Romantic and Recumbent

Loosely after Rubens. VERY loosely.

The Recumbent is a combination of Wynn M5 by Male-M3dia, GenX2'd to G2M, and Big Boys for G2M by SickleYield -- the Wallace morphs. The Romantic is Caleb M4 by Shimizu, also GenX2'd. Julius hair on Caleb, Messy Dreads on Wynn Wallace.

A couple of different learning experiences. For one, even slightly older textures, which Caleb is, can look really odd with render Gamma 2.2. I used Amazing Skins on him, and he looked fine with render Gamma 1.0, but probably needs a bit more red for 2.2.

A 3Delight learning experience: render Gamma has an on/off toggle in the Studio render settings, so you would assume that when it's on, it's on, and when it's off, it's off, right? Yeah, not so much, it turns out. Apparently, it's always on; it just isn't always at 2.2. I found this out when I turned render Gamma off with the toggle, but forgot to reset the number, and came up with a surprisingly bright and shiny image. Weirdly, it's on, but it's not doing quite the same thing as when Studio is explicitly told it's on, with the toggle. (Why DAZ would choose to leave Gamma on all the time, but have it default to 1.0 instead of industry standard 2.2, I leave as an exercise for the viewer.)

Final learning experience was that GIMP 2.8.14, or whatever the current production version is, misconfigures itself when you first install -- in some weirdly nonsensical ways. It took me forever to realize that it had incorrect paths in its folders, for no apparent reason. Once I fixed those, suddenly it could find all the bits and pieces of itself. Including some plugins I'd apparently installed that make it behave more like 2.6. In any event, one of the filters I installed is called, I kid you not, "National Geographic". Based, apparently, on the sorts of things that National Geographic does to its images before it publishes them. So, just as an exercise, I did the normal things I do to tweak and increase image saturation on one, and then ran National Geographic on the other, just to see what would happen. The results were ... interesting. And, again, I leave it to the viewer to figure out which one is which.

(Side note: the "Suggested Category" for this is truly head-scratching. And yes, I know it's technically "Suggested Categories", but it only has one Suggestion. Which is: "Traditional art/drawings/macabre and horror". I can't even begin to figure out what it would have found to suggest THAT one.)