Fantasy Castle Books Logo Update

This is my new 3D rendered company logo, made to replace the flat, 2D version I've been using thus far with something a little more detailed and applicable to what I'm currently working on. It's sort of like what Disney has done with their new castle logo. A big improvement in both cases I think.

For reference, you can see the one I've been using at my website here. I may add a background with some clouds and birds at some point, depending on what I use it for, but not just now. I like the clean look of it as it is.

Oddly enough, the model I used is actually called Fantasy Castle, and it's purely coincidental (though not a real stretch of imagination for either of us), to which I've applied the Fairytale Castle texture set. The lighting is essentially default with some minor tweaking, and with the ground shadows all removed. The flags have been added individually and their wave pattern customized.

For the text, I sampled the castle texture and applied it to the lettering in Photoshop, adding bevel and shadowing to create a matching 3D title. For the lettering itself I used the Scriptorium font Folkard (seen most prominently of late on titles for the World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King game expansion), a handwriting font based on that of Charles Folkard, a contemporary of Arthur Rackham who also did a set of illustrations for The Ring of the Nibelungs. Funny how these things all comes back around.

Rodney Matthews

Stumbled across this book a while back and had to pick it up. Being a fan of both Nordic myths and Rodney Matthews, whose art I've loved for years. As a teenager I had several of his posters plastered on my bedroom walls, and everytime his artwork graced the cover of an album by the likes of Eloy or Asia I knew immediately whose it was (although I didn't know he painted the original Lonesome Crow cover for the Scorpions until years later). I even painted a mural on the wall of a video arcade once, back in the early '80's, featuring one of his eerie alien spaceships (the Venus Cruiser in case you're curious). Next to Roger Dean, he's probably the most recognizable of the classic record cover artists from that era.

This book is sort of a "Who's Who" of Norse mythology, short at only 48 pages, and is meant to function as something of a Dungeons & Dragons style manual for role-players and gamer world building. But it also serves as a quick and concentratred introduction to the major aspects of ancient Germano-Nordic beliefs, retelling many of the major tales in brief, from the Theft if Idun's Apples to Ragnarok and the Twilight of the Gods. And of course, it features some fine art by this master of fantasy.

Young Author Mentor Program

Not long ago I was approached to mentor a student who, according to her teacher, showed exceptional skill at writing. The student had, in fact, just completed her first novel, and the teacher was looking for someone to help develop her innate talent. The student expressed interest in becoming a professional writer, showed considerable promise in that direction, and was hoping to get published.

The student was also ten years old. I said I'd have a look.

Indeed, the writing was quite good, the story clever and compelling, and the belief in her talent not unfounded. I was, in fact, quite surprised at how developed some of her thoughts were: the psychological depth of her characters, the insights of her statements, her observations of the world around her.

So it was that (apprehensively) I took on the challenge of helping a fifth grade girl develop her skills and fulfill her ambitions as a writer. A great deal of work has yet to be done, and it will likely prove a long road to her dream's achievement, but not a road by any stretch impossible to travel. And few things could please me more than offering some bit of assistance along the way.

To provide a little inspiration for her journey to that goal I threw together this image as a mock-up of what her book might one day look like. I didn't do the artwork (its a piece called Circle of Life by Chall-Art, using a background from thier Forest Grunge set and a character called Telka by Nursoda, which I think is really cool) - I just set the text and layout; somehow the image reminded me both of her and her story's heroine. Every artist needs a vision, and few things motivate an author more than seeing their name in print on the cover of a book.

An Update of the State of Digital Printing - or, Will Print Books Survive?

We've come a long way since Gutenberg first conceived the idea of producing multiple uniform copies of a single manuscript from a mechanical press sometime around the year 1440. Since then printing has advanced through an endless series of technical and social improvements that have brought us to the point of vitually universal distribution of anything anyone might choose to write.

From Print-On-Demand to eBooks to blogs just such as this, the publishing industry today is an open field, accessible for the first time to anyone (for better or worse). Where once only the wealthy and aristocratic (or those under their patronage) could hope to see their work in print, where those with controversial themes might have to use a pen name or "midnight pamplet" to express their thoughts (or see them burned or censored), today's more advanced societies offer ample opportunity for anyone to speak their mind or vent their spleen. No longer are authors at the mercy of the "gatekeepers" of the industry: the agents and editors of mega-corporate publishing conglomerates that have come to squelch the very freedom of expression they themselves once championed.

