It's been a while since my last entry... and there are a few entries overdue since then.
I'm still here, alive and well... it's just work has been keeping me busy, life outside work has been pretty hectic as well and there are also "distractions" that are keeping me from starting a new project.
But things have slowed down, at least for now... and I'm working on something now. Dunno how long it will take, but if I don't get it done before Christmas I may have to put it off until February or March next year.
But I'll see what I can do.
2008年11月29日土曜日
2008年8月26日火曜日
2008年8月10日日曜日
2008年7月31日木曜日
Waiting 4 paycheck
I'm in Osaka now. Here to meet those guys we work with. Haven't had a chance to do any work on my render but rest assured it should be done and up by next week.
Haven't checked my account balance yet, but my pay should be in at least by this weekend. Which I really hope, because there's this gadget that I wanna buy and I gotta buy "omiyage" for Simona and my family before I go back. I also wanna go to Nipponbashi and shop around, maybe even buy Soul Calibur IV.
Speaking of which, I went to the arcade with my friend the other day and played Tekken 6. Damn that's one sweet game. Making me reconsider buying PS3 also, since it's not gonna be released on 360. I had the chance to play with Anna and Nina, my favorite characters, and to check out their costumes. The console version I heard allows extensive character customization, although it's not out yet, but man... I gotta get my hands on that.
Yeah, just meaningless babble this time. Can't wait to finish my work so that I can concentrate on other things.
Haven't checked my account balance yet, but my pay should be in at least by this weekend. Which I really hope, because there's this gadget that I wanna buy and I gotta buy "omiyage" for Simona and my family before I go back. I also wanna go to Nipponbashi and shop around, maybe even buy Soul Calibur IV.
Speaking of which, I went to the arcade with my friend the other day and played Tekken 6. Damn that's one sweet game. Making me reconsider buying PS3 also, since it's not gonna be released on 360. I had the chance to play with Anna and Nina, my favorite characters, and to check out their costumes. The console version I heard allows extensive character customization, although it's not out yet, but man... I gotta get my hands on that.
Yeah, just meaningless babble this time. Can't wait to finish my work so that I can concentrate on other things.
2008年7月17日木曜日
2008年7月14日月曜日
Real busy... but another render's coming up
Yeah, after that snag with my harddrive problem things have been quite hectic at work.
I'm quite depressed now about something, mostly about this big decision that I have to make regarding my career. But that's not the only thing that's on my plate...
but enough about that, this isn't the place to be bitching about it. It's a different blog.
There was nothing wrong with my harddrive by the way, I took it to the shop and all they did was swap the wiring. It appeared the harddisk was drawing power directly from the cooling fan, that explained why it experienced a slow-down and eventually shut down. Yeah, I don't know... that's what they told me anyway, didn't even charge me for anything so that was good. But one thing for sure, I had to reinstall everything, including windows... took me half a day to do that.
Well, as far as rendering and postworking go, I don't think I can ever stop doing. It's good practice for my real job and I derive a great deal of pleasure from doing them too. Unfortunately free time is a luxury I don't have often these days.
I'm anxious to start working on episode 2 of 'Nina vs. Anna'. But ideas are still brewing in the cauldron right now, such as possible poses, camera angles... I had a pretty good idea before about how I want to conclude the story. But seeing how the first episode turned out, I scrapped the original idea because it would be a snooze compared to that. The conclusion has to be at least more "explosive" than the beginning.
But another work is nearing completion now. It's a project I abandoned months ago, I gave it up not because I lost interest, but because I couldn't find any conforming clothing that would agree with the posing of the figures. A solution is to paint the clothing free hand, but I didn't have the skills back then... Even now it's not perfect by any means, but it's good practice and practice makes perfect.
Yeah, it should provide a good "interlude" between Nina vs. Anna episodes 1 and 2.
I'm quite depressed now about something, mostly about this big decision that I have to make regarding my career. But that's not the only thing that's on my plate...
but enough about that, this isn't the place to be bitching about it. It's a different blog.
