All the 3D work was done in DAZ. This project game me a great opportunity to work with the Midnight Price hair again -- the same style I used yesterday on one of the Renaissance vampires, but that was set to white-blond, and this is set to ebony.
Also, this hairstyle is great because it gives you the ability to swing the loose front strands way forward -- which means the character can duck his head and the hair appears to obey the laws of gravity. This is such a cool hairstyle -- it looks just as good on Victoria, believe it or not. I popped it on the female model to see how it would look. It fits perfectly, first-time out, and looks great.
So, with the 3D work done and finished, and the images rendered, I opened two out of three of them in Micrographx Picture Publisher 10 to have the lens flare added ... makes it look like Janos is spinning magic out of the air. Nice!
2024 Edit: Micrographx was bought out by Adobe (ie., Photoshop) and shelved. Abandoned. It was that good. In the 1990s, it was doing what Photoshop would later do; it was so powerful, Adobe didn't want to handle the competition. Soooo ... bought and abandoned. Unfortunately, many of the tools in Micrographx Picture Publisher were so great, in 1998, that by 2020, Photoshop still hasn't replicated them. Sure, you can do lens flare in PS. I do it all the time. But MPP's lens flare was soooo much better, sooo long ago. Since MPP was bought, Adobe cannily never issued a 64-bit version, and when the old 32-bit systems went over the horizon into dodo country, Picture Publisher was gone forever. Rats. Sigh.
Then the images were opened in Serif X3 to have the borders and signature added, and I was happy to call it good at that point.
The other interesting thing about this series of renders is that I showed the light source -- the torch, on the left side of the shot. This is a nice prop from the Dungeon Lighting kit ... but you have to be careful what you do with such props, and every time you show the light source in the picture, because the light on the model has to match! People won't be fooled if you get this wrong. So, notice how there's a yellow-gold light set up to shine on Janos's right arm, or elbow, and there's a blue light set up on the other side, to suggest dim, cold ambient light, which looks right, when you see from the background, they're in the catacombs under the Citadel.
The Swordsman is one of my all-time favorite books. I'd love to design the other characters too ... Seb and Jack and Luc. (If you're interested, it's a Mel Keegan novel, which means it has glbt content, but it's not hot --
Yes, you could give this one to a coming-out mid-teen ... it's a great fantasy story where the love interest just isn't hetero, that's all. I painted the cover for the paperback a few years ago. The story was captivating then, and it's still a blast.)
Jade, 17 January
***Posted by MK: my connection is intermittent, too slow for this. Seriously, guys, I've got dialup speeds. How are you expected to do anything these days, at 1990 dialup speeds?!!!
