Two generations of geometries. In the same shot. Not too bad ... and dForce!

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. 

Speaking of challenges --

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. 

Nope, not yet. Grrr.

As the post title suggests ... nope, not yet, no call from the workshop to go and collect the computer ... which means Tuesday is the next earliest date I can expect to have it back. Whimper.

But the time hasn't been wasted: I downloaded manuals. And read them.

Which means I ought to be able to hit the ground running, and have also thrashed through a number of the problems which beset users -- not least of which being in the download itself. Fortunately, one of the things I paid for (and it wasn't cheap) was a full upgrade on the operating system. This should give me all the bang up to date drivers to run something called dForce --

-- and dForce is the next generation on from the old dynamic cloth idea. I was never able to get into that, since I toughed it out with Studio 3 for many, many years. Now, I'll probably leapfrog dynamic  whatever and go right for the dForce engine ... I hope. What's it do for you? Well --

-- with any luck, it ought to drape fabrics like this, above, which is a catalog image (credits printed into the picture: not my work. I think it's from the DAZ shop: it certainly looks familiar). It does automatically what you'd spend eons doing by hand, and comes up with results which follow gravity and so forth...

Catalog image: track it down here

This is all absolutely virgin territory to me, but thank heavens, YouTube is just loaded with tutorials; so, so long as my drivers are all sorted and I can get nice, clean downloads of the software and plugins, I ought to be in business.

In the meantime, the desktop has taken most of my programs with it: DAZ, Bryce, Photoshop, Krita ... I've got nothing on this laptop except Amberlight and Terragen. Am playing in Amberlight because it's soooo easy, and if I tell the truth, I'm too tired to make Terragen do anything. It's winter now, dark and cold, and when you're nursing a huge backache and listening to driving rain ... urk. So --

You won't (can't) see any new art from me till the desktop is home and everything is up and running. My arms aren't long enough to reach IT Warehouse from here, and even if I could, I imagine they have the case laid wide open and cables dribbling out of it. One last Amberlight image, and I'm going for dinner. *sigh* Maybe, a phone call tomorrow? If not, Tuesday?

It's worse than being an expectant father. I think. 😶

There. Dinner, here I come, then a DVD, and call it a day. Too, too exciting, right?