(If you're tuning in late: I'm designing the 3D characters for the NARC series by Mel Keegan. There's a promotion coming up, involving a lot of work on the NARC website and a big campaign for the books. Be warned: these are not kids; books; there's GLBT content, and if you're troubled by this, or if you're not "of age," whatever that might mean in your neck of the planet Earth, stick to the blog here and enjoy your 3D stuff, and leave the books to the grownups. However, I think we're all big kids on the blog here, and I gotta tell you, if you like cutting-edge sci-fi with the delicious thrill of the dangerous and even the forbidden, you could do a lot worse than get into this!)
Right -- caveats and disclaimers have been given, so I can get back to where I was before: Sergeant James Cargill Cronin ..!
In the books, which are set in the 25th Century (not the 23rd, which was erroneously stated on the original GMP edition of Death's Head ... the editors there were watching too much Star Trek, I think; the 23rd century thing was engraved on the brain), the majority of Earth's population is describes as being "Afro-Eurasian," meaning gene strands have woven themselves so far together that most people look a bit African, a bit Asian ... maybe a bit Celtic, a bit Polynesian, a bit Native American if you're from that part of the globe.
So in designing Gil Cronin, I knew several things, which gave me a flying start: he's Earth stock (not a colonial like Jarrat). He's waaaay bigger even than Stoney, which you'd expect, since he's the leader of the elite Raven unit aboard the NARC-Athena. He came up with Stoney, though, so he's got to be about the same age (about 32). He's ex-Army (like Jarrat), and the unit's sharp-shooter; he's as tough as nails, infinitely experienced, but when you scratch the surface there's also a rather lovely human being inside all that riot armor...
The first step was to set the body morphology. I loaded up the Morphs++ for Michael 4, and did Body-builder and Definition. He's a big boy -- come back tomorrow, and see for yourself, because in tomorrow's renders I'll talk a lot more about the physique. Today I just wanted to get down to the face and race. The racial type is "indeterminate" but the face...
Now, you'd never believe in a million years that this guy started off as Michael 4! But he did. I slapped the High-rez skin map on him to produce the deep olive skin that crosses all borders and knows no racial boundaries. I left the skull bald/shaven, because this is how Gilly is described. Then ... eyes, dark brown. For the life of me, I can't find a reference to Cronin's eye color in the books, so -- brown it is. (Jarrat's eyes are slate gray; Stone's are bright blue.)
Then I got to work on the features.
His eyes are a little bit Asian. There's something Polynesian about his mouth. His nose is a bit broad, and I gave him a nice, square law. I also changed the cranial slope, the eye depth, the mouth width, the depth of the corners of the mouth, the set of the temples ... and virtually everything else.
This is the best thing about it: when you load up the Morphs++, and load HEAD, the controls are made available. You get a huge selection of icons in your left-side pane, and every time you click on one of them it adds itself as an "adjustment slider bar" in the appropriate place in the right-side Parameters pane. Then you just go ahead and slide those bars to your heart's content!
The last thing I did, to get really believable shots, was to set up a background of cinder bricks, or blocks, (besser bricks), set up half a dozen lights, and a spotlight to cast a nice shadow. To get the background, I used the Backgrounds Made easy kit, which is terrific -- I've blogged at length about it elsewhere, and it's highly recommended...
Actually, there's one more thing. In the screen capture of the work-in-progress, you can actually see that the Flight Suit the model is wearing is still displaying the Green Hornets unit badge. This comes attached to the M4 Air Crew Flight Suit, and though you can change the color of it, you can't make it disappear ... now, our Sgt. Cronin doesn't fly with the Green Hornets. He's the team leader of the Blue Ravens on the NARC-Athena ... so he oughtta be wearing the NARC-Athena unit badge, yes?!
That's what I thought, too, so I I went back to some artwork I did for one of the book covers years and years ago ... I cropped out the unit badge, and used Micrographx to slap "our" unit badge on top of the US Air Force one. And if you have another look at the second-from-top pic in today's series of renders, well, you'll see the badge right there! Cool, yes?
I'll be back tomorrow to talk about the physique part of this; we'll get some serious guy-candy when I hit the "hide" icon on that flight suit, I can assure you... join me then!
Jade, 8 January
***Posted by MK because the internet is AWOL. Intermittent crap. Be warned, guys: our connection is going to be in and out for a week or two, as of this point: Telstra (or whatever) is doing a lot of work on the landlines in this area. And as you know, if you've been looking at the "poster notes" on these journal entries in my looooong adventure through the world of CG, 3D and digital, even at the best of times we can find ourselves with dialup speeds in this area. This is why MK has been making many posts for me, since Day One -- Keegan has the fast connection, not me! (This should change in the near future, when the cables or whatever are updated, and they stop working on them. At least, s'wot Telstra promises.) Credit where it's due: this blog would not have been possible without the support of a pal with decent internet. Because ours sucks. We moved into this area about six months before I got into Studio and blogging about it, and I almost quit right there: DAYS to download something from the DAZ store, at one point. Argh. Thank gods for friends when you need 'em!
