FirstBastion said:

First thing you need to do is search the competition and do market research on romance novels. If you type in romance and bodice into amazon, you get no shortage of book covers.
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias=aps&field-keywords=romance+novels+bodice&rh=i:aps,k:romance+novels+bodice

You should also have her tell you, "I want it to look something like this" and then she can point you to 5 or 10 cover arts that put you in the ball park of what she wants.

Since there's certain genre elements to these you should be able to fine tune your composition and subject matter by checking out the structural patterns in the various cover art.

There's no shortage of couples poses in the store; these links should help.

http://www.daz3d.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=couples

Now your author friend needs to tell you what her new book is about, time period, her absolute favorite scene description, central story conflict, and pick that as the moment in time for the book cover's image. Better still , read it. Usually a visual image will form in your mind's eye. Use it.

Pick up the appropriate clothing models (historical, modern, ...) hopefully with built in morphs that can be "bodice ripped"

Lightsets in the store can help with lighting for your program of choice.

thank you for the specific pointers. It's been a guessing game until she finally sent me a copy of the galley. I searched on the main characters names, and got to their description.I had a vision, but, LOL, it turned out to be quite different. Still, I gave her choices by giving her the urls and letting her tell me what she liked and doing some test renders. I did find costumes she liked, but no rip able bodices. In fact no bodice was harmed in this project.

GussNemo said:

@Rareth: I was thinking about this off and on throughout the day, and decided to give an idea a try; I needed a ground texture for another model I made following one of David's ring tutorials. And shock of shocks, it worked. Created a terrain, went into the TE, Newd that terrain, held down the shift key and pressed the button next to Picture, followed your previous suggestions and when I exited the TE DTE what I'd created was in the preview window and the working window. Played around with that in the TE and got something I liked and the result is in the image below. I now know how to create a terrain using the TE DTE, I need to learn how to get symmetrical looking ones. And I think I might know what to do, it's just a matter of giving the idea a try. Oh, and which video were you referring to? There's no link in your last post.

@Dave: The grass in those three images looks real good, though I'm more convinced of it being grass in the third image when I can compare it to the fence, curb and street. However, had you not had the sign, and bird, all three would have been less interesting to me.

@Trish: I think the composition of your recent image makes it very appealing. No one thing in that image overdrives itself, thereby detracting from the overall look. You've created a central focal point, and used everything else to draw the eye to it, whether or not you meant to do this. I really like what you've done. But then again, I'm easy. ;-)

Backtracked a bit and worked one of David's ring tutorials I'd missed. I also continued trying to create a terrain using the TE DTE, and think I succeeded somewhat in the image below. The material is was a dark cobblestone/brick type but I adjusted the colors in the DTE to get what you see.

That looks great, the terrain came out very well, you can save the terrain height map to a library inside the TE DTE then use it in the Mat Lab DTE as a base or alpha map for a texture.

here is the tutorial I was referring to

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xm9U9sWbO0Y

The geometry synthesis tutorial.

@Rareth: I was thinking about this off and on throughout the day, and decided to give an idea a try; I needed a ground texture for another model I made following one of David's ring tutorials. And shock of shocks, it worked. Created a terrain, went into the TE, Newd that terrain, held down the shift key and pressed the button next to Picture, followed your previous suggestions and when I exited the TE DTE what I'd created was in the preview window and the working window. Played around with that in the TE and got something I liked and the result is in the image below. I now know how to create a terrain using the TE DTE, I need to learn how to get symmetrical looking ones. And I think I might know what to do, it's just a matter of giving the idea a try. Oh, and which video were you referring to? There's no link in your last post.

@Dave: The grass in those three images looks real good, though I'm more convinced of it being grass in the third image when I can compare it to the fence, curb and street. However, had you not had the sign, and bird, all three would have been less interesting to me.

@Trish: I think the composition of your recent image makes it very appealing. No one thing in that image overdrives itself, thereby detracting from the overall look. You've created a central focal point, and used everything else to draw the eye to it, whether or not you meant to do this. I really like what you've done. But then again, I'm easy. ;-)

Backtracked a bit and worked one of David's ring tutorials I'd missed. I also continued trying to create a terrain using the TE DTE, and think I succeeded somewhat in the image below. The material is was a dark cobblestone/brick type but I adjusted the colors in the DTE to get what you see.