There was nothing wrong with my harddrive by the way, I took it to the shop and all they did was swap the wiring. It appeared the harddisk was drawing power directly from the cooling fan, that explained why it experienced a slow-down and eventually shut down. Yeah, I don't know... that's what they told me anyway, didn't even charge me for anything so that was good. But one thing for sure, I had to reinstall everything, including windows... took me half a day to do that.
Well, as far as rendering and postworking go, I don't think I can ever stop doing. It's good practice for my real job and I derive a great deal of pleasure from doing them too. Unfortunately free time is a luxury I don't have often these days.
I'm anxious to start working on episode 2 of 'Nina vs. Anna'. But ideas are still brewing in the cauldron right now, such as possible poses, camera angles... I had a pretty good idea before about how I want to conclude the story. But seeing how the first episode turned out, I scrapped the original idea because it would be a snooze compared to that. The conclusion has to be at least more "explosive" than the beginning.
But another work is nearing completion now. It's a project I abandoned months ago, I gave it up not because I lost interest, but because I couldn't find any conforming clothing that would agree with the posing of the figures. A solution is to paint the clothing free hand, but I didn't have the skills back then... Even now it's not perfect by any means, but it's good practice and practice makes perfect.
Yeah, it should provide a good "interlude" between Nina vs. Anna episodes 1 and 2.
2008年7月7日月曜日
my HD's busted! (again)
Crap, crap, crap, crap, crap!!!!!!!
FUUUUU!"#$"$&#$&#&($#"#$k!
What the hell happened???
My HD suddenly stopped working! I just replaced it last April, God... The last one stuffed up the same way too. Is this typical of SATA harddisks?
First everything slows down to a crawl, even opening "my computer" takes a full 10 seconds. I thought I had a virus... my task manager showed very little CPU activity, below 50%, so if a process isn't what's slowing it down, something must've gone horribly wrong with the hardware.
Tried scanning my disks, but no virus was found. Everything started to fall apart when I restarted Windows. It just went downhill from there on.
Now it's completely dead... piece of junk! Well my last harddisk lasted for 3.5 years... that's not bad, but this one is barely out of its packaging! It's ridiculous, I hope I'm still covered by the warranty.
Everything was fine until yesterday, I didn't do anything out of the ordinary such as kick my CPU or spit on it. Did my new PC configuration have anything to do with it, I wonder. It shouldn't... since when is upgrading your PC hazardous to your harddrive???
SATA's the way to go they say... IDE's era is over, they say. I never had this kinda problem back when I was using IDE.
This is bullshit. I gotta take it to the shop tomorrow afterwork or I won't be able to finish my assignment. At least I didn't save it on that damn thing, in fact I haven't installed that many applications yet... which is a blessing in disguise that the HD broke now rather than later, I guess. But still it's such a hassle to reinstall windows again. I just did that a few days ago!!! (sob)
Can't do my office shit on my notebook, that's for sure.
FUUUUU!"#$"$&#$&#&($#"#$k!
What the hell happened???
My HD suddenly stopped working! I just replaced it last April, God... The last one stuffed up the same way too. Is this typical of SATA harddisks?
First everything slows down to a crawl, even opening "my computer" takes a full 10 seconds. I thought I had a virus... my task manager showed very little CPU activity, below 50%, so if a process isn't what's slowing it down, something must've gone horribly wrong with the hardware.
Tried scanning my disks, but no virus was found. Everything started to fall apart when I restarted Windows. It just went downhill from there on.
Now it's completely dead... piece of junk! Well my last harddisk lasted for 3.5 years... that's not bad, but this one is barely out of its packaging! It's ridiculous, I hope I'm still covered by the warranty.
Everything was fine until yesterday, I didn't do anything out of the ordinary such as kick my CPU or spit on it. Did my new PC configuration have anything to do with it, I wonder. It shouldn't... since when is upgrading your PC hazardous to your harddrive???
