Pax's Pretty Boys Thread
Pax Asteriae
Posts: 445
I have this really, really bad habit of buying stuff and not using it. I'm a ridiculous hoarder. My Scenery runtime scares me every time I open it. Uhh... so I figured I'd start a thread and actually try to work through some stuff, with the help of a couple of my aforementioned pretty boys. Who, to be honest, are the reason I keep buying stuff: "this'd look good on ..." or "this makes me think of a scene with ... so I might as well."
So! This is Alex and Milos, freshly transposed from Gen1 to Gen8 through blood, sweat and so much bad language you would not believe.
Alex, on the left, is a government agent with the somewhat unusual talent of being able to walk through walls. (But it's not a good idea because one day it might kill him.) He's been raised from childhood to do what he does. Well, once he survived all the testing and experiments. Milos, on the right, is a dark elf with a bit of a dodgy past, who ended up crossing paths with Alex when Milos's landlord (and mentor, or so Milos thought) was preparing to offload him into the underground government testing scheme because his somewhat overreactive behaviour was becoming a liability. He was taken in, briefly terrified by Alex, experimented on and now his fingers turn into polymetal claws. It turned out this was less of an impediment than he'd expected and now he works with Alex.
This didn't go down so well with Alex to start with, but a few bickering months later and through a slightly blackmail-y series of events involving too much alcohol (Alex) and a desperate wish to just be left alone (Milos), they ended up as a couple. Several years later, and they actually even like each other.
They've had a lot of adventures over the years -- I've written a disturbing about of words about them and am currently avoiding writing more -- so I should have plenty of stuff to think about!
Like the time they both ran away and hid from the government in Scotland for a while... but Alex wouldn't let Milos's training go by the wayside, even if it attracts an audience that spends a lot of time wincing. (Milos's co-ordination is still not that great, it drives his instructor nuts.)
I love these guys, you can kinda tell...
As I'm also having trouble writing right now, I'm also writing wildly self-indulgent stuff about this guy, Vaana. He's a merian from a different story universe, this section of which mostly turned up in my head after I put Fi's texture on a G8M character and grew from there. I don't seem to have many decent (or at least shareable) pictures of him (he spends a lot of time naked, apparently) so it's just a headshot for now.
Since 3D is both the ultimate inspiration for my stories and the ultimate procrastination tool, this should be... interesting. :D
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Comments
Oh, for completionist purposes, I should probably share what they looked like in their Genesis 1 incarnations too. Milos was a pain. He uses the Shadow Kin for M5 textures modified to suit his blondness, but the M5->G8 converter and me really don't get along, it turns out, and things just kept going sideways when I added Iray. So rather than keep repeating an exercise in futility until I threw the poor little computer out the window, I decided it'll have to stay on his Gen1 self and he can use a modified version of Ashwyn instead... Despite all that, his face was pretty easy to dial-spin again. Once I realised some morphs that used to be minuses are now pluses in G8, anyway.
Alex was actually harder, despite that he should've been easier. It's hard to find a nice pale skin that isn't freckled, his old hair (Pyrit) never actually worked properly originally (you adjust styles and the ears go nuts, etc.) and when I autofitted it with G8 it just made it all worse (which I never before believed could be possible). So he's now got a very peculiar concoction of Lyall hair(s) on his head instead, which looks... okay. I kinda miss Pyrit, but I can't seem to find a suitable G8 replacement, so...
G1 Alex, with Pyrit hair. It actually takes him days to grow that kind of stubble... but I realised the original picture I used might've been a little too risqué for the forums (his fly was slightly undone). Ahh, my old Garibaldi beard...
G1 Milos, with Shadow Kin texture (which doesn't seem available in the store any more...) That hair didn't play nice on G8 either. I think I now have three versions of it for three different generations, and none of 'em are G8~ I like Kenji hair better on him now, he's learned to use a hairbrush over the last few years I guess.
