Currently unnamed statue products [Commercial]
j cade
Posts: 2,310
This is also a story of my terrible work habits and how I start on one thing and then get distracted.
So two weeks ago, I made a less than fully accurate greek Chiton (my referece was less actual greek and more Pre-Raphaelite paintings of an imagined historic greece - primarily JW Waterhouse paintings)
Its a fun dress - I still need to finish all the textures for it and do things like morphs, but the first thing I do is use the dforce material settings to make the top looser with one exposed breast, this was fairly common in my reference, but of course not exactly daz friendly.
Suddenly inspiration strikes, why not make some marblesque textures? Its thematic and work safe! and at this point I am off down the rabbit hole.
I make up some basic marble textures and well you kind of need stone hair so I very roughly sculpt some of that as well and oh boy is this my #aestetic
buut the marble material and hair isnt all that accurate as I didn't look at any reference. So I look at more reference of marble statues, and oh right there are a buch of CC0 scans of statues because sometimes the modern world is actually great, so rather than sculptige hair from scratch I borrow one from a scan.
And then I realize that bringing these scans in is just about the best reference for sculpting a morph ever. also my marble lady is a bit lonely and I have a dialed female face I like that I kind of based on Jane Morris, but the face morphs I have for men are pretty lacking so I load in a bust of Michaelangelo's David, as you do, and start sculpting. I am quite gratified when I post an image with human textures and people still recognize it (the pose and expression help).
I also quickly edit the Chiton that started the whole thing for a man
sculpting the morph from ref works so well I immediately go and do one for G8F
At this point I figure I should probably give the male character some marble textures and hair, and also tweak the morph more. The clouds are parting at this point I'm spending a lot of time just moving the camera around and staring at him in my viewport while listening to countertenors
Eventually I recover and decide I should probably start on a body morph
this is 100% the swimwear I plan to use in promos
This is where I currently stand:
Chitons for G8F & M. the male version needs to have its uvs redone so theres not big useless space where the longer skirt used to be. I also need to add some fit morphs etc.
The G8M character: Finished head morph, preliminary body morph finished hair, 60% or so on textures. Still need to make a hd morph and necesary JCMs Also I really want to make some sculpted pubic hair,
G8F character: Head morph, 60% or so on textures. Still need to make a body morph and necesary JCMs. Also either figure out some better rigging for the hair or choose a new hair style that doesn't have the shoulder bits, because it gets some ugly deformation when she bends her neck too much - sculpted stone isn't really designed to turn as it happens.
Other thing I kind of want to add - bronze textures
Any other suggestings for things that are needed? Should I get rid of the shoulder bits of the hair?
Also what should I name them? originally they were going to be called Acis and Galatea, but given how directly they are inspired by David and Venus, I'm thinking those should probably be their names.
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2024 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
These are wonderful, j.cade!
I look forward to seeing them appear in the store. If the name David would be confusing to those who own the original DAZ David figures, how about Davus (and Venus)?
Thank you for the brilliant sneak peek.
Lee
LOVE IT! I'm really looking forward to this!
Well, to my eternal sadness, there hasn't been a Daz David since the original genesis David 5 is still my favorite male release ever :(
It's facinating to me how angry David looks whe he's flesh toned instead of marble. Looks neat anyways.
These are great. I like the shoulder tail on the hair, but agree that it limits the posing. Probably one of those elaborate chignon things would be less limiting.
Those definitely look great :)
The solid hair is amazing. It's always been the big obstacle in trying to do statue versions of characters.
+1, the hair is just too pretty to be used only on statues!
Personally, I'd love the shoulder bits to stay, maybe they could just be like an add-on prop? - The statues in general plus the dresses are great, will wait for them eagerly in the store!
The original statue is actually quite a grumpy lad!
Part of my second round of sculpting was to keep the spirit of the brow minus the frownyness. It will probably still see a bit more revision. There's also some general interpretation: A) modern sensibilities of attractiveness are pretty different from that of the renaissance B) Michaelangelo messed with the proportions because the statue was desingend to be viewed from below. The morph is probably going to remain a bit uncanny used 100% with flesh textures though.
This is probably impossible sadly. The underlying mesh looks like this,
So for strands to make work I'd have to make every sculpted lock its own section in the uvs the straighten every chunk, and even then you'd have weird intersections
How does that hair look like with non-stone shaders? Metal? Ice?