SATA's the way to go they say... IDE's era is over, they say. I never had this kinda problem back when I was using IDE.
This is bullshit. I gotta take it to the shop tomorrow afterwork or I won't be able to finish my assignment. At least I didn't save it on that damn thing, in fact I haven't installed that many applications yet... which is a blessing in disguise that the HD broke now rather than later, I guess. But still it's such a hassle to reinstall windows again. I just did that a few days ago!!! (sob)
Can't do my office shit on my notebook, that's for sure.
2008年7月3日木曜日
Nina vs. Anna Gangbang pt.1 (technotes & thoughts)
Direct link:
http://www.renderotica.com/modules.php?name=My_eGallery&file=index&do=showpic&search_type=artist&search_var=kikuchi&pid=208142&orderby=dateD
*Thoughts / ideas:
I've had the idea for quite some time. Wanted to make something featuring the two sisters, either beating each other up senseless over some guy while he watches in horror or going down on each other, that kind of theme, but it wasn't going to be a gangbang. The gangbang idea came because I'd wanted to try a crowd scene in D/S. My last one was done in Poser7, it was a lot of hardwork.
I thought since this was my last render on this machine before I upgraded it, I'd give it a grand exit by making this a crowd scene.
This project took about a month to complete. I usually didn't have more than 2 hours daily to work on it.
*Composition:
Done entirely in DAZ Studio 2.2. Took me around 10-15 hours to compose the scene, experiment with the lighting as well as textures. It wasn't bad, not once did the program crash, but it did gradually slow down to a crawl as the number of figures increased. The way to remedy it was to turn off visibility on any figure that I wasn't working on. The file takes about 1-1.5 hour to load and 30 minutes to save in the end. The latest version of D/S is undoubtedly the most stable version from my experience.
*Rendering:
I thought it would take me at least half a day to render but it ended up taking 3 days! Well, the rendering process itself took only about an hour actually... which was very surprising, with so many figures on screen at one time, I'd expected to make a few separate renders and combine them later in postwork. Poser would either have refused the rendering job right off the bat on my machine or crashed in mid-render, but D/S took it like a brisk walk on a sunny afternoon. Until the slap in the face came.
I'm sure it was a memory problem. D/S did okay completing the render, but I got an error message saying "unable to save render to blablabla..." when it had finished rendering. I couldn't even use "save last render" - that function became disabled. So basically it was wasted. Well, if at first you don't succeed, what do you do? You try again... differently of course.
This is where D/S crashed a number of times, leaving me no other choice but to close and reload the scene again and again. So it's an hour of loading, another hour of rendering... crash... close program, open program, load the scene... wait an hour... tweak-tweak... render... wait another hour... oh it still wouldn't save, try again... f@#k! it crashed again, so I gotta do it all over again. This vicious cycle continued for 3 days, if I didn't have to go to work and feed my household, maybe it wouldn't have been that long. I was so frustrated but I wasn't gonna give up.
I even thought, maybe I should postpone it until after I've upgraded my PC, but nah... Did I try reducing the render size? Of course I did, but I didn't want to go below 3500px. I started with 4000px, because I just knew this particular project would require a lot of postwork, so I needed a lot of room for error.
Then I don't know what happened on that fateful day, I was just about to give in and reduce the render size further to 3000px... but no lower, I'd even decided to do separate renders with fewer figures and combine them later in postwork. But on that fateful render, the condition must've been right... it successfully rendered and saved the file!!! I was ecstatic, I must've tweaked the right thing. But what the f@#$ was it??? Who cares?! At least I won't have to go through that ordeal anymore.
*Postwork:
It's divided into 2 stages, stage one is fixing the final render, smoothing out jagged edges, correcting the figures' body proportions, and reshaping them if necessary; enhancing the lighting and color tones. Stage one took about maybe 6 hours.