As much as Alex hadn't wanted a partner, he really does miss Milos when they're not together. And not just for the heavy lifting (even if the damn elf is always on the precipice of being too skinny), or the...'stuff' they can do to pass the time while they wait for whichever troublesome Skilled person they're checking up on to turn up. No, it's weird, but he actually misses Milos's company when he's alone. Isn't that a bad sign?
Turns out it's not only Milos that can end up overthinking things.
I wanted to do a render with last week's PC items (of which I only have the freebie ones because my bank is run by idiots), and somehow Alex ended up thrown into the mix too. I'd originally intended for the camera to be full on him, but once I put it over here I liked the thoughtfulness of the scene too much... and it looked weird how I'd originally intended anyway, so it was no great loss.
Took ages to render though.
Pretty boys yes plz :)
They looks like awesome characters, and you are really good at posing them.
Thank you! And more pretty boys... well, one, anyway... inbound.
Vaana's eyes have been bugging me for a while. On one hand I like how unearthly they look. On the other, he's... well, not unearthly. Merians are human-adjacent: the myth is that a merman took a human lover but (and who'd have thought it?) the merman became pregnant, which spawned a whole race of tropical humanoids. Eh, like all creation myths, it skirts over an apparent requirement for incest. The more prosaic reality is just that some humans had excessive wild magic that altered their appearance. Ironically, (most?) merians have all the magical ability of a housebrick.
Anyway. I finally decided to properly play around with his eyes. Then I discovered that I don't seem to have any male textures with red eyes at all, but I have maybe four female ones. A quick bit of playing (and a bit of waiting for renders to turn acceptably less-fireflied) later, we have... Vaana and Vaana.
(Click for bigger if so inclined.)
I think I prefer the human-eyed version better, although I ummed-and-ahhed between them a lot. His face is odd anyway, I think I need to still work on it a bit because he can look totally different depending on the camera angle (I shortened his ears a bit too, but it's a bit irritating how the higher the subdivision level, the more they curve instead of laying flat.) He's still cute anyway. You'd totally kidnap him if you were an amoral git of a pirate who'd already turfed the unable-to-swim lover out to sea, wouldn't you?
I'm pretty sure this render is cursed... Thanks to the gallery update, I'm now very sure this render is cursed.
Alex has had an extensive martial arts education: once they were pretty sure he was going to survive most of the experiments, he started aikido along with other basic lessons. Once he reached 12 and they were really sure he wasn't going to die, he was sent to the Academy with the other Skilled kids to learn to become an asset to the government. (Which, to be fair, he mostly succeeds at.)
Milos had no such education. His preferred method of self defense is to punch someone, knee them and run the hell away. He'd say he's more sensible. (He's had multiple terrible encounters that prove he's wrong.) Once he joins the government, there's no escape. Adult education classes, and specially tailored martial arts lessons with his own dedicated instructor. Which would be great, if he was Alex and irritatingly talented at everything. But he's not, and he falls over a lot. Alex finds this hilarious; his instructor most definitely does not.
He's improving now, kind of.
His instructor has a slightly disturbing resemblance to Sean Bean that was absolutely not intended, but I found it so funny I left it. And Alex is just leaning against that mirror, but for some reason it bows off quite weirdly. Ah well. Makes things interesting.
I had so many goes at this bloody render that in the end it has a whole wall missing, and even then the render kept dying at ~440 iterations. ...And then I realised something had randomly changed my render settings and it was timing out, rather than my PC just giving up in disgust which was my first fear. *sigh* And then I was pretty deeply into the render (~5500 iterations) when I stupidly misclicked while trying to figure out why the dForce bed poses are so massive, and despite the fact DS was occupied with rendering, it promptly applied one of the poses and loaded the bed into the scene. Mid-render. Well, I was planning on stopping it anyway, but that wasn't the way I'd wanted to do it...
I think today is not the day for rendering.
(Of course, I say that then carry on.)
I gave Milos's martial arts instructor his normal maps back and turned his displacement way up, then fiddled with his texture settings. The resemblance comes and goes, sometimes he reminds me of someone else. Not quite such a pretty boy, but not bad looking nonetheless. (Also seems to have been claimed by Milos and Alex's supervisor while my back was turned.)
