Make A Smile For Yourself ...

Part of a separate image that I did for the Platinum Club montly contest -- or tried to do, anyway. It's going to need to be re-rendered, because the first version didn't quite work. Not sure that the second one will, either, but it's a somewhat more interesting way to look at the same characters in the same setup, I think, so. (And given the situation, she pretty much has to "make a smile for herself", because nobody else is going to help out.)

This one got entered in the weekly contest. I don't think it's going to win, particularly, but I do like it. Featuring FSL Regal Monique Abby by fuseling, with fractional additional Queens of the Savannah head morphs support, and Olivia V5 texture; Platinum Cocktail Dress Luxury Lace II; Modern Home 2 by NFX Studios/RPublishing. And a metrick buttload of mesh lights here, there and everywhere, with environment lighting fill support. (It's a nighttime/twilight scene, so how much help the environment is providing is debatable, at best.)

One of the things that I'm discovering as I do all this stuff is that because almost none of these texture sets was designed for Iray, the underpinnings wind up being quite the hodge-podge. Diffuse is Olivia V5 by Raiya; translucency/transmission textures come from either Interjection or Reinterject by Dimension Theory; everything else from ... all over the place. (Seriously, for the time being, until something more specific to Iray comes out, I highly HIGHLY recommend getting Interjection and Reinterject for the strength, normal and color textures. Mind, you don't actually need the normals Reinterject has for V6, since she has her own generic normals, but the G2F textures are very useful. [It is a puzzlement why, when they rebuilt Phillip and Bree for Genesis2, Basic Male and Basic Female remained the only realistic main figure textures in either Genesis or Genesis 2 to not have DAZ-produced normal textures. It is also a mild puzzlement why DAZ didn't commission Reinterject for G2M/M6. A mild one. And yet another puzzlement about why vendors are doing JPEG normal textures; the normal JPEG lossy compression gets rid of much of the fine detail that normal textures are supposed to be used for. I mean, there's a reason that all the DAZ normal textures are TIFs. But I digress.])

One small helpful thing, I hope: because there's a level of detail that you do NOT need in textures that aren't visible, you can use Map Transfer to move things to UV sets that don't have them. (Map Transfer of diffuse limbs maps, sadly, remains a horror show of too many or too few fingers.) However, at least in my Studio installations across the last two computers, normal maps in the normal map slot will NOT transfer. Don't ask me why. However, normal maps in the bump and/or displacement slot transfer just fine. Again, don't ask me why.