I could use more sculptural shapes for G8 characters. Not that many characters come anywhere close with their body types. Modern bodybuilder morphs don't look right at all as Classical gods/goddessess.
dont know whats going on with the figure in the glass image, but the hair handles shaders quite well!
its pretty large uv chunks and the seams are decently hidden
for all images I kept the original normals because they hold a good amount of baked detail.
I really like the plaid one, its very avant garde
Wow... if Daz doesn't buy your David.... to make it a Daz Original David for Genesis 8.1, then the marketing folks are asleep at the wheel!
Very Nice!
I think it's probable that you have created a hair that is perfect for 3D printing. A very rare thing from a DS hair.
So many hairs are sheets of facets with no thickness to print, and dForce SBH is simple lines, without even an area to solidify like facet based hair. On this point, regardless of the fact it looks great on a statue, I think you probably have a winner with a decent sized market segment. The only thing it'd need to work perfectly (if it's not there already - hard to tell from the 'glass' render) is for the hair to be attached to the skull cap to turn the hair into a closed volume without being closed through the head. If closed straight through the head there's a possibility of intersecting volumes and some simple slicers interpret that as a void rather than as solid.
Regards,
Richard.
I mean, i guess if wanted a statue i would just get one of the countless scans off sketchfab so this doesnt really solve a need for me, but they do look incredibly good as all your stuff does.
As far as names go, the one thing I might suggest is NOT calling your male character David. There's already a G8 David from Darwin's Mishap, a morph for Diego 8 called "David" as part of a P3Design morphs package, to say nothing of the previous generations of David 3 and David 5.
You could always be meta and call him "Michelangelo" if you didn't want to stick with Acis.
(I will also admit to being fond of "Galatea" as her name, but less dogmatically -- oddly, while there are products that have "Venus" as part of their name in the store, there aren't any characters named Venus.)
Ah, I see. No, this really doesn't make much sense, sadly. Huh, maybe just include two version of the hair then, one with, one without 'shoulder strands'. Personally, I often do portrait renders where the pose is not so much different from the standard zero pose, so the strands would work well for that.
Maybe the whole deal could be a bundle? Statues morphs, 'stone' hair and clothes?
If you are interested in making statues, don't forget about https://www.daz3d.com/sculptural-genesis-8-ultra-fun-kit which has a lot of statue poses, materials, and props.
Those demonstrations in non-stone shaders really make that hair useful! Stone statues are really nice to have, but I've actually found ice and metal statues much more relevant to my projects, for some reason.
This set also has special UV for male and female that makes shaders tile better. It's why I got it in the first place, but I ironically ended up using its separate/split poses more.
Jepe has made Art Deco statue products. Oso3D has a tiling UV for G8 too here https://www.daz3d.com/oso-shader-pack-1-for-iray . To me, none of these product compete with J.Cade or Canary, because they all offer something a little different.
As for J.Cade's products, I specifically want the clothing, the hairs, and the characters. So my interest isn't for making statues.
I love your David! You definitely should keep this name. Great work!
I don't know if it is just me, but I have just realized that your David also reminds me a bit of Frodo Baggins from the movie
Very good renders. Quite artistic. Lots of energy!
JCade
I think your are on to a great idea...
It caused me to do some poking around on my own and saw this (if you haven't already)
I'm not to sure of the need of another statue making asset, but if you can bring historical artifacts and sculptures to life and into daz as G8's and G8.1 (and eventually G9s).... I think you have a winner.
Ceasar, Caligula, Greek gods etc....
Awesome potential!
Love this idea of bringing historical figures into 3d! Great video also, thanks for linking it.
I definitely see the problem with that, textures that have strands defined would mess up a lot. A hair base like this would still look great with stone and wood based shaders though, I can totally see a niche for "sculptural hair styles" like this, allowing people to turn their custom figures into statues. Maybe with matching custom eyeball morphs, since there are a handful of different methods on how to carve those as well in both stone and wood sculpturing. (I do sculptural woodcarving as a hobby, I use Daz to "draw" my designs for me, as I really can't draw chit. Bonus advantage is that in Daz I can make perfectly matching shots from different angles, which is hard even for people who can draw)
This looks interesting :)