Misadventures with displacement maps and Iray surface parameters

 

Michael 4 in Iray; Elite Lee skinmap

Today I'm revisiting the fourth generation figure -- good old Michael 4 himself. I'm loath to just abandon the figure, because 80% if all the resources I own are for M4, and all the characters I ever designed over ten years are for M4! So the question is, what can be done with Michael 4 today, in Iray? Turns out, you can do quite a lot with the old figure, though it's also a lot of work. The Genesis figures are pretty much "plug and play." With minor exception, they load up ready to render, while M4 takes a whale of a lot of configuring, to make the old materials and maps work well. This, above, is an HD map, Elite Lee, and it renders well in Iray. But when you use a skinmap that's not HD, you work hard...

Michael 4 in Iray; Ferendir skinmap

This, above, is Sixth Sense's Ferendir, which looks fabulous in a raytrace, but looks very, very flat indeed in Iray; I pulled every trick I know to get a halfway decent result out of it, in Iray! You would not believe, would you, that this, below, is the same skinmap, raytraced --

Raytrace, in Studio 3

...and there's one other thing that Iray will absolutely, positively NOT do for you: displacement mapping. Iray utterly ignores displacement maps, which means the easy way to turn on the vascularity (venous mapping ... to throw into relief the veins in the skin) is off the table. So I did a lot of research, and discovered that Iray will recognize a normal map, which is something; and it allowed me to work with a simple prop and get better results:

Normal mapping...

That's not bad: the normal map brought up the bark very nicely. I'm now asking the question, would a normal map bring up the vascularity in Michael 4? I'd have run the experiment today, but I ran out of time (ie., wasted over an hour) when Studio began to jack around, mis-cue and generally be weird. Right out of the blue, after having no problem with lights for weeks, Iray ceased to recognize the light pumped out by a photometric spotlight! I mean, I ended up with a searchlight about a foot away from the dude's face, the preview was glaring with light, but when you clicked "Render," the Iray engine couldn't see the light. The figure rendered flat black! Say, what?!! So I lit the whole this with IBL lights and then painted it in Photoshop, to make the most of a short foray into Genesis 3, and the result is like a storybook illustration:

Genesis 3 ... such a child!

You can tell "something is wrong" with it ... if this was supposed to be photorealistic, it's more of a painting. And Genesis 3, right out of the box, is such a ... a child. That's a little boy, which is not to my taste at all. I imagine you can make something of him by adding character morphs?? Maybe so, but I've trawled the DAZ store, and I can't find any! Hair and costumes, yes, but as for character morphs and skinmaps specifically for G3? Nope. Go figure. So we'll be leaving G3 pretty much alone...

Tomorrow, I'll see if I can figure out what Studio is doing with the lights (not rendering them); and I'll see if normal mapping will make the venous detail appear in M4 ... and I'll have another go to see if I can get a coherent raytrace, and perhaps we can get back to this kind of work -- which is a raytrace, and you can tell that because M4 has the vascularity on and working ...

Raytrace, in Studio 3

A swordsman in the snow ... whooo!

Hunting around through the "assets" I bought a long, long time ago -- and never had the harddrive space to install! -- I came upon this skinmap: Ferendir, by a designer called "SixthSense." It's a gorgeous skinmap, and renders beautifully ... though I do admit, I painted the eyebrows, which are too pale and thin for my liking; and I also applied the SAV Atlas displacement mapping on the torso and arms to bring up good venous mapping. But just take look at this skinmap in closeup -- if you can, see it at full size:

That's superb. A pleasure to watch it rendering! Using the Atlas displacement maps adds an extra dimension to it; and I designed a new face to go with this map. This is not the Ferendir face morph, as packaged by the designer. To be honest, the original face doesn't do anything for me. You might like it, and the good news is, it's still available from Renderosity.

