Romance on the high seas -- a bit of 3D swashbuckling!

3D Swashbucklers ... romance on the high seas? It's always interesting to see what construction you can put on a set of images. Here's another episode where, if I thought visitors were motivated enough I'd have a competition: suggest the story that goes with this, and win an art print or something! But here you are ... a scene unfolding, following on from yesterdays' renders of Swashbuckler Bert -- who's not really a swashbuckler yet, though he wants to be. He ran away to sea and the best he could do was Cabin Boy, so it's a good thing the skipper is a handsome hunk with a hear of pure gold!

So I thought I'd add he skipper to the scene today. He sure is the handsome hunk! In fact, this is "just" the Remendado character morph, right out of the box, wearing about half of the Leon di Castiglia costume, original textures and all, and the Midnight Prince hair set to auburn, and the hazel set of eyeballs from The Eyes Have It. That's the Remendado skin map, but I admit that I designed the body morphology myself ... which made it darned hard to get the Leo pants to fit!

In fact, this makes for an amusing story: once the body morph is juuuuust right, and you slap the Leon di Castiglia tights onto it, there ain't a morph in the whole Leon pants set that allows you to get them to fit around the crotch. He really is nekkid in the critical region! The next thing I tried was turning "off" the M4 hip region, which usually works ... but not this time, because the Leon pants are low enough in the waist that you can see a big empty space where Michael 4 ought to be! So, then I tried shrinking the M4 model through the pelvic area to see if I could get it to fit the pants -- no joy. Last ditch attempt at a solution: take the material, the fabric, which is applied to the pants ... and apply it to the M4 hip region. Ta da! In one or two shots, it looks like you're seeing an underwear line, but you're actually seeing the M4 hip zone wearing the texture from the Leon pants! Basically, it makes it look like the crotch of the pants fits, which it actually doesn't. Optical illusion = you can have your buff body shape and have your pants fit, too!

The other Michael 4 is wearing the same pants, but he doesn't have the buff bod, so the pants fit. He's wearing the M4 righ-rez skin map, the bright blue Eyes Have It eyes, and the Spartacos hair--

Talking about hair, I was over at Renderosit t'other day, and I was blown away by this:


That's the Teagan character, by a designer called Phoenix1966 ... and the hair is so photorealistic, I'm just speechless. The hair is also part of the model.

I'm searching everywhere for such photorealistic hair for M4, but -- no joy yet. If anyone reading this knows of an M4 hair package that has this realism, please tell me what it is, and where!

Jade, 4 June