Just playing with shadows, colors, textures, depth of field ... this character and scenario just happened. And I thought, ooooh, that's an exorcist. Not the exorcist, but certainly an exorcist!
(Does anyone recall an old Harrison Ford movie, The Possessed ...? A TV movie made at virtually the same moment as Star Wars, so he looks exactly like Han Solo, in spectacles. Yeah, that one. James Farentino played the exorcist in that movie, which I always thought felt like the pilot for a show that was never made. Wish it had been. Google it. I think it's out on DVD ...)
Anyway, I was playing with a character from yonks ago: Roald. Remember this guy?
That one, above, was rendered in Lux, back in 2015 (yes, yes, I know, I need to get back into LuxRender. Soon, I promise). Today, I changed the hair ... but I wasn't intending to change the skinmap. Then ... for some reason, the skin textures were rendering so flat, so matte, the same skinmap that looked good before looked like mud today --
Confession: am nursing the headache from hell, and I just got sick and tired and messing with it, trying to squeeze something out of the specular values, so I quickly got to the point where I said, "Stuff it, switch to a different map." The effect is surprisingly good.
That's the SWAM Garry hair, and the Marco skinmap, added to my old character design ... and he comes up as someone quite new! Makes me wonder how this would render up in Lux. Some characters "pop" and come to life startlingly in the unbiased render engine, while others don't render so well at all. Everything in life is an experiment, even now. That's what makes it such fun.
Hopefully, more tomorrow ... there's some stuff I want to do in Bryce, if this headache would just STOP and let me get on with my life!