So, not wanting a teenager, I designed a face and body I like, and came up with this:

This is what I love about working with Michael 4: it's so easy, and so quick, to get results. Sure, Genesis  can be significantly closer to full-on photo-realism, but it takes soooo long to get anywhere, especially on a slow system like mine. With M4 you can create new characters on the fly in a snap. I rather like this face -- and the eyes are the brilliant green item from The Eyes Have it set:

The hair is hand-painted, based on the old Mario's Hair for M4, from Neftis Hair Salon. That doesn't render up so well (well, it's quick, but the downside to that is, you pay for speed in low-rez results: human hair isn't supposed to go around corners, and so forth), but it does give you a good base to paint over, and ... Photoshop to the rescue again.

The snow is an old .ABR brush, Ron's Magical Snow, from the days when Ron's brushes could be used with Photoshop Elements. Alas, his new brushes need the full on Creative Suite version, or whatever it is these days ... I can't use them. I'm still running Elements 9! It works, I own it outright, and I've no reason to change it, since it does everything I want it to! The only thing is, sometimes people come along with fabulous new brushes which I can't use; but there's a free site, All Free Download (dot com), which is loaded with old fashioned brushes. They are absolutely free and this is not one of those sites plagued with viruses and such antisocial rubbish. It's perfectly safe, and the worst thing you might have to do is look at a couple of pay-per-view commercials in exchange for downloading some very good .abr brushes. Enjoy!

This sword is Merlin's Katana ... but I've been unpacking loads of props from years ago, and just discovered that I own Xurge 3D's Ranger weapons! I had no idea I had these -- expect to see them very soon. I honestly have no idea what I have stashed away from 2013 or so. Even though I didn't have the harddrive space, I shopped a lot of sales, grabbed fantastic special offers. Now's the time to bring them out, dust them off and play! The Ferendir skinmap is one such stashed item. It renders as well as anything I've ever seen, and with the pixel and shadow sampling settings cranked way up on 3Delight, the resolution is brilliant. That skin absolutely glows.

The costume is the bottom half of Xurge 3D's Medieval Royalty cossie; you saw the whole thing yesterday. Now I've got the surface texture adjustments worked out to get good results in Studio from an item configured for Poser, it's easy to work with...

And so to bed. More tomorrow! 

Xurge fantasy goodies, and chasing image quality ... whoooo!

Nope, that's not an Iray render, and that ain't Genesis. That's good old Michael 4, and a Studio 4.11 raytrace right out of 3Delight, with the render settings cranked way high. Now I'm amazed. Also thrilled to bits. Take a closer look, see how the mapping renders up:

Firstly, that's believable sunlight, and the higher sampling rate brings the skin tones up brilliantly. I've dialed the render settings up so high on this, the render took a whole whopping 43 minutes, as against nine or ten for the default settings. Whooo! So, let's go again --

Wow. Seriously. The costume is Xurge 3D's Druid Shaman, which is optimized for Poser ... I only needed to overdrive the displacement mapping and dial down the specularity for it to render up beautifully in Studio. The skinmap is SAV Atlas (from Renderosity), but the vascular map is the M4 Displacement from the DAZ marketplace. The eyes are the dark brown option from The Eyes Have It (DAZ marketplace). The set is DM's Elven Shed again (Renderosity), and the trees you see here are the Deluxe Trees, also from DAZ marketplace, I think. Depth of field is turned on, and the virtual aperture is set to F/15 to get this effect. I have two lights on it, with softer shadows.

I did a tiny bit of painting in Photoshop afterward, largely because the mask needed a little help to look good in a screaming closeup. Seen very close, it's obviously made in halves and "stuck together:" the diffuse map doesn't quite match down the nose. But it's a dead easy fix in post, if you just give it a few minutes. And the costume has an impeccable fit on Michael 4. Take a close look at the sandals.

