope it turns out good" school. On the other hand, with stage lighting, I have a fair amount of experience.
This happens to me EVERY SINGLE TIME. What I see in my head, is not what happens on the screen.
So what I do when this happens:
1. Cry.
2. Gnash my teeth.
3. Browse other artists galleries that inspire me and mutter under my breath that I'll NEVER be as good as they are, and I may as well give it up now and chuck it all in cos I am just fooling myself.
4. Stress over it for a few days.
5. Start all over again...and have it happen again. Rinse, repeat.
*grin*
I once sent away for a "how to draw manga" CD by the artist who draws GoldDiggers. While he is of course a superb artist, the one thing that got me was that he erased and would do a leg or arm over again. The same with an old friend of mine. Anytime I would bring him a finished piece he would ask me "Is this how you wanted it to look?"
My answer was always no. He'd redo it the panel (it was a comic) the way I wanted it and I just marveled at how his vision of what I wanted was better than my own vision. He'd chuckle and tell me to keep practicing.
It's okay to erase and do it again. Repose a dozen times (who hasn't done that?) And when it's done, ask, is this how I wanted it to look? Oh yeah, Post work really counts. It's used in movies, TV, book covers. Why not with what you want to achieve?