Noir Style Tutorial, Pt. 6 - Step 1: Figure Set-Up

Enough intro text. It's time to dive right in.

As with any new scene, you open Poser 11, create a new scene (if one wasn't created automatically) and then load your figure, hair, props, etc.

Poser 11 with Victoria 4.2 loaded, along with hair and wings.

DISCLAIMER: I know I said this earlier, but it bears repeating. This is an intermediate tutorial. I'm not going into detail on how to load a figure, load hair and size it to fit the figure, or how to load the props (like these wings). There are scores of tutorials that cover these subjects, so go check with them first before contacting me for more details.

Now, moving right along.

In this screen capture, you can see that I have loaded Victoria 4.2 (hereafter referred to as V4), the Girl 4 Hair, and Enchanted Wings. I will also load the Morphs ++ and Expressions, which are all available in the Victoria 4.2 Starter Bundle from Daz3D.com.

Of course, you can use any figures and wardrobe you want for your own work (if you're following along). The key is to stick with figures that are easy to use in Poser, which means avoiding the Genesis (and all their many descendants) figures.

Detail of screen capture.

Right now, everything in the scene is still default. And, if you look closely, you can see that the wings are semi-transparent (which is something we'll have to deal with, eventually) and that there are these funky little stalks coming out of them. There's nothing wrong with them, per se, but I don't like them and they don't quite match my character concept.

© 2017 Daz Productions, Inc.

For clothing, I will be loading the Rose Fairy V4. By the way, if you're a member of the Daz Platinum Club, you can pick these props up for $1.99 each. In other words, the whole fairy outfit is less than $5, and that includes license to publish images and animations for profit. Here's a look at the promotional art for the combined wings and fairy costume.

For my design, I decided to dispense with the skirt. Considering my intended use for the character in a comic book story I'm working on, the skirt really isn't needed. In fact, I played around with it for a full day before deciding that it just got in the way. The leaf top is low enough to cover her groin, so as long as I'm careful with my camera angles, I shouldn't need the petal skirt. I will have to be careful about shots from the rear, though, as there is no petal back there. Unless I watch it, this rose fairy could become a moon fairy.

As you can see from the promo image for the wings and costume, they're pretty detailed. In fact, I think they look pretty good. But my final character is going to be rendered small (think Tinkerbell size), and all those other details are just going to be distractions. That's why I hid the elements I don't want to see in the final renders.

On the left side of the figure, you can see where I've selected the top wing (identified as  rTopWing at the top of the Properties panel, and I am going to toggle off its Visibility. I already did this for the extraneous items on the other side of the figure. I hid the stalks and two of the wings, leaving me a simple profile that will work well in the finished comic book I'm working on.

NEXT TIME: Turn on Live Comic Book Preview