Actually, the images didn't connect themselves in my mind till I'd finished rendering them! Nights in red satin ... okay. Genesis 8 looking sultry and gorgeous. Now, add this one:
Yes, our old friend Leon, standing in a new set I just acquired today (DM's Absolute Sanctum, I think it's called). Now, what's he doing in a place like this, at this time of night? Tracking down a vampire? Right -- hence, the Van Helsing coat, no doubt! Now, just imaging that the guy in the red satin is the vampire ... and let your imagination spin away on that topic!
The set itself is very nice and was on sale at Renderosity:
Lots more experiments today. Couple of days ago, I discovered that the M4 Head Morphs++ do not carry over into an exported OBJ, in the event that you want to send your version of Michael 4 to DAZ Studio 4 as an OBJ -- wearing a costume that can't be installed into Studio 4, for instance. Then I wondered if the commercially created head morphs will carry through the conversion to OBJ, and it turns out --
-- they do. This is the Chase for M4 character, skinmap, face and body morph. On the left is the character as built from scratch in Studio 4, from the M4 model, Chase skin maps and morps, and Mario's Hair by Neftis, wearing the AS Narquilir costume. On the right is an OBJ created in Studio 3 from the Chase head and body morphs, and imported into Studio 4. You can't actually tell the difference between them. To make a fair comparison, I re-did every texture with Iray shaders --
And here's the neat thing. The M4 figure is low-poly count. Means it renders fast. I told Iray this image could cook for two hours, if it wanted to, and it was done in about twenty minutes. Aha. And if you're careful with the old figures, with lighting and so on, you can still get credible results:
That's actually not too bad. The coat was done with a leather shader, but the M4 maps (and the Midnight Prince hair) are just the original maps from many years ago. Low poly figure, high poly set ... two hours in Iray -- as opposed to four hours for the satin shirt guy ... and after that amount of time the satin still hadn't rendered fully, so I put the picture into Photoshop and painted it to get rid of the acres of unresolved pixels! No more time to leave it rendering...
I'll set up another one and let it render while I nick off to bed (yawn: it's half after midnight), and we'll see what five hours will do for it. This satin shader is sumptuous, fabulous, but it takes a whale of a lot of processor power. Ouch!
One last thing for today -- wallpaper, 1900 x 1080. Enjoy!