So, since raytraces are done in a lot less than an hour, let's go again with two Michael 4 characters in Xurge 3D costumes, and a set --

This time I wanted two very different skinmaps, hair, faces. Aside from a couple of "artifacts" in the render, and adding highlights to the hair, I did nothing at all to this. Oh -- I hand-painted the body hair on the paler character. Otherwise, you have two M4s, Xurge's Untamed, their Druid Shaman sans the headdress and mask, DM's Mirador set, the Aether hair on the swarthy character, the My Rock Star Hair from Neftis on the paler character. Faces and body morphs designed by me, and again, the vascular mapping is the M4 Displacement map set. (You have to be careful with that one. It has four settings, low, medium, high and super, but anything over medium crumples the mesh on the base figure, so really, only low and medium are useful.)

I switched out materials in a couple of places, changed some diffuse colors, to make the costumes "pop" a little more in Studio -- Xurge warns that they're configured for Poser, and some of the textures do render up rather flat on the default settings. Easy to  fix...

This was just a twenty minute render, even at high-quality settings on 3Delight ... no trees, LOL. Like hair, trees really slow a render down. Even so, a forty minute render is screamingly fast by comparison with anything I can get out of my old PC in Iray, so I'm happy.

Been looking at systems and components. Went to the IT Warehouse site and picked out all the components I'd like built into my new system ... added by the retail value and had to laugh. I just built a (hypothetical!) $3,030 system. We're going to have to come down to earth here, when I finally go shopping, this time next year. We'll see. For the moment, I have tons of toys to play with -- scores of things I haven't even installed yet. So -- more soon! 😁

A grab bag of goodies -- barbarian, dancer ... vascular mapping, shaders and all

Back to basics -- a raytrace right out of good old Studio 3. The skinmap and face morph are Atlas (which I think is by SAV; from Renderosity), and the render pulls virtually every trick in the book, with a good result. I fell back to basics after a fruitless hour trying to get the M4 Displacement to manually install properly ... it gave me the right, royal run-around, but in the end -- just as I was about to yank my hair out by the roots and run around screaming, I did get it to work:

This one is a Studio 4.11 raytrace, and I cranked up the sampling to get higher fidelity. I'm actually fairly pleased with this. (The only downside is ... I can't save the project file. Whatever I do, I do on the fly as a one-off, which makes for more work, but -- hey ho._ As you can see, I got the M4 Displacement to work in the end -- there's only one proviso: it doesn't work in Iray. So finding out that you can get higher quality raytraces becomes more important! Remember how much you love raytracing, and explore the new depth in the 3Delight settings.

The vascularity adds a dimension of realism ... it's going to be fun playing with this. The big challenge was finding the package, once it was copied over. If you're having the same problem, take a look here:

My DAZ 3D Library \ People \ Michael 4 \ Materials \ M4 Displacement

...and whaddaya know, there it is. The way Studio 4.11 reads files and folders is confusing, and can be confounding, but after six months I think I'm starting to get the hang of it. 😜

There's a package for Genesis 8 called "Add Some Veins," which essentially does the same thing for Genesis 8.. I don't have that package yet. Still going fifteen rounds with Studio, trying to get it to install things manually, and do it reliably, coherently. I had six items to install today, and got through three of them because with the exception of a set of poses (from Renderosity) the rest gave me a fight. But --

Genesis 8 -- "Going Dancing:" new poses and shaders, installed and working. Phew.

It was a bit of a chore getting the Polygonal Miniatures Iray Shaders Collection to work properly, because although everything copied over to the letter, and is in place, Studio can't find any of the texture maps ... meaning, every time I apply a shader, you have to "locate" the map. Just one more hoop to jump through I guess; so I went through the motions with a test piece --

-- using eight shaders on one prop, the Chinese screen from the Folding Screens set. Fair enough, I can go through the "locate" routine for this. The only "hmm" I have about this shader pack is that, as you can see immediately, the shaders visibly "tile" over large areas. They're beautifully seamless, but the texture maps are quite small, and you can pick the pattern at a glance. These will have to be used with considerable care, to hide this.

The poses are really good, and I think they were a freebie from Renderosity. Ain't it odd? The freebie is the item that works perfectly, installed without a fuss and just clicked into place. The only thing I need to remember is where Studio finds this item! So I'm going to make a note to myself here, LOL, so I can refer back to this post if I forget where it is! Note to self: the Thorvan Poses are here:

My DAZ 3D Library \ People \ Genesis 8 Male \ Poses \ thorvan-poses

...simple and logical, when you think about it, but I had to hunt it down. Worth the hunt.

