First and foremost, this demo is NOT work safe.  It contains images of full frontal male nudity.  You have been warned.

And now that that’s out of the way…

I wanted to do an online art demo for the Dark Diva Reviews Yahoo group a couple of weeks ago.  Every third Friday of the month they have ‘Casual Sex’ Friday, and it’s a fun online party where readers and writers are encouraged to chat, share excerpts, and post favorite naughty images.  I had intended to do this demo the last Casual Sex Friday but due to technical difficulties (two back up power supplies in our house went belly up!) and then further technical difficulties (the software I wanted to use would simply NOT cooperate), I ended up delaying a couple of weeks.

In the end, it turned out to be for the best, as the image I decided to create for this demo is not as simple as I had initially imagined.  The working title of the image is ‘Go Fish’ and it’s a scene between a merman and a male fae at the edge of a pool of water.  I’ve decided to do this demo in stages, doing each character first, then setting up the backdrop, doing the lighting and rendering, and then handling the post-work.  Ideally, this should work out to be a four-part demo, with a new installment posted each week.  I hope to have part 2 done by Friday evening, but it will depend on the work load.  In the meantime, here’s part one.

I decided to start with the male fae character.  I’m using DAZ Studio from DAZ3D.com.  This is a free software package used for character rendering and animation.  If you’re not familiar with 3D programs, it’s sort of like having a combination photo studio/doll house inside your computer.  Basically, DAZ Studio allows you to take pre-built models and pose them, modify them to a certain extent, and render or ‘photograph’ them.  It’s very similar to Poser (which I also have, but found too expensive and too prone to crashing to keep up with). 

I recently purchased a new character and texture pack from Renderosity.com, called Daniel for D3.  Yes, he looks like a certain boy wizard, all grown up, but I like this package because it takes the original model we’ll be working with – DAZ3D’s D3 or David as he’s known – and makes him look actually human!

Here’s D3 before I add the Daniel character morphs and textures:

Pretty boring, isn’t he?  No skin texture, face like a block of stone, dead eyes, and oh look! He’s got no genitals.  Let’s fix that right now (this is supposed to be an erotic piece of artwork, right?).

For the record, D3 comes with genitals, but they don’t just automatically show up.  They’re a separate model that has to be added on.  Talk about your detachable penises.

So that’s the basic model we’re working with.  Now to add the Daniel character morphs and texture.  The character morphs are basically changes that re-sculpt the face of the model.  In DAZ Studio, once you tell the program to add a morph, you get a little dial that lets you decide how far you want to re-sculpt that particular feature.  For example, let’s say we wanted to lengthen the nose.  We’d load up a morph target for a longer nose, get our dial, and then we could turn the dial to get a longer or shorter nose as need be.  You can take morph targets to ridiculous lengths, by the way.  I once made a morph target to flatten the nipples of a character, and ended up sending them shooting out the backs of her shoulder blades.

We’ll also be adding a texture to the character.  Think of the texture as an image to be wrapped around the 3D model.  In this case, we’re adding the skin and facial texture.  If you’ve ever seen an animal skin spread out, that’s a lot like what a texture looks like, only it’s an image drawn in pixels, and not real leather and fur.  Let’s see what the D3 model looks like with the morphs and texture:

Wow, what a difference!  His face looks a lot more human, sexy even, and he’s got body hair to go with his genitals.  In addition to adding the Daniel character morphs to his face, I also added some other morphs to his body, to give it a youthful but well-toned look.  And I’ve added a hair model (a sort of 3D wig) so he’s no longer bald.  The wings are the standard fairy wings that DAZ gave out with the version of DAZ Studio that I downloaded.  One of the reasons that I like buying from DAZ is that they do give away a lot of free models and I use them as much as I can!

Looking at this, I like the wings, but I realize it’s not quite what I’m going for.  It’s too… fluffy?  So I’m going to try something else:

These wings actually belong to a different model, this one a dragonfly.  I’ve got the whole dragonfly model attached to the D3 model, but you can only see the wings.  I told the program to make the rest of the dragonfly invisible.  These wings are more what I want, and I think this character is about complete.  The image is a little dark though, so I took a few minutes to play with this last render in Adobe Photoshop, to see if I could adjust the skin color and brighten the image.  This is called ‘post-work (for those not familiar with the process of creating 3D artwork, post-work is when you jump from 3D to 2D to clean up an image, add special effects, and do other nifty things you can’t do in the original 3D program).  Here’s a quick post-worked version of the male fae:

I can still see some things I want to change, like that shiny highlight on the abs, but overall this is about what I want.  At this point, I’m ready to move onto the next part of the project, which would be creating the merman character.  I’ll leave that for the next post in this series.  I hope to have it up in about a week or two, so keep checking back!