The Life-breath ... Lit with Love

 
    The Life-Breath is inexhaustibly fertile.  It is always recreating.  If we would give up thinking of death and substitute the word rebirth, we would suffer much less and grow much faster.  The death of everything is its rebirth, the death of every cell is rebirth and science says the cell dies with every movement you make, every move of your emotional, mental and physical body.   It dies and is reborn again.  This is not a sentimental remark; it is a statement of science.  It is up to us whether the cell into which it is reborn is a better or worse one.  It all depends upon the image we make.  The next form that is made within us can be better or worse depending upon our mental images.  The quality of our work and life depend upon what we see and the dedication of our intent to realize the material form of what we see.

   Don't you love a classic face?   The character above is Rianne created by Handspan Studios & Thorne.  She was released six years ago this week.  Rianne was one of the first characters I worked with in Poser, and you know how it goes with your first.  

  Few people work with Victoria III these days.  So many technical advances in the figure base make it hard to justify staying with the elder characters.  While this moving on is a natural way of life it often seems a real shame to me.  There was an immense amount of diverse creativity invested in the development of characters during the reign of Victoria III.  There are great rewards yet to be uncovered and great works to be created working with elder characters.  True ... they may require a bit more ingenuity and there are certainly limits at the figure level but it's a creative sin to disregard elder materials completely for loyal adherence to the state of the art.

  There was a different mind-set among artists who crafted characters five to ten years ago. And, yes, to the 3D purists, there were and are artists from a broad range of media attracted to working in Poser for a variety of reasons.  Seldom back then was the motivation "to make a living at it."  There just wasn't a large enough user base of Poser at the time to make steady money at character creation.  It is true in all creative fields that when the medium is new or widely unexplored and talent gets involved for reasons other than profit interesting things soon develop.

  If you still work with the early Poser/DS characters, outfits, scenes, etc then you already know what I'm talking about.  I am writing mostly to folks who may have begun working in 3D in just the past couple of years.  One does not need to love a particular character to produce interesting imagery ... although it certainly helps.  

  This much is certain: any character, all the way back to the first generation, will look vastly different under the lighting of current software.  If you do have some favorite characters from years ago it is definitely worth re-installing them or linking out to an elder runtime.  Just explore and have fun.  This portrait was created in Poser Pro 2012.  I did not use SSS.  Any decent texture in a close up portrait will start to look impressive under IDL once you bring your shading rate down below 0.4 and the pixel samples up to 12+ or as high as your system permits.

  If you do work with any of the elder generation characters feel free to let me know.  I'm a big fan of the Classics.   


With warm regard,

Terry

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PRODUCTION : Character & Scene Set up and Rendered Within Poser Pro
POST : Tonal Enrichment, Film Effects, DOF, Typesetting & Framing Within Photoshop
CREDITS : Rianne - Crafted Character for Victoria III by Handspan Studios & Thorne  [link]
              Sapphire Fox Hair by Quarker [link]
VINTAGE : June 2012