"The Admiration of His Majesty"
Baldur's Gate 3 fanart of Astarion with His Majesty. Thank the gods Larian returned him to his hairless glory!
I may or may not totally have it in my head that Astarion insisted on going back for His Majesty at some point. <<
Tools used -
Daz Studio
Photoshop
NO AI EVER
DeviantArt
Instagram
Twitter
4K notes
·
View notes
Meanwhile, at the digital art end of things...
Here's another shot of that Magic Room set that I'm about to kitbash/rebuild into a bedchamber.
I'll be stripping all the contents out before I get started. But let me add a couple of human figures first for scale...
...as they're going to be the ones using this bedroom most. —Yes, other members of their marriage will be there often enough. But this is a working family, and the other spouses frequently have other places they need to be.
The initial problem becomes immediately apparent: this space is way too big for a bedroom, even for a king. And with ceilings that high, it'd be hell to heat with just one fireplace. Sure, there'll routinely be at least one magic-worker in the bed at any given time, but why should they have to constantly be spending useful lifeforce on room heating? (Or wasting power on anything besides the things one goes to bed to do.*)
So: time to throw everything out and deal with the scale issues of the main structure.
From the outside, here's what the room structure looks like.
If there's a problem with this, it's that the maker has built it all in one piece. You can't pull annoying chunks off it and get rid of them, or substitute others in their place. But (the flip side of this coin) it is possible to rescale the structure as a whole.
So what I propose to do is squash the room flatter, thereby shifting the shape of those arches somewhat, but also lowering the ceiling. I can also decrease the length of the room somewhat. The combined reductions along the X and Y axes should render the room's proportions a bit more snug and liveable: roomy enough for a Middle Kingdoms family bedchamber, but not a great hollow echoing space that can't be comfortably filled except by sending out to USC or someplace similar for a marching band.
So let's throw all the extraneous furniture out. And (after this shot) the chandeliers. No need for them: this isn't a public space, and the intended resizing would screw up their proportions anyway.
Now we start squeezing the structure into better dimensions. Reducing the room on the X axis (to about 80% of its original length)...
... then on the Y axis, making the ceiling about 30% lower...
... and then widening the Z axis out to 20% or so wider than previously.
So that's a start.
Now about twenty different things have to happen to this space, including fixing the lighting (which got knocked out of kilter by the various resizings, as you can see), hiding unwanted objects like that staircase, changing various materials—such as the floor, which before has always been European-medieval style encaustic tile, so that's what it'll be again—reshaping the head of the bed into something more neo-Gothic (probably in Blender) to reflect the arches, installation of the necessary fireplace, and loading in much old furniture from other renders. (As it happens, this detail's canonical. The other main characters have started teasing Freelorn about Kynall castle's endlessly recycled furniture—especially those beds still equipped with mattresses so old that Héalhra Whitemane himself might have slept on them.)
Anyway, not going to bore anyone still reading this with any further process, except to say that the reworked room features the pale-colored marbles quarried all over that part of Arlen, as well as whitestave wood, used extensively in the Castle and nearby official buildings for its durability and its ancient associations with the Lion and Arlene royalty.
So this is what's in place at the moment, at least down at the bed end. Yet to come: more hangings, more furniture, better bed linens, clothes-presses and bookshelves, clothes thrown over chairs, etc etc...
And at the fireplace end:
More texture and detail work to do down at this end as well; as well as tuning the firelight (always a nuisance). ...A job for another day.
Meanwhile, turned around the bed-facing camera just in front of the fireplace, and found myself regarding a not-too-bad reverse angle.
(eyeroll) These two idiots. :)
*Like sleep. ...Or, yeah, okay, other things. (shrug/grin)
160 notes
·
View notes
"Welcome home, Detective..."
I'm always up for a little gender fuckery, so here's Connor and a fem RK800, Corinne waiting to welcome home their favorite detective.
That or Connor figured out how to run two bodies at once as a surprise heh
65 notes
·
View notes
@raenegade-accio and I talked about how Wren could use a little of Hellendil's calm vibes to offset the chaos of their friend group and he in turn could use a little more of their chaos. She told me Wren would totally want to put flowers in his hair and make flower crowns for them both, so I had to make it happen. ☺️❤️
I am so sorry this took so long to finish, but I love them so much!
42 notes
·
View notes
Hey @rembrandtswife: Re: "that armor Herewiss is wearing"...
...over here? Yeah, it is nice, isn't it!
Here's a test shot I did shortly after I acquired it a couple/few years ago. (ETA: re-rendered just now to fix a problem with Dusty's armor's skirt, and to make Segnbora's hair look a little less like she just got out of the hairdresser covered in hairspray.) They're both wearing the men's version of the armor; the women's version gets very boob-plate-y, depending on the character's chest measurements, and I don't hold with that kind of armor design. It's a one-way path to serious chest injury, and no one who routinely engaged in sword fighting would wear something so misguided more than once.
This armor is a welcome relief from the usual hilariously (or tragically) overstated, over-ornamented, badly designed crap. Alas, Daz3D is, in way too many cases, the House of Idiotic Armor. (There are 36 pages of it here, and some of it just hurts my brains to look at.)
This harness simply pretty much covers you in the places you want covered while you're busy with the thinking parts of fighting. And even magic-workers like these two would, when going into battle, wisely prefer to be wearing something that doesn't require time off their lifespans to protect them—as would either sorcery or the Fire—and won't become ineffective should their concentration slip while dealing with other issues.
Also, the texture is pleasant. It looks like this armor's been around the block a few times. (As for the loincloths, they're a little silly, but it's easy enough to render an image without them being visible.)
So, definitely a keeper: and recommended for other Daz Studio users.
68 notes
·
View notes