I need an actual rendering computer at some point. I did this at slightly over Amazon eBook resolution and it took over 3 days to get to 6%... although it was a surprisingly clear 6%, so I'm not complaining too much. (Times like this I miss Superfly/cycles... particularly the segmented rendering. Something weirdly intriguing about watching blocks of picture bloom over your screen.)
Vaana's doing his best Ophelia impression. The irony is, it's only a mockup of something I saw in my head and it's not a real book cover at all. (It's a story, but not one I've got any intention of showing anyone.) I'd rerender it with tweaks, if it wasn't gonna take another 3 days...
^ This is absolutely gorgeous!
I'm half tempted to get Fi just for the skins...
@Hylas It's well worth it IMO. The different textures are all really pretty, it'd be a shame to just let the G8F characters keep them to themselves. Plus it comes with hair materials you can use on anything (well, anything hairy) and some really interesting eye textures.
It is a beautiful render
I started trying to render an action scene, which is the kinda thing I'm terrible at. I was, predictably, terrible at it so I put it to one side for a while, then decided to render the 'main character.' Then decided he was pretty and decided to render him again.
He's wearing Vernon's skin (...that sounds wrong) and I'm not sure how I feel about the hairy arms baked into the texture. On one hand it saves on rendering hair... on the other, you're kinda stuffed if the character's hair doesn't match.
I don't do that much sci fi (I'm studiously ignoring a story I started a while -- a good few years, now I think about it -- ago and got... I dunno, ten, twelve? chapters into before somehow putting it aside and then never returning to it) so I don't need any more characters, especially as I haven't redone RQ and Fayth from that story with Gen8 yet.
I really do prefer doing pinups.
Wow such amazing renders
Aw, thank you!
I've had a hell of a time getting DS to do what I want it to. I spent ages on a couple of images and couldn't get them to play nice at all. I also updated a book cover, but I'm so sick of the sight of it now I might render a different scene entirely for it.
So I took a break and did this one for the Plat Club new releases forum thread thing, and I like the end result even if the damn thing kept doing stupid things. I got through several different sets of pants on Milos because multiples kept exploding for no reason (no intersection, no funny collisions, nothing) so in the end I needed something fairly baggy to cover up the slight but noticeable gap between him and the bed. Plus he does prefer comfortable clothing... and Alex prefers him in clothing he can remove without too much difficulty. :p
I realised many (many...) hours into the scene that it looked kinda like someone was watching them from a distance... so the camera has a shrub parented to it, which amused me no end every time I moved it.
The geometry on Milos's toes went weird and I have no idea why. You can't see it from here, but there are two polygons on both feet from between his toes that spiked through his middle toe joints.
I spent more time than is probably normal prepping the 'sneaky camera viewfinder' look, which meant sitting with my camera on my knee looking at the display and going, "I'm not trying to emulate that icon."
At this point they're on a mini-break courtesy of their supervisor, as a kind of thank-you and also a kind of sorry for all the stuff they've been through the last couple of years. (I'm also pretty sure their supervisor is the only person aside from Milos who can stand Alex, and sometimes even that's hit-and-miss...) The whole idea of their break came from another render I was doing (very not safe for the forums...) that kinda just built the whole story around it from that moment... which felt just a little weird. I ought to start writing it, I'd be interested to know where it's going (because right now I have no clue!)
I wanted to test out canvases (yes, I'm really that behind; I only came back to DS a month and a half ago...) and some Photoshop actions I bought to redo a book cover with (new to me: I usually used PostworkShop/Photodonut, but PD is clunkier than PWS was and the actions looked prettier) so I decided to render a simple picture of Yve. (He says that's his name, and since he's categorically Not A Character I'm not arguing.)
It got a little away from me.
I did discover, through the joys of a very large render, that the Vernon texture has some really dry, rough feet. They look like mine.
Give him futuristic, non-clunky sneakers and sporty gloves and it's a Mirror's Edge promo.
