2024 Edit: sorry guys. All I have left is a bunch of thumbnails to give a clue as to what was going on in the original artwork. The images from 2010 have gone along with a dumped subscription to one of those services like Photobucket or whatever. These are all that's left ... for what it's worth, they just a bunch of Deep Shadow Map renders of Michael 4 in fantasy costume. Nothing to get excited about now, but for me, it was all part of the learning process -- which is why I'm including the thumbnails here, more to jog my own memory than to entertain anyone else. I'll leave the text of the original post, but I'll gussie this up with a bunch of nice images from later on, which fit the same bill "Michael 4 with fantasy costume and tweaks and textures. In fact, everything here is M4, and I've switched out the textures and/or settings on virtually everything. Almost everything here is raytraced ... one or two are Iray renders.
In this shoot (ie., the original 2010 shoot -- see the thumbnails at the top!), Michael 4 is wearing the Chase skinmap, the Hermes hair, the pants from the Utilitize set, the boots (made to fit Victoria, again ... she gets all the cool stuff) from the Chaos Seed set, the arm-gloves from the Wood God set -- and a face designed by me. And yes, I saved this one as a character preset. His name is Stan; he's in the troupe along with Bert and Agatha and Ethel. (No Angelicas and Sylvios, Barbarellas and Orlandos here. You might find a Horace and a Hortense...!)
In fact, given that Michael 4 is supposed to be a little bit outrageous, he's probably wearing altogether too much. A lot more than Victoria 4.2 was wearing yesterday!
The lad's got great legs, why not show 'em? The body is also my design, guys; sorry, you can't guy this off the beg anywhere. You need to get up close and personal with the Morphs++ for Michael 4, and you can make these body shapes yourself. Morphs++ was one of the first things I invested in, when I got into 3D art. Money well spent! And you can see how effective the morphs are, when you get a clearer look at the face: all faces are designed and made with the Morphs++ too:
That's Morphs++ giving an ultra-realistic result. Fantastic realism -- slap on a good skinmap (and the Chase skinmap is very good; I just don't like Chase's face. In the early days I used to go shopping for a skimap by looking at the face. Wrong! Look at the skin all over ... design the face yourself. Now ... losing the trousers is all well and good, but after what Victoria 4.2 was wearing yesterday, there's nothing really exotic about this costume. So let's fix that. Let's "go Flash Gordon:" and see what happens.
It's dead easy to change the texture on a 3D object. I've blogged about this several times. Just search on "textures" and "displacement maps," and you'll find what you need. This texture, here, is one of mine, slapped right onto the OBJ files from the Wood God costume set. You want a better look at at:
Michael 4, being a good lad, obligingly hops up and strikes a new pose for us. Speaking of poses: in this shoot I'm all over the spectrum! I've used poses from M4 Nuance, Maschille, Chaos Seed, Journeyer Scout ... but every pose was also tweaked and adapted before the scene was rendered. You use the stock poses to get you into the ballpark ... saves a ton of time.
Now, here, I've actually changed the boots for the thigh boots from the Leon di Castiglia set ... and then whacked the same texture onto them -- same texture and displacement map you see on the gloves and T-back bikini. The effect is really "Flash Gordon" (go, Flash, go!) but I don't know how comfortable this would be! The 3D costume designers never seem to worry about Victoria 4.2 falling out of her costume or freezing her ... appendages ... off, so why should we?
Last frame for today -- also showing the Bryce landscape in which the DM set is standing. You might also noticed that I changed out a lot of the stone textures in the set for visual variety. I like this character. Expect to see Stan back, along with Achilles and company from last month.
And join me tomorrow, when Victoria 4.2 in the sexy boots (Agatha, the Barbarian Queen from the Stormlight renders, in a new costume and setting) will walk into this scene. So it's Agatha and Stan massing the troops for war against the Orcs...
Jade, 7 June
And join me tomorrow, when Victoria 4.2 in the sexy boots (Agatha, the Barbarian Queen from the Stormlight renders, in a new costume and setting) will walk into this scene. So it's Agatha and Stan massing the troops for war against the Orcs...
Jade, 7 June
