The Three: A Study in Faces and Textures

Many things contribute to a successful model in Poser 4.0: pose, light, texture, material coloring, body and face shaping. As an exercise in identifying how these elements contribute, I've built the first half of this page around some baselined images. In the second half is a review of three face models available at Renderosity, Rasputina's "The Three." The model for both parts is DAZ3D's excellent Stephanie, a buff female character with great potential to represent women beautiful in ways more realistic than the glamorous images DAZ3D's other Millenium Woman, Victoria, lends herself to.

For the exercise, I started with a figure of my own, based on Stephanie and Catharina Harder's bargain-basement (you can't beat free) Stephanie texture, Ona, available at Catharina's own site, Mecom4D. My base setup is seen in the first image in the table, the dark-skinned Stephanie. For this image, I have optimized the materials settings to my own satisfaction. That included making changes to both Object color and, to a lesser degree, ambience. Necessarily, this gives a slight advantage to the Ona texture over the other three, since the coloring is adapted to a darker, grayer base texture than the others. But I've left the materials settings unchanged for the first group of images in the interest of baselining.

I have adapted Catharina's green eyes from her Michael character John to work with the Stephanie model (not a major undertaking, by any means), and I keep them from one model to the next, because their effect is so noticable. I have also stayed with the same hair from image to image, Kozaburo's Alice with the black texture, again with some material color adjustments. I neutralized the lights and set the Face Camera's focal length to 75mm. The result is four sets of images that demonstrate the effects of adding carefully designed and integrated face designs, specifically "The Three," a set of three character faces developed by Rasputina and available at Renderosity, to various textures.

Below the texture exercise, I've done an "optimization" for each of the three faces, linking it to one of the other textures as carefully as I had already linked Stephanie and Ona.

Stephanie Antoine Ona texture, Catharina Harders. The darker texture highlights the Afro-American look of Antoine, actually lending this racial identity to all four faces, in spite of the unusual contrast of the green eyes. The dramatic coloring mutes the subtle changes in the Jeanne face—a longer profile, rounder cheekbones, depth in the eyesockets. Rosario and Antoine are hard to tell apart, the texture is so overwhelming. Jeanne Rosario Stephanie Antoine Lucy texture, by RenaPD. The Lucy texture, available in the subscription area of PoserWorld, offers a pale Caucasian look for the faces. The Ona lighting is a bit stark for such pallor, and the distinctive racial quality of the Antoine face is muted a bit. Interestingly, Jeanne now has something exotic in her look, a kind of intriguing ethnicity that isn't quite identifiable, like, for Americans, certain northern European types or the blonde Italians of Lombardy. What emerges immediately from the change is realization of what a huge impact texture and coloring have on the look of a character, overwhelming physical subtleties of bone structure. Jeanne Rosario Stephanie Antoine Dionne texture, by Daio. The Dionne texture, available free at Renderosity, is another dark complexion, with more red tones than Ona. The complexion suggests a deep tan rather than a racial origin, even though the Dion texture for Michael, which it is based on, looks distinctly Afro-American. Note: The slightly sunburnt quality in the images is created by the Materials coloring retained from Ona. I have corrected it below. A common mistake users of Poser will make is to fail to use the Object Color to fine-tune a texture. The Ona texture demands such fine-tuning; without it, the texture is almost grey, but the grey is a neutral base that Object Color can bring to life. The Dionne texture, on the other hand, seems to be meant to stand alone, dropped over a pure white Object color. Jeanne Rosario Stephanie Antoine Kitty texture, by tonyhag. The Kitty texture, available free at Renderosity, is almost unnaturally pallid, giving a Goth/Vampire look accentuated by the muted purple on the lips. It's not a texture I would ordinarily use for my own pictures, but for this exercise it provides a useful extreme contrasting with the two darker textures. Of the four faces, it highlights the distinctive features of Jeanne best, bringing out the narrower chin and the changes to the shape and length of the nose. Jeanne Rosario

A rather mechanical exercise, but revealing. Now I'm going to work up an image for each face, seeing what I can do with each of them. The rules are, I can tinker with anything except the face-shaping dials. So I will make changes to lighting, coloring, textures, and expressions, but not to Rasputina's face shapes.

Antoine and Ona

Ona and Antoine—a marriage made in Heaven, if you ask me. Bear with me now while we make something out of them.

The image on the right shows Antoine with the Ona texture. Ona's facial coloring is in grey light with an Object Color for the face of pure white (255, 255, 255). Compare the skin of her neck and chest, which is still toned. As you can see, her base coloring is almost grey, with dramatic pinks and reds between the eyes and mouth. The tone added to the Object Color turns this into a natural shade that suggests Gypsy, Hindi, or perhaps certain American Indian skin coloring. The Object Color functions as a base that is modulated locally by the texture.

