Yep, it's the same model you saw yesterday on the historical romance book cover ... just lit differently and with a bit of painting: the beard line on this skinmap is actcually printed into the map, which means it's flush with the skin ... which a natural beard never is. So I got in there and painted it so that it -- isn't. Duh. I also painted the eyes a little, and the hair a bit, to get more out of it. Gotta say, I really do like this character. I might send this to LuxRender and see what happens. (Sometimes Lux makes a complete muck of a character; sometimes the picture "pops" and you're astonished. Won't know till we try. If Lux doesn't do it well, we'll come back to raytracing (which this is) and just do more along these lines.)
Nice! Call him Antonio, I think ... because he makes me think Desperado. In fact, that's the title of the picture. 😉
Also -- if you were ever in any doubts that photography can also be art...
This is what happened in the sky on Wednesday evening, when Dave and I were on our way home from the mountains. We got back to Tailem Bend, tired and hungry ... decided to stop off at Subway (!) for a bite and a rest because home was still 90 minutes away. Hardly had we walked out of the gas station forecourt when this began to happen! These shots were taken from the aptly named Cliff Street (or is it Cliff Road), right on the river bend.
Speaking of which -- I've posted to the travel blog: Destination: Grampians. Well worth a look. I could tell you I rendered most of those shots in Terragen, but I won't, nudge, wink.
And I was going through more of the old, old files from years ago, and stumbled over a project that was done in something like 2011 or 2012. These were a team effort:
Mike built the physical model (it's a hobby of his ... and he sometimes gets paid to do it. He does real 3D ... in the real three dimensional world we actually live in. He has a modeling blog, World in Miniature...). He took one of the photos from the window of a plane on a flight long ago; I took the sky shot from a hilltop not far from home; and Dave rendered the desert background in Vue. Then the model was photographed from various angles against a plain green background, and combined in Photoshop by me. The result is pretty spectacular, if I say so myself! I'd completely forgotten these pictures were done, but I never throw anything away. The only folders, on the old harddrives, do contain a heck of a lot of dross, but there's also hidden treasure.
More soon!