I was making Christmas cards again yesterday and someone said to me, what about cards that are non-religion-specific? That got me thinking. According to legend, there's dozens of "magickal babes" being born at the winter solstice ... Mithras and Cernunos being just two. If memory isn't playing tricks on me, Horus was also born at mid-winter.So how about gay-themed solstice cards?? With this thought in mind, I used the above image twice, and change over the greeting on the second one to read, "Merrie Yuletide."
Folks with sharp eyes will recognise this model as the same dude from the Saxon Hero art. I just gave him white-blond hair and changed the pose a bit. I left the suntan on him. He just looks better as a real palomino.
It was also noted, he should have white-blond body hair ... well, maybe not. I tried that. It looks like fungus! Seriously. You can change the color of anything with the DAZ "surfaces" controls, but there's a time when you shouldn't muck about with it, because the result isn't an improvement. To change the color of objects, open the SURFACES pane; scroll down till you have your item selected, and then, uh, fiddle about with the color. Now, the bit where it gets "interesting" is when you run into the Triple Threat: to really, really control what colors things are going to be, you need tweak about 40 parameters in the Diffuse, Specular and Ambient registers ... inside of which there's also strength, gloss, opacity, and a whole lot more, including indexes or refraction, bump maps, and ... so on. Do I understand all this stuff? Not ... really, not yet. I'm still flying by the seat of the pants and learning this. But --
The DAZ book, FIGURES, CHARACTERS AND AVATARS arrived today!! I already whacked the CD-Rom into the computer and had a mess about with some of the content. They give you the Horse, the Dog, the Cat, the Dragon, and a lot of other content. Boy, do I have some gear to play with now.
The book looks good. About half of this stuff, I've already worked out for myself ... and at least some of the stuff I'm desperate to know ain't in the book at all. I dove into the index, and checked for some key things. They seem to have been omitted. The book looks, at first glance, pretty basic. There's room for a 600pp manual something like the 3D STUDIO MAX BIBLE. Still, it's going to be good having a hard-copy of the book... I did download the PDF version of the guide, but it's 500pp of dense-color content, which would cost about A$60 to print out ... y'know, I never did hit the "print" button. I'd rather spent the sixty bucks on more models.
Speaking of which, I was just asked to do a review of the Michael 4 model, and this is one thing I can do, and speak with a lot of authority, because I've been manipulating this guy (sounds fiendish, I know) since August, and I know every square millimeter of his body. Seriously.
My next post will be a couple more Gay Christmas Cards, with Zazzle links; and then I'll review Michael 4, and after that I should be able to review the book.
Jade, 9 November