Three more items to install, if I can manage it: a new hairstyle, a Wolverine-style leather jacket for Genesis, and an SF costume. I'll get to them tomorrow, and with a bit of luck they won't mess me about the way the M4 Displacement and Polygonal shaders did. Cross fingers.

Michael 4 fantasy, in and out of Iray ... and feeling optimistic --

As promised yesterday, we'll step back a couple of paces, go back to simpler things and work back toward what's doable in Iray (for me, with my hardware). So -- for a start, we'll do a raytrace! And here's where it gets interesting. I've never really delved into the 3Delight engine in Studio 4 -- why would you? You to to Studio 4 to get access to Iray, right.? But I did "go backwards" for a while, and wound up noticing that 3Delight is a lot more fully featured than it used to be --

The version built into Studio is the freebie. The full-on pro version of 3Delight is about A$2000, which is dumb, when you realize NVIDIA Iray is free, like LuxRender, and you can even get Maya, from Autudesk, for about a grand, Aussie. The major thing Poser users always held against DAZ Studio 3 wasn't the interface, which is fine, but the very rudimentary render engine built into it. The truth is, by comparison with Poser's Firefly engine, 3Delight is extremely limited. Disappointing. Soooo ... I was intrigued to dig around in 3Delight, as built into Studio 4.11, and discover a lot more ways to configure it... Hmm.

You can now squeeze a lot more out of raytracing than you used to get out of it. There is a downside: as you crank up the sampling and so forth, render times blow out massively. Duh. You have to look for the sweet spot, because you could wind up with a raytrace that took longer to render than an Iray image! Anyway, this raytrace, above, was done at much higher settings, taking about an hour. I can tell the difference.

Curious to see what Iray could make of the same material (all of which is low-poly: two Michael 4 figures, a couple of props, a set), I gave the picture one hour in Iray, at half size:

Very different, isn't it? The same render time as the raytrace, albeit at half the size. Seeing the result here made me wonder how our avenging angel might render in closeup, so --

That's an hour in Iray, too -- and the beauty of this is, there renders are finished, whereas the Genesis 8 work I've been tackling in the last week or so chokes my system after about five or six hours and can never be finished on my current hardware! I do like Michael 4 a lot, actually. With this character here, the only thing that's missing is the vascular mapping: the venous, or vein, mapping. Soooo...

I'm 99.75% sure I have the manual installation thing worked out now. Seriously. I've got the old content working tolerably well in Studio 4 (even though I still can't actually save a file in Studio 4!), and I was feeling optimistic enough to shop a sale DAZ is having right now. One of the things I just got was this:

Catalog image. See this.

This is a very, very nice displacement map for the Michael 4 figure. It was on sale at about 70% off, so how could I not get it? (I also got some Genesis stuff, including a new wig). I just have to slog through the process and get this installed and working ... tomorrow. Then we'll mix and match skin maps, hairdos, costumes, and we'll see what we shall see! This is going to be fun ... stay tuned!

Barbarians sack a fantasy Ancient Egypt ... plus Terragen and wallpaper

The barbarian is back! Conan who? Seriously, I'm just in a mood for Conan, something like a happy cross between Frank Frazetta and Boris and since I've got the biiiig new harddrive I have the space to install loads of 3D models that I bought anything up to four and five years ago, and couldn't install for need of harddrive space. This picture is full of experiments, too...

It's just an old fashioned raytrace out of Studio 3. I might see how this renders up in IRay tomorrow or the next day ... I just didn't have time to mess about in Studio 4.10 today. Studio 3 is so fast by comparison, the fact that the raytrace takes a bit longer means nothing. The job can still be done so quickly, you're done in half the time. Take a look at this big beauty at full size (1200x1800), and see the venous mapping in the torso and arm. Oooooh, nice!

