Spending a hot afternoon painting...

Spending another hot afternoon painting (also unpacking a lot of photographs from (!) November. Shows you how far behind I am!). Here's another touch-up on Chino -- a character I love, and a story I'd like to go back to eventually. It has been professionally published, incidentally, but it as a "hard sell," because it's what's termed a "frame story." In other words, a story told by a raconteur.  Every single Sherlock Holmes story barring one is told in the words of John Watson ... that's a frame story. Well, the format might have been popular in Sir Arthur's day, but -- not today. Which made The Gates of Petheris a very, very hard sell indeed. Still, it sold in the end, and I do believe there's enough meat and potatoes in it to make a short novel, which can happen in the fullness of time --

Or perhaps it would make a better graphic novel than a text-driven piece? Now, there's a thought. And it's a thought I'd been playing with more and more lately, which is why I've been running experiment after experiment, trying to find a way to produce the sheer volume of art required to publish an 80 - 100pp graphic novel. It could easily take 250 pieces of art, and since I don't expect to make much, if any, money out of it, I can't afford to spend a year working on it! 

Bottom line: I have indeed found a way to churn out a lot of art in a short enough time. It comes down to taking insanely fast renders, plus some photo montages that are largely based on my own images, shoving them through a bundle of complex Facebook processes, then painting the result by hand. The end product is pretty decent. Good enough, I think. And since Chino is already finished (and a dang good story, to boot), it would make better sense to run with this than to try to finish a looooong story like The Forgotten songs, and then illustrate it, all for no income. Ha.

So here's the fruit of a hot afternoon's messing about. The SF render is a twelve-year-old raytrace which has just had a fresh rebalance and tweak, and looks the better for it. That's Neil Travers in the cockpit of the Capricorn ... reminding me of how much I love the Hellgate novels. I could live in that universe. Must go back and read the whole thing again, total immersion, and will probably end up doing a load of new artwork for it! I was utterly immersed in this universe in 2011-2014, and a lot of the work I did back then was Neil Travers and Curtis Marin, Mark Sherrat, Mick Vidal, Richard Vaurien ... oooooh, I miss them! I feel a Hellgate binge coming on! (If you're even vaguely interested...)

Elves, winter, misty rivers, Science Fiction heroes ... quite a grab bag!

A grab-bag of goodies today -- we're all over the spectrum. To begin: Beauty, for its own sake. Actually, there's an ulterior motive. I have an idea for a story, a huge story, and I can't resist designing the characters for it! I might write this one. (Yes, I do write. I just finished a movie, in fact. No, I haven't sold it it. Yes, I hope to. Duh. No, I'm not in negotiations with a studio. Yes, I'll blog it here, and on my personal blog, if/when it ever happens ... and it's a one a thousand shot, so...!) So right here is one of the characters from my story idea. Yep, an elf. It's a fantasy ... but not what you expect. Neat texture on the shirt ... made it myself, in Serif Page Plus!

Next ... an actual digital painting:

That one is actually quite neat, and it was unplanned. I set this up as a Bryce 7 Pro render, and waited over two hours for the program to give me an estimate of how long it wanted to render it. TWO DAYS. I said, nuts to that, and turned it off! Then I thought, hmm ... and set it to give me a regular preview image, without even any anti-aliasing. That gave me a very rough sketch, which I put into Photoshop and, uh, painted. (Understand, I can not draw to save my life. But I can composit anything you like. I like this a lot -- and it didn't take long, once I shut down Bryce...

I think the length of the renders is getting worse lately, as the desktop gets closer and closer to having to be upgraded before it becomes useless. I'm under 6GB of harddrive space now, and this means it's waaay short on "swap disk space," or thinking space. Can't go very much further without that upgrade, so -- wish me luck at the dentist, on Friday! If he doesn't take all my cash, the computer is next on my agenda.)

And then...

Figuring out the other day that I can load several trees on the same coordinates, duplicating the foliage to make a much more convincing tree -- well all that gave me an idea. How about deleting the foliage this time around, leaving the winter tree? And how about seeing if we can work out how to simulate snow ... without getting into Bryce, which is soooo slow now. Well, this is about the best I can do in DAZ Studio raytrace, but it's actually not too ad at all.