Last year I wrote a series of posts on POD and the Espresso Book Machine (see here and here, for example). At the time it seemed this was the next great revolution, and it may yet be. But much has changed in the intervening year. There are now some 30 Espresso Book Machines around the world - less than I had hoped or imagined - but at $97,000 each it's not surprising. Each machine now has access to some 3.3 million titles via its proprietary EspressNet software, which allows readers to browse and buy - and authors and their publishers to get paid - from any EBM around the world. And print on demand now accounts for some 15% of all books in print, with Lightning Source alone printing over 20 million books last year. This allows back titles and expensive texts to remain "in print" in perpetuity, and small niche titles with very narrow interest to be published at all.

This is an historic advance, the significance of which is critical to the survival of the print book industry. In the face of impending advances in eBook technology with such devices as the Kindle and next month's release of Apple's iPad - with its full size color screen (crucial for graphic novels and many non-fiction textbooks), and with their "read on demand" ability - it's just a matter of time before economics (and the green revolution) do away with print books altogether. With the ability to print only books which have actually been sold, rather than printing, storing, trucking and ultimately destroying large bulk runs on speculation, the physical print industry still has some life left in it.

But for how long? Ultimately, I believe people will read books right along with all their other info streams, on a multimedia device such as the iPad (or whatever comes along to take its place). Just as today's iGeneration use their smart phones as an extention of their world for increased connectivity - to the extent that it's second nature to communicate by text or browse the web on mobile phones - tomorrow's youth will live in a world where libraries are digital and available from anywhere at any time, on demand. Within the next ten years we'll see the last newspaper, and in twenty ebooks will become the norm, with printed books relegated to the antiques collector.

Of course, I could be wrong. It might come sooner.

For further insights into this subject, see Jason Epstein's recent New York Review of Books article Publishing: The Revolutionary Future.

Wagner's Ring: Turning The Sky Round

Polished this book off tonight after working on it for about a week. At only 120 pages it could be read in a matter of hours, but is instead the type of book that requires considerable contemplation to draw out its deepest meaning.

Based on a series of radio intermission talks given by classics professor Father M. Owen Lee during the 1988 and 1989 seasons of the Metropolitan Opera's Ring of the Nibelung productions, the prose is crisp and conversational, yet immensely deep and filled with brilliant insights into Wagner's life and work.

Beginning each of the four sections with a plot synopsis of the individual operas of the cycle, Owen then procedes to analyze and evaluate both the external narrative of Wagner's work, as well as its inner philosophical and mythological significance, demonstrating over the course of the performance how Wagner came to envision, create, and ultimately be changed himself by this enormous masterwork of operatic metaphysics.

Drawing inspiration from a broad range of revolutionary thinkers from Schopenhauer to Nietzsche - and anticipating the confluence of psychology and myth soon to come with Jung and Freud - Owen shows how Wagner's own comprehension of his work evolved over the course of nearly three decades as he came little by little to understand its true meaning only as it unfolded before him. That revelation is mirrored in the compact pages of this stunning book, where nothing short of the fate of mankind and the death of God is discussed. For both a look into the making of a major work and a philosophical evaluation of its import, few books will stimulate greater conversations than this.

A Poetic Ending

Following up on the thoughts laid out in the last post, I spent the better part of this weekend continuing to build up the scene I now refer to as A Poetic Ending.

Widening out our shot a bit, we can now see some additional furniture components - another Gothic Window and a matching Medieval Chair (there's also a chest, but I didn't pull back that far). There's now a carpet on the floor courtesy of Kelly Lodge, and a second candlestick which has been knocked over by our dying monk, giving me the opportunity to add some drifting smoke effects using Ron's Smoke, a Photoshop brush set. In addition, the inkwell has been tipped and Ron's Stain Splatter Drips Wash brushes provide the running ink and drips from a pool of ink I simply painted in (applyng distort and stretch to make it pool and run). The feather quill in now in the poet's grasping hand. I've also added a nice gold engraved goblet from Traveler's Fantasy Banquet Set, available from RuntimeDNA. The wine stain is painted in.

Then, alas, there is our poor monk, who has met with his untimely demise. Poisen perhaps? Viking raiders? Or just a heart attack from too much fatty pork? Perhaps it was a curse, brought on by penning pagan folk tales when he should be writing Christian homilies and verse.

