Poser Artist Giana on creating ".happy place."

Where in the world do you create from?

Giana: I live in the United States. 

Tell us how you became a Poser artist.

In late 1999, I received Photoshop 5.5 as a birthday gift, and set about trying to learn the program. The internet was still quite young, but growing fairly quickly. I became involved with a gaming community in 2000, and that was really what got me started, I think.  I was interested in 2D art, trying to explore that medium from both graphical and artistic aspects.

I decided to purchase my own domain and teach myself HTML because through the gaming site, I had discovered other websites and individual websites, and it was a matter of following links.  At around the same time, a friend brought me a boxed copy of Poser4.  I had no idea how to do anything and simply started mucking about with Posette, the default figure at that time.  I had no assets outside of what came with the program, but that offered me the challenge of working with Poser & Photoshop as a way to try to achieve some type of result.

Eventually, in 2001, a link lead me to Renderosity, and I discovered a whole world of fascinating creations. After falling in love with 3 particular artists' work, and after about a month, I worked up the courage to join and eventually post something.  Most of all my working knowledge regarding Poser was taught to me by the small handful of friends I made at that time, predominately a vendor who taught me most about the back-end of Poser, such as reading a pose file in a text editor, or what Ka & Kd meant on what is now known as the Poser Shading Surface. 

I learned other things by pulling apart files that became very useful as well, such as lighting. Everyone was in the throes of discovery, really, and I think that that kind of excitement was all rather heady for a lot of us, which just furthered the inspiration to explore more and share the findings.

In the past year or so, I've had the luxury of discovering more, and learning more, as with all software that I use, I'm all too aware that I've barely scratched the surface of each software's capabilities. These days, I use Poser10Pro, Photoshop or one of the other several graphic programs I own, and Hexagon2.0.  I adore the Morph Brush in P10, and having a Set-Up Room is absolutely critical for me now since my figure of choice really has no pre-made assets available aside from a limited amount of clothes.  But I like choices, and I love to learn, so I've taught myself how to adapt & adopt most of my assets to my current endeavors through a lot of trial & error. And Photoshop is used for texturing clothing, hair, skin, etc., in tandem with creating Poser shaders, as I do try to create as much of what I use in an image as possible, as well as for post-processing. It really has become quite a production before I can even get to the actual image-creation phase of things. 

.happy place. really caught my eye. I was wondering how you created this wonderful scene.

That was from a set of test renders that I did as I reworked a pair of V4 glasses to my figure. The glasses were taken into Hex, broken down into pieces (think frames, left arm, right arm), and then the pieces were imported to Poser, positioned how I thought looked best size-wise, then the three pieces were exported out together, brought back into Hex and tweaked a bit. Then back into Poser they went, parented to the head, saved out as a Prop and the geometries were extracted, files manually re-written/edited for the OBJ call, and thumbnails created.  Then it was time for reworking old shaders, or creating new ones, into what looks best to my eyes. That is how most of my workflow goes these days, though it really depends upon if I am working on a prop or clothing as to what I do, and it is highly dependent on any given individual item and what I want/need from it.