2014 Edit: sorry, guys -- this one, above, is the last surviving image of the series. The rest have gone. The only hint as to what they were is in the raw thumbnails, below. In fact, this is a pretty neat idea -- I need to come back to it in Iray with Genesis 8!
DAZ Studio 3 meets Frank Frazetta -- and I'm not quite sure if Frank would be impressed, nonplussed, bemused, amused, or scandalized! Top : the classic version ... Frazetta was the one who invented the brawny barbarian with the naked babe sort of draped off one leg, on a mound of bodies or bones or cast-off armor. Middle: we live in the age of Xena Warrior Princess, and where it'd be positively sexist not to play both sides of the field. So ... here's the barbarian babe with the naked hunk sort of draped off one leg. Bottom: We also live in an age of equal rights across the board, so here's the gay version. There ought to be an L version as well, but I totally ran out of time. Let me see if I can do it later, and paste it in!
Here's how you do this work. It all starts with the background -- same as yesterday:
Airbrush colors into the shades and tones and blocks you want, then use your Gimp brushes to paint in the steam, smoke, fire, fog, clouds, whatever you need. Then...
Import the background into DAZ 3D and pose your models in front of this. Now, here's where it gets clever. It can take a loooong time to get the poses right, and you don't want to be doing that over and over. Really special poses (like these) are pretty hard to buy, too: nobody does them! So, here's a nifty trick...When you get the pose just right (and it could have taken you 15-30 minutes to get it), leave the character selected and go SAVE AS ... then look in your "save" flyout menu. You'll see a Preset Pose, or Pose Preset option. Use this, and DAZ will save the POSE only, to a special file called a .dsb file. A dialog opens with options -- take "record all."
So now you've got your .dsb file. What the heck do you do with it?! Well, the next time you want a character to jump right into that pose, you select is, and the MERGE the .dsb file. That simple. Nothing to install. Nothing to import. Just select your character, go MERGE, and hen double-click on your .dsb file, and chuckle smugly.
So, to get these shots today was pretty easy one I can the initial poses done. I save Michael 4's pose, then I saved Victoria 4.2's pose ... then switched out the characters and merged the poses. With very minor modifications (the right hand must be tweaked to fit a left leg that's a different size and shape ... and Michael's left arm doesn't need to be positioned to occlude the babe's bare superstructure) the scene is ready to be re-rendered.
Then ... have your Gimp open in another window. You only need to paint the smoke and fog into the foreground ONCE, if you paint it into a new layer. Then, you can go back into the bottom layer where the DAZ render lives, and paste a new render right over it. The smoke and fog stays the same. You can get three spins on the same art (classical, shero and gay) in about five minutes!
Jade, 12 May
***Posted by MK: my connection is intermittent, too slow for this.