Let me start by saying it could have went a lot better.

Now that’s out of the way. I think it’s a mix of people not interested in the prints, not a catchy enough display, and then just generally bad experience at the hotel.

Saturday afternoon I drove over to Greensboro Mariott, about an hour and a half from home, and booked in to the hotel. I figured I’d stay at the hotel the night before to get a head start on the following morning load in time of 7 AM.

In hindsight I probably should have just drove over in the morning and saved myself a lot of the trouble that lay ahead.

Dinner was a dry hamburger from room service. This 25 dollar meal included a 4 dollar can of Mountain Dew and some really great fries. I should have probably just driven to Wendy’s or McDonald’s though. Would have saved me a lot of money, and I think I could miss out on those fries for the prices I was charged.

Let’s talk about the room. Downtown Greensboro is under some construction and rehabilitation at the moment. So I didn’t expect a lot from the view. But, I had hoped for a view of the city. Instead I got a dirty construction site and some trees.

I went to bed early, expecting to get up early for the load in. Everything was going pretty well until around 3:30 in the morning. That’s when I was woke up by an alarm going off in the hallway by the elevators. I finally got someone from the front desk to answer the phone and all I got was a “We’re looking into it.”

Not sure if it was a fire, elevator stuck, ghosts maybe, I went ahead and got dressed just in case. The alarm went on for a little over an hour (2 episodes of Forensics Files later) and it finally shut off. Back into PJs I went and then couldn’t sleep. When I mentioned this while checking out they took some money off the bill, thankfully.

What I did not expect was the hotel’s breakfast buffet to charge me. I would have thought after how much I spent on the room the breakfast would have been free. But, I was surprised when I was billed.

Then load in. Holy moly is our display small and dwarfed by everyone around us. Seriously, this I feel is a major contributing factor. One that leads to people over looking our booth when so much more is so shiny.

Anyone reading this is welcome to give suggestions. I’ve thought of a few. The backdrop of poster prints needs to be closer and more visible. Beyond that I’m open to suggestions.

A little after 10 AM the doors opened for guests. This was the start of being rejected by hundreds of people that passed by the booth. I know that’s not what was happening actively, but it sure felt like it.

Had a lot of people stop and go “Wow, these aren’t photos? Great job.” then walk away. I won’t lie, it was disheartening.

At the end of the day we made around 20% of what we invested into the show. I think it’s a mix of people at a Comicon not being that interested in 3D, a simple non-eye catching display, being at the back of the hall (people already spent their money by the time they reached me) and a few other things.

However, it’s really leading me to realize that we do much better with our jewelry than the art. Seriously considering focusing on the jewelry going forward for our conventions and eventually phasing out the art entirely.

Really looking forward to the UCPL’s SuperCon the last weekend of September. In Monroe, NC.

We’re going to be there with our modular jewelry, hand made crafts, and of course prints of our amazing 3D art!

This is very exciting as we like the area and are hoping that our application gets accepted.

Already put together a custom print that we’ll be taking to this year’s show to give to the first 20 people to purchase any other print from us.

For anyone in the WV area my wife and I are going to be at Charcon this year! We’re bringing a couple hundred prints, posters and possibly more. Including a convention exclusive poster for the first 20 people to purchase something!

Each Print is:

• 8.5″ x 11″ (Standard Letter Sized) print on premium glossy photo paper
• Matted for framing in an 11″ x 14″ white mat and backing board
• Sleeved in a rugged clear polymer bag
• Shipped in a sturdy cardboard mailer for additional protection
• Discount on shipping for multiple prints

There is a large range of prints that will be available from fantasy, steampunk to pin-up and many more.

They physical prints will be available in 8.5 X 11 inches, pre-matted in white 11×14 mats and supplied in a sturdy poly-bag for shipping. Some posters will be available which measure 12×18 inches.

And, of course the digital downloads will be supplied at print resolutions and 300 DPI.

If you know of an image of mine that you would like to see in print resolution, or have in your hands a physical and matted print just leave it in the comments below!

This logo will start being put on all our branding.

It was created and delivered by another artist friend of mine, who is so awesome, you should check out her site: https://www.galindorf.com/

She has some beautiful and creepy prints of her own, and can be contracted to help you with your own branding needs!

Let me start by saying this is not my greatest image, and it’s not my worst, but was put together primarily for this review of lighting. You can find much better examples of this style of art in my Horror Gallery.

Rage against the Headlamp

By default Daz Studio wants to light the scene with a “Headlamp.” Image this as the light on the old camcorder or studio camera with it’s bright uncaring brightness glarine straight from right near the lens.  It is on, and will wash out images if you aren’t careful.  I see a lot of images, especially from newer artists using Daz Studio, that are use just the Headlamp for light or the Headlamp and some environmental lights. Because the Headlamp will only automatically turn off if it detects “real lights” in a scene.

Come on, admit it. That looks like junk lighting. You can only see the front figure, he’s washed out, and anything behind them is lost in darkness.  I’ve also seen people do this with their spotlights, forgetting the entire scene needs some kind of light typically.  Even a darkness scene.

