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I wanted to do a figure study based on an image I saw long ago in a ballet/dance book.
Poser 4, Photoshop 4
Michael x4. They all use the default Michael texture map. The guy second from the left has a yellowish light on him, and the guy on the right has a slightly darker skin base (non-white). The hair is Male Hair 1, Male Curly Hair, Male Hair 1, and the Conform Curls as hair prop.
There's one infinite fill light in the back, and four spot lights, all shadow-casting. And what a mess! I don't have enough memory to render the shadows at very high resolution. Nor, in fact, do I have enough memory to render with shadows AND textures at the same time. Luckily my technique already calls for making non-textured renders.
So, three renders. One with shadows but no textures,
one with textures but no shadows... and one with no textures, no shadows,
and no ground plane (to be able to get a selection channel out of the tif.
That doesn't work too well when you ground plane is your background.
Wish Poser had a way to tell the thing not to use the ground plane
in the mask channel!)
Then Photoshop kept crashing as I tried to save a composited
layered version. (Luckily, to a new file!) I fixed that by telling
it not to use a secondary scratch disk. Hmmm.
I copied and pasted the shadows (using my handy mask)
onto the background. I then differenced the textured and non-textured
and used that to create a saturation layer. Then various soft lights,
overlays, and um... okay, so I didn't really pay attention this time. In
the end, this is the best I could get out of it.
Then I had to go and fix the shadows. These Michael
derivative figures didn't get their hips fixed with the update, so I had
to fill in the cracks again. The shadow edges were very jaggy, of course,
so they had to be blurred out.
Made a new empty layer to brush out the hair, including
a new colour dodge layer for some stronger highlights. And paint in
some hair, too. For some reason, I couldn't get Poser to render the
fool pubic hair. Painted that in. Then I tried some leg and chest
hair. I used the same splotch brush in 'shop to make some blobs over
the areas with hair. Smeared it out a bit, then hit it with some severe
sharpening to make it sharp and hairy looking. You can't really see
it much at this size, but it does a decent job of communicating 'hair' to
your eye.
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