I just misread 'promo' as 'porno' and I would totally have been on board for that.
I did actually try to find some decent futuristic gloves in my runtime but I don't seem to have any that suited well, and I'm finding this generation of figure has some truly iffy shoes. He's still very much a work in progress personality wise -- which he shouldn't be because he's Not A Character, and I'll keep saying this until he gets the bloody hint.
(Also I may have very much loved the original Mirror's Edge and am very pissed off I couldn't get into the sequel at all. Maybe I need to try again. ...Thinking about it, I might've bought the Cyberpunk outfit with that in mind without even realising, and I didn't buy it for the ladies.)
These shoes and gloves would fit in my opinion, if you happen to own them:
https://www.daz3d.com/dystopian-ninja-outfit-for-genesis-8-males
https://www.daz3d.com/future-wilderness
I also quite like the gloves from this free set:
https://www.renderosity.com/mod/freestuff/the-major-for-g8f---100-free/79495
I actually never played any version of Mirror's Edge... I just saw your render and remembered the pornos promos :)
Apparently I have Future Wilderness. O_o I guess this is what happens if you nope out after Gen1 and don't come back until Gen8: you forget what you own. I don't remember it turning up in my runtimes in Poser either. *scratches head* I'll have to have a dig around.
I love that freebie set. Well, who doesn't love Kusanagi? I've still got the original (fairly massive) GitS collected manga somewhere. I think that's kinda what I was aiming for with the wristband (and possibly what the creator of the set was aiming for too), so I'll have to download it when my rendering PC isn't swamped in... well, a render. (I foolishly wondered what Alex looked like with eyeliner, after I came up with a scene (I still haven't written) a couple of years ago involving Alex, Milos, a nightclub, an argument and a hunt for a rogue Skilled. At the time the mere thought of it got Milos quite distracted. ...I should've realised that the reality of it might prove even more distracting, even after multiple save and render iterations... Milos's revised skin is driving me up the bloody wall though.)
...rambling aside, I really recommend the original Mirror's Edge. The more stylised approach works better IMO, and the control system, despite being clunky to get used to, suddenly becomes second nature and hurtling over buildings is so much fun.
Huh, I guess I should probably post a picture at some point too, so... I'd intentionally blown out the front light in this, because it didn't seem to be doing anything discernable and I needed it to do something so I could fine-tune it. What I got as a result was a fun 'caught in the flash' look that'd likely be followed up by Alex smacking someone that had no right to be taking photos of them. It's... heavily a work in progress, moreso since I started fiddling with Milos's skin.
So... long time no see. My little PC's had intermittent noisy fan problems (it works, it's just really, really irritating) and I spent ages working on two new book covers (the books aren't new, the covers are), one of which took like three attempts. And then I tried to morph a character from another story (which I already have a picture and a doll of) and that's just... not going well. Add in a sprinkle of learning Welsh on Duolingo, and my 3D work has been a bit neglected lately. Oh, and my internet connection has been absolutely awful (200mb/s? lmao, maybe once a month at 3am...) so downloading stuff has been fun.
But it's nearly NaNoWriMo, so I expect I'll be procrastinating like crazy soon enough.
This is Iphre, the love interest. I've been desperate to get a decent render of him for years, so I was happy to finally manage it. His hair was a real pain in the arse to render, and I'm not wholly sure how I got it to look how it does so I hope I never have to replicate it.
This is Maddeson, the main character of a totally separate book. He's an awkward half-elf with, apparently, a real talent for jumping to totally the wrong conclusions. This is actually the third revised cover I worked on for it; I didn't like the other two so much. So of course it was the one that took the least amount of time to set up and the least amount of time to render.
This is Gael, Maddeson's love interest and who was originally supposed to be on the cover. This is the second revised cover, but it just didn't work out as a cover, even though I'd had a backdrop with the text set up behind the image so I knew exactly where it went. It just... bleh. Wasn't fun.
