Michael 8 himself ... first look, as rendered by moi. Fairly nice renders, actually, and it's quite a nice skinmap, if very pale -- but I'm not sure I'm a tremendous fan of that body shape! It's a bit "eighteen years old next birthday." We'll be adjusting this with the body morphs ... oh, tomorrow, I expect!
In fact, DAZ was having one of their crazy store-wide sales today. I couldn't resist getting the Michael 4 Pro Bundle, which is thirteen items rolled into one (including the dangly bits for Genesis 8, ahem!). The usual price is about A$210, and I got it this morning for about A$80, which is a colossal saving. Couldn't not make the investment. The pack contains --
The M8 base figure, two other skinmaps (characters), two hair props of varying value, two packs of poses, five costumes, and the aforementioned "male anatomical elements," or whatever they delicately term the dangly bits these days. [Rolls eyes. Is prudishness on the rise lately?] So this is what you're downloading:
That's a nice library of goodies to play with. Add some really versatile shaders to this lot, and we can get some very nice results.
Speaking of shaders, I installed the pack I bought from Renderosity yesterday, and used the "rough sandstone" on the column M8 is leaning against there. That's a pack of rock and stone, including marble, concrete, bricks, pebbles ... it's going to be very handy indeed. But with some costumes to play with now, I'm going to be wanting fabric shaders. I love this:
 |
| Catalog image ... see this |
 |
| Catalog image -- see this |
One last image for today:
This was a quickie to test a theory regarding the balance between IBL lighting and the, uh, photometric light. And it worked! Safe to say, the lighting battle has been won. And I also stumbled over the dead easy way to get depth of field (DOF) to work. I mean, honestly -- ten seconds, one test render, and you're done.
Does anyone need to know how to do this stuff in Studio 4.11?? I still have plenty of problems about which I can do nada (4.11 will not save a file! That one is for tech support to fix, not me -- and they're not helping, not even 2%, after almost two months). But if you'd like to know the quick ways to make the new(er) DAZ do what you need it to do -- drop me a line, I'd be happy to share. You can always contact me via my gallery, and if you don't want to be bothered with emails, you can also contact me via a comment on my personal blog: put a comment, or request for secret-sharing, on this post, and Gmail will tell me I gotz a message. No problem. Comments are turned off on this blog because it was getting a lot of unpleasant remarks, being gay-friendly and dedicated to the heavy of the human form! Nooo, I am by no means an expert yet, but I've got a lot of stuff figured out -- enough to start having fun.
That's it for me, for today. Off to bed now. 'Night, all!