Been amusing myself making new faces with Genesis 8. I rather like these ... might use them agaibn. They were just done quickly to test-drive the new wig I bought the other day. I wasn't 100% sure the hairdo prop would work, since manual installation is still a little bit iffy, but there's the proof of it -- it works!
The hairdo is "Side-Part Hair for Genesis 3 and 8," from DAZ. It has six different styles and numerous colors, so you can mess it about, make it long or short, tousle it -- stand it on end. It works well, and I got the installation figured out, first jump out of the gate. I think the basic file structure is going to be the same for newer DAZ materials (not Poser formatted files, of which Michael 4 himself is one). In the case of hair props, it's this:
My DAZ 3D Library \ People \ Genesis 8 Male \ Hair \ Side Part Hair ... with extra drop-down folders with \!!Styles and \Materials sorted for Iray and 3Delight.
These two snapshots were done in Iray, obviously, before I changed projects. I wanted to get back into 3Delight; and I haven't said that in yonks. In fact, I've spent the last four years or more trying to escape from 3Delight, which was the one true bugbear of Studio 3, if you ask me. The freebie installed in the interface was too rudimentary, and the pro version was too expensive. Well, that was then and this is now --
Iray was yanking me about so much the other day, I got so cross with it I said, 'Nuts, I'll just raytrace this!' And I stumbled into previously unknown depths in the Studio 4.11 version of the old engine; additional features which appear to be specific to Studio 4.x, and possibly even to the later versions of 4. Soooo...
This is a re-render of a Studio 3 image done five or six months ago:
I have never seen such response out of 3Delight ... this is a fairly quick raytrace, just ten minutes; and what I'm seeing is already getting fairly comparable to the work delivered by the Firefly engine built into Poser 9 and 10. I'm still 75% clueless as to what I'm doing as I configure the raytrace engine, but I'll work it out. You can configure this version ten ways from Tuesday, and I've barely started, but I like what I'm seeing! Can I persuade you to look at this, at full size (roughly double the size you see on the page here):
Even with just a little nudge in the pixel sampling and shading rates, gamma and gain, there's easily twice as much response in the skinmap. Whooo! Exciting, innit? Michael 4 is wearing Xurge 3D's 'Untamed' costume. I painted a new diffuse map for the metal parts, to make them gold; the original costume has steel gray, which looks a bit drab, I thought. The good news is that the new map applies itself automatically on the old UV coordinates, so -- cheers.
And if you want to take a look at the hairstyle Genesis 8 is wearing in these snapshots:
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| Catalog image. See this. |
More soon -- probably not tomorrow, because we're going out for the day. The day after, I think, because I still have a Wilverine-style leather jacket for Genesis to install, and an SF costume ... and I'm dying to get back to playing with the raytrace engine into which I blundered by chance, LOL. 😎