Last night, around midnight, I was messing about with Terragen --

Am delighted with this -- for a start, I was in control of it, LOL, it didn't just "happen." The water is very shallow; that green color is the lake-bed, and I set that surface shader before flooding the terrain! The clouds have bulk and structure. Sooo nice. Almost reminds me of the River Iss segment of John Carter of Mars.

One more thing for you today: another wallpaper at 1920 x 1080 size:

Park that on your desktop, set all your icons off on the right side ... neat! It looks a treat ... you're welcome! Tomorrow, with any luck, let's see what my barbarian looks like in IRay! I do like the new battle-axe; it's part of a collection of antique and historical weapons that's been waiting for installation for about five years! Good gods, where does time go?

More soon! 

The cover model, the Thing ... and the Highlands

Just starting (and I stress that, starting!) to get Studio 4.10 under control ... still messing about with IRay, because still waiting for DAZ Tech Support to help me get get the installation problems squared away, and ... well, I don't know about you, but I can't quite bring myself to put my hand in my pocket for something like $400 for odds and sods, like skinmaps, costumes, hairdos, plus Reality, when I'm not even sure they're going to install properly! So ... here's a whole new Michael 4 character created this afternoon...

That render took about 35 minutes. I could have left it cooking for a lot longer, but this answered pretty much everything I wanted to know about IBL lighting within Studio 4.10. Uh huh. The last thing that's got me scratching my head with the IBL lighting is, how the heck do you get proper shadows?? And yes, I've set a spotlight as well, to try that. And yes, I've been into the tone mapping controls and said, "crush shadows, burn highlights." Hunh. More experiments tomorrow!

This is a quite useful character, and I used this physique in, uh, this:

I wanted to know just how far you might be able to drive Michael 4 in IRay, because I've been looking at book covers ... romance book covers ... and am thinking to myself, "I can do that." Some of those male models you see on the book covers, they are CG, not photos. Michael 4 is almost good enough. Not quite, I think. It's going to take Genesis 3 or 8, or both, to get juuust what we need. Hmmm. So, the best you can get with the old model and the new render engine is this:

...and the truth is, I'm actually quite impressed. With the head cut out of the shot, and the venous mapping worked out, and a looong render to get rid of fireflies and whatnot, you're hard pressed to decide if this is CG or a photo. (This is a crop from the book cover image, just as it rendered, no touch ups or Photoshop work.)

Anyway, that mockup book cover is a 150 minute IRay render of M4, Photoshopped in post, against a Bryce sky, with typography in Serif. It's not bad at all, actually. You'll notice, I got the venous map to show on the model! The trick is this: you overdrive the settings, to the point where, if you raytraced the image on those settings, it would look like this:

And that is just so ghastly, it looks rather like the character in the Marvel movie, what is it? Fantastic Four, is that right? The rock dude. The Thing? I think his name was Ben --

LOL, if you compare poor old Ben there with the overdriven bump map that's necessary to get IRay to show any venous detail at all on the Michael 4 ...! 😱

While messing about with raytraces, I'd already put the book cover model through that process too, for the sake of interest:

The raytrace has its own charm, doesn't it? But what really annoys me is the way the POSE changes when you send the Studio 3 file into Studio 4.10. Look at the angle of his head! Also, the boots and the gnarly trees dropped out in the file transfer ... but I've had a humongous headache today, and couldn't be bothered going through the process of adding them back in. Ack. I leave it to you to figure out which you like better, IRay or raytrace, and I won't blame you if you choose the raytrace!

Last item for today: "Here in the highlands, the Highlands if Scotland," to quote the opening song from Brigadoon --

Terragen ... with a gorgeous sky, lovely water, perfect atmospherics (see the way the distant hills go hazy), and the tree right where I wanted it, LOL! Actually, I blew off about a hour, trying to work out how to add populations of things like grass and small plants, but it's waaay too complex for a day when you're full of pills and occasionally the headache punches right through the fog and slugs you. So we'll call this one done, and will see if we can figure out populations another time! Fortunately, YouTube is full of videos, like this one, and if worst comes to worst, I can always admit defeat and watch the tutorials! ("Instructions? We don't need no steenkeeng instructions!" 😀😁)

More soon...