Rummaging around, I stumbled over this, which I did a couple of years ago and never uploaded here, though I believe I did put it on my personal blog:

And lastly for today ... am messing about with rebalancing techniques, Photoshop work which makes "more" of simpler, old images. Hmm. This is interesting, especially since (and I sob as I say this) I've lost a lot of the 2011 project files. They are just ... gone. I can't get them back, so you're stuck with whatever is online at the gallery etc., etc., and shots like this one, below, need to be reworked:

That's Richard Vaurien and Neil Travers from Hellgate, of course ... two of my all-time favorite characters (especially Vaurien). I would love to tell you I have the project file and was able to re-render this, but that file doesn't even seem to exist now. I'd have to recreate this stuff from scratch. I did this shot about seven years ago, and like so many of the old pictures, they were great ideas, but they could be so much better. The only thing I can do right now is rebalance them, take care of occasional artifacts that got through in the render, add Photoshop "post" work to make them more vivid and interesting. The rest of the work will have to wait ... soooo much other, new, stuff to do first! Including this enormous story idea of my own to pursue.

Cthulu Manifests! Also barbarians, SF heroes, and more...

Cthulu manifests! Do you know your H.P. Lovecraft?! This picture came out of an observation that one of the Amberlight images I did a week or so ago seems to have an alien face looking out of it...

Original Amberlight render

...so it was a case of spinning the image around, using custom numbers to get it upright, then painting it lavishly in Photoshop:

Photoshop painting over Amberlight render

Ouch! Then it occurred to me that this would make one heck of a great backdrop for a much deeper work, where a human bears witness to the manifestation which tore open a great rent in the cosmos as we know it, so -- back into DAZ Studio for the barbarian to be added.

One of the final experiments I run on any piece of artwork is to bucket-fill a color layer into a blank top layer created in whatever new piece of art I'm finishing, and run through the blend modes, just to see what magical weirdness might spontaneously happen -- and it did! This time I used an ickly shade of green, and this happened:

...and of course as soon as I saw that, I thought to myself, "Dang, I can see this was a magazine cover from the golden age!" Mike got involved at this point, and we had all kinds of fun making up the ludicrous story titles and witty bylines, and running the DTP software (Serif) to mock-up the cover. Cute!

And I was fiddling with characters and starship sets yesterday, and this happened:

Soon as I saw this, I said, "I know who you are!" Do you remember Tully Ingersol fro the Hellgate series? Yeah, the chief engineer on Rick Vaurien's incredible salvage Vessel, Wastrel. Whooo, I used to love that ship, that crew. I'd happily sit down and read another six books, if the author could be coerced to write them. Anyway, I saw this guy, and I thought: I know you! (Which is really, really inspiring me to get back into the Hellgate art. The fact is, all of that art goes back to 2012, and ... I could do it sooo much better now. Okay. Let's get into this.)

Lastly for today, am starting to hammer some sense out of Bryce 7 Pro:

Now, that one doesn't bear very close examination, but it's getting closer and closer to the photo realism that one knows, academically, Bryce will deliver, but emotionally, one begins to doubt it after the fiftieth crap render in a row! But yes, the penny is starting to drop now. We'll get there.

The classic "muscly torso" -- art for its own sake. And for a book cover.

Playing in LuxRender and Photoshop today ... and it's actual work. Whoo! Doesn't get any better than that. As you can probably tell from the dimensions of the image (67:100), it's a book cover. What's more, it's a book cover in current design trends.

It's astonishing, when you look at a few hundred book cover (as they show up on the book club sites, Amazon, whatever) and you start seeing trends.  Not every cover on every book follows the trend; but a hell of a lot of them do, and the majority of books falling into the "big seller" range seem to adhere more or less to the set criteria. So -- what the hell?

So, what you have here is a heavily over-painted rainforest image (it's far more than 50% Photoshop painting, as it stands right now), and then the LuxRender of one of my Michael 4 designs; and then some more painting on top. The LuxRender layer is so photographic, I'm thrilled to bits with this. Can't wait to set something up tomorrow and see it go again! This is fun.

You have actually seen this Michael 4 character before. I designed him a couple of years ago, and you saw him back in January, 2015:

That one had hand-painted hair, he's what you could call "scruffy-adorable," and looked a few years younger. I actually prefer the model with a few years on him. In fact --

One of the projects I've promised myself I will get down to, soon, is ... Harrison Shapiro. You know Harrison Shapiro? The General who actually managed to catch the whole lot of them, from Rick Vaurien right through to Mark Sherratt, Curtis Marin, Neil Travers -- the whole lot. If you don't have the foggiest notion what I'm talking about ... hehehe, you don't know what you've been missing. But you can catch up. Anyway -- those of you who do know what Jade is babbling about today will know that Harrison Shapiro is a doll, one of a kind. I've modeled Travers and Marin, Mark, Mick Vidal, Barb Jazinsky, engineer Tully Ingersol, mercenary Sergei van Donne, the hitman, Ramon, and even the little twerp, Tonio Teniko. But I need to model Harrison Shapiro and his other half, Jon Kim, and also Robert Chandra Liang.)

