Oh, this is going to be fun, seeing what I can do with this character now -- and maybe, just maybe, I can get back into Abraxas? It's a good story, if I can just DO IT. Anyway, here's what was involved in bringing the character back, in Iray:
- Go back into an old project file in Studio 3, on the old computer;
- Select Leon/Michael 4, and --
- Save as ... Character Preset (it's a .dsb file format).
- Save to a jump drive and import to the new computer.
- Load a new M4 figure and select it;
- Go File - Merge --
- Click on the .dsb file...
And voila. Leon appears, just waiting for his skinmap (Michael 4 default, not even the HR skinmap -- Stoney wears the HR skinmap; remember Stoney?!) and hair (Midnight Prince, set to black) and eyes (the Tony Stark dark brown, from The Eyes Have It collection for M4 and V4).
Now, with that lot done, set up the Iray lights ... and the magic of the generation 4 figures (pre-Genesis) is that they're soooo low poly, you can get a 2000 x 2400 render, with the Iray settings cranked up high, in about ten minutes! Then, pop it into Photoshop for some effects to give it the look of a studio photo done to promote a new film, and -- done. And following that theme along, just to see how fine the Iray render is, let's really do a movie promo still. Monochrome:
Right now I'm thinking, "Ooooh, what did I miss, what new movie's coming out soon?" But the magic is in the details, so we'll zip back into colour and have a closer look at this:
Now, to get that level of realism on the hands, I used Aged for M4, from the Morphs ++ pack, and pulled the slider over to 100%. You actually see bones and veins in Iray, which is amazing ... because Iray loves to ignore displacement, bump and even normal maps. Meaning, I can't render vascularity on M4 in Iray ... yet. There has to be a way, but I might end up touching down on the DAZ Forums for enlightenment. I bought some really good vascular maps for M4, and they work brilliantly in a raytrace; but in Iray they disappear. (Have a look at the last image in this post: that's a raytrace with the vascularity turned on.) How to fix this? Dunno. Yet. Put that one on the Must Do list, along with dForce -- and also rendering "godrays" in Iray, when, technically, Iray won't/can't do atmospherics. I found a tutorial, and as soon as I have a free afternoon, I'll be following the cookbook method and seeing if I can get atmospherics going. This is the effect we're looking for --
 |
| NOT my render: see link below |
--and it turns out, there's two or three ways to "fudge" it. We shall see. For now, I'm going back to another old project file in Studio 3 and seeing if I can resurrect another character I used to like a lot. It's this guy here --
I've gone through the process to get the .dsb character preset file, merged this onto M4 (no problem so far), and am just trying to get the hair and skinmap to look good in Iray. He's wearing the Atlas skinmap, from SAV, and the Hermes hair; and neither of them performs the same in Iray as they do in 3Delight (and presumably Poser). So I need to configure everything ... two hours later, I'm 75% of the way and out of time, LOL. Back to this tomorrow. For now, I have to work, so -- here we go.
