A new barbarian ... the skinmap is Kingston (though not the face or body morphs -- those, I designed myself), and though I'd had high hopes for this skinmap, I'm not thrilled with it. It took a lot of post work in Photoshop to fix it -- and sure, you can do this, but surely you shouldn't have to, when you've paid quite a high price for the materials? What was the problem? Well, this:
You can clearly see the seam, where the torso mapping adjoins with the limb mapping. I suspect something is way off in the specular values, and yes, next time I fancy having a struggle with a skinmap, I'll delve into the numbers and see if I can straighten it out. But wouldn't it have been nice to just render this up and have it turn out properly. Hey, ho. Next --
That golden portrait of a black horse came out of an experiment in turning surfaces into light sources, in Iray. It's actually easy, and so effective. And the practical outcome of that was, "I wonder how far I can go in lighting a whole scene only with surfaces???" So --
In this on, the fire is the main light source. I almost, almost got there, lighting the whole thing just with the flames. Not quite. I had to turn on a 0.2% environment light to back it up, and in the end I stopped waffling around and put a soft point light on his face, just to brighten it up a bit. But these are small things by comparison with the light being emitted by that surface. (The flames are an object, obviously.) With the barbarian standing back far enough out of the light, you didn't see how the skinmap doesn't quite work. I didn't have to do any post work on that one. And that's all from me, for today ... more soon!