Whatever the cause, for our poor departed friend I started out with Pappy's Brother Paul, a set of rustic robes for Michael 4. However, I ended up using Michael 3 instead, because I wanted to use the dead skin texture set from Davey Jones' Ghost, which only fits on Michael 3. This caused me no end of grief in conforming the Michael 4 dynamic cloth to a figure it wasn't designed to fit, but I did it with a little ingenuity (I posed the robes on Michael 4, then used three separate M3 body parts positioned independently to replace the deleted M4 figure). It's unfortunate that the image is so dark, as you can't see all the ghastly detail, but any lighter and the scene just seemed to lose its creepy edge. I did enhance the saturation of the stained glass windows on the left a bit, but other than that I didn't add any more lights than what I already had.

The one thing I forgot to do was add in texture scans of the Beowulf manuscript to replace the pages of the open book. But it's back to my day job in the morning, so that will have to wait.

ADDENDUM: Monday Night, March 15th

I've created a new texture map for the book using the actual Beowulf manuscript handwriting font on clean parchment, rather than scans of the damaged extant text we now possess. This is, therefore, what the original document might well have looked like when new, before age and fire damage left it in its current compromised state. It's not as visually impressive as the illuminated manuscript of the default Poseable Book model pages, but it's more historically accurate, and, I think, actually blends into the scene better.

As a final note, I was considering adding a second light source, such as a sconce on the wall above the smaller chair, but have - for the time being - decided against it. I've just bought a bunch of new models I need to install and sort into their proper categories (organizing several thousand models is no small feat, I can tell you), so that will likely keep me busy for the next few weeks.

The Poet's Abode

This was initially intended to be a 3D full color digital version of the black and white pen and ink illustration I did for The Saga of Beowulf''s Prologue (see below). There I had the candle snuffed out and the ink well spilt across the poet's writing desk, leaving the sheaves of the Beowulf manuscript incomplete.

The idea there was that the creative life of the unknown poet of Beowulf (that is, the English monk who actually penned the one extant manuscript in which the Beowulf poem survives) was snuffed out prematurely, for unknown reasons. It is, in fact, known that there were two "authors" of Beowulf, the first of whom penned the first two-thirds of the poem, but suddenly broke off, and a second, with a slightly different penmanship, who completed it. It is presumed that the first poet either died or was called away unexpectedly on more important business, never to return. Whatever the case, we are immensely fortunate to have their work, an incredibly tedious and thankless task for which I, for one, am grateful.

In this version I decided instead to start with what that room might have looked like on any given day. I started with the lectern from Medieval Furniture Pack, available from DAZ for $12.95, or just $1.99 for Platinum Club members. Eventually I added the Medieval Chair and Vitrine from the same set, populating the latter with a host of book props (Ancient Arcanium, the Ancient Book DAZ freebie, RobotMonster's Battered Books, and Fantasy Book plus The Alchemist's Archive texture add-on), a skull with dirty texture applied (V3 & M3 Skeletons plus Skeleton Textures), and a pair of mortar and pestles from The Alchemist's Apothecary set. 

But right off the issue of a light source cropped up. If the candle was blown out, where would the light source come from to light the scene? My solution to that was to add stained glass windows through which external light might pass to illuminate the scene in creepy garrish colors (Morphing Gothic Window/Arch by ParrotDolphin, available free at ShareCG). But that proved to be a particularly difficult effect to achieve without it looking utterly unreal. In order to get a light strong enough to reveal any significant detail it ended up looking like a SWAT team was just outside. I wanted a dark and sombre mood, but that just wasn't it. These are the you can only learn through trial and error.

So then I thought to add multiple candles and snuff out just the one. That quickly went out the stained glass window when I saw how cool the candlelight looked shining on the manuscript lying open on the lectern. Of course, I had also intended to insert actual scans of the original Beowulf manuscript, and this book (Poseable Book by 3DCritter, available on Renderosity) was only a temp stand-in until I had time to create a new texture map for it (which I may still do). Creating the candlelight was, in fact, a particular challenge, and took more time than anything else in the scene. Getting the right translucence and color for the wax (I still think it should be more yellow to match the scene), as well as the exact orange-yellow cast to the glow on the surrounding walls - while still letting their natural stone texture to come through - was the biggest challenge. Ultimately it required nine lights to create the effect of just one candle.