This is fun. Have been looking some more at the Michael 6 model (Genesis 3), and they're up to Victoria 7 now ... and the first rumors are circulating regarding DAZ Studio 5. Ahem. The latest version of Studio is 4.9, which means Studio 5 can't be more than a year or so away. If I just hang on, I might be able to leapfrog right over Studio 4 altogether and re-enter at Studio 5. Also, recently something called Luxus has come out: a plugin for DAZ Studio which places the icon for LuxRender right there on your Render menu inside Studio. Hmmm. This is starting to get interesting.

Help! The project files are missing!!

Well, fudgesickles, as Dave says. I've just spent about an hour and a half tearing several harddrives apart, looking for a whole swag of the project files for Jarrat and Stone, the Hellgate characters, and a lot of other stuff which I've been wanting to rerender in Lux and so forth. A case of mild panic ensued. A lot of the files are there to be found. A lot aren't. Well ... dang. The good news is, Jarrat and Stone have survived; and Rick Vaurien, Mark Sherrat and so forth. The bad news is, some of the minor characters -- such as Tully Ingersol, the Weimann specialist on the Wastrel, for instance, is just gone. So...

Some of the characters will have to be reimagined. Like this:

There's the new Tully Ingersol -- somewhat serendipitously, because I'd just finished doing fresh art to rejacket at old book...

...and couldn't resist playing around with the hairstyles. Would you believe that the two characters you see above are actually the same Michael 4 morph, just with a switch of hairdo! Amazing, but true. I'm barely believing it myself, but the facts are right there in the software. Cool.

So the next weeks will see me recovering a lot of the old ground ... but this is actually a good thing, because so much of the art from 2010 needs to be re-rendered in any case. It's always astonishing, the way it comes up afresh in LuxRender -- or even with the techniques I learned in later years.

In fact, we're running up to a milestone. The first post went up on this blog on September 25, 2009. We're racing toward the seventh anniversary of the day when I decided to share the process of "nutting out" 3D art. Dang, what a long way I've traveled -- and we're not done yet.

Stay tuned. Good things are to follow.

After a very, very long absence ... am I back? I sure hope so!

Richard Vaurien and Sergei van Donne

After a very, very long absence ... I'm back. At least, I hope I'm back. I'm certainly going to try! I've been wrestling with health issues that came close to utterly defeating me, and though I'm still not well, the fact is, I'm bored out of my gourd. So I'm going back to artwork and writing, and nuts to the fact I don't feel so good. My head's going to ache permanently? Fine: be like that. It'll just have to get on and ache, because I'm bored enough to stick out a thumb, just ahead of the next UFO, and bum a ride right out of here. So...

What better place to start than Hellgate. Always my favorite place to "run home" when I need a vacation. I could live there in a heartbeat because I love the places, the people ... everything. All credit to Mel Keegan as the creator of this fantastic universe. [2023 EDIT: the dot-com web address is defunct as of early this year. For some reason, the system utterly denied access to it, and it could not be renewed. Then some joker bought it as a zombie domain name, and MK would have to buy it back at significant cost. Not going to happen, but the web pages are all still there and still viable. Find MK online in the same place.]

I did a lot of Hellgate art years and years ago, and some of it has traveled surprisingly well across time, and some ... hasn't. Generally, it was "okay in its day," but CG art has progressed by leaps and bounds since the last time I dabbled. Michael 4 has become Michael 6, while I was looking in another direction, hunting for my health! Well, I don't have access to Michael 6, or the Genesis figures, or anything remotely similar. But I do know where I am, driving the classic software.

So here's one of my old favorites: Richard Vaurien, talking to Sergei van Donne in the big industrial airlocks on the Wastrel. This is "just" a DAZ Studio raytrace with a modicum of Photoshopping in post-production. No Lux or Bryce involved here. Most textures on the costumes were switche dout for my own textures, and displacement maps added. Depth of field (DOF) is turned ON, and much work was done with lights and virtual camera settings before the whole shebang was raytraced at 3200 pixels wide. Good old Studio 3. Still works -- dead simple, friendly interface. Next, I'll go play with LuxRender!

And just in case you're into Hellgate, here's a wallpaper version  ...