For this exercise, I'm going to give the Ona texture a base Object Color of RGB 140, 90, 50, a coffeed cream. Keep in mind that the addition of material color is a bit like adding spice to a fine broth. A little bit—a tiny bit—goes a long way. Look at the suggested tone in your own Poser Materials dialog, and compare its lightness to the dramatic change it imparts to the texture. You can make similar changes by adjusting the ambient, as long as you remember that you must apply the desired hue from the black end of the spectrum. If you were to use 140, 90, 50 in the Ambient Color, you would have to mute the Object color down to pure black (think of Object + Ambient as a seesaw) and the end result would be very unsatisfactory, because ambient light, effectively the "inner glow" of an object, suppresses details. You get essentially the same color, but no face.

My first thought, when I looked at the shape of Antoine's face, was Tina Turner. Tina Turner's face has very distinctive colors and planes that derive from her mixed heritage: black and American Indian. During the period immediately before the Civil War, many escaped slaves became members of the southern Indian tribes—Creek, Choctaw, Seminole, Cherokee, for example. The blacks married into the tribes, and their genes created the very distinctive blend that you see dramatically in Tina Turner's bones and coloring, dark red, almost pipestone (Catlinite) red skin, aquiline nose, high cheekbones. Rasputina refers to Antoine's face as a mixture of African and Asian. I'm going to add Indian.

I fiddled with the Materials colors for the eyes a bit to get the shade of green I wanted, green I saw once on a stunning black woman in a Waco, Texas, 7-Eleven. Since I'm using a custom eye texture, I won't go into detail about the tinkering, except to note that I had to add some flat grey, to prevent the huge amount of light used to illuminate the skin from glazing the eyes. I've also added Object Color to the DAZ3D Bobbed Hair to make the brunette texture a bit darker and redder. But the main change, once I'm satisfied with the overall look, is adding lights. My experience has been that spots do not provide adequate illumination all by themselves, especially with darker-toned skin and hair. So I've mixed Infinite and Spot lights to get what I want.

First, I built a basic set of three spots, Key, Fill, and Back. (If you want a good tutorial on how to do this, check Craig Burton's at Poser Arcana.) I've put a little yellow in the Key and Back, and a little blue in the Fill. In addition to the basic spots, I've added an Infinite light at low intensity to back up the Key, with some red in it, and another to back up the Fill, with pale blue. Finally, an aimed spot, the same color as the key, is adding highlights to the hair.

All that remains is to add a facial expression, drop my cromlech prop behind her for a backdrop (I would fill the grey on the right with a background as part of the post work). The image above right is my Antoine/Ona, with no post work, hot from the render.

Jeanne and Lucy

RenaPD's Lucy texture for Stephanie, available with a subscription to PoserWorld, has a 30's glamour look that it's tempting to play with. Lipstick slathered on with a spatula, the best eyebrows money can pluck.... No doubt capped teeth as well. Not quite decadent, but well past camp and on its way. Add Jeanne's sharp nose, and you have a look somewhere between Barbara Stanwyck and Darryl Hannah. So the Rei Hair (Kozaburo) seems like a logical choice to add (a homage to Blade Runner), and PhilC's Classical Wrap gives me just a hint of casual dress on one shoulder. Good enough.

The result is drastically overlit by the Antoine lighting scheme, however. Poser spotlights are not very effective with dark skin. The same lights that were required to make the Antoine image work will turn this one into a white-on-white dazzler. Recall that once I got the skin lit, I had to "damp down" the bright eyes with grey Object color. With the Jeanne/Lucy's lighter overall coloring, Spots handle the image without the assistance of Infinite lights. Here, I have set up the basic Key/Fill/Back set, with the Back at full intensity to make the hair more stark. Three lights, and we're done.

For variety, I've thrown in a nice sunny park building as a background picture, so the image will need some post work to eliminate the f/64 look of the depth of field. Ordinarily, I would render the model on black and then drop her onto the background, but for consistency's sake, I'm not doing any post work on the pictures. Personally, I find the "background picture" approach pretty useless as a method of creating a scene, but that's a methodology issue.

Rosario and Dionne

Ok, so I'm obsessed with gypsies and belly dancers, Ok?

According to creator Rasputina's shop notes, Rosario's "look" is intended to be Latina, so the natural texture is Daio's ultimate suntan, the Dionne texture available as a freebie at Renderosity. With that, some black hair and a judiciously placed magnet, one more try at creating my own Iberian Esmeralda, sans goat.

