SereneNight's Sci-fi Fun
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okay! I love it.Are you sure you aren't writing my story? You have great ideas there Fabe! =-)
Well, Sarge is my main character and he happens to be gay. Most of my thread is pretty much about this character and his evolution. As I get better skills at art, I change him, and he changes in appearence. Him being gay is pretty incidental to what he does most of the time, which is infantry and training men to fight and helping people. . Boyd is probably at leat bisexual if not gay. I haven't decided and it isn't a huge issue in the future. Boyd doesn't have a body for most of his life so when he gets a body he does make the most of it, which involves romancing Owen who has been his best friend for a long time and who is the person who matters most to him.
My themes in art that I like to do (in no particular order) are:
1. Military scenes
2. Actions scenes
3. Rescue scenes
4. Superheros
5. Hot men.
6. Sci-fi
7. Friendship
8. Love in spite of how one appears or is from the outside.
9 Difficult poses or poses which illustrate day to day activiites.
10 Robots.
That's basically what I like to illustrate and what I enjoy doing. It can be assumed though, that the majority of the characters I illustrate with the exception of Owen and Boyd are probably straight. It just doesn't matter because it isn't relevant to the situation at hand.
Hope that explains my thread and what I'm into.
If you are like me, you have a kill file of unsuccessful renders which did not work out for various reasons. I'll show you a few just t for fun of course.Begin Blooper Reel:
Here is Owen putting on the SF-01 Suit in the locker room. For some reason even wtih scene optimizer, this scene killed my computer. Too many reflective surfaces. I also had trouble with the boots. Really wish there were some with unlace morphs. The characters in the background are kinda goofily posed. I'll add a few more to the thread so you can see them. Unfortunately after making this one, I think I saved over it. So this is just one that never took off.
Here is my experiment with motion blur in iray. I read about using a technique to render the background, blurring it, then rendering the vehicle on top. I was only partially successful here. I will try it again, since I think the technique has merit, just that I wasn't able to make it work here.
Here is my attempt at a cowboy render. I wanted to show someone getting tossed in the water trough. It didn't quite work out. The bottle of whiskey looks great though!
Okay, and this is the final and penultimate weird one... Boyd eats pizza while wired in. I dunno. Not sure about those cables in the stomach, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Blooper reel continuing...One of Owen and Boyd's missions involve investigating and destroying an alien lab. Owen frees the human clones the aliens were growing in vats and disobeys orders.
I had some trouble with this one, because rendering children isn't really my thing, it was too dark, and blurry and didn't really come together. Despite my best efforts I thought the kids looked bad. And worse, the outfits they wore, just added to it. I don't have good clone children outfits! Even though I turned off the cutoff opacity for the shirt beneath the prison jumpsuit, it showed up for some reason as a shadow on the necks.
LOL, well at least you save yours. Mine never see the light of day because I only save once it gets where it's supposed to go!
Topaz Studio is free right now. This is the bare bones TOPAZ, so you have to pay for more, but you get 10 free and useful adjustments with this download and their filters are some of the best.
http://web.topazlabs.com/2017/05/free-topaz-studio/
That's a good effect. I will download it.
I realized I have several of Darwin's Mishap characters I haven't rendered yet. This gave me ample opportunity to mess around with painting on water droplets. You can decide which one you prefer. I didn't do them exactly alike. Maybe next time.
You've done an excellent job with those droplets- I still can't get my attempts to work right. Both are great, and you really get a sense of the warmth of the lighting in them. Hnnn..favorite? I personally hedge toward the first, but I'm biased. Thank you for doing these!
Me too, but then I''m biased too. I also like to contrast two different skin tones together. It makes for an interesting composition.
This was a great pose by Feral Fey. When I saw it I had to use it. The pose was "Show Restraint." But I can just see Owen telling Boyd that he needs to calm down.
I like the second but they both are pretty neck and neck. The 2nd gets the nod because technically there a slightly fewer breaks in style.
Space Welder, an outfit for Genesis 3 females, I thought might make a nice basic space suit since we are really lacking in non-skin tight clothing for space dwellers and it was in the recent sale. The chest area didn't work for me. Also tried New Neftis hair. I thought it sat a bit high on the forehead. There were no adjustments so I had to use Nadino's minimzer tool to pull it down. Even pulled down it is higher than Boyd's normal hair and there aren't any adjustments. I do think it has a lot of realism, and looks less fiber-meshy than the recent hairs produced. I just wish there were some adjustments. I'd love the ability to tug down the hairline and expand the top an bangs or to have the wind blow it different directions.
Someone mentioned that it was difficult to do tears on male characters in another forum I am in. Now I will have to try doing that and see what it is like. If I am a successful, I will write up instructions. Who do you want to see cry? It has to be a male character and I will have to own him or it can be one of my characters...
Your renders are great as usual. Really great job at painting in the water droplets, very realistic. Boyd has a pensive look to him, might be interesting to see what he looks like with tears.
Okay Boyd it is!
I definitely prefer the second one. Who are they?
