Playing in LuxRender and Photoshop today ... and it's actual work. Whoo! Doesn't get any better than that. As you can probably tell from the dimensions of the image (67:100), it's a book cover. What's more, it's a book cover in current design trends.
It's astonishing, when you look at a few hundred book cover (as they show up on the book club sites, Amazon, whatever) and you start seeing trends. Not every cover on every book follows the trend; but a hell of a lot of them do, and the majority of books falling into the "big seller" range seem to adhere more or less to the set criteria. So -- what the hell?
So, what you have here is a heavily over-painted rainforest image (it's far more than 50% Photoshop painting, as it stands right now), and then the LuxRender of one of my Michael 4 designs; and then some more painting on top. The LuxRender layer is so photographic, I'm thrilled to bits with this. Can't wait to set something up tomorrow and see it go again! This is fun.
You have actually seen this Michael 4 character before. I designed him a couple of years ago, and you saw him back in January, 2015:
That one had hand-painted hair, he's what you could call "scruffy-adorable," and looked a few years younger. I actually prefer the model with a few years on him. In fact --
One of the projects I've promised myself I will get down to, soon, is ... Harrison Shapiro. You know Harrison Shapiro? The General who actually managed to catch the whole lot of them, from Rick Vaurien right through to Mark Sherratt, Curtis Marin, Neil Travers -- the whole lot. If you don't have the foggiest notion what I'm talking about ... hehehe, you don't know what you've been missing. But you can catch up. Anyway -- those of you who do know what Jade is babbling about today will know that Harrison Shapiro is a doll, one of a kind. I've modeled Travers and Marin, Mark, Mick Vidal, Barb Jazinsky, engineer Tully Ingersol, mercenary Sergei van Donne, the hitman, Ramon, and even the little twerp, Tonio Teniko. But I need to model Harrison Shapiro and his other half, Jon Kim, and also Robert Chandra Liang.)
This is fun. Have been looking some more at the Michael 6 model (Genesis 3), and they're up to Victoria 7 now ... and the first rumors are circulating regarding DAZ Studio 5. Ahem. The latest version of Studio is 4.9, which means Studio 5 can't be more than a year or so away. If I just hang on, I might be able to leapfrog right over Studio 4 altogether and re-enter at Studio 5. Also, recently something called Luxus has come out: a plugin for DAZ Studio which places the icon for LuxRender right there on your Render menu inside Studio. Hmmm. This is starting to get interesting.