Hellgate wallpapeer: 1600x900

... at 1600 x 900, which suits most monitors. Certainly, if you have Irfanview, you can tell it to "stretch proportionally," and it'll fill the whole screen on a big 26" monitor --

-- like that. Neat. Loads of space on the blank left side of screen for parking icons out of the way, allowing you to keep the art clear. Golly, you'd think it was designed that way, LOL.

So in the days and weeks ahead, look out for new art, with all the bells, whistles and skill I learned and acquired in the seven years since the original art on this blog was done! If I do manage to trade up to new software and Genesis models -- dandy. If I don't, the art will still be suitable eye-candy ... and there's a lot of it, backlogged, from the ten months or so (I know, I know ...) since I had the chance to upload here.

Cross fingers, things are "coming good."

A little CG science fiction: Landing Approach ... updated (with the "oopsie" fixed!)

click to see all images at large size:

first and third are configured as wallpapers

UPDATED next day -- was anyone sharp-eyed enough to catch the "oopsie" ?? You'd have to have a monitor that was set very, very bright to notice it, but ... I used the wrong image when I was preparing the uploads. There was an "artifact" in the painting that had no business being there. It didn't show on monitors set darker or more contrasty, but it was there! So: re-uploaded, fixed. Now, back to the original post...

Yes, your eyes do not deceive you -- that's Neil Travers. And that's still the "Brad" skinmap dropped onto my face morph ... I ran the experiment to see how the Mitchell skinmap would work out. Nope. It changes the face a great deal, especially around the mouth. So it looks like the Brad skinmap, from H3D, is going to be the one. The only work needed on it, in fact, in the post-painting, is to take some of the ruddy color out of the face, and make the eyebrows a leeetle bit more firm, so I actually did a tiny little bit of painting direct onto the skinmap itself, to lessen the work needed each time we render Neil. Result ... very nice!

This is another piece that was worked up in layers, and is a hybrid between Bryce, DAZ Studio and Photoshop. The whole project started with the city, which gave me the inspiration for the rest:

I call this one "Landing Approach," and I'd guess the city down there is something like Hydralis, or perhaps even Sark. I'd need to refer that question to Mel Keegan, see which of the major cities that play such a large part in the Hellgate books best fits this piece.

If you're into the SF aspect and want to chase up Hellgate, be aware that there is GLBT content in these books -- and there are five volumes (big ones!) to date, with one to go to finish up the series. Just go to Mel Keegan Online and follow your nose. [2023 EDIT: the dot-com web address is defunct as of early this year. For some reason, the system utterly denied access to it, and it could not be renewed. Then some joker bought it as a zombie domain name, and MK would have to buy it back at significant cost. Not going to happen, but the web pages are all still there and still viable. Find MK online in the same place.]

If you're into the artistic aspect and want to know what went into this image: that's Michael 4 wearing a face designed by me, and the GQ Event hair by Neftis, and the Brad skinmap by H3D. The costume is the M4 Classic Trenchcoat (from Renderosity), the M4 Cowboy Jeans and the teeshirt from Stylin' M4 (all from DAZ). The textures have all been changed out to give the costume a new look (let's face it, if you stick to the same textures every time, it looks like the characters never change their clothes). The set is the cockpit of the Vanguard space craft (from DAZ). The background is the Alien City standing set for Bryce, with sky and lighting conditions designed by me; the other spacecraft are OBP models (the Bryce version of OBJ) from the Space Combat Force set. The Bryce part of the image was rendered first at high quality, which took 82 minutes, and painted in Photoshop -- which took about the same amount of time; then this was used as the backdrop for the DAZ Studio render. This isn't even a raytrace! The difference between the raytrace and the deep shadow map render was noticeable ... this was one of the very, very rare occasions when the raytrace was not as good. So I went with the other, shipped it into Photoshop and started painting again. The final image was rendered at 3000 pixels wide, to allow for fine painting. The raytrace took about four minutes and the deep shadow map render took close to forty seconds. Go figure. Painting in Photoshop took about an hour after the final render was complete.

The finished image, and the background as a whole, have been uploaded at 1920 wide, so it ought to be perfect for a wallpaper. I've just set it as the wallpaper on both my 24" widescreen and my 15" laptop, and it looks great. It looks so good, I'm reaching for the Hellgate books, and will pass away a couple of pleasant hours this evening with them ... it's way too hot to do anything much. By the third or fourth day of a 100 degree plus heatwave, you're just about ready to admit defeat!

