Creating Duster, Part 3

Once I had settled on Victoria 6 as the base figure for Duster I then had to go get some more tools. In particular I had to spring for the Genesis 2 Female Morphs Bundle from DAZ Studio so I could delve into shaping her body and especially her face. I had tried using SickleYield's conversion for G2F of DieTrying's 182 V4 morphs but I could see they weren't going to get me all the way there.

I won't bore you with all the details of shaping Duster's face because it took awhile and got me into the minutia of tweaking morphs in DAZ Studio. This video helped me by providing some overall principles to follow and techniques to use. I went back and forth between my substantial collection of Candy Loving photos (ahem, obsess much?) and Studio, getting as close as I could.

Here's where I eventually arrived. 

Pretty close, if I do say myself. Most importantly she looked attractive and had a distinctive look that was close to how I've described her in my writing. One of the key points of advice in the video I mentioned above was to focus on two or three significant features and get those as close as possible, then get the others close enough. This makes sense; humans mainly focus on a small number of facial features to recognize each other. So I focused on her lips (especially ensuring that the upper lip was bow-shaped and the lower one thicker), the eyes, and the nose (and the area around it, especially just below the eyes).

I made some decisions based on aesthetics; an adjusted morph was accurate but it looked better in a render when set to a different value. For example, Ms. Loving's eyes are actually smaller, but in Studio Duster looked better with bigger eyes. And when I considered that I'd be partially concealing those eyes a lot of the time behind a shaded visor, making them bigger to ensure they didn't lose their expressiveness made sense. And when I applied a skin shader, this happened:

Look in particular at the area just below her eyes. Suddenly she aged ten years! Well, that wouldn't do. I went back to adjust her nose and cheek morphs to smooth all of that out. This was challenging since it wasn't really visible in Studio's Wrapped Texture view where you do most of your work. I had to make a change, perform a partial or even a complete render, then go back and tweak things some more.

Eventually I got there.

Ah, yes, the hair. I'll grant that since Ms. Loving was Miss January 1979 her hairstyle is a bit dated, definitely mired in between the Farrah Flip of the 70s and the big hair 80s. Nevertheless she rocks it and I wanted a similar style. But of course the vast majority of hair available for Studio follows current fashions, so I'd set quite a challenge for myself. The best match came when I found the SAV Dynasty product, which emulates those colossal hairstyles featured on 80s prime time soaps.

Of course I had to dial it back. Here's what she looked like with the full do. (And oh yeah... bewbs!)

Fortunately the product came with many shaping morphs--which I imagine is why digital hair is almost never available free. It looks like in must involve a lot of work to create these.

I also had to try some different colours to match the dark auburn I wanted. Interestingly the SAV Dynasty package came not just with the hairstyle and about 25 colours, it came with three different gloss mats which when you think about it really adds up to a lot of possibilities. However each of the glossiness options significantly changed the hair colour. For example, here's colour #24, one of the ones I was considering although I eventually decided it was too red:

Now here it is with low gloss applied.

Yeah, it changed from ginger to dark brown! And that's with low gloss. Medium and high did the same thing but brought out more gold-coloured highlights. I eventually gave up on the gloss options as I couldn't find one that left the hair close enough to the colour I wanted. I settled on option #9 with no gloss.

With her face and her hair in place, I had Candy Roberts, Duster's civilian identity, ready to go. But of course a superheroine needs a costume. That was my next challenge which I'll describe in the next part.