April 2020 - VReam Art

Peaceful Morning

29 April 2020April 29, 2020

Luane’s world presents so many photo opportunities that I am certain you will see more. This image is barely a composite…barely.

It also marks a small departure. As I’ve become more comfortable using the Black Dragon viewer, I’m becoming more reliant on it’s abilities – especially the poser. The down side is that when using the BD poser, the actual image is visible only to the person running the viewer. This means that this image wasn’t actually taken by me but by Christi since she is the only person in the photo.

I completed the post processing – small fixes for the most part with the single most time-consuming portion being the addition of the ground fog. For the most part, she gets credit for the composition and light.

With that I should point out that was no easy feat. She actually took her first image for this setting a week ago. However, once back in the shop it was obvious that her face just wasn’t right. This round of images was the introduction of my character named Louise and I didn’t want to repeat the same mistake as the very first image of Louise..which did not fit the character I had in mind.

So, after the first round of images, a new head and painful searching for a skin (of which I am still not satisfied with), she returned only to find that it wasn’t possible to return to the same exact pose and angle because the horse in the foreground had moved!

So, rather than a frontal shot of Louise in which I had wanted to reveal some of her attributes, we settled for this side shot.

Still, I am happy with what she brought back.

To finish this, I set the image to some music that I hoped would reinforce the peaceful silence of a misty ground fog as the heat of the sun touched the wet grass on a cool spring morning.

A Night Out

21 April 2020April 21, 2020

The last couple of weeks have kept me busy chasing down free heads and bodies that have come available in SL during this period of global lockup. Collecting freebies was the easy part. Trying to decide on what skin to use on them was more difficult – especially since I now have more heads than I expect to need to illustrate my story.

So, when the weekend was nearly over, it was time to relax and it seemed that Kyashi had been locked up for a while – even her last trip out of the closet was a working one. The result was that she took off and had a great evening listening to music and dancing her feet off.

Not all was play, though – she did stop to allow me this one photograph as she was leaving Taox Tattoo…

This image was another exercise in Black Dragon. I think I’m slowly getting a handle on it which is somewhat ironic because this week I also decided to start uploading poses that I have created to my marketplace store. The problem being that Black Dragon eliminates the need to create poses in world and unfortunately, is not able to export the poses you create in browser.

Back to the image, though. There were two glaring issues I noticed while taking the photographs. The first was that while using depth of field to blur the background – the viewer did not initially blur what was behind the windshield. As I considered how I was going to address that, I found there was an option to leave alpha channels out of DOF consideration. Great! That eliminated that problem.

When I toggled that option, I noticed that something changed around Kyashi’s head. I toggled it a couple more times and saw that there was alpha in the edges of her hair and it was causing problems I hadn’t noticed. Unfortunately, no matte which way it was toggled, there was still a problem. I opted to turn the alphas off and tend to the blurry hair in photoshop because it seemed that would be less noticeable and easier to fix.

I’m sure the second issue is also related to the alpha channel. Kyashi’s dress is full of alpha and it was playing havoc with the shadows being cast on it. The shadow was so dark that it was nearly black. Additionally, the shadow edges were sharp and jagged but that has always been an issue for me with Black Dragon.

I ended up using the stamp/clone tool in photoshop to soften the shadow edges and a curves/blend-if solution to reduce the super dark shadows on the dress to something more reasonable if not still a bit on the dark side.

In closing, I’ll praise Black Dragon for it’s poser. Actually setting poses without twisting something into a pretzel – especially fingers – is a challenge. The flexibility is just so awesome that I’m sure I will keep working at it long enough to get the knack of it.

Finally, I used this image in the following video – Are you coming back…

Spring Is In The Air

15 April 2020April 15, 2020

I’d like to say that the three sims I saw on the map were some of the most beautifully put together that I have seen…except I can’t. I can’t say that because I never made it to the third sim. Instead, upon stumbling across a patch of tall giving birth to multitudes of flowers which were busily serviced by as many butterflies, I knew this was the place to take a photograph.

I’m still struggling with the Black Dragon viewer but should have caught that Noel’s face was a bit brighter than I wanted it. I suppose i was too busy trying to catch more butterflies in the image as they flew into and out of the view. Unfortunately, I feel I failed at both and perhaps the over exposed face wasn’t a bad thing but simply a reflection of the strong sun that day.

Yes, the dandelion and it’s seeds were added in post processing.

To complete this image, I had searched and found, I feel, a perfect piece of music to accompany this photo so I was intent in publishing a video with it. After struggling to get the encoders to work because Serif has stopped supporting my video editor, I finally got it in place. Hope you enjoy.

Secondlife Location: Luane’s World

M	T	W	T	F	S	S
		1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30

We are using cookies on our website