CG art is so much fun. If there's any reason why any of us keeps on doing it, it's because it's enormous fun. If we get paid for doing it, so much the better -- and I feel very privileged for being paid to do something I'd do as a hobby even if I was never paid a bean.
Here, I'm playing with a lot of new and newish stuff. You've been looking at this costume, in bits and pieces, for the last couple of days. Here it is on a new character, and I want to recommend this one. It's a skinmap from Renderosity called Jackson, and it's a beaut. The head morph is also very, very handsome -- it's going to be one of the few third party head morphs I'll be delighted to use "right out of the box."
The hair is the Neftis Casual Slick Back, which I got last month -- brand new on release, too. And the background -- well, you recognize the background! I cut a piece out of yesterday's misty riverbank with elven boat and blurred it down a little.
More interesting is where it started. About six months ago I did a Bryce landscape specifically to play with a set of new Bryce textures I'd acquired. I posted this eons ago, and then yesterday, when I needed some hills and mountains in the background of the riverbank, I went back to the old render and tweaked it, color-wise, to make it look like it was fading into the distance:
Now, in yesterday's art the boat and near riverbank were the foreground. Today, they've turned into the background. The character, the sword, and some more plants and little trees, have become the foreground. The entire backdrop "layer" is pasted in as a flat image, which made today's pictures render fast.
The Jackson skinmap is superb -- there are no problems with it whatsoever, nothing to work around, nothing to fix. It comes with a variety of beard and eye options. The pointed ears? Wellll, I added those myself, when I realised I wanted to do something deliciously exotic. Who says elves have to be European?! So he's also wearing the Elven Prince circlet and armband.
Working up the Euros chainmail shirt to look very good in extreme closeup meant setting a deep displacement map to ruck the model up into 3D shape, but otherwise the costume is a mix-and-match of textures available in the retail kit.
Once again, the plants are an assortment of herbage. There's a little spruce tree from Rhodi Design, and the sage grasses from the H3D Lost Path set. Very nice to work with -- and these don't tax your computer the way some of the other plants and shrubs do.
The swords -- that's Merlin's Katana, and the Fae Weaponry Greatsword, which I bought well over a year ago. In fact, if you're ever surfing around in the first 100 posts on this blog, I'm sure you'll see it there!
I'd like to pose this character in some really exotic nudes, so watch out for a post on the other blog -- soon.
Jade, July 13