Then stage two is where the fun begins. Drawing the costumes on the two girls, giving each individual special treatment so that everyone is unique. The trick is to make the two sisters, Nina and Anna, being the stars of the show, stand out among the sea of guys. I wanted each guy to be noticeable too, but not so much that they blend with the two girls, or too less that they blend with the background. stage 2 took me probably about 10 hours... just can't rush these things.
*Notes on the Williams' costumes:
Yes, yes I know... all you Tekken fans, Nina usually wears a pair of combat boots, not high heels. I originally had her wearing boots, tried different kinds too, but boots made her look tough and just somehow not fit well with the theme. She is supposed to be a tough character, I wanted to convey that but at the same time I wanted her to still look feminine. So I went with the high-heel boots, she did wear those in at least one of the Tekken instalments, but I forgot which one. Her arm protectors/sleeves always change in design with each game, this one is based on the ones she wore in Tekken 4 minus the gloves. I didn't think I should give her anything else to wear (lol) as she should be identifiable enough by Tekken players this way.
Anna's costume is based on her Tekken 6 costume. She always wore gloves for her primary costume, but in the older games they look like they're made out of velvety material. I chose the fishnet with floral design from her latest costume because it was challenging to do; the same also with her panty hose.
I wanted to include her trademark 'qipao' (chinese dress) also, but really there was just no more room, it would only make the scene look very busy. Well, at least I wanted to include her ribbon just to add in the familiar factor. Plus it's so cute, I love it on womens qipao, kimono or yukata.
Except for their shoes, every article of the Williams sisters' clothing are hand-painted in CS2. Oh, also the jade necklace that the 2nd guy from the left is wearing, that's not a prop, that's added in postwork.
http://www.renderotica.com/modules.php?name=My_eGallery&file=index&do=showpic&search_type=artist&search_var=kikuchi&pid=208142&orderby=dateD
*Thoughts / ideas:
I've had the idea for quite some time. Wanted to make something featuring the two sisters, either beating each other up senseless over some guy while he watches in horror or going down on each other, that kind of theme, but it wasn't going to be a gangbang. The gangbang idea came because I'd wanted to try a crowd scene in D/S. My last one was done in Poser7, it was a lot of hardwork.
I thought since this was my last render on this machine before I upgraded it, I'd give it a grand exit by making this a crowd scene.
This project took about a month to complete. I usually didn't have more than 2 hours daily to work on it.
*Composition:
Done entirely in DAZ Studio 2.2. Took me around 10-15 hours to compose the scene, experiment with the lighting as well as textures. It wasn't bad, not once did the program crash, but it did gradually slow down to a crawl as the number of figures increased. The way to remedy it was to turn off visibility on any figure that I wasn't working on. The file takes about 1-1.5 hour to load and 30 minutes to save in the end. The latest version of D/S is undoubtedly the most stable version from my experience.
*Rendering:
I thought it would take me at least half a day to render but it ended up taking 3 days! Well, the rendering process itself took only about an hour actually... which was very surprising, with so many figures on screen at one time, I'd expected to make a few separate renders and combine them later in postwork. Poser would either have refused the rendering job right off the bat on my machine or crashed in mid-render, but D/S took it like a brisk walk on a sunny afternoon. Until the slap in the face came.
I'm sure it was a memory problem. D/S did okay completing the render, but I got an error message saying "unable to save render to blablabla..." when it had finished rendering. I couldn't even use "save last render" - that function became disabled. So basically it was wasted. Well, if at first you don't succeed, what do you do? You try again... differently of course.
This is where D/S crashed a number of times, leaving me no other choice but to close and reload the scene again and again. So it's an hour of loading, another hour of rendering... crash... close program, open program, load the scene... wait an hour... tweak-tweak... render... wait another hour... oh it still wouldn't save, try again... f@#k! it crashed again, so I gotta do it all over again. This vicious cycle continued for 3 days, if I didn't have to go to work and feed my household, maybe it wouldn't have been that long. I was so frustrated but I wasn't gonna give up.