In the end I liked the composition of just the one candle stand balanced by the quill pen and ink well, and left it at that (for now). The whole was intended and sized to fill a 6x9 two-page book spread, with the foreground objects filling up the left-hand page, leaving room for a text block on the right, as seen here comped in atop a slightly transparent parchment paper texture in Photoshop, with a bit of outer edge glow added. Here I used my own Beowulf Modern font, which I based on a scan of the actual Beowulf manuscript hand (and which has since been stolen and propagated across the internet as a free download by "Black Pirate" - note my name in the font header credits when you snag it). I don't know if I'll keep it in this font, as it may be a bit too difficult to read. Let me know what you think.

So, What Have You Been Writing Lately?

As you can see from my recent posts, I've been really wrapped up in this digital art thing lately. In fact, for almost a full year now I've done almost nothing else. And, combined with the half year I spent establishing Fantasy Castle Books and preparing The Saga of Beowulf for publication, as well as the subsequent half year of promotion and marketing, it's been roughly two years since I've done any serious writing. Which, I have to say, has begun to bother me.

It's not that I haven't done any writing at all, because I have: I've done rough drafts and outlines for two new stories, and made good progress in working out their plots. But more significant, I think, is the fact that for nearly ten years I had been writing virtually night and day - from the first inception of The Saga of Beowulf as a film script to its final incarnation as an epic novel - working in every spare minute I could find, in between life's constant surprises and demands. And now, by comparison, I spend hardly any time writing at all, and it leaves me feeling somewhat hollow.

But it's not as if I've been dormant or unproductive since that time, because I haven't. I've just shifted my focus in a new direction. Or more accurately, widened my horizons to include some other aspects of my chosen medium, so as to include some other skills and interests.

Lately, however, I've had several inquiries as to how my next book is progressing, and it's caused me to stop and ponder just what the answer to that question might actually be. In a way I feel as if I've gotten a bit off track, following a tangent down a winding side road, not knowing quite where it might lead. And yet those are often the roads that offer the best vistas and adventure.

Initially, upon finishing The Saga of Beowulf (which I lovingly refer to as The S.O.B., and which took about forever to complete) I had intended to jump right into my next book, challenging myself to write it in as short a time as possible. This was in part because I wanted to get another book out as soon as possible to help build up my audience, and also because I didn't want to spend another ten years on a single work. But then I got turned on to 3D art, and off I went at break-neck speed.

You see, I had wanted to illustrate The S.O.B. right from the start. I had conceived of it as something like a graphic novel initially, almost like a storyboard to a film, but with far more dialogue and narrative than the glorified comic books that pass as graphic novels these days. But as the story grew and grew there was less and less space for visual imagery, and at the last, for none at all, save a map and a single pen and ink (plus the cover).

But I still want to fulfill that dream of creating something bold and new in the realm of the illustrated novel, and I believe that digital art has provided me with the tools I need. However, building a digital model archive and learning how to use it is an incredibly time intensive process, and so far it's taken up almost a whole year of my life, seemingly with little to show for all the effort.

But that's about to change.

The Faces of Poser

The official Poser Facebook page hosts an image gallery called "Faces of Poser" featuring digital art renders done by users of Poser's 3D software. Most of them are quite impressive, so I thought I'd share a few of my favorites here, just to give you a sample of what you can do with a reasonably decent computer and a little imagination.

UNTITLED, by Ian C McLein

This one has been the wallpaper on one of my monitors for some time now (its sister monitor features a companion McLein piece in what I refer to as the "Green Series").

ROMA 8
by Jmariuskl

Being partial to history and mythology, this image struck me as particularly poignant. I like the pose and the way the rough, metalic exterior contrasts with the smooth, youthfuless of the bronzed Greek hero, his skin as yet unmarred by scars of battle.

DILIA
by AlexWert

This one reminded me of the Vermeer masterpiece Girl With A Pearl Earring as it might have looked when first painted in 1665 - before all the cracks and discoloration set in. The use of light and texture here is exceptional, highlighting the soft details of both skin and silk.

SUBJECT 17

by Bergone

I love the use of high contrast light and shadow here, with the subdued hues being offset by the bright teal-blue sci-fi iconography and inverse white tattooing. The composition utilizes a nice balance of dark and light set against straight lines and curving angles, giving it a depth beyond the sum of its parts.

SOMETHING WICKED, by Lyndsey Hayes

Again, beautiful use of light, but here with an intensity that almost completely washes out the skin tones, leaving just soft white and pastels of color to shape the face. The darkness of the eyes and the surrounding forest of snake-like hair sets off in stark contrast the whiteness of the face, giving the whole an almost cartoonish quality, augmented by the vivid use of spidery fine black lines and earthly sunlit yellow-green.

