This one is pretty good ... am getting enough costumes, wigs and textures (shaders?) to mix and match, and start coming up with something that's part-way original ... and getting enough experience to know that the automatic "wardrobe wizard" that's supposed to make Genesis anything fit Genesis 8 is not 100% reliable. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. You pretty much take it as you find it, and go on to something else if it fails --
I'd say, "Hey ho," if 3D "assets" (costumes, hair, whatever) weren't so expensive. Stand by for a teeny little rant. Sorry, guys, but I gotta say this stuff. Having to buy everything afresh for each new base figure gets rough for someone whose pockets aren't so deep -- and in fact, I've heard this on several forums. Am not the only one saying it! Also, have been going through the DAZ Marketplace and looking for stuff designed specifically for G8 Male, which would take the ag out of the work; and the fact is, in terms of costumes and hair, there isn't so much, yet, for this guy. As usual, 95% of everything is done for the babe, G8 Female, and the male base figure is still severely neglected. So there just isn't -- yet -- the depth of costuming for him, though there are some lovely skinmaps (you're looking at one here: Rex). I'm almost tempted to go back and take a look at the Genesis 3 figure ... but that means I'll have to chuck another hundred bucks at skinmaps for G3, in order to tap into the larger wardrobe and hair. [Rolls eyes]
Anyway -- that's enough ranting. Let's look at what we can do rather than growling about what we can't, right?
One thing that didn't work out so well is the Shavonne Hair, which is a Genesis 3 hair prop which should fit G8 like a charm. Hmm. Not so good, actually, especially when you try to get it to get it to sit well over a costume. So this wild mane is about half Shavonne Hair, and half hand-painted. Not that you can't paint the hair; but you shouldn't actually have to. Still --
It's actually a hell of a nice result, so I'm not going to complain too much! The brushes to paint this hair, incidentally, are freebies, from All Free Download (dot com). Just go there and search for "photoshop brushes" and be astonished at what comes up. I'd love to give individual credits to the designers of these brushes, but the fact it, I used five different brush packs to get this effect and I have no idea who should be credited for what. It gets very muddled, very quickly, when you're trying to create something like this. Or this:
Best I can do with the old Millennium Horse from about 2010. There are better horse base figures now, I know! One day soon I'll have the cash to invest. For this one, above, I used CWRW's textures on the model, and also her Manes and Tails pack to achieve the luxurious mane in about a third the time it would have taken to paint it. (It's a 2D texture pack for Photoshop, available from Renderosity, if memory serves me; I know you can still get it). Two hours cooking in Iray, another hour to set it up before rendering last night, and another hour to paint it, this morning. It's fairly decent, but I know -- fact -- the results you can achieve with the Hivewire Horse will blow this away.
Check this out, for a start:
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| Catalog image: Hivewire Horse base figure |
So the next thing I'm going to do is put this post-apocalypse barbarian warrior together with the black horse, which for some reason just renders better than this Hancock Bay. Or I'll try a new color/texture for the horse. Perhaps because I rendered them on the same day, I'm "seeing" them in the same story. I'd say he was a "warrior of the wasteland," due to the Badlands Gladiator costume (which reminds me somewhat of Mad Max, if you load the whole thing ... here, I turned off most of it, kept only the odds and ends I wanted, added a pair of jeans, then switched out the texture for a leather shader on the pants), but the horse is obviously in a green place. There's a story here, and it's tickling the edges of my imagination --
Stay tuned! Am also about to load up the Garden of Galahad set, see if I can render it in Iray. I might not be able to ... its a lot of polygons, and Iray is extremely demanding in terms of RAM. You can easily "choke" the CPU or GPU, which needs to hold every last polygon in memory. Ack. It's this set, a big one (I just rebalanced this piece and re-uploaded it here -- worth a look):
I also have no idea how good the Garden of Galahad set is going to look in Iray. First, all its textures and maps are designed for 3Delight. Second, I overdrove all the bump and displacement maps to get this effect:
...and I know ahead of time that overdriving bump and displacement maps doesn't work in Iray. So the Garden of Galahad could look very, very flat and disappointing in Iray. Won't know till I try, and this is today's first experiment! (Ooooh, how I wish Reality had worked out... fiddlesticks. 😶
Stay tuned...
