Craig Orion Michael and Jerome Alpha Kamesh

So, continuing the parade of naked men, and after mentioning in "May 2018 Notes from the Management" that there were only two dark-skinned male merchant resources, and both were back in the Mil4 generation, I decided to go spelunking through my content for the second one, which I knew I had, as well as for the other dark skinned guy that I'd bought roughly at the same time.

Turns out that there were NOT two dark skinned male merchant resources produced for Michael 4. There was only one -- the hairy-chested guy that I have mentioned before. The one I thought was a merchant resource was in fact a second texture that was included with the Michael 4 Pro Bundle. (So ... one merchant resource. In five generations. ONE. Yeah ... Moving on...)  Michael 4 Texture 02 has been used as a merchant resource, I think -- I know I've seen him elsewhere (or parts of him, anyway) -- so I'm guessing that Daz gave some people specific permission to do so. That texture, sent through Texture Transformer 2, is on the guy on the left. He did need a hands/feet edit ... but for a very unusual reason. His hands had, in fact, been corrected after an overpaint. The margins were more or less in the right place. The artist had even somewhere found the middle palm area from a dark skinned resource and shimmed that into the hand. (Why they didn't simply use the entire hand and color-match that, I leave as an exercise for the reader.) The problem was that they overcorrected in the first place, and the mid-palm insert didn't extend across the entire lighter area of the palm and sole. So what happened was that you wind up with a reasonable margin, a reasonable middle, and between those, a completely featureless pale pale pale area that is very noticeable and looks really strange. They have my sympathies; the very first texture I corrected was done the same way (without the inserted area) and had the same washed-out result, so I know how they got there. He also has weirdly assertive lips, of all things; they looked so painfully dry and gray in Iray that I layered Darius 7's lips over them at nearly full opacity ... and they STILL asserted themselves.

His shape is a combination of the EJ Ethnic Males (Craig) plus Spicy Fusion (Orion), hence the name. Hair is, again, Killmonger hair, this time with beard. The beard's material settings are the first problematic ... anything I've run across in a Samsil hair. I think, at a guess, the surface zones aren't properly defined. What's supposed to happen with the various color presets is that the base stays black, while the ends shade into color -- bleached (above), less bleached bronze, primary colors, etc. What actually happens is ... nothing. Nothing at all. I try the various presets, and I can see in the surfaces tool that it is actually using the color matching the preset, but the beard remains black. I think that maybe the color area doesn't start close enough to the beard base, so it doesn't appear in scene or render. I wound up using Hair Lustre Shaders to get the color to work. (Note: apparently "vanilla blonde" is slightly pink. Don't ask me why. It just is.)

Jerome's texture comes from Jerome by Virtual World. I thought I'd seen him before, and as soon as I realized he was by Virtual World, I realized where. He's a brother to DeShawn and to Leroy for Dusk. And by "brother", I mean, the three of them very clearly share the same facial texture base, with all of its issues. And by "issues", I mean, spectacular specular contamination on the face! And elsewhere! In terms of level of contamination, default Jerome and default Deshawn are about even, with Leroy for Dusk just painfully far ahead. I can only guess, but maybe this comes from the combination of being a darkened diffuse along with the default texture actually having really strong specular issues. (Note that while they all clearly have the same head/face, they have different bodies; neither Leroy nor Deshawn is hairy -- more about that in a second.) Iray seems to be more tolerant of badly corrected textures, while 3Delight is --- very very slightly --- more tolerant of that type of specular contamination. From this end, the trick is correcting without the character looking painted; I hope I've gotten better at that over time. (I did overcorrect his eyelids at first and had to go back and fix them. Turns out you need the place where the eyelashes attach to be clearly visible and defined, otherwise, it looks ... weird. Who knew!) Jerome's base texture is also hairy, hence fibermesh body hair used with wild abandon. And he needed a hands/foot edit for the usual reasons for a Mil4 texture; the dark color went right to the edge of the texture map and stopped with a clean edge in the wrong place.

As for the rest: Jerome's head and body shapes come from roughly equal amounts of Faces of Africa (Alpha) and EJ Ethnic Males (Kamesh), with just a touch of Alexander and Kagiso. Hair is Spiked Curls.

And the pose for both comes from one of the Love is Love sets by Aeris19 at Renderosity.