I even thought, maybe I should postpone it until after I've upgraded my PC, but nah... Did I try reducing the render size? Of course I did, but I didn't want to go below 3500px. I started with 4000px, because I just knew this particular project would require a lot of postwork, so I needed a lot of room for error.
Then I don't know what happened on that fateful day, I was just about to give in and reduce the render size further to 3000px... but no lower, I'd even decided to do separate renders with fewer figures and combine them later in postwork. But on that fateful render, the condition must've been right... it successfully rendered and saved the file!!! I was ecstatic, I must've tweaked the right thing. But what the f@#$ was it??? Who cares?! At least I won't have to go through that ordeal anymore.
*Postwork:
It's divided into 2 stages, stage one is fixing the final render, smoothing out jagged edges, correcting the figures' body proportions, and reshaping them if necessary; enhancing the lighting and color tones. Stage one took about maybe 6 hours.
Then stage two is where the fun begins. Drawing the costumes on the two girls, giving each individual special treatment so that everyone is unique. The trick is to make the two sisters, Nina and Anna, being the stars of the show, stand out among the sea of guys. I wanted each guy to be noticeable too, but not so much that they blend with the two girls, or too less that they blend with the background. stage 2 took me probably about 10 hours... just can't rush these things.
*Notes on the Williams' costumes:
Yes, yes I know... all you Tekken fans, Nina usually wears a pair of combat boots, not high heels. I originally had her wearing boots, tried different kinds too, but boots made her look tough and just somehow not fit well with the theme. She is supposed to be a tough character, I wanted to convey that but at the same time I wanted her to still look feminine. So I went with the high-heel boots, she did wear those in at least one of the Tekken instalments, but I forgot which one. Her arm protectors/sleeves always change in design with each game, this one is based on the ones she wore in Tekken 4 minus the gloves. I didn't think I should give her anything else to wear (lol) as she should be identifiable enough by Tekken players this way.
Anna's costume is based on her Tekken 6 costume. She always wore gloves for her primary costume, but in the older games they look like they're made out of velvety material. I chose the fishnet with floral design from her latest costume because it was challenging to do; the same also with her panty hose.
I wanted to include her trademark 'qipao' (chinese dress) also, but really there was just no more room, it would only make the scene look very busy. Well, at least I wanted to include her ribbon just to add in the familiar factor. Plus it's so cute, I love it on womens qipao, kimono or yukata.
Except for their shoes, every article of the Williams sisters' clothing are hand-painted in CS2. Oh, also the jade necklace that the 2nd guy from the left is wearing, that's not a prop, that's added in postwork.
2008年7月2日水曜日
new pc, but
Upgraded my PC, finally...
But, but I ended up having to reinstall Windows again because some programs suddenly stopped working. Tried everything I could think of to remedy the situation, but it looks like the only sure way is to install fresh. Such a hassle.
I sort of expected it though, and it's perhaps a good idea too installing fresh Windows onto a new configuration.
Anyway, it's gonna be sometime before I'm gonna be up and running again.
Thank God I have my external harddrive and laptop... also am I glad I didn't save all my work files on my desktop PC. If I lost my current project my boss would have my head for sure.
I'll write them notes on my latest work soon.
But, but I ended up having to reinstall Windows again because some programs suddenly stopped working. Tried everything I could think of to remedy the situation, but it looks like the only sure way is to install fresh. Such a hassle.
I sort of expected it though, and it's perhaps a good idea too installing fresh Windows onto a new configuration.
Anyway, it's gonna be sometime before I'm gonna be up and running again.
Thank God I have my external harddrive and laptop... also am I glad I didn't save all my work files on my desktop PC. If I lost my current project my boss would have my head for sure.
I'll write them notes on my latest work soon.
2008年7月1日火曜日
It's finally done! (Nina&Anna part 1)
Yeah, my latest work. Starring Nina and Anna Williams from the Tekken series.