FWSA Taia HD for Victoria 7
Parker by darwins mishap
I definitely prefer the second one. Who are they?
Not quite what I meant. Are you using them as "named characters" of your own, in your fictional universe, and who are those characters?
Nope not named characters. Just ones I used to test and work on render technique.
CRYING TUTORIAL
Ok, well, so here we are attempting to make Boyd Cry. The challenge here is I may use stuff and content you don't have. For example ron's brushes. I'm sorry about that, but I will suggest an equivalent item if I know of one. For the most part I draw with the basic brushes. They come with photoshop and consist of a series of small round, and harder round brushes.
1. FIGURE A: Do basic render of character in pain/grieving/sad.
2. FIGURE B: Take it into photoshop. Create a second layer. Using a soft round brush, select a dark reddish color paint the whites of the eyes red. Lower the opacity of the layer until the eyes are slightly tinged as though crying.
3. I'm illustrating fictional fantasy tears, not the hard gross reality. When drawing tears remember that most illustrated tears don't reflect reality. In reality crying is a messy process, mostly involving scrunching up various features etc. Most people when they cry look messy, eyes scrunched shut, nose pinched, very much like a baby. Fantasy/comic tears should look artistic, in which case you want your character to cry with his or her eyes mostly open, tears rolling artisticly down, no snot, no fluids, no extra moisture. That's what I'm going to do.
This technique will work for water droplets too, sweat, and other bodily fluids.
Remember that tears will be drawn down by gravity. They will spill out of the ducts, and when the eye becomes full will spill down the cheeks.
FIGURE C shows some basic tears I've drawn with my mousepad. See how there is a long white trail, that ends in a pendulous tear. There are long and short 'tear tracks' which will spill down a character's cheeks when he/she cries. I use only basic brushes, but the smaller ones to make the trail and the larger ones to fill out the pendulous drip. This is just a quick sample. Some tears will have multiple drops from the same track.
If they look sharp, don't worry, you want them a bit defined. I'll show you why later. And you can always blur them.
4. FIGURE D: Step four is to create a new layer over the red eye layer. Using a basic brush and using the technique on step 3 draw tears on your character. Don't worry if they look white or weird or too big. You can erase the unrealistic ones later. And yes they look stark. Just trust me here. You can also use this for sweat if you want.
A:
B:
C:
D:
5. Okay so now we have some basic tears drawn in white on your character's eyes. Make sure to add some tears to the bottom of the eye where the fluid will spill over.
6. Here's where you need Ron's stuff. In the Ron's Splashes set you need to use the "Ron's Water Styles" that came with this set. You can achieve blending and transparency without it, but it is far too time consuming. The water Styles will give you some nice water transparencies to your white tears quite quickly. If you haven't already done so, SAVE your PS file before applying styles.
7. FIGURE E: There are ten styles in the set. Depending on your lighting and your skin tone of your character you might think one looks more realistic than another. Go ahead and apply them and see.
8. FIGURE F: and G: Okay, well it is looking better, but a lot of layers tyles look a bit gray, as do a lot of store bought tears. Unless there is mascara in the picture, tears are clear. So I chose from The water styles the style 'ice cube.' I set it to 40% transparency (see screenshot), and I turned OFF Inner shadow and color overlay to get rid of some of the dark aspects. I also changed the style to 'lighten.' These tears are looking much better to me now.
9. FIGURE H: So now it is a matter of taste. Erase out the stylized weird looking tears. Use the blur tool to smudge others so they aren't as hard edges. Increase opacity strength of the tears etc. You can use the same technique for sweat, drops from the shower etc. I've added some more sweat streaks to Boyd's Face just for fun.
E:
F:
G:
H:
Okay, I think I know why Boyd is crying! I left his fibermesh brows off..... Poor thing.
Okay one final tip. Since the eyes are the focal point of the scene you want to accentuate them a little. Open a new layer in photoshop. Use a bit of white on top of the eyes, and use overlay mode. This will lighten lighter areas of the eye and make them pop a little. You can see in particular in the center image, this effect. Compare it to the one above. Looks much more compelling eh?
Hope this quick tutorial helps you do some nice tears. The more time you spend drawing your tears the more real they will look. Have fun.
Nice work- and a great tip on Ron's water styles. I'll have to remember that one. XD Poor Boyd.
Great information thanks so much!
Those are very authentic looking tears. I'm impressed! Thanks for the tutorial on how to create them.
@Darwin's Mishap: glad it was helpful to you. The water styles without some of the elements seem to work really well for tears.
@Ice Dragon Art, Barbult: I'm glad that worked for you. I think it is enough to get people started in the right direction.
Great tutorial, and I see Ron's Brushes have just gone on Flash Sale
I have Splashes 2 and not Splashes (yet). I have seen a tutorial on drawing tears in an issue of Photoshop Creative but I think your tutorial is easier. Many thanks.
Great tutorial! I'm going to try this sometime this week. Thank you so much for all the effort you put into it - very clear tutorial.