Did someone mention the word -- centerfold?!

Beefcake never looked so good ... glam is so well suited to the 3D medium ... in fact, in some of these images I'll defy you to tell the difference between the 3D "digitoid" (as Mel Keegan calls them -- a term he coined for the Hellgate books), and a real male model. Except, if you hired a real male model, you'd have to pay him a ton of money, hire a studio, and a lighting technician, and get the model releases, and haggle over rights and usages and royalties --!

Here: it all happened on the desktop. First came the inspiration: one of the subsidiary characters in the NARC books is Blue Raven 6, Joe Ramos (see the whole story of how he was created). I got Mel's stamp of approval on the character's 3D model a couple of days ago, and it occurred to me at the

 time that this ethnic beauty, who's also one of the "big boys," since he belongs to one of the NARC-Athena's elite units, would make a gorgeous model for a beefcake glamour shoot.

In today's renders, someone appears to have bribed Ramos to pose for the shoot ... and cam't you just hear Gil Cronin, his partner, in the background, cackling with amusement? Except, we kept the negatives, and all you have to do is click here to check out where Gilly was bribed with unknown quantities of unknown substances (probably Wild Turkey) to do something along the same lines...! (I can just hear Cronin saying, "Yeh, well at least I kept my pants on." And Ramos reposts with, "Well, I've got better legs.")

You can tell it was a load of fun doing these renders!

So what went into the project?

Michael 4 base model, face re-dsigned by me from --
Falcon skin map (default face used as a starting point);
Morphs++ to design the physique (I don't have M4 Elite body shapes);
Midnight Prince hair, set to ebony
Loin cloth from the Wood God costume and props pack
Wrist watch from the M4 Aircrew pack
Dogtags from the M4 Aircrew pack
Three distant lights -- white, blue, green;
Background artwork -- digital painting by me:
Hubble telescope starfield image
Raven mask
Lightning generated by Micrographx 10
Border designed and built in Serif X3

Then, you just put the whole lot together, pose the model, and hit RENDER! Actually, there's a bit more to it than that. I rendered six or seven and picked the four best; the others were "variations on a theme" ... jeans on, or off, in the rear view shot? Trust me -- OFF. And then I really played around with the lights to get them to "paint" on this physique...

And speaking of the physique, this one was designed in Morphs++ (I really have to get down and review that, because I use it every day and you can't do much that's really creative in DAZ Studio 3 without it). What you do is, load up the model, then go to Poses > DAZ Michael 4, then load the body morphs, or whatever parts of them you need. The easiest way to get the results you see here is to work with "Bodybuilder" and "Definition," and just keep tweaking till you see what you want.

To get a really fantastic upper body, though, you'll wind up with legs that look too big -- the thighs get ... well, disproportionate, maybe. So load up the Thighs - Thickness and fine them back down ... but you'll notice that his bum gets too small as his thighs trim down! So load up the Glutes selection of tools and give him the nice "bubble butt" effect.

Then be sure to make him look like he's trying hard not to bust right out laughing --

-- because this dude is a professional soldier in a 24th century paramilitary space force, and I don't know what they bribed him with to pump up and stand still long enough for this shoot --!

Seriously, this was fun. Mel Keegan also got into the spirit of it ... before anybody says anything, I'm not taking liberties with one of the NARC characters without permission! If fact, Mel is so amused by everything that's going on here, he just put up my advertising banner on his blog! (2024 Edit: the blog was abandoned about 2014 when, out of the blue, Blogger decided that the password was wrong. It became impossible to update or edit -- also impossible to delete. It's now laughably obsolete; it's just ... un-get-riddable-of. Hmm. That's not a word, but it should be.) 

Now, if I can get the time to spend being really clever, I need to pose Blue Raven 6 and Blue Raven 7 (Cronin) together, maybe in the gunships' hangar ... hmmm. Let me think about this.

Jade, 3 February

***Posted by MK, because I have no viable connection to the www today.