A poster boy, trees in Terragen, amazing skies, and -- wallpaper!

If he looks familiar, he should! You've seen him in a raytrace, but I was curious to see what IRay could do with Michael 4 and this skinmap. It's actually reasonably good -- tickling the line where you're getting almost photographic results --

Not quite photographic, but not too far from it, and this one pulls every trick that anybody knows on the community forums knows: simple skin shader, photometric lights, loooong render time, high sample rate, whatever. You name it, the technique was invested in this. The face and body were designed by me; the skinmap is SAV Atlas, I've honestly forgotten what the hair is (!) and the only unresolved question here is ... why IRay is utterly ignoring my added bump map. The venous map is on and cranked to ludicrous levels, and it just doesn't show. I must look into this next. Hmm.

If you're interested (and certainly artists among you will be), here, have a look for yourself at the difference between the IRay render and a brand new raytrace out of Studio 4.10:

 
(Sorry about the download time on the above: the picture is very large, to let you see the differences properly. Much more detail in the skin, from IRay; gorgeous venous map in rayrace. Take your pick!

Anyway -- I bit the bullet and shopped a sale at Renderosity. Yay! After an absence of about five YEARS, the server knew me, logged me right in, and -- Flink's Tree was on sale, so I nabbed it quick, while I could save some bucks too. (Sorry, Flink ... I'll send you my dentist's phone number, you can call up and shout at him...)

The pack contains four trees, and here is #1, rendererd by IRay against a backdrop created in Terragen, with a bit of foreground created in Bryce 7 Pro and Studio 3:

Not bad. That's already the most realistic tree I've ever been able to render, LOL -- so I bit another bullet and decided to "go fifteen" with Terragen, and learn how you do this:

Terragen renders: they took about 20 minutes each, and boy, did I learn a lot here. How to import an OBJ into Terragen. How to position it, rotate it, light it, drive the camera around it. Cool! Terragen also gave me the option of importing this tree as a "population," meaning, it's standing by to paint whole hillsides with them and create a forest. That's the next experiment. 😉

Quite happy with those renders. Sure, I know the tree's still not 100%. The leaves are actually about the size of hubcaps, but seriously, what do you want for ten bucks (AUD) for four tree props? You can go to XFrog and pay A$62 for one tree prop. And one day I will. But "this is not that day," nudge, wink.

On the way in from a day in the national park yesterday, the weather changed the sky was amazing. Managed to grab these shots from the front street while Dave unpacked the car ... life imitates art!

Yes, that is the moon in the first shot ... and yes, the weather was changing. A couple of hours later we had thunder and, today, rain!

I'll leave you with a little something for your desktop. 1080 x 1920 wallpaper -- and it looks gorgeous, I promise you! You're welcome...

1080 x 1920 wallpaper

Park him on your desktop, arrange your icons on the right side. Nice! I'll make up more wallpapers as we go ... stand by to download a collection of them. If you have a request, drop me a line!

Red dwarf homeworld, Terragen atmospheres, gorgeous gay heroes and Photoshop brushes. Yes!!

Yep ... Jarrat and Stone ... and this picture is chock full of experiments. You might not believe it, but even now, after how many thousands of images, almost every picture I render and/or paint is still an experiment! I'll yack a bit more about that in a second, but for those of you who can't open the image at bigger scale (small phones, for a start), here's a closer look at our heroes:

(Credit where it's due: all kudos to Mel Keegan for creating Jarrat and Stone and the NARC universe, without which these gorgeous gay SF heroes would not exist, on these pages or anywhere else.)

