Name of the Neví Cover - Viking Visual Art Tutorial

Last time, I put together my character Jilia for the cover art of my book Name of the Neví. Today, I will tell you a bit of what I went through to grab a new hairstyle for Jerreck.

Because I need long hair for most of my male characters, I end up having to use female hair quite a bit. However, this character is very carefully described in the book as having golden-red hair, inelegantly streaked with gray... braided into one long plait like an ancient warrior Jilia had seen in story books as a child. (Not an exact quote as it's on my main laptop and my DAZ work happens on my desktop.)

Thus began the search for a hairpiece that would work well. And a bit of a nightmare to go with it.
I couldn't find any free hairpieces for Jerreck, but finally found a piece for $6 that I felt good about buying - making it the first thing I've actually paid for in this game since buying Poser Pro 2014.

I finally found my piece at Mankahoo, the 050 hair piece designed for Victoria 4 which is a doll on Poser.

Here is the description straight from the Mankahoo website - I do recommend her as she has the largest collection of basic hairpieces of anyone I've seen yet.:

One of the first things I did was to edit the image map to give him his gray streaks. I tried to just add streaks, but I didn't like the results, So, I used the fuzzy select tool to highlight contiguous areas and add some white at about 25% opacity.

Unfortunately, this job turned out to be less-than-straight-forward... This was caused by two main problems - the fact that it wasn't designed on Genesis figures - and the fact that it wasn't designed on DAZ, but on Poser.

Here's what the hair looked like when I put it on my Genesis 3 male after I adjusted the fit...

As you can see, the hair piece doesn't come all the way forward on his head. And when we turn him around, it disappears into his body.

As a side note, I experimented with how the different Genesis people worked with this product and found it somewhat interesting, the Genesis 3 male was the worst option, lol.

In this image, the original Genesis models are in the front row (furthest away from us), followed by Genesis 2, Genesis 3 and Genesis 8 (numbering system changed to compare better with Poser products.)

Anyway, back to Jerreck's hair.
The first problem was fairly easily worked around by resizing his head slightly and the second problem isn't a huge problem for my scene this time.

But I also decided the his bangs/fringe needed to be removed and those ghastly-looking "handles" needed to go... as you can see in this image.

Although the creator of this hair added mods to hide the handles and the fringe (she did that part because I asked nicely), they didn't work in DAZ, so I had to figure out something else... That's when I discovered the "opacity" control. Hehehe... Now, all I had to do was find the right parts of the product to modify... like so...

At this point, I'm declaring Jerreck's hair done for this scene, but I need to spend some time learning how to use it in Poser as I have discovered that the posing of the hair (as shown in the original product) works perfectly in Poser, but didn't work for me in DAZ. I will have to learn one of two things:

How to use my Genesis models in Poser.
How to make the hair in Poser as a separate item to take back to DAZ.
I think no. 1 is slightly easier, but I'm not sure yet...

Next, I will show you something about how I pose these two. (Yes, I had to take some of these shots out of order, since I wanted to keep working while I was figuring out how to use the hair - including e-mailing the creator.)

Another thing I need to learn is about aging my characters - since this pair will be silhouetted, it doesn't matter too much, but Jerreck is in his 50s and probably needs a few wrinkles...

Other parts of this tutorial: part 1, part 2

Past tutorials:

Map Development for Alacantis (on GIMP), part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4
Cover image for Acting the Part
Cover image for Brighid's Blood (part of the update).
Cover image for Birth of the Neví, part 1, part 2
Map Development for Velantia, part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4
Map Development for Kranisis, part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4
Cover Image for Name of the Neví, part 1, part 2,

Crossposted at Steem, Whaleshares and WeKu.

Lori Svensen
author/designer at A'mara Books
photographer/graphic artist for Viking Visual
verified author on Goodreads
find me on Twitter
also on: Whaleshares, WeKu

_{Join us in the Official Whaleshares server in the text channel "the-phoenix-project"}

Name of the Neví Cover - Viking Visual Art Tutorial - part 3

Past tutorials:

Photo salvages:

Coloring Tutorials & Mini-tutorials:

Miscellaneous Artwork: