Well, now I'm impressed! I've had my eye on the Iray Converter for Generation 4 for about a month, and it was on sale today, so I couldn't resist. I've been hoping (putting it mildly) for Iray materials for the old Michael 4 and Victoria 4 figures, and -- yep, there's a smile on my face now! This skinmap, above, is SAV Atlas; it's difficult to work with because it has red overtones and tends to render up with silvery patches in Iray, but even this one (which is the torture test) looks great; and as for the M4 skinmap itself --
I don't think Michael 4 ever looked this good before. This -- Leon -- is not even the HD skinmap, just the regular one; and it has a lustre, a velvet quality, created by the SSS and translucency. This is very good ... in fact, in all the world, the only thing I can't work out (and no one can, apparently!) is how to get vascular mapping onto the Generation 4 figures in Iray. People will advise using normal maps, but that Does. Not. Work. So I'm very pleased indeed with the Iray Converter for Generation 4. While I was shopping the sale I also got a couple of new skinmaps for the Genesis 8 female ...
This is Ginnie, with one of the two supplied faces, and the tanned version of the skinmap. The model, right out of the box, is rather a stick-figure, so I put some meat on its bones and muscles on its limbs, for the long-shot --
This one was mostly to try out a new hairstyle -- SA Hair, from Renderosity. I'd had some misgivings about getting Genesis assets from Renderosity because I've been having a devil of a time trying to install them. Then, two or three nights ago -- he he he ... I worked it out. Yep, I can get Genesis stuff from Renderosity now, because the SA hair is working perfectly. Now, I need to use this as a rout map to install other assets, and if it works right every time, I'll blog the file path for the Windows 10 installation right here ... you're welcome.
I've been working on this last one for a month or more -- there was so much to figure out. The lighting. It's almost entirely lit with surfaces within the 3D model which have been turned into light sources. (You do this by putting the model into the Surfaces pane, applying the Uber Shader to each individual component and then setting the Emissions Color to white. As soon as you reset the color an extra control point pops up, where you can set the strength of the emissions in lumens -- millions of lumens, to light a scene with surfaces. It took a while to figure this out. I painted the city/sky background specifically for this; and I wussed out and painted the atmospherics in Photoshop. I know you can do this in Iray, but it's such a chore, I honestly can't be bothered.