On another note completely: wahooo!  We watched Black Caviar run at Flemington, this time yesterday ... yesss!!! As the commentator said, "The legend lives on." You know me and horses, through the art you seen on these pages and posts. Like everyone else, I love this particular horse: http://www.blackcaviar.net.au/. She's back ... she's bigger, and she's faster than ever. What's not to love:

...and lastly, still on the subject of horses, I just discovered something called Cavalia. You have to see this to believe it: http://www.cavalia.net/en. Oh, my. 

Back soon -- after the heatwave, I think...

Jade, February 17, 2013

At last -- my gallery! 600+ of the best images

At last -- at last! -- my Gallery is done and online, and as the post title indicates, there are over 600 images in a dozen categories. What else can you say about it? Hope you enjoy visiting ... here's the url:

EDIT: the ancient 2012 Gallery has gone and is being replaced, in 2023, with an all-new gallery.

I'll be updating the site now and then with new work, and as I start to write I'll also be posting some readings there. Right now, I'm seriously thinking about a novel -- not Abraxas, Not instead of Abraxas, but as well as. In fact, what I might do is write Abraxas in segments and upload it to my main site, and then we'll see how we go with tackling something like a Very Major Novel. The idea I have right now is huge -- I mean, it's going to make for an enormous book. I want to start out with something a leeetle bit smaller before I launch into a project that'll take a long time to complete just because of the size of the beast. so Abraxas will definitely come along first.

Right now, I'm starting to watch out for the first segment of Event Horizon -- the sixth and final Hellgate novel. If you're thinking it's overdue, you're right! But I can tell you three things right here. One: Mel Keegan is having problems of the RL variety. Life is being a bitch for him, and he's coping at the expense of putting certain items on the back burner. Alas, writing is one of those things. Load him up with one more thing right now, and -- well, you know the old saying about the last straw breaking the camel's back? Not that Mel looks like a camel, but you get the gist of this. Two: Event Horizon is enormous, and it'll be done in segments, just as Flashpoint was done. Flashpoint wound up at 251,000 words, which is four or even five times longer than an average novel in today's parlance. So ... patience, folks.You'll be getting incredible value for money when you pay the usual ten bucks for this! And, Three: Event Horizon is going to be way more than worth the wait. I've seen the outline -- about 12pp of highly detailed notes, as per Mel's usual game strategy. In a word: wow. So I'm watching out for the first segment of Event Horizon; the book will be processed through in chunks, like Flashpoint, and when the last segment is done, she'll be ready to "go." When? As soon as is humanly possible. Beyond that, I can't say ... it depends how Real Life treats Mel! I'm not going to nag about it; I'm just going to look forward to it...

Jade, July 10

SF heroes. Why not?

click to see all other images at large size... 

Sorry to disappear on you for a week. The last few days, health has been an issue. Some kind of sinus infection -- it started out as major sneezing and a headache, which I was slow to realize were symptoms of the same thing till the full-on "lergie" hit me broadside, Friday. Anyway, as Sam said, I'm back!

Here's a couple of things I've been tinkering with, off and on, in the background -- Richard Vaurien and Neil Travers, from Hellgate. Lately, Richard is fascinating me more and more, and Hellgate is very much on my mind, with the sixth -- final -- novel of the series coming along soon. Event Horizon. Indulge yourself in a shiver when you think about it. I surely do!

Have been enjoying myself playing with effects --

--like that. Reflections in lenses. Many, many projects are simmering in the background, and if my health was 100%, I'd be going a lot faster, but ... grrr. Thanks for bearing with me.

Also picked up the latest issue of ImagineFX ... and whaddaya think's on the CD-Rom taped in the back of the magazine? Pirate costumes, pistols, and what they describe as a highly detailed model of HMS Victory. Aha. Well now, this will be explored in some detail, very soon!

While posting to the other blog, I chanced upon the blog stats. The most often-loaded post over on the Exotic blog? It's been loaded well over 6,000 times. And it ain't for the text! I don't write much over there. It's all about art that's not merely sensual, but "adult," if you know what I mean. Nudge, wink and whatnot. That's pretty fantastic -- six thousand views of the one post!

Anyway -- please enjoy these pieces, and ... I'll be back soon with some projects that have been buzzing around in my mind while I've been hovering within reach of the tissues and teapot.

Jade, May 21

Romance in hyperspace. Like one needs a reason...!

click to see all images at large size... 