I would like to see a thread (sticky) on this forum for us end users to review products that we have purchased, maybe with sub-categories for different types of items.

I for one would like to hear what others think of a product before purchasing it. I mean seriously some of the products I've bought are not all that great and wont ever get used and some are just to resource hungry and slow things down too much and maybe some feedback from other users would have prevented me from wasting my money on them. Don't get me wrong, I have more than 1500 items in my runtime and most of them work great but you really don't know that until you have parted with your hard earned cash.
Just saying knowing that someone else had a good or bad experience with a product could help in the decision of whether or not to buy something. I have found some random threads about one product or another but no central database of reviews.
Anyone else agree?

By the way, if such a thread already exists then it needs to be easier to find.

Ned.

First thing you need to do is search the competition and do market research on romance novels. If you type in romance and bodice into amazon, you get no shortage of book covers.
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias=aps&field-keywords=romance+novels+bodice&rh=i:aps,k:romance+novels+bodice

You should also have her tell you, "I want it to look something like this" and then she can point you to 5 or 10 cover arts that put you in the ball park of what she wants.

Since there's certain genre elements to these you should be able to fine tune your composition and subject matter by checking out the structural patterns in the various cover art.

There's no shortage of couples poses in the store; these links should help.

http://www.daz3d.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=couples

Now your author friend needs to tell you what her new book is about, time period, her absolute favorite scene description, central story conflict, and pick that as the moment in time for the book cover's image. Better still , read it. Usually a visual image will form in your mind's eye. Use it.

Pick up the appropriate clothing models (historical, modern, ...) hopefully with built in morphs that can be "bodice ripped"

Lightsets in the store can help with lighting for your program of choice.

I really think you should hold off until you get used to DS4+ a bit. If we start using Categories before the folders get merged together they will need to stay that way, as separate folders.
Also the DS4+ Categories is different from the one in DS3, we can not set DS4 to use it as our only content view. I miss that feature. Let me get some rest, do some Admin stuff and if you still think your ready to start after thinking it over for the night I'm show you. I come online at about 5pm Central US time each day.
This will take many steps a few hours and means making a brand new database for the CMS so Categories works for the ONE content folder. Until all this is finished, once started, doing almost anything in DS will not be possible. You can not stop once started. It must all be done in one long process. Please think on it and maybe do a render or two just to get yourself into DS4 some.
HINT: Building the Categories will take MUCH longer than the rest. I'm still building mine and I only have 1300 item/bundles total.

Marmalade Boy said:

I thought that might be it as well but it's not. I checked all 3 central joints ( Abdomen 2 chest and neck) in my rig and they all match up. The other joints, their node namess have all been renamed so they are not the issue. Could it possible be because I don't have certain joints in my rig?

Possible. Do you have a pelvis or hip joint, and did you check those?

I thought that might be it as well but it's not. I checked all 3 central joints ( Abdomen 2 chest and neck) in my rig and they all match up. The other joints, their node namess have all been renamed so they are not the issue. Could it possible be because I don't have certain joints in my rig?

Richard is the man when it comes to stuff like this, but I'm a little confused about what you're actually doing. It looks to me as if you should be able to use the "fit to" on the one you've got there if the names and translation values of the central core are the same (the hip, pelvis, abdomen, chest). If you have the arm bones properly renamed (to shoulder01 or something) you /should/ be able to select Genesis, ctrl_click the arms in the scene tab, and use edit--rigging--transfer rigging space.

This updates the bones that have the same names as Genesis' bones but does not do anything to your new ones. I've found it invaluable when working with custom body rigs (just finished a huge mermaid set that is in testing now).

...now that it's Sunday here, happy "so many" trips around the central stellar mass Skiriki.

Dartanbeck said:

Ringo, do you know?
Did Carrara first get its Vertex Modeler in version 5 (pro?), or was it just greatly overhauled?
I remember Jack making a big deal about it.

So... I see that it's no new thing for the artist to perform the modeling operations in Hexagon and then render in Carrara.

It kind of eludes me as to why I would even begin to protest this workflow - being a bit of a software junkie (well, now more of an ex-software junkie). There are quite a few inexpensive modeling apps out there that are very different and very cool - yet there is now a true competitor in the line up that is utterly Free! And doing very well against a very fast-growing environment of modelers, it seems.