FALLEN ANGEL

by Tempesta3D

Exquisite use of pure black to highlight the bright white of the single eye, as if it were a full moon in the depth of darkest night. This image shows how much can be done with just a single character and really good lighting. The dual lip piercings lend a fang-like impression to the overtly vampiric, wolf-like expression.

UNTITLED

by Ian C McLein

Here is Ian in his "White Phase" - a nice compliment to the black of Fallen Angel above. This image is so white that the torso and shoulders disappear entirely into the background, leaving only shadows and the encircling necklace to define the soft lines of the throat and chest. The blue of the eyes is balanced nicely by the tinting in the lower left, with the color of the hair augmented by the necklace. Absolutely stunning.

Want to upload your own render art to Poser's gallery? Just click here.

Arthur Rackham & The Ring

Arthur Rackham was an early influence on my appreciation of both art and literature. As a child I remember vividly reading editions of Rip Van Winkle and The Romance of King Arthur illustrated by Rackham, both of which I still have (the latter now worth a fortune). In addition, there was Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, Undine, and Grimm's Fairy Tales (all now sadly gone from my collection, save in memory).

But one I never came upon until much later in life was this collection of 64 watercolor illustrations and several dozen black and white vignette's for Margaret Armour's translation of Wagner's Ring (published 1910-11). I bought a facsimile edition some years ago, which contains all of the color plates, plus a handful of pen & ink vignettes, but only a line or two of Armour's text beneath each color plate. Consequently, although I got the gist of Wagner's plot, I was fairly vague on the details until just recently (I filled in much from my prior reading of Wagner's source material, but was at a loss to discover where the Rhinemaids came from, for example, not to mention the gold itself). I've just downloaded the complete Armour edition of The Nibelungenlied, so I'm looking forward to finally reading the full text (although reviews of it are less than kind).

One of the things I used to do for fun (and occassional profit) is screenprinting t-shirts. Several years ago I had a website up where I sold hand-dyed and printed shirts under the name Art-Shirts, most of them containing images from classical artwork, such as daVinci's Vitruvian Man and Picasso's Don Quixote. Among my top sellers were prints of Arthur Rackham illustrations, such as this one from Wagner's Ring of the Norns weaving out the threads of Fate (still one of my all-time favorites).

It was this image of the three sisters that I had in mind when I added them (or rather, they inserted themselves) into The Saga of Beowulf. It was completely unintentional (and unforseen). They just showed up, in one of those strange unconscious fits that come over writers in the throws of narrative compulsion.

This one of the Rhinemaids I liked to print on mottled blue (a sort of tie-dye that looks a lot like marble) to make it seem as if they were swimming underwater (I removed the border for my print), while the dwarves Mime and Alberich struggle beneath the burden of the Ring, here stylized by Rackham in the likeness of the World Serpent (also seen in the illustration of the Norns above). Few artists can depict such agony and ecstasy in a single monochromatic image. But his color renderings are among his very best work, and considered by many to be his masterpiece. Perhaps one day I'll go back to printing shirts again, but until then you can click on the black and white vignettes for my high-resolution scans.

The Ring of the Nibelung

Just finished reading the 1960 Stewart Robb translation of Richard Wagner's libretto for the "Ring Cycle" operas. Although not considered a standard text among English translations, Robb's edition is highly readable (as far as librettos go) and one of the more clearly understandable renditions (as far as Wagner goes).

I have to say that I've never been a big fan of opera, finding it ridiculously contrived as a theatrical medium and hopelessly outdated as a style of music (as with most of classical music), but this whopping monster is really something else altogether. Conceived originally in 1848, Wagner first captured his ideas of composing an opera based on Norse mythology in The Nibelung Myth as Sketch for a Drama, a short rough draft in prose form (click the link to read or download). The final work took some twenty-six years to complete, being performed in its entirety for the first time in 1876.