As promised, I'm back with more art to share, and ... yes!! I found the original files for the character of Tonio Teniko. Here's the original Tonio:

And here's what DAZ Studio saved as the .dsb file (the character preset, which you merge onto the basic Michael 4 doll):

Well ... looks are actually a bit deceiving, because changing the hairstyle a little bit in today's renders, and changing the expression, certainly makes Tonio look a lot closer to the character you saw yesterday, so ... maybe the .dsb file was right after all. Maybe what I was remembering is a trick of the hairstyle and expression and lighting? Could be. One thing's for sure: Johnny Depp knows all these tricks, and this is sixty percent of his craft. The magic of the actor. Compare Jack Sparrow with Barnabas Collins with -- ye gods, have you seen the first look at Tonto? Remind yourself, it's all the same face under that make-up, the wigs, and the bird he's wearing on his head in The Lone Ranger.

Soooo ... when I found Tonio Teniko, I couldn't resist setting up a couple of renders with Tonio and the object of his utter fixation, Richard Vaurien. Then, I couldn't resist playing with Richard's hair. The original toupee was the Mon Chevalier wig, which doesn't actually let you "pull" it into long styles so well, and -- if you know your Hellgate, you'll know Richard has a mane of  red hair.  So I switched the hairstyle for the Aether Hair, which actually looks pretty magnificent on Richard.

The only downside to this was, I realized both Richard and Tonio were now wearing the same basic hairstyle. So next, it was a question of reorganizing the hair on Tonio -- hence, the difference between the former appearance of the character, and today's renders. It's the wig. Ask Johnny Depp!

I love the Richard Vaurien face. This one was such a challenge, so rewarding. Richard is not a young kid, and bringing the extra years, the maturity, to the face was very rewarding. Note to self: do more with this character.

Well ... having posed Tonio and Richard, how could I resist bringing in the new version of Neil Travers to pose with Richard? Fair's fair -- Neil was the one Richard spent all those years waiting for, only to lose out at the last minute, when Neil met the love of his life aboard the Intrepid, Curtis Marin. (You know Hellgate, right? You know what all this is about, yes? Cool. If not, check this out!) The difference in Neil Travers is the skinmap. I tried a new skinmap on him in February, because I've never been really happy with previous skinmaps I've tried on Neil. This one is "Bart" by H3D, and it does seem to work nicely on him:

The only thing I might see if I can change is the eyebrows. They look a little bit "pencilled on," and I might get in there and see if I can paint something that looks a tad bit more natural. This skinmap was designed to fit on a Brad Pitt clone (see this post), and these brows were probably designed to dovetail with the character from Interview with the Vampire. That's the only reservation I have about this skinmap on Neil Travers. That experiment comes next. Soon as I have the time, right? Right.

As promised, here's the bookcover I've been wanting to share for a couple of weeks:

And here is is without the text objects overlaid...

The book is a fantastic read, and due out in April. I'll tell you a bit more about it closer to the launch date, but ... yes, the character you see here is the big beauty you saw a few weeks ago -- and that link will also take you to the post were I débuted the spacecraft and ringed planet art, which were done in Bryce.

More soon -- there's a good deal more to share before Dave and I vamoose on that road trip I mentioned yesterday.

Jade, March 20

Now, that's more like it!

click to see all images at large size...

Suffice to say ... it worked. I've been looking for the right skinmap for Neil Travers for a long, long time, and it turns out, my intuition regarding the Bart skinmap -- which you saw yesterday, with the Brad Pitt clone wearing it! -- works very nicely indeed. I did have to do a little bit of painting to tone down some redness in the facemap, but otherwise, it looks very, very "right" on Colonel Travers here. (What's that, you say Colonel Travers? If you're still thinking Captain or Major, you just haven't gotten along to Flashpoint ... and you don't know what you've been missing!)

So I'm going to count this one done and dusted. He's amazingly realistic, especially when the lights are brighter; he got Mel Keegan's stamp of approval about fifteen minutes ago (in fact, Mel is thrilled with this -- "the best best ... lock it, call it good," said MK. So I did), and I look forward very much to posing him with Curtis Marin, Rick Vaurien and Mark Sherrat. I'll probably revisit some of the old renders -- open the projects back up, apply this skinmap, and the slightly repainted face, to the character, and re-render them ... especially as, now, I have the ability to fairly easily raytrace things that were giving my computer a hernia last year!

I still have't had the chance to install DAZ Studio 4 Pro, or run the Collada experiment, to -- hopefully -- get DAZ and Poser Pro 2010 talking to each other. I have high hopes, and I'll let you know how it goes!

Jade, 23 February