I have even downloaded and installed the latest Blender. It look beautiful - very elegant in deign and layout, with an amazing array of features to access easily from a main, central region - which I like. As for modeling in it (or anything else, other than just looking around) I am completely clueless - as I still use Carrara for ALL of my modeling. So far I've not done anything even close to being as adventurous as the beautiful work you're posting in here - and I'm noticing that the text in each post are not 'your' words but those from the post in which you've found the image - which I think is very cool - but might throw some people a bit! lol But still... I've done enough modeling in Carrara to know that it certainly CAN handle the creation of highly complex mesh. Have you done modeling yourself? Just curious - Always curious! ;)

Carrara's vertex modeler was greatly improve in version 5 as many of the Hexagon tools and features were added to the VM. This made modeling much easier in Carrara.

Ringo, do you know?
Did Carrara first get its Vertex Modeler in version 5 (pro?), or was it just greatly overhauled?
I remember Jack making a big deal about it.

So... I see that it's no new thing for the artist to perform the modeling operations in Hexagon and then render in Carrara.

It kind of eludes me as to why I would even begin to protest this workflow - being a bit of a software junkie (well, now more of an ex-software junkie). There are quite a few inexpensive modeling apps out there that are very different and very cool - yet there is now a true competitor in the line up that is utterly Free! And doing very well against a very fast-growing environment of modelers, it seems.

I have even downloaded and installed the latest Blender. It look beautiful - very elegant in deign and layout, with an amazing array of features to access easily from a main, central region - which I like. As for modeling in it (or anything else, other than just looking around) I am completely clueless - as I still use Carrara for ALL of my modeling. So far I've not done anything even close to being as adventurous as the beautiful work you're posting in here - and I'm noticing that the text in each post are not 'your' words but those from the post in which you've found the image - which I think is very cool - but might throw some people a bit! lol But still... I've done enough modeling in Carrara to know that it certainly CAN handle the creation of highly complex mesh. Have you done modeling yourself? Just curious - Always curious! ;)

Okay- will show you the divisions you haven't seen on the Day Dreamer top- you can have separate colors for the sleeves. If you don't have Day Dreamer I would take another look. It also comes with pantaloons (pants) if I recall. They're like knickers, 3/4 of the way down the leg. Us old timers used to call them pedal-pushers! (Am I the only one who remembers that, lol?)

One note- I got a PM a few minutes ago thanking me for the notes about the Flash Sales because they thought their pages weren't refreshing and they couldn't clear their cache (so were relying on me and others on the forum) - and in the course of the conversation, I found out the individual was going to Hot Promotions and not seeing the Flash Sale promos. Just in case, let's mention this here- to see Flash Sales- GO TO FAST GRAB or NEW RELEASES.

If you are up around 1:15am Central Time United States, that's when the promotions usually change. And any glitches are then too. (I got the 58% instead of 51% on one of the new releases. Was it Gia? We all discussed it that morning as there was price confusion.)

Going to do some funky ones now. Just wanted you to see you can do very simple, classic clothes with Totally Bazaar too. Let's head back to those gorgeous swimsuits, modeled by Chiara. Coming in a few minutes!

Cassini /Totally Bazaar / Day Dreamer Outfit (Again Using Native American)
NOTE THE SEPARATE SLEEVES option

I personally will not insist on exe-installers, but I want any kind of offline installing method.

Today everyone assumes that all people have broadband access to the internet wherever they are.

Even I'm located in central Europe I do not have DSL or cable at home. It's simply not avaliable.

Downloading hundreds of MBs via mobile will cost me hundreds of Euros and endless hours of time.

I need the option to download at my workplace and to install at home, anything else is a 'no go'.

I already cancelled my platinum membership because latest changes to the site and DS somewhat killed my mood and I quite sure will cancel my account and stop buying in the store if things go 'DIM only' in the future.

It's beautiful Jay :) The procession draws the eye from left to right, to the center where the action waits. Very effective.
The only thing I scrutinized was the far right, bottom corner. They looked like mini mountains and are almost as tall as the central figure in the middle. I might lower them a bit, as because they are dark they draw the eye that way too- and it's good because you are balancing out light and dark by having dark over there :) They just MIGHT look better a tad bit lower though. JMO. But this is so gorgeous!!! (I had to really think hard for any changes (note I didn't say improvements, lol) Nothing to be brutal about!

