I treated myself to a nifty set of props a couple of nights ago. Merlin is one of my favorite content providers, because his stuff is so different, and so well done -- and at the same time, priced where I can afford it, and it's render-able with the PC I have right now. So --
The flowers look so convincing, how could you resist? The model is CC Foster, for Genesis 8 ... which can sometimes work, and can at other times be a bear to work with. When it works, the results are very good indeed -- though I've adjusted the gamma and balance on this render to put some tone into his skin, which tends to render up very pale indeed, in anything remotely similar to natural daylight. Still, take a long look at Foster if you're looking for a very useful Genesis 8 guy:
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| Catalog image. See this. |
I ought to use this character, or parts of him, more. Hmm. Expect to see elements, and versions, in the very near future! In the 'spring romance render, he's wearing the Landis hair, which I got last week along with the Varun hair, but this is the first chance I've had to play with it:
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| Catalog image. See this. |
Good news and not-so-good news with the Landis hair. It looks fantastic, but after six hours of render time I still had to paint a little here and there to get around a lot of unresolved pixels. It's high, high poly, and with a slow(er) system, it could be rendering for the rest of your life. But if you don't mind painting on it a little bit, it does look great in the final product.
The props are what make this shot, honestly. Otherwise you just have another Genesis 8 with its kit off. Cheers to Merlin for crafting a really fantastic set of wild flowers -- I find myself wondering if they might just work in Terragen, too! Can't see why not -- Flinx's trees work in Terragen, so...
I only used a few of the wild flower props to create the 'Spring Romance' picture, and these will be showing up in sets and scenes everywhere. Lovely! I did a CU shot on the cow parsley, which rendered for about two hours to get to this point, at 600x900 size:
Now, that is nice. It's also a full-on 3D rendered shot, no a backdrop -- everything in here is from Merlin's auto-load (ie., load the whole thing with one click), but you do have to set up the lighting; the lights packaged with the auto-load scene make it look like a raytrace.
I'm thrilled to bits with the results, dying to work more with these props. They're on sale as I type this, and they're not expensive to begin with. If you're interested in this kind of thing, take a look --
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| Catalog image. See this |
I've been wanting to check out the dForce dynamic fabric function of Studio 4.11, so I went over to YouTube and had a look at the tutorials. Phhht. Ahem. Not on this computer, sorry, guys. Anything dForce is going to have to wait till Christmas 2020, when I can run it. Right now, it would just be a time-waster and (another) source of endless frustration. So, for fifteen months, we'll stick to the old morphing costumes and hair, and let the rest slide on by. 😜
More soon!
