With Halloween coming up in a few days, I couldn't help clicking into the vampire hunters mode. Am not such a huge fan of zombies, to be truthful, but I can get interested in vampires, given the right setting. (Uh, Frank Langella hits the spot for me, nudge, wink.) Sooo...
Let's say...
THE STORY (indulge me)
Paris, 1893. A foggy night at the end of October ... you hear the horns of boats on the river, you smell the still, oily water. The clip-clop of horses' iron-shod hoofs, cabs and carriages going by; the shrill sound of laughter in the taverns and bordellos of the oldest part of town. Our (gorgeous) hero, Jean Pierre Marin, is abroad, hunting an and ancient, immortal abomination who is known only as Alighieri. This vampire is so old, he was painted by Caravaggio in 1604 ... he slept in the ruins of a church outside Boulogne until the building was demolished, the crypt emptied out -- which brought him back into this world. Alighieri has already taken two of Jean Pierre's friends and captured his young sister, Roxanne, who's hardly more than a child. It's been a week-long hunt through the docks and slums of areas of Paris that were standing when the Musketeers were this city's heroes. At last, Jean Pierre has tracked Alighieri to a place from which he cannot fly, and where he cannot hide. With the life of Roxanne in the balance, the two meet in a street in the old quarter, for a battle from which only one will walk away.
And the reverse shot --? Here we go:
Uh huh. Wouldn't like to go up against this one on a dark night!
What you have here is two NVIDIA Iray renders ... The Hunter: Genesis 8 with a body more or less designed by me ... the face is actually Rex, and the figure is wearing the Kingston skinmap and Varun hair. The cossie is the bottom half of the Buccaneer costume known as Crimson Seas (for GM 3 and 8). The backdrop is a snap out of one of the Sveva "Variety" set, with Photoshop effects applied to it; and I just flipped it horizontally for the reverse shot. In the second image, The Vampire: that's Michael 4 wearing the Bart skinmap and the JM Alexander face, the Aether hair set to dark brown. The cossie is the pants from the Lockwood costume. I did some Photoshop painting on the M4 render to make it a bit more interesting.
The good thing about rendering M4 is that you can get a render in half an hour flat ... low poly count figure. The bad thing is that M4 can render very flat. So far I've only discovered two skinmaps that render up in Iray looking superb -- Ferendir, which is very Norse, and Atlas, which is very swarthy. Am working my way through my whole collection to see what works. This one here is Bart; again, flat and matte, just like the high rez Michael 4 skinmap; but at least it doesn't dither up a red and green storm, like JM Falcon! I can just about work with Bart, but I could wish it had a healthy glow about it. Mind you, being flat, like this, it was the perfect choice to slap onto the Vampire Alighieri.
More soon -- Halloween stuff! I have some neat ideas and a few nice things to work with, so...
Ciao for now, and take another look soon.