Carola O: The second one is definitely the winner for me. It's a great image as a concept and as a scene setup. The only thing that could be touched is the framing, so that there is much more lion and less stone ;) Probably by getting the camera farther from the scene, lowering it and tilting it a bit, and maybe moving it a bit to the left, so that the perspective is more central you'd get a better framing of it (you'd need to change the focal length to a short teleobjective, 135 - 200 should be more than enough).

Are you doing cheap all day discount fares ?? Will you be running them in Oxford St ? If so you may need permission as many central London routes are run
by a little company here in my local suburb of Brisbane -- just a bit of trivea !! ;-P

ps1borg said:

Woolyloach said:

ps1borg said:

Woolyloach said:

I don't recommend carrying a full pack of food in 104F weather and trying to make an early bus by rushing along on your cane. :ahhh: :bug: Now tired, sweaty, sore of foot, but.. home an hour earlier than I planned! :coolsmile:

The store had Sam Adams Octoberfest beer so I got a six to try. :red: Everything else was lunch meat, sausage, pepperoni, tortillas, and CHEESE! :cheese: I should be good for about 5-6 days now,

Glad I kept the two gel cold packs.. makes my busted foot happier. :)

Off to sip diet ginger ale before dinner and a beer., and install content! Then.. backup time. :blank:

Nutz to hurty feet but the beer sounds good :)

It was very relaxing, and I got to bed early! :coolsmile: Ready to have a decent Friday, I hope. :cheese:

Friday was cold and gloomy and wet for me, hopes you do better :)

It looks to be another warm and toasty Central Texas day. :coolsmile: - I need to buy a cowboy hat! :blank:

Hi there, my quick suggestions:

1 keep all the figures wholly framed, don't cut off any part of them.

2 when you have 'figures extensions' depicted (like the swords), pose them in a way so they point back to the focus center of the picture, otherwise their lines will pull the eye out of the picture, causing confusion and distracting the viewer. This is most important for border figures, since the central one is ideally framed by them and thus more free to assume a less 'eye drawing' pose.
Ideally the scheme of the picture should look like a central figure surrounded by 'arrows' that point to it or lines that converge towards it.

3 use an additional point light at the camera position, and set its falloff in order to have the closer figure a bit lighter than the others.

4 maintain a common style! Either by using similar colors or similar style objects, make it so all blends together. You can have a goth character near a casual one, but you should match better the clothes tones then, otherwise you get a *cough* JC-pe.sky... *cough* catalogue style, that you don't really want ^^ - for example your secondary characters are using black and red clothes, while the main char is err... uhmm... ^^ - retexture her clothes so the t-shirt is black and red too! Can be anything... a rock-band groupie t-shirt, one with some text on, whatever... also the pants, black denim? even dark grey. And the shoes, some red sneakers (or black and white) would do better as well.

5 use any possible mean to 'contain' your scene into a visual outline (without overdoing it): flowing hair also can be posed to make the watcher eyes follow their lines and send the view back towards the center of the scene...

Woolyloach said:

Mrgrayewolf said:

Woolyloach said:

Mrgrayewolf said:

Complaints:

Hot and muggy weather causing my wall unit A/C to ice over several times per day requiring shut down to high fan only until it melts causing it to get even hotter inside.
Clueless neighbors in building propping doors open to make it "cooler" in the interior hallway, not realizing that heat rises making the hall outside my second floor apartment hot meaning those of us on this floor have to run our A/C more to cool down.

Happy Happy Joy Joy:

Garibaldi hair for me this month! (Not so joy joy is now having to learn it and look at hairstyle pics to get references.)

Definitely complaint-worthy stuff there! A freezing up A/C is blecherous!

What I have actually done is purchased an wind up timer to "ding" after 1 hour so I can turn the A/C to high fan for 10 minutes before switching it back to cool to prevent it icing over. Doesn't help when i am not home though. How I miss having an actual thermostat like my last apartment and central air.

Ugh, what a pain in the tail to deal with! :-S

AC gets real noisy when it ices up as well *empathises*