So here's a bold experiment! I've been wondering for some time how a Generation 4 character (Michael 4) and a Genesis character would look, in the same shot. Would the Gen 4 character hold up, or just look hopeless? Well, the Michael 4 is obviously of an early generation -- well, duh! -- but on the whole it's fairly good. You just have to be careful how you pose the older figures; and the faces take quite a lot of work to make them look fully realistic (to some degree, the same can be said of Genesis, too). Genesis makes it soooo easy, you just load the figure, pose it set lights and camera, and render ... but now and then I enjoy a challenge. I'll be playing with the many M4 skinmaps I have, to see which ones work best. All are different, and not all are created equal.
It may look like an ordinary shot -- nice enough, and very pretty lights -- but you are witnessing my first ever experiment in (gulp) dForce. It's far from perfect, I know; in fact, it took a fair bit of fixing in post, in Photoshop, to mend a lot of goofs in the dForce fabric draping, which, here, only worked 95%. But this is a first attempt, and I'm sure there's a lot I didn't do, and was supposed to do, LOL. So far, I have about one tenth of an idea of what I'm doing in dForce, but we learn by doing. It'll get better as it goes along. When I look back at Iray, and the learning curve for that, I often wonder how the heck I ever got started, much less got through it. But the fact is, I did. And when you have a look around at the great costumes and hair available for dForce these days, this is something you just have to learn. So here we go!
The one real downside to dForce is the sheer time it takes. To drape this skirt to this degree of exactness took about twenty minutes (even on a super-fast computer); and I suspect I didn't allow enough virtual frames in the so-called simulation. I think I gave it about 20 of these iterations, or frames; and I rather think it'll take upwards of 40 to do a really good job. Ack. That means forty minutes just to drape the fabric, before you can even think about setting up the rest of the scene, and setting the engine to do a high-rez render. Ooof. Hmm. We'll have to see about this -- dForce is a neat thing, but it's sooo time consuming.