Based primarily on sections the Elder Edda and The Volsunga Saga, with additional segments from the 13th century Germanic varation, The Nibelungenlied, Wagner's masterwork (commonly dubbed "The Ring Cycle") spans four complete operas - The Rhinegold, The Valkyrie, Siegfried, and The Twilight of the Gods - requiring 15 hours of stage time to perform. I've never managed to make it through an entire production on video, finding it intolerably tedious as stage drama, but during the writing of The Saga of Beowulf I listened to it quite extensively, often playing it for days on end while working on specific passages (the battle scenes in general, and the final funeral procession in particular - this is, in fact, where I took the inspiration for Haereth's immolation, as envisioned here in Robb's cover art). Having come to know the score so well, and having read all of Wagner's source material - but not knowing German - I've wanted for some time to read an English translation of the libretto.

The main thing that struck me was how much Wagner added to the story, inventing entire passages, and changing characters to meet the needs of his theme and plot, while drawing what he needed from these varied sources to produce a complete, cohesive whole, which in many ways is far more powerful than any one alone. For example, the scene in The Valkyrie in which Odin strips his daughter Brunhilde of her immortality and sends her into exile among the humans contains one of the most poignant and passionate appeals I've ever read. That said, I feel that Wagner also missed some key opportunities to develop some underlying concepts further. Of these, the conflict and contrast between the mortal lives of men and that of the immortal Gods is foremost: this could (and should) have been made much stronger in the final sections of The Twilight of the Gods, where we hardly see the Gods at all. And here I was also astounded by the fact that Wagner chose not to include the traditional apocalyptic Nordic myth of Ragnarök, the final battle of the Gods that is pre-destined to bring about their end. But perhaps this was just too much, and would have drawn away the focus from the human characters. Still, I was disappointed not to see the Fenris wolf take down Odin.

As for Robb's translation, I can only say (having read no others yet) that it was clean and fairly easy to follow for such a convoluted plot and so contrived a medium as operatic poetry. His vocabulary is essentially modern, without the "thous" and "thees" I've seen in glancing at other translations. In addition, the syntax of his lines is straightforward and relatively unencumbered, having the feel of an Old English style, much akin to Howell Chickering's translation of Beowulf. I intend to read some others soon for comparison, among them those of Jameson and Spencer. I'll let you know how that goes.

Poser Video Contest

With the release of Poser Pro 2010 due next month, Smith Micro is holding a contest in which 25 copies of their professional level edition of Poser will be given away for free. To enter, simply make a video of yourself saying "I'm a Poser!" and submit it here to enter.

Retailing at $499.99 (twice the cost of the basic edition), Poser Pro is the high end version of Poser that many graphics and film studios use to produce commercial digital art. The new version will be based on the advances made in Poser 8 (indirect illumination, cross-body morphs, search-enabled content library, etc.), with 32- and 64-bit support. Poser Pro is designed with the graphics production studio in mind, with advanced features to support efficient workflow, such as network rendering and improved integration with third-party software. However, it has all the features of the standard Poser package for use by all of us lone, independent artists as well.

Contest ends next Tuesday, March 9th, at 9am Pacific Time. So all you posers get your phone cameras out and get busy clicking!

3D Digital Art 101 - Part 2

Today I'll go through the basic steps in creating a digital 3D image from a pre-made model using Poser 8 (the steps in DAZ are similar, but I don't use it anymore). As mentioned yesterday, you can, of course, create your own models, but if you're already doing that you don't need to read this. I'll be using the Anglo-Saxon Shield model from Merlin's Medieval Shields set (available at Renderosity), which I used in the recent illustration work I posted.

What you would be making, were you do make your own models, is a wire mesh geometry. This is the basis of all 3D objects, and consists of several, hundreds, or even tens of thousands of individual polygons, connected together to create vertices, the points at which they meet. Both polygons and their associated vertices consist of mathematical data which can be manipulated in 3D space to create any object (depending on your level of patience and proficiency, I imagine). Here you see the underlying geometry of the Anglo-Saxon shield model.

The simplest form of polygon is a single triangle, any number of which can be pieced together to form complex shapes with nearly smooth curvatures; the more polygons make up a shape, the smoother each angle will be between them. Each of these polygons contains a plane: the space defined by their mathematical positions in space. Here those planes have been shaded to create a continuous surface as defined by the polygons. Those surfaces now cast shadows and catch highlights from light sources.

By default the planes defined by the polygon geometry are flat, as seen above. But among the many mathematical equations that define the 3D geometry is the sharpness of the angles between those planes. In the image above the angles are set at 100%, or exactly the sharpness defined by the degree of each angle. Here those angles have been smoothed by decreasing the sharpness of the angles, functionally rounding off each edge and corner. Were you to take a 3D cube and decrease the degree of each angle you could make a perfect sphere.

