Redhead, 2005 (my first full ochre piece)
What made you decide to start a blog? If you’ve blogged about this before, go back and read it. Is that still the reason? What’s changed?
[From Topic: Why did you start? | The Daily Post at WordPress.com]
I started a blog because I was bored and in pain and everyone was doing it. no seriously! before I had heard about blogging as a marketing tool, before I rediscovered my art, I was in a bizarre limbo state as part of my dealing with my pain and the loss of my job and ability to work a full time desk job ever again. I oscillated between different varieties of denial and came up with a million random entrepreneurial ideas (I suffer from chronic entrepreneuritis – symptoms include glassy expression, a constant flow of business ideas, inventions, books, applications.. anything you can create a business around. I get it from my dad) and decided to write a book. my blog was a way for me to get those book ideas down, and to be emo and stuff. but I didn’t like being all emo and whingey and I really didn’t like writing a book! so I started painting again to while away the hours, and blogged about that instead. you can see the blog click over from random nothings to art and how excited I was about it all! it turns out, the more I experimented with painting and enjoyed myself, the less pain I felt. and sharing with the world enabled me to create the career I have today.
sometimes I wonder about taking down those old posts, they’re a long way from where I’ve come today, and I worry that they aren’t in keeping with my “brand” but I look back fondly on them, they’re part of my journey. this blog is the history of my career from the beginning, an online visual diary and a fun diversion. I lost some aspects of that along the way, but I’m hoping to recapture some of the best aspects again.
I’ve come a long way!
Over to you- why did you start a blog?
Jennie's Palette 
My reason for a blog was simple: I wanted to create a community of Poser shader folk, one that would be keen to examine existing shaders, invoke some of what we’ve learned from the Poser shader guru Bagginsbill about what should and should not happen in a shader, like:
–diffuse_value should never be set to 1… nothing diffuses at 100%)
and:
–always untick the Refl_lite_mult channel on the Poser material room PoserSurface node: it does no good and untold harm to your renders
etc, and develop really good shaders for just about any Poser surface one could imagine. There’s heaps of stuff like that in the Poser forums on Renderosity. He introduced gamma-correcting colours for the renderer, and how to create materials based on real-world properties like IOR, which can be entered into Python and compiled into Poser mt5 materials.
No one has bitten, though. I think the whole concept is all a bit too daunting.
Niche blogs are always a great idea 🙂 but I have to admit, I only know DS shader settings, and even then, the shader baker is pretty arcane! I sometimes think if I knew the poser shader settings better I could tweak the preset poser shaders for DS, but usually someone beats me to it. it’s funny how different poser and Daz are, and the users for that matter!
have you set up affiliate earnings? Content Paradise and SmithMicro both have programs. I find my affiliate programs help keep my energies up when posting arcane things! 😉
I agree with you, Jennie: Daz Shaders (and DazStudio3Advanced’s Shader Mixer, which is meant to somewhat answer for Poser’s material room) are quite arcane, and badly documented. The issue is that people create Daz shaders (as they do Poser shaders) by connecting nodes and eyeballing the effect. This can be problematic because if the shader has no basis (mathematics/physics) in reality, a different lighting will expose that shader as not quite right.
I don’t pretend I know the secret formula to physically-correct shader development… heavens no. 😐 A dear friend of mine (fellow Poser user, but she’s a maths whiz!) is teaching me how to approach problem-solving with maths in order to develop materials that will display/render correctly in any light, but given my seemingly genetic resistance to maths, it’s uphill work.
Good job I’ve got that book by Danica McKellar “Kiss My Math” to get me through the fundamentals. LOL
Um, I actually do have an affiliate program set up with Rendo, but I’m pretty sure that most Poser users would find their time better invested looking for the rare and elusive “Make Art” button rather than discuss shader development, neither Rendo nor I will see much traffic generated… LOL You have a more mainstream approach to DS, which is a good thing, and just what the community needs. Oh, and I really find your artwork fresh and strong… it’s quite clear just even at a glance that 3D is just one facet of your creativity. Well done on the site as well!
Thankyou so much! I know, the crazy make art button drives everyone in 3D, there’s truly no such thing in any art form!
I see where Daz were going with the shader mixer, but it isn’t there yet.. it’s pretty interesting and powerful and I’m sure I’ll take the time to work it out one day… when I have time.. and can be bothered.. 😛
The maths involved in the Poser shaders just baffles me! I’m glad that 3D is just a pathway to my art so that I don’t need to work out the more complex parts of the equation! good on you for trying to demystify it for the rest of us! 😀
Hi … just a quick note, Jennie, sorry to be monopolising your blog with my observations. As you know, the Pret-A-3D plugin Reality has provided DS users the option to use a different renderer: LuxRender. What you might not be aware of is that there is a similar application available now for Poser users: Pose2Lux. It is still in Beta, but promises to be quite a powerful alternative to Reality, and the price is more in line with what hobbyists can afford: it is free. Originally developed by odf, Bagginsbill and ADP, the project came to a standstill (for a number of reasons) until SnarlyGribbly took up the challenge.
So now Poser users can enjoy what DS have access to.
Are the renders better? I think that technique, lighting and materials knowledge will play a role. Here is a link to an image rendered in PoserPro 2010:
… and the same image (roughly) rendered in LuxRender:
There’s a lot less material work done in the latter: still a lot to learn. But it is exciting, nevertheless.
I’ve used reality for DS and it truly does do some wonderful things, my system just cannot handle it! But I think physics based rendering is definitely the way to go for the best results, the treatment of materials is so superior, it’s the closest to a make art button- except for the hardware needs and the new lighting learning curve that is!