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| Generation 4 |
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| Genesis 8 |
Six months after the new PC was installed (yes, it really has been that long!) I'm getting around to installing the Xurge 3D content. Started with the Druid Shaman wardrobe props, which have a really cool "Green Man" mask, which I love. They're designed for Poser, and when they land in Iray they tend to look verrrrry flat indeed, even with the Uber shader applied (which you should do immediately that you import anything to the workspace that wasn't designed for Iray. So...
The trick is to dive into the Surfaces pane and dial up, or down, the values here and there. To test this, I exchanged half of the metal surfaces on the Shaman costume for MEC4D shaders, then dialled up the metallicity on the others ... both look grand. We'll call this piece "Mistletoe Dawn."
(If you try to do this and don't see the metallicity slider for the surface you want to adjust, select that specific surface in the Surfaces pane, and apply the Uber shader to it a second time --
-- then look back at the item in the Surfaces pane. Click the carrot beside the item in the menu, drop down the sub-items. Choose General --
-- the metallicity slider will be there this time, absolutely guaranteed. This is also 80% of the trick of turning any surface in the scene into a light source. The Uber shader makes available suites of new parameters you can fiddle with; you just have to have the guts to dive into the Surfaces pane, LOL.)
The second piece is "Back in the Hangar," which is a return to a project I did a month or so ago. G8F wears the Hadron Suit, which I've resurfaced in car paint shaders (!), and I re-did the Thunderbike in a new colour (again, car paint), and stood the pair of them in the Level 19 set, then got clever with the light. I have a soft blue environment light (HDRI image) on this, plus one phenomenally bright golden spotlight (colour set with the photometric colour temperature); the only thing I had to fudge was a soft, cool point light to bring out the character's face, which was rendering a bit too dark.
So today I'll install more of the Xurge 3D items, and see how they perform ... standby for some serious science fiction!