Okay --

One thing I do love is "old fashioned SF" where writers like Poul Anderson (my absolute favorite of the Old Brigade ... he created Nicholas van Rijn and David Falkayn, for a start!) would not only spin great yarns but also build alien environments designed on solid science. Keegan is on my mind again lately, not merely because I'm up to Scorpio this time through (!), but also because he's writing again (!!!😁!!!), and he describes the current project as "At last, a 'Golden Age' romp without the 'warts' ... gay heroes and up-to-date tech." It's going to be great. Seriously. And what Mel is doing here really is as if someone like Poul Anderson or maybe Brian Stableford just decided to write a full-on gay adventure/love story on a fabulous alien world. Yeah ... wow. Which got my own imagination to working, and I found myself daydreaming about a fertile planet circling a red dwarf star (meaning a smaller and dimmer and cooler star than our own sun). So --

Into Bryce 7 Pro, and let's model it. The sun is small and dim and cool, so a warm, fertile world has to orbit close to it, right? So the angular size of it in the sky is somewhat larger than our sun appears; this planet sits in the "sweet spot" where the world is just warm enough to be fertile ... the cool sun looks yellow, not white, when you look right at it, and the red end of the spectrum puts a bloody wash over the sky and everything else. Makes for a very nice picture, too.

All of which got me interested in atmosphere, so --

Terragen sky: late afternoon, and ...

...right on sunset; and...

After sunset, when the sky is bronze and dimming rapidly, and the world is becoming dark, you expect the stars in a few more minutes. Nice.

(Does anyone else find Terragen a bit overwhelming? There is so much to learn that, frankly, I've decided on the old KISS rule: Keep It Simple, Stupid. AKA, one thing at a time. I've learned about all I can for now about "heightfield terrains," and "proceedural terrains" continue to baffle me a bit. Atmospheres are the next thing I need to master, then I'll come back to proceedurals, and, when the computer is rebuilt (soon!) I'll see about working with populations: adding forests and so forth. Ack. Soooo much to learn here. But it's fun. It's good for your brain, especially at my age. Put it this way: I ain't gettin' any younger. 😒

Now, going back to the experiments in today's main render! As I began, the picture is full of them, and they work! For a start --

Look at the forearm on the left, and the hands on the right. This is a combo of bump mapping and painted highlights, using a blend mode (thank you, Photoshop), plus a touch of "aging," using the special morph in the Morphs ++ package. That's ... not bad at all. The hint of veins makes this so much more realistic, yet it's subtle. Your eye expects to see this; it doesn't hit you in the face, but it makes the figure that much more "real." Well worth the extra minute or two it takes to switch out the bump maps and do a few test renders to get the settings just right. Then, this, below, was the big experiment...

...and I don't know why I didn't do this a long time ago. It's the hair. Jarrat wears the Mon Chevalier hair from Neftis (via the DAZ marketplace; you can still get it, but it's a bit more expensive than it used to be, from memory). The one thing about this toupee that always annoyed me was that, "fresh out of the box," as it's applied, it looks awfully fake, as if it's ... plastic. Eventually (rolls eyes) I thought, "I wonder what would happen if I overdrive the bump mapping on the hair???" Uh huh. Duh. A bit of overdriven bump mapping, and the hair "pops" into an effect that's far, far more realistic than the results I've been getting across the years. I could kick myself, honestly. 😝

Then, the last thing I did differently on this is...

...I hand-painted Stoney's hair. There's nothing much you can do with the GQ Event Hair when it's set to a shade near to black (as Stone's hair is described in the books). You can't see detail in it, ever. But the shape of it is always 100% identical, in every single render ... which is not really realistic. Nobody's hair stays the same for ten consecutive minutes. So this one is hand-painted, to give Stoney a slightly more tousled look for once!

The brush I'm using for the hair is a (free) download from a very, very talented artist and brush creator at DeviantArt. I want to give a plug to "para-vine," and say thank you, thank you for this brush set, which has been terrific. (For clarification: no, I don't know para-vine personally, but I'd like to shake him by the hand and say thanks for these brushes. Wow.)

That's all from me for today. Back soon -- hopefully tomorrow, because on Wednesday the computer goes into the shop and you won't see new art for a few days while it's upgraded. Whoooo!