Okay -- call this a success. Not all experiments work, but this one did. I wanted to know how the images behave if they're repainted and relit ... now, I knew it worked with raytraces (the Consulting Mage and the baby dragon called Trouble -- that's a raytrace), but how "fake" would the process look if you tried it on an Iray render? The horse, above, it the 3D/CG equivalent of what artists would call "mixed media." The props are so ancient, some of them are 2D! The backdrop is an actual painting. The horse was rendered in Iray ... the mane and tail were added in Photoshop, from CG's packs of add-ons for the Millennium Horse, from Rendo. It's a 2019 render, and very "storybook," and I was nowhere near to confident that repainting and/or relighting it wouldn't just make it a messy fake. Okay -- no problem. So I delved back into the archives for an "okay" Genesis Iray render -- Sinbad. It wasn't bad, but I always knew it could be so much better. Ha! Now it is, and yes, you can do this repainting, relighting on Irays, and they don't look fake. Neat!
