Here's an unexpected pleasure! The sale at Renderosity never stops, and since there's been a few things I've wanted (can't actually say "needed") for a while, I decided to take a look. This is AppleJack's Ruined Church, and it renders brilliantly. I added some skies photographed in the Flinders Ranges last week (where the sky is overwhelming, and gets very dramatic several times a day), and then got clever with IBL lighting, actually using the same images for backdrops and lighting. In this one, above, I added a hugely bright, warm spotlight, angled off to represent the lowering sun, and two copies of Merlin's crow, from the Wild Borders set.
The Ruined Church set may be old, and low-poly enough to render like lightning, but the finished result is
more than good enough to feature on a book cover, for example -- and with careful lighting and camera work, it can be indistinguishable from reality. Neat! Very glad I shopped this sale! I also got a boat and a bridge, and you'll see more of all this in days to come.
Next thing on my list of gotta-have items is this:
Rather speaks for itself, doesn't it? Basically, you can dial the exact-same body morphology for M4 into the Genesis 2 Male, which means that all your costumes and skinmaps will work. What
won't work, of course, is the Morphs++ for M4; and you lose the head morphs. So the old characters (Jarrat and Stone, Leon, Sebastian, Amadeus, the list goes on) will be much,
much harder to resurrect in the high-poly figure; though I wonder if it might be possible to go a step further. For US$50 there's a face transfer system, whereby you put in a clear full-face image, and it drops it onto the Genesis 8 ... mind you,
not the Genesis 2! So there's a major compatibility clash, and to date no one has offered to resolve this. Hmm. US$50 is a a lot, but supposing Jarrat and Stone and the rest leapt into being as Genesis 8 characters. Lemme think about this. You have to wonder if there aren't better ways to go ... do what Hollywood does, and "recast" the parts. Try this for size:
See that full-sized,
please ... I uploaded it large. This is
Ragnar for Gianni 7, for Genesis 3 Male, by GypsyAngel, who also designed the Rex and Dae characters I use so much. Hmm. I really go need to think this through before I run hither and thither, chucking $$$ in every direction!
Gianni 7 bundle for $90, and the
GM3 Body morphs for $20, and Ragnar for $20. You're out US$130, but see where you are at the end of that spend! Huh.
See where your imagination goes, on a lazy Sunday afternoon?!
