Serendipity struck last night. I was physically crawling around under the desk, playing tag with the dust bunnies while I jiggled cables, trying to get my internet connection back -- which I did. To test it, I started up my browser (I use Opera) and loaded something ... and saw that DAZ was having one of their rolling sales, with massive discounts. So --
The Morningstar Wings for G8 ... the Huntsman leathers, also for G8. I also got another costume, Crimson Seas, which is a buccaneer outfit with really neat "mix and match" sections, and a set of tattoos, which obviously you can't see when Genesis 8 is wearing the costume, so we'll play with those next. The savings were immense, being able to pounce on the sale right then and there...
The only downside to the Morningstar Wings is that they take a lot of rendering; predictably, my system won't finish them properly, so it's the same story as the satin shaders: you paint a lot in Photoshop after the fact, even though the render cooked for six hours overnight. But the costume rendered brilliantly, and quickly, so we'll be using that, and parts of it, often...
Playing in Iray, I went back to the low-poly set and high-poly figure concept for a second take:
-- I think it's a Genesis 2 hairdo, but at least it renders up well, if you jiggle the surface settings somewhat. Right out of the box, it looks ... plastic. Kill some of the gloss, crank up the bump strength and change the base color to a dark brown instead of flat black, and it looks credible. (It just also looks like something you'd see on the Three Stooges!) It's called Duke's Hair, and I guess it's supposed to look like Duke William of Normandy's coiffure ... the old "pudding basin cut" which was so common right up to the time of Richard III. (So-called because, so it is said, the barber put a pudding basin on your head and cut around it. Huh.)
Anyway -- Matias for G8 with Duke's hair, all high-poly stuff ... sitting in DM's The Gate, a low-poly set. And it finishes rendering properly, so this obviously works. The Morningstar Wings are a very high-poly prop, added to a high-poly figure, and I don't think they'd finish rendering on my computer, supposing I left it rendering till the day Mephistopheles skated to work!
Photoshop to the rescue, right? Will be playing with the other new goodies later today ... might even be able to post a second time before lights out. As I said -- Serendipity, late last night!
