I've been wanting to get into 3D modeling for years but the software needed to do it is crazy expensive. I’d love to use Poser. It looks amazing, but it’s $300 bucks. My threshold for software is around the $200 mark. After that, then it gets hard for me to justify the purchase. There’s also ZBrush. It’s $700 and looks like the most amazing piece of software money can buy. I’ve wanted it since I found out about it around 2006, but I could never justify that kind of money for software.

I’ve played around with some of the open source alternatives like Blender and Makehuman. Blender is amazing, but there’s definitely a learning curve. I played around with Makehuman when it was in beta, but I wasn’t happy with the results. They’ve come a very long way since those beta days, so it’s probably worth checking out again.

I found DAZ Studio yesterday. It's amazing. And it's free! Their whole deal is to give you the software for free with the hopes that you'll buy content and plugins, etc. Sounds like a good business model because I can see myself getting hooked on this.

If the splash screen gives any indication as to what you can do with it, then I’m already impressed.



You start out with a 3D model. Just a plain character.



You can pose it anyway you want. Everything is fully moveable and customizable. You can tweak the facial features as well as, ahem, everything else.



You can configure you light sources. There’s many to choose from: spotlight, point light, etc



I then rendered the image to see what it’ll look like.



It takes some getting used to and it's definitely not a matter of just clicking a few buttons and you have a perfect model. It took me hours of experimentation and learning to arrive at this render.

I experimented with some of the built in backdrops and props that came bundled with the software. You can create the entire scene within the software if you have all the assets. This is where the money comes in. You can buy pretty much anything you can image and pop it into your scene. Not to mention, there’s no shortage of 3D-share sites where people just give away there digital creations. Everything from clothes, to hair, to props.



I’m probably just going to add some smoke or something to the background, so I can do that in post-processing. I continued to tweak and adjust until I had something cool. This jacket seemed kind of cool, but the collar passed through her right cheek.



There was no way to get around it without moving her head and hand. I really didn’t want to do that, so I settled for a different jacket.



Being happy with it, I exported the model to a 2D graphic and brought it into Pixelmator for a little post-production work.



I drew in a layer of smoke.



I then duplicated the smoke layer and changed the color, added some blurry effects, tweaked the brightness, etc.



I then added some more colored smoke to the foreground to give it some depth.



I then drew in a glass sphere. It’s basically just a white circle with the center erased with a soft brush.



I then added some cool sun bursts, some color, and some blur for the finishing touch.



Here’s the final image:



From start to finish, it took about 6 hours to create. Not bad since this is the first time I’ve created something. Like I said before, I’ve played with the likes of Makehuman and Blender, but I never got to the point where I actually rendered a model and exported it into an image for post-processing. This is my first “finished piece”.

I think it came out really cool. What I really like about this is that there’s no end to what you can do. You can take an image like the one I made above and totally change the feel of it with just a few color tweaks and a crop.



I’m about to add this “3D stuff’ to the list of things I love to tinker with. It’s a lot of fun.