Note to self: the dreadlocks are filed under "Props," not under "Hair" or "Figures" in the DAZ file list. That's why I couldn't find them yesterday -- I was looking under "Hair," which is where most of the hairdos are, and failing that, under "Figures," where the rest tend to land!
Seriously, you need a photographic memory to keep track of all your models. When you've been doing this for a long, long time you get hundreds and hundreds of bits and pieces, odds and sods. There's things I've forgotten I had, and other things I know I have, but can't find, because I've forgotten what they're called!
A great idea would be to go through the whole library and make up something that looks like the Sears catalog! The only problem is, it would take a fortnight to do it... Umm.
In the portrait, the first render in this post, I uploaded it at 1:1 size, so you can really enjoy it. The skin tones are mostly hand-painted in this one. I haven't yet found the way to jiggle the shaders in DAZ to get nice results. I'll find it eventually, but as a stop-gap, it's so easy to hand-paint skin tones, and this is the quickest, easiest fix! (The bordering was painted with the Tribal borders and edges set of .abr brushes, in GIMP; the actual face work, which is delicate and demanding, was done in Micrografx, but I'm sure you can do this in whatever your program is, be it Paint.Net, or GIMP, Corel, and so forth.)
A couple of times I've been asked if I'd post something about painting skin tones ... faces, limbs, whatever is needed, and this would probably be a good opportunity to do that. In fact, this is what I'll do tomorrow, so join me then!
To my American visitors, have a great Memorial Day weekend! To Aussies and Kiwis on this page -- stay warm if you can. Especially in Canberra. I just saw the weather forecast for your neck of the woods ... -4C overnight. Brrrrr!
Jade, 29 May
