 |
This one is a combination of so many elements. The guy is Genesis 8, with a face and body form designed my me, and he's wearing the Dae skinmap, with the venous map turned on. So far, so good. Now, the horse ... I don't (yet) have the HiveWire horse, but the Millennium Horse is rendering up quite well, and it's also compatible enough with Studio 4 that you can pose it along with a Genesis 8 figure, and it looks okay, except for the mane and tail, which are (not to put too fine a point on it) crap. But wait, there's more --
Having rendered the horse with the mane and tail turned OFF, the next step is to paint the mane in. Now, I would love to tell you I hand painted this from scratch, but it's be a barefaced lie (and you know me better than that, LOL. No, no, this is the old CWRW Manes and Tails Pack Volume 1. which is 2D and manipulable in Photoshop, or Krita, or Affinity Photo (and since I can no longer use Photoshop, I did this pic in both Krita and Affinity, bouncing the image back and forth via the Windows clipboard, since neither program, on its own, has the functionality to do what I need. Ack).
The effect is quite nice, though nowhere near photographic. We'll shoot for photographic later, when/if we upgrade to the HiveWire Horse. For the moment, I'm happy to work with the old Manes and Tails packs by CWRW; if nothing else, they give be fantastic practice at using the new paint programs. I've already learned a lot. I was hunting around for the "skew" controls, and couldn't find them ... found out that this has been replaced by something immeasurably better: the Mesh Warp Tool. Woooow. Okay, so there's one big thing I've learned LOL ... and I'm happy enough using CWRW's packs of 2D add-ons, I might even treat myself to Manes and Tales 2 and 3, and perhaps even the poses and some new skinmaps for the old horse! If you're interested, they're at Renderosity; just get into the marketplace and search on "CWRW." The thing I like most about the Millennium Horse is, it still renders well in Iray, yet it's so low-poly, it renders fast. Meanwhile --
-- DAZ has upgraded to the Horse 2, which actually renders up much better than the MilHorse. But it's expensive ... As in, forty bucks for the figure, and not much in the way of skinmaps and morphs. If you want to morph this guy into a Frisian and Clydesdale, you have a problem. The starter bundle is a bit better, for $70 ... still few morphs or skinmaps, but you do get a swag of tack and add-ons. Hmm. I have to decide if I want to go with the DAZ product, or the HiveWire product ... and it's no easy decision to make! So...
The backgrounding for this piece is another 2D resource, one of the 2D/3D backgrounds which are produced by the raft by Sveva, and also available at Renderosity for around $10 per pack. So I took my cue from the 2D background, when I came to design the Iray lights for this one. (He's wearing the Landis Hair for G8.) And the last hurdle to be fallen over was finding a way to make Photoshop brushes work in Krita ... easy answer: they really don't. You can import them, but all the import gives you is the "tip," or raster image from which the brush was created. In other words, if you have about 2,000 .ABR brushes (which I have), you'd have to import the tips into Krita and then make the brush presets for 2,000 brushes. Uh, no. Thanks, but no. Too much work. So, if I'm going to switch to Krita 100% for painting, I need to get the brushes to do it with, right? Right. The hunt is on ... and I think it's going to start here. But not today -- it's so hot! It's 40C in the carport, and the a/c is struggling, so ... signing off for now.