Took me a month to finish it...
It's finally done, and posted it successfuly.
Two actually, I decided to post 2 versions of it, the partially nude and fully nude versions.
I put in lots of hours in drawing their costumes but I like the nude version as well.
It's my last render on this machine.
I'm having it upgraded sometime this week (yaaay, finally!).
I thought I'd do something big with it before upgrading, really push its capabilities to their limits.
I've always wanted to try a crowd scene with DAZ Studio. A few times it did go beyond its limits and boy what a pain when that happened.
Can't wait to see what I'll be able to do when my machine's upgraded. I think for what I have in store for part 2, I'm gonna need a hell of a lot of computing power.
I already have a few more render ideas, but I just want to take a break now.
Took me a month to finish it...
It's finally done, and posted it successfuly.
Two actually, I decided to post 2 versions of it, the partially nude and fully nude versions.
I put in lots of hours in drawing their costumes but I like the nude version as well.
It's my last render on this machine.
I'm having it upgraded sometime this week (yaaay, finally!).
I thought I'd do something big with it before upgrading, really push its capabilities to their limits.
I've always wanted to try a crowd scene with DAZ Studio. A few times it did go beyond its limits and boy what a pain when that happened.
Can't wait to see what I'll be able to do when my machine's upgraded. I think for what I have in store for part 2, I'm gonna need a hell of a lot of computing power.
I already have a few more render ideas, but I just want to take a break now.
2008年6月26日木曜日
Intro
Hi, call me Kikuchi.
Some of you must've arrived here from seeing my works on Renderotica.
and the rest of you... should (lol)
Thank you for all your kind words, praises and votes.
I've received a lot of questions surrounding Poser, DAZ Studio, etc and Postworking. Some of you even suggested that I write about my projects in a blog, so here it is.
Please note that I'm no expert in those programs. I do have a lot of experience working with them, that's what I can share with you. I have been forced to dwelve into the technical stuff, mainly because I like taking on big challenges even when I had my old, slow PC. I've had to tweak settings, compromize and try out different things, and achieved successfully what some artists claim to be impossible even on high-end machines.
Let me tell you something, nothing is impossible when it comes to creation, if you're passionate enough about what you do. There are always ways to make things work, you just have to have the patience to find it and determination to finish what you started. I'm sure George Lucas and Thomas Edison would agree.
This blog is intended to share some of the frustration, confusion, fatigue from working with the aforementioned programs, as well as discoveries, technical workaround, and of course the joy and satisfaction when the work is finished. A lot of times the results don't exactly turn out the way I originally picture them in my mind, but they're always better. And I only display my work if I myself am satisfied with it.
So be seeing you, happy rendering and viewing.
Some of you must've arrived here from seeing my works on Renderotica.
and the rest of you... should (lol)
Thank you for all your kind words, praises and votes.
I've received a lot of questions surrounding Poser, DAZ Studio, etc and Postworking. Some of you even suggested that I write about my projects in a blog, so here it is.
Please note that I'm no expert in those programs. I do have a lot of experience working with them, that's what I can share with you. I have been forced to dwelve into the technical stuff, mainly because I like taking on big challenges even when I had my old, slow PC. I've had to tweak settings, compromize and try out different things, and achieved successfully what some artists claim to be impossible even on high-end machines.
Let me tell you something, nothing is impossible when it comes to creation, if you're passionate enough about what you do. There are always ways to make things work, you just have to have the patience to find it and determination to finish what you started. I'm sure George Lucas and Thomas Edison would agree.
This blog is intended to share some of the frustration, confusion, fatigue from working with the aforementioned programs, as well as discoveries, technical workaround, and of course the joy and satisfaction when the work is finished. A lot of times the results don't exactly turn out the way I originally picture them in my mind, but they're always better. And I only display my work if I myself am satisfied with it.
So be seeing you, happy rendering and viewing.
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