Of course, plain grey surfaces aren't all that interesting to look at. You could simply change the color data assigned to each plane or group of planes, to make them gold or silver, for example. But our object needs more detail to be realistic. As explained in a recent post, these planes can be "unfolded" like a box to lay flat. This is easy enough for an object like the box I textured before, but becomes vastly more difficult as the object becomes more complex, such as a human face. You can simply tile a texture to cover every surface, or a group of surfaces (defined during the geometry creation process), and that works fine for many objects whose textures are reasonably consistent, such as the forged metal rim of this shield, for which I'll use that technique in a bit. Fortunately there are programs such as UVMapper Pro (screenshot pictured at right) that can extract a two-dimensional map (called a UV map, or texture template) from the surface of even the most complex objects. There are freeware programs out there, but I haven't tried any of them yet.

Once you have your UV map (which in the case of this shield doesn't look all that much different than a full front view of the wire mesh), you can either paint right on it any way you choose, or you can cut and paste and shade using actual photographic images, or a combination of both. Here's the basic texture set that comes with Merlin's Anglo-Saxon Shield, which has a nice wood grain and leather texture, but a fairly lame flat color for the metal surfaces. The 3D shading is pretty well done, but you don't really need a lot, because the light and shadow acting on the 3D object will do a lot of that for you. Essentially at this stage you just want to create a nice color map to lay over your geometry. Using nice high resolution images is key to getting really good detail, but remember that the bigger the image the longer the render time will be, especially when you have a lot of objects in the final image. This is one of the problems you'll find with cheaper models (and most older ones), because they're UV maps are minuscule, so low resolution that they have no detail at all. This one is 2048 pixels square, a pretty good size image (upper range is around 4000x, which takes a lot of render time).

Here I've applied the basic texture to the model, using the default settings. Essentially at this point the color information has just been laid onto the surfaces planes, and so consequently looks pretty flat. The wood, for example, just looks like a picture of wood, which is exactly what it is. You may notice that the leather strap and handle are not on the UV map, and that's because the brown sections of the strap and handle have been mapped with sections of the leather shield cover (an efficient reuse of the same texture map), while the metal hardware portions are just given basic color data with no texture. This is done in the Materials Room of Poser, where we'll be spending quite a bit more time here in the next few steps.

I've been speaking of "texture" when referring to what is really surface color, and this is standard practice, though technically not correct. Because what actually creates your texture (aside from any built in to the model geometry), is what is called a bump map. Generally this is little more than a slightly manipulated grayscale version of your color texture map, but can be really anything you like. They don't have to correspond. For example, you can easily create a freakish Thing by applying a cracked lava texture to a human skin, or make ripples on the surface of a pond by applying a series of circular geometric patterns to an otherwise smooth and flat water surface. How this works is that where the color of the bump map is dark a corresponding depression is made in the actual surface of the 3D model: the darker the color, the deeper the indentation. The amount of this effect can be adjusted to achieve exactly the result you want. Of course, here we want our woodgrain texture to match the corresponding color data.

To the left is another variation of the bump map which is called a specularity map, and which provides light reflection data for the render engine. Here, instead of depth information, the relative lightness of the image tells the computer how bright or reflective that surface is. Related to this is a reflection map, which is not so much a map as these others are, but a gradiated color pattern. The one to the right is just a landscape shot tinted gold, and can be used to add highlights to any reflective surface, such as a person's eyes or on a wine glass. You can see how I employed it in the next and final step.

Here is my final rendered image with all the maps applied. You can see that there is now nice depth and roughness to the woodgrain (more than any self-respecting Norse woodsmith would leave, and far more than any Viking warrior would want have chafe his arm). The leather has a nice "tooth" to it, too, and the metal has a nice hand-beaten look. This is a custom touch, due to the fact that, as I said, I didn't care much for the default color and flat texture. To rectify that I've added a metal texture to the rim and boss sections of the bump map, using Photoshop CS4, and at the last minute changed the color to a nice rich gold. In addition, the gold reflection map above was added to the Reflection box in the Materials Room, which gives that nice striation to the highlights on the boss, as if the nearby mountains were reflecting in the setting sun.

So there you have it, a completed 3D image, complete with light and shadow. These I've left at their default settings, but as with every aspect of 3D model rendering, they are infinitely changeable. And this is just a very simple prop, one with no moving parts. Just wait until you see what you can do with a dragon!