Being downunder we're on the last day of October today already, a day ahead of all those visitors who are upover (we're not bouncing around on our heads ... you guys are!) so ...Happy Halloween, folks!
I had loads of fun about a week ago, playing with a new DAZ 3D model ... specifically, it's one of the Halloween packs, which was going for about five bucks in special. What interested me in it at the time was that it offered a whole new "skin map" which fit Michael 4 -- "smoothie," with eyebrows so blond that they barely show at all.Now, here's where it getting really, really interesting. All three of the characters you see in the above two images ... are tweaks on the same model! They're ALL done with Michael 4, and they're ALL done with the same skin map! See what I've been talking about for the last few days ... when you get into the "surfaces" there's so much you can do. And it's a whole lot of fun.
I'm going to finish out this post with a beauty shot, because I want to contrast the "smoothie" skin map with the high-rez map I normally use...
You can get loads of different skin maps from the DAZ catalog ... I've hardly even scratched the surface yet. And I need to be a bit conservative because I also need to upgrade my video card. You *do* need a medium-high quality video card to run this software easily and get great results. Mine is only about 90% of the way there to what you need, but the fantastic news is that it's only a fifty-dollar upgrade, and these days that's chickenfeed.
In case anyone is interested, the beauty shot above was done with Michael 4, face designed by me; hair by Neftis Studio, color designed by me; background green vortex swirled into a Micrographx frame with the airbrush tool, and a swirl effect applied by Irfanview, which resized the image to 600x900, before it was shipped into DAZ as the background for the model. Then the whole thing was rendered and shipped into Serif to be feathered and matted on a marble background, signed, and exported as a finished image. How long did it take? About 15-20 minutes. And yes, I'm still gobsmacked at how fast you can do this stuff ... because I'm still used to spending hours and days on a painting...!
Happy Halloween!
Jade, 31 October
