5/23/01
Though not drawn from any specific scene in my novel Source, this image of the two protagonists is the first of the illustrations (including Hangar, Escape of the Zadar and First Sight of Prometheus) to show what Lan looks like. It also helps to illustrate the love felt by these two people - a love that sustains them across their long and eventful separation.
Several different versions were created on the way to this image and a number of difficulties had to be surmounted.
The figures are DAZ3D Michael and Victoria (2.0). Clu uses Byte Me Ok's Carmen skin map and HMann's Total Hair hair style, color and transparency maps. Lan uses a modified DAZ3D Millenium Man Beard Pack face (MMSoulPatch) with some modificatons to desaturate and yellow the color, clarify the edge of the lower lip, and remove the lower lip mustache; his body map is the Catharina Przezak Tomy, made slightly more pink / orange to match the face color; his hair is a Wonder Wedge with a right and narrow part. Lan's shirt is textured with a scanned t-shirt fabric and Clu wears some color modified items from the DAZ3D Victoria Clothing Pack.
It was necessary to port Clu's character from the P4 Female to Victoria 2.
Clu as a P4 Female
A lot of trial and error went into making the character work, but it helped to a slight extent that some of the parameters were the same from P4 to Victoria, so that I could export the P4 character and reimport it onto Victoria from the library.
Lan was more problematic. But I knew what I wanted... or so I thought.
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Lan with a thin face and a scruffy beard. Too red, too thin, too harsh. You can see that the transfer of Clu to Victoria had been successful and had improved the realism of the character. |
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Lan's face a little flatter and broader. A slightly different hair color. I had forgotten that I could influence the hair tint by changing the underlying object color, so I actually tinted the image map for the hair instead. Too reddish, still, the lips are too thick, and the face is not the right combination of youth and harshness. |
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Thinner, less flat, better lips and eyes. The right shape, but the face is too pink. |
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I tried the 3Deep Blond Michael texture. But it looked like it had eye shadow on... |
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... because the photo used for the map was not lit to eliminate the under the brow shadow; in addition, the forehead looked mottled because of the shiny reflectivity from sweat (?) So I went back to the original map and tinted it. I also created a tinted version of the Tomy body map to match. |
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The final character look before the romantic pose became an image itself... |
Working with Poser to create the right look for a face turned out to be a complex and daunting task. It took three days to recreate Clu Sherril's face and over a week to create Lan's. At times, because I had something in mind for the look, it felt as if the process was escaping my control and creating faces that looked less and less like what I had in mind - until one evening, everything snapped into place, and tiny careful adjustments fine tuned the look to exactly what I wanted.
Posing the figures to show their relationship was comparatively easy. But it is important to remember that you apply the character to the pose, not the pose to the character. You have to save each character to the library first so you can apply its characteristics. For instance, I used Lisa B's Couple Poses to set the initial positions and then made a number of modifications to complete the look. But whenever I applied the pose, the face and body reverted to the old Michael and Victoria look. So I saved the characters to the library and then reapplied them after the pose was applied.
Minor post processing in Corel PhotoPaint 9 was used to clean up some shadows and correct some hair boundaries.