To disable the Headlamp you have to do it in two places. First is in the Render Settings on the General section, the other is on the Camera itself.

Now, with that done we can move on to the lighting the scene properly.

Use Emissive Surfaces on Sets

On a lot of sets, even if they are older ones that only have 3DLight textures there will be some surfaces labeled “Light,” or “LED,” or “Candle,” or something else that screams “I’m a light source.”  Find them and use them.  I’m not going to go into how to do that in this opinion.. I mean tutorial. I may in a future piece.

However, after turning off the Headlamp and setting up the ceiling and wall lights with some surfaces that act as ways to emit light we get:

It’s a bit dark, but in general more well lit all around.  And, if you look hard enough you can see the outlines and shadows of what goes bump in the night.

Using Spots for Focus

In this image I used three spot lights, and each one was to bring focus to a particular area.  I tested the first on the back right where one of the beasts was most obscured.  I used a large spot light with a wide angle so that it was soft. But, I was generally happy with the result. The monsters were lit enough to see, but not so much that the eye was instantly drawn to them or too much detail jumped out.

I could have probably stopped there, but decided to use clones of that spot light and move them around. This was to capture and highlight the beast to the left as well as the main subject up front. By cloning the spot lights I kept the same angles, intensity and custom color settings.

I’ll also admit that I updated the textures a little bit here with Anagenessis on the figures to give the figures more depth.

Now with the image lit and rendering to the point I was happy enough for this opinion piece I tossed it in Photoshop for a little touch up on the levels and exposure for the final image below:

Hope you’ve enjoyed this dive into how I lit “Bump in the Night.”  If you have any thoughts leave a comment below.

Tom

Now I’m looking for excuses to use The Mad Lab in images.  Oh, a villainous master-mind has captured the hero and is about to perform something heinous, the evil doctor is animating the ultimate soldier, using just parts of this for that steampunk mad-scientist’s lair. The list is practically building itself. I could see this showing up in my Horror or Sci-Fi galleries soon.

So what makes this set so great? Why am I praising it?

Packed to the gills, for SCIENCE!

First, like the caption says. Look at all that stuff. And, that ain’t even all of it!  The Mad Lab is packed to the gills in goodies, gear and SCIENCE!

Almost every major piece of equipment is a separate prop and loaded into the scene as needed.  That’s one downside, no single pre-load scene file that loads the lab. But, I think that was okay as I didn’t have room for everything and the camera.  So you can custom build your lab as needed.

Also, another downside for me was that by default the only textures I found available were some pre-Iray shader/textures. This was easy to solve by passing The Mad Lab set through RSSY 3Delight to Iray Converter.

After that I had to adjust a few of the sparks and glass. In fact, most of the lighting for these preview images are from the sparks being set to emitters.

What does this comes with? 

• The room, with a upper gangway and stairs
  • Each wall can be hidden, or not loaded, for camera angels
• Multiple props, each meticulously designed
  • The central table and arch has a table that raises, lowers, spins. And the lightning arcs are morphable to be shaped how you want.
  • The large capacitor and machine banks, where the levers can be posed in a variety of flipped positions.
  • A wicked looking control console with more Tesla sparking.

What doesn’t this set have?

• Iray Shaders.  This would be a major pain without a fast converter. 
• Poses. A lot of people want poses with their sets. This one doesn’t need them.
• Price. When not on sale this thing is $39.95!!! Probably wouldn’t pick it up for that price.

In general I would pick this up if you like the old horror films, noir or need mad science in your life. But, given how niche it is only if you find it on sale.

There were a few reasons for this.

The first and foremost is my wife’s genealogy site was killing GoDaddy’s hosting solution. In my search for another host I found HostGator and saw their cloud hosting package with far more resources and unlimited domain hosting!

Wait, what? Say it’s not true. I could move both her site, mine, and a few others to a faster more robust hosting solution for like two dollars more than I was paying to just host two of the them?! Sold.

One of the best damn hosts I’ve worked with!

Tom – “The Crown”

Only problem, in my excitement and getting the big multi-gig genealogy site properly migrated I failed to do so for my personal one (Hint: you are here). Now, for anyone looking for a new host they offer a single domain free migration based on the package. That went pretty seamless for the wife’s site.  I just forgot to export and back up everything from the old host for CrownDigitalArt before redirecting the DNS. 

So what does that make this? An opportunity to redesign the site.

• Redesigned Galleries – Using Envira Gallery
• Optimized Gallery Categories
  • Cheesecake – Where the skin is teased
  • Fantasy – Anything alt-history or involving mystical elements
  • Horror – Where dark things and fears tread
  • Humor – A touch of lightheartedness 
  • Monsters – Could be Fantasy, or Horror or even Sci-Fi but if there is a monster it will be here.
  • Sci-Fi – Super Science and the Future live here.
• Product Reviews
• Freebie Reviews
• Behind the scenes of my scenes

I promise to keep this updated and relevant going forward with only some of the best pieces from my Deviant Art account. Which is where you can go to see pretty much everything.