Byson, Zere, Zena, Cayman

First, have some background music!

(What? ... WHAT? Look, people, every time I use that set, I get thoroughly earwormed, for no reason at all. If I have to go through it, so do you! ... Ahem. To continue...)

In which Texture Transformer is used with wild abandon to bring characters from Mil4 and Genesis 2 to Genesis 3. (Cayman has since -- somewhat accidentally -- been moved to Genesis 4, but he's the only one of this crowd, due to the way that Singular Blues' script works.)

From left to right: Byson M4 by MEC4D; Zere V4 Male and Zena V4 by Morris; Cayman for Darius 6 G2M. You have seen (earlier versions) of Zena and Zere before, as well as quite a lot of Cayman (and yes, that link is worksafe, oddly enough). Zena and Zere use Anagenessis 2 shaders, I don't think Cayman does, but I don't remember, and Byson uses Beautiful Skin Iray. Note that Zena and Zere are not using the dark skins options for Anagenessis, which pulls back on the darkening that the shader normally provides. That said, they're both normally so dark that I don't think it would make any difference.

I'm noting a few things constently with Texture Transformer. First, it's a real fight to balance bump and specular, much more than usual. I think the conversion process must do something to the textures. At the least, it's transferring bump maps as color images, which I discovered by accident. It makes a sort of sense -- it's easier to code that to do only one type of image (although I'd have thought the simplest thing to do would be to simply transcode information directly -- grayscale to grayscale, color to color, etch.

Second, it seems to be bringing out tonal differences that get highlighted in Iray in a way that didn't happen with 3Delight. For example, it looks like Byson may be a partial (but extremely well done) overpaint; that's the only answer I can come up with for why his arms are so much lighter. He's almost got a reverse farmer tan.

Related to that, comparing a VERY VERY NSFW scene with Byson (the NSFW In the white room, and did I mention that he's full frontally naked in that one) to this one, both rendered in Iray and despite the white room scene being notably brighter, he's paler in this one. No idea why. I suspect Texture Transformer may be doing something, but I've no idea what it could be.

At the moment, there are no plans to move any of the Mil4 characters to Genesis 8, although I might wind up using the textures. I'm trying to keep from getting G8M/F as bloated as my G3M/F bases are.

Oh, and the set is Powerage's Visions of Paradise. Hence, the earworm.