The Object color is RGB 150, 100, 50, to add some darkness to the Dionne skin tone. The eyes are Catharina Harders' John black eyes. The hair is Kozaburo's Kyoko with a black texture. In my endless quest for a usable belly dance outfit, I've added the Poserworld bandana, available in the subscription area of Poserworld, to my costume trunk, but I haven't textured it yet to include with the belly dancer textures I have. The Poserworld "Picnic dress" adds a bit of shoulder fabric and a sleeve. I picked up a tambourine from the Renderosity Free Stuff, and added some jewelry courtesy of Cake One that accents the skin nicely. I loaded one of my beloved Digiport Designs Belly Dancer Poses from DAZ3D, rearranged the arms and adjusted the facial expression. Using a magnet, I pulled Kozaburo's Kyoko hair down and inside the Poserworld bandana, then shifted the Object color for the hair to RGB 54, 0, 0 to redden it overall. The tambourine has a 60% reflection added, with a silver reflection map, to put some glare on the cymbals.

All the bits assembled, it was time to step back and deal with the real challenge—the bleepin' lights.

I wanted a night scene with dramatic lighting, so here's what I did. I took my basic Key, Fill, and Back as a starting point, but reduced their overall intensity about 50%. Then I added a second key light, aimed at her neck and coming from a bit below shoulder height. Red coloring gives the image a bit of a firelight look and some dramatic "up" shadows. Next I put a reddish light at the far right and aimed it at her right eye (not her left). The aiming and position gets the light right on the bridge of her nose and inner left eye socket. Using the same sort of trick, I aimed a tightly focused light (Start and End Angles of 10 degrees) from behind her shoulder at her right thumb, which hits the cymbal instead, since the thumb is "behind" it.

Unfortunately, spotlights tend to "break up" in the workspace display if you push them too hard, so it took multiple renders to get the combination I wanted. But I did, and my Esmeralda will do just fine.

"The Three": Good Deal or What?

For $6.00, you get three facial types. Good deal? Depends. I'd pay $6.00 just for Antoine, because it would take me at least a half hour to come that close to the look I wanted, the Tina Turner/Black Cherokee look. But do Jeanne and Rosario add anything to the package? In one sense, no. The differences between the three faces are so subtle that I think I could have done similar adjustments in a few seconds (whether I am right or not, that is my perception). I would not have created "Jeanne," but I'd have created a more Anglo look based on Antoine, and I'd be satisfied. So it's one face, not three.

All too often, this seems to be the case with Face packages. The differences are not significant enough to warrant selling them as a "set." Rasputina has an Asian package of three faces that I would consider purchasing if the basic face were something I needed, but the fact is, it's one basic face, a Cambodian skull, with some modifications to make three looks out of it. I'm looking for a more Japanese look, and a Filipina. So I move on.

A similarly marketed Stephanie face package from another artist touts fifteen "faces" for $7.50, and as near as I can tell, it consists of one face with some not terribly complicated expressions. A bargain at fifty cents each instead of two dollars? No thanks. I can do expressions, and the chances someone else will get the look I want are pretty near zero.

Buy "The Three" at Renderosity. This is Antoine with RenaPD's Jacklyn texture from Poserworld, and the DAZ3D Updo. And some dial spinning on the lights and materials, of course....

"The Three" offers three thoughtfully created faces with bone and tissue changes, not just a bit of puckering and grinning. There are no unique morph targets included, just carefully set parameter dials; morph targets would increase the perceived value, simply because they increase the uniqueness and unduplicatable qualities of the face. Building a face that is distinctive and not cartoonish requires some skill and care, even if you confine the changes to parameter dials, and both skill and care show in Rasputina's products. Nevertheless, the perceived development process, in both of her packages, is to create a unique face, and then spin two variations.

The problem this creates is a strange psychological thing, really. It's a bit like buying a package of three golf balls because you need one and that's the way they come. If getting one golf ball is worth what you paid for all three, then the purchase makes some sense. If you will eventually need the other two balls, then it makes sense. But if all you want is one-third of the package, your first thought is likely to be, "Why can't I buy one golf ball for one-third the cost?"

So it's a marketing problem. The right face is worth $6.00 to me, because I measure the cost in the time it would take me to create it—or a facsimile that will suit, rather. By that economic reasoning, a $15.00 texture is a bargain, and Antoine was a good deal. But it has to be a face, or texture, that I need. With essentially one face on offer, the chances that this face will be the one I'm looking for are reduced by three.

But these are quibbles. As I worked with Jeanne and Rosario, they became individuals for me, just as Antoine had, easily giving me as much entertainment as any recent movie. In fact, thanks to Rasputina and Catharina Harders, I may find, with a few more tries, the golden woman who has haunted me for fifty years.