EDIT: He... looks a bit like Brandon Routh. O_o
And this, thankfully not a cover, is His Serene Highness Prince Araxis. So serene he spends most of his time escaping the castle he's never supposed to leave (because royalty) and sneaking out into the city in pursuit of fun. He was one of last year's NaNoWriMo characters (true to form, in over a decade I've never once finished a NaNo, although I've always hit 50k) and is the one I have a ball-jointed doll of. The doll came before the character; the day he arrived, I started writing... then had to stop halfway through chapter one as I realised this was gonna be NaNo.
I've forgotten what the name of the hair is (bad Pax) but it came out like... the day before I started this render, and I had to buy it because it's the first long 3D hair I've seen that would actually work for Araxis's massive amounts of hair. I swear it was fate.
He is a pain to morph though, and he still isn't done. I haven't even started working on Ro, the other main character, yet. I sort of lost the will to live halfway through this.
Playing with Kjaer and figuring out how to slim him down while keeping him solid. He's at 50% smooshed in with Nix 8 and Rascal, and then trimmed down some more in the Body Size setting. His face is 50% Kjaer and 50% Seven (who I still haven't had the chance to really play with) and... he's now decided he too is in the story I am categorically Not Writing with the purple-haired technomage Yve.
I love this Thorin hair. It really has this nice cyberpunk feel to it. I want to play with it more now.
Yeah, I guess I know who I'm writing about this NaNoWriMo.
Not who I intended it to be.
Double-post~
I have so much stuff I've barely even looked at, let alone rendered, and it's almost NaNoWriMo, a.k.a. prime procrastinating time, so I thought I'd make a start on the content...
Although maybe I shouldn't have started like this~ Yve's floof is a bit... floofy. He should stick with his own hair. He looks weird all serious anyway.
Usually, when I buy female clothes here, I try to get stuff that can be used at least in part on the guys.
When I bought the Impractical Adventurer outfit, I bought it solely to use on the boys.
Iray on my computer takes really a little too long to do properly ridiculous scenes though (this got to almost 10k in 24 hours, mostly thanks to the scenery, and it's still fuzzy), but it amused me far, faaaar too much. Might have to see if I can get this scene into my NaNo at some point.
Yep, it's Yve again. Well, he did shoehorn his way into being my main character for NaNoWriMo, so he's stuck with me now.
I was attempting to try something for this... and did it wrong, but liked the effect enough that I kept it anyway. It's got that weird 'glossy magazine photoshoot' look, which is impressive for a thief who lives in a one-room apartment.
Playing with shaders and so on. I spent ages faffing around trying to do something with his hair... and then decided that I actually much preferred its regular shader, so I went back to that again. I like the high key effect, although it's another one of those "lighting washes out the scars so I'll forget he's got them again" moments. Yes, I really forgot he has facial scars. (He still hasn't told me why. Something about oneshot nanites...? I'd like a further explanation at some point, preferably a very wordy one as I'm about 5 thousand words behind right now...)
I'm pretty sure every single article of women's clothing I've bought in the PC sales has really been for men, and most of them look bloody good on them too.
He's gorgeous. What hair is that, it looks so soft and realistic.
It's Neftis' Magnus Hair, with the textures from one of the OOT Hairblending expansions used instead because OOT has a particularly nice shade of purple in there.
I'd bought it for a totally different character, but fully in-keeping with his personality this brat stole it and made it his own instead.
What outfit is this?
As always, love your work!
@Hylas That is one of the awesome female outfits that came out last month that I bought just for the men: the Sci-Fi Retro Outfit For Genesis 8 Females. The T-shirt doesn't fit too well with the jumpsuit after conversion (mesh grabber helps as ever, but I was impatient), but it was no hardship to just drop it.
Did a close-up portrait of Steffan too (since he decided that's his name and he is now very definitely in the story) which shows a close-up of the jumpsuit. Swapped his skin from Kjaer's to Nikolai's but kept the tattoos. Came out looking a bit like it should be a soft-rock album cover. All he needs is to be leaning on his folded arms. Hmm...