First things first: fix those damned eyes! And yes, I guessed right ... you can go into the surfaces pane and dull them down with a diffuse color. If anyone else is getting this problem, the chromatic gray I used is 176-176-195, and it works like magic. This guy went from having eyes that looked 100% fake (spoiled the effect of the character, in fact) to looking fairly natural. Very pleased with this. Then --
Starting to experiment with the pack of IRay shaders I bought the other day. Took me about half an hour to figure out how to apply them, because DAZ Install Manager didn't put them in Smart Content or even in some special "shader" folder, so that they'd appear in the surfaces pane. Nope, it just dumped them into the A-Z, 'everything but the kitchen sink' cache of assets ... and how the heck are you supposed to apply them from there? The instructions (yes, I read them!) say that you select a surface and double click the shader of your choice to apply it. Good luck with that: it doesn't work. What does work is drag and drop. I tried everything, and then tried this in desperation, and wham, there you have it.
Now, I need to figure out where these blasted shaders live, inside the Studio filer hierarchy, so that I can top up on free ones, and less-expensive ones, from third party retailers. Can't afford to buy everything at DAZ, which means I can't rely on the Install Manager. Installation has to be done manually, from ZIP files or similar. So ... file structure, please. At the same time as getting it worked out for the shaders, I'll be able to figure it out for other third party content (I hope), so that lots of stuff from the earlier version of the program will pop into the A-Z bin of the Content Library. Then, if this works ... kind people who post freebies at DeviantArt, CG Share, and even Renderosity might just save my financial life here!
Very happy with the way Michael 4 is rendering ... still waiting for tech support to tell me what's going wrong with the file save routine, where the M4 figure drops out and is replaced by a stack of boxes! But yes, I can pose him in Studio 3 and just open/merge that file into 4.11, and ... in fact, here's a project for tomorrow: let's put the Genesis character, Dae (the brooding one with the Vulcan eyebrows) and my own Amadeus into the same scene, render them together. Hmm. Interesting!
I also need to get the Genesis 8 guy something to wear. Right now, he has a pair of slacks, a tee shirt, a dorky pair of shorts, and a sweatshirt of some kind. But this looks promising:
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| Badlands Gladiator G8 costume |
