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I wanted to try out some new male textures (and character) by John on the Run.
Poser 4, Photoshop 4
textures, hair, and Domenico character by John on the Run.
This is the Domenico character by JotR. Domenico is a vampire, but these aren't his textures. These are actually Simon (on the left) and Daniel (on the right) textures. (Er, when I saved the textures, I renamed them with a jor- on the front, so Daniel became jor-dan... which is how I got his name mixed up. But anyway...!) The textures are very nice, but they do have a few seams here and there. Simon's hips are a darker colour when you turn the genitals on, so it doesn't match quite right. Daniel doesn't seem to have any pubic hair, so I painted that on, as well. But they are marvelous textures, nothing that a little tweaking can't fix.
They're both using Michelangelo's Dying Slave pose, somewhat modified. The main light has that Poser fleshtone cast, shadows at .7, and a very huge (6000-some-odd) shadow map, to get the shadows smooth. The secondary light at the right is a dim brownish, no shadows. The third is a standard faint blue overhead, no shadows. They're rendered over the plain grey background and saved to tif.
In 'Shop, I grabbed them with the tif mask Poser saved,
cut from the background and pasted them to a new layer. They needed
a bit of smoothing and smudging at the elbows and armpits. Simon had
a dark line at his hip from the slightly off texture map. I selected
along the edge and down the hip further, and airbrushed on some matching
colour, and smudged down a bit, until everything matched up nicely.
I used the paintbrush and the hairy brush paint splodge
to put on Daniel/Jordan's pubic hair. I also used the paintbrush in
fade out mode, and the smear tool a bit on the edges. Same deal for
Simon's armpit hair.
As for their hair, I used my furry brushes to tease out
some strands. I also painted some highlights on another layer and used
overlay to give them a bit of shine. I don't think it turned out too
well.
Lastly, I put the shadows under them, on a new layer.
I grabbed their transparency selection, scooted it over and up, feathered,
and put in some airbrushed black. Then I expanded the selection and
did more shadowing... and finally deselected and put in some freehand shadowing.
Now this was a trip! I wanted a traditional silky
wrinkly deal. So I thought I'd use KPT's texture thingy. It happens
to have a pink silky setting. But that wasn't right. So I tried
some zebra-stripe type things. That was too... regular. I wanted
little curves and wrinkles where the elbows and stuff land and smush things
around.
That wasn't working, so I popped up a new layer and took
a big black pencil and started... making swooshes in the direction I thought
the wrinkles would go. So now I had these big black lines. Then
I took white and a faint paintbrush and scribbled over/between the black
blobs. Blurred it. That wasn't doing much, so I deleted the
background to white and flattened it. Then I did the steps again, but
with a smaller black pencil, making more little detailed wrinkles. No
white. Blurred...
Then things started getting weird. I hit it with
Lighting Effects to make it more 3d-ish. Then I fiddled with the curves...
you know how if you make the curve a big M or W, you get a kinda chrome-effect
deal? I did a sorta lopsided M. Then made a copy, hit it with
the Lighting Effects again... very metallic and shiny. Did some sorta
composite with the original... And, well... it didn't turn out half bad.
It was still black and white, though, so I made a new
empty layer and through my blue colour in. Set it to Colour composite...
then fiddled with the Hue/Saturation/Lightness until I found a pleasing satin
colour that complimented the figures.
Lastly, I used the smear tool, sampling all layers, to
smudge two wrinkles over the edge of the figures. Well, it's subtle.
Some text in overlay mode, and it's done.
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