Hi, I thought some of you might find this interesting. Some of my commercial work lately has consisted of product promo's for various fantasy weapons sets. In the interest of time, efficiency and meeting deadlines; I've found myself re-using characters in these promo images. So, they've been developing from project to project. I thought I might take some spare time and polish some of these characters; so that when I do need to 'drop' them into a scene they'd be ready to go and look really nice. First up is "Luk-Tor" who, for the longest time, was known simply as 'the Orc Guy.' He's my goto guy when I have a particularly bad-ass looking sword, knife, hammer, spear or shield to promo. Texture is RawArt's "Roarc" and the morphs are a combination for the Roarc morph, some M4 Creature Morphs and some Freak 4 morphs. Surfaces were treated to my usual pwSurface2 process with multiple specular settings, sub-surface scattering and translucence etc. Clothes are "Barbarian King" from DAZ, with various grunge and rip textures added using Marieah's "Rag-Erator" and "Grime-Inizer" products to give that Orc-ish 'lived in' look. Hair is Predatron's "Shaolin" hair. Sword is from Predatron's "War-Stuff" pack, again appropriately aged though use of the "Rust-Icator" textures. Turn table base is from Ant Farm's "Base Camp." All of these things can be had at DAZ. Lighting & environment in the two turntable views is Dreamlight's "White Room" with some personal enhancements. The head shot replaces the White Room lighting with a 5-Point Basic Studio Lightset (warm to cool preset) also from Dreamlight. No Uber-anything used to light the portrait shot, folks - just five stock spotlights and a lot of depth of field. All three renders were done in DAZ Studio with high quality render and lighting settings. Each took about an hour and a half to two hours to render. The three shots were composited in Photoshop, with filters added to adjust levels, brightness/contrast and vibrance. These filters go a long way to enhancing a stock DAZ Studio render, which seems to me to usually come out kind of dark and flat. I find it's also important to do my compositing on a 16-bit image and then drop it down to 8-bit after I've flattened out the layers. So, time and situation permitting, I'd like to do similar studies on some of the other characters that have been popping up in my promo work. I'm hoping you'll enjoying them and get something out of them as well. As always your constructive critique and comments are most appreciated. Feel free to PM me with any questions you'd like answered directly. I'm also going to start trying to leave comments to answer any questions raised in the comments section, so check back in a few days if you leave a question and hopefully it'll be answered. Thanks, --michael