Thank you! In High School I used to do a lot of decorative lettering (the eighties were full of metallic looking fonts)
For the pool I used so many different techniques to get it to look remotely passable as pool water. I even downloaded “water” brushes to get that glint off the surface riffles.
Whirlwind lightning. Did you personally find that easy to do or a pain in the butt?
It’s a product I was testing, I didn’t make any of the assets 
They are always going to be refining this stuff, but at least in an artistic level, it looks really good.
Experimented with some new Daz acquisitions. “HD” Characters and violins (with poses).
I discovered the hard way that the violin grasp poses do not hold the violin or bow correctly, and applying the pose presets (limiters off) removes the ability to move the characters’ hands / arms with the three cones / triangles (no fine tuning)…Note Krista’s (the blonde girl’s) levitating violin, and Freyja’s bow clipping into her palm…I deleted the pose’s installed (parented) violin bow and imported a separate bow. The only way I could position the bow correctly and move / angle her arm separately (using the roller-ball icon on the viewing screen’s top left corner), getting her hand somewhere near the bow handle (minimal finger / palm clipping) before my patience expired.
Renders still plagued by excessive noise and abysmal skin texture details / quality. The inability to change Krista’s eyebrows, or change the thickness /density of Freyja’s hair were perpetual annoyances. Krista’s eyes should be a much lighter blue too.
Another test render with two of my legacy characters(as they would appear in my first novel). Karen and her bodyguard / closest friend, Zorik.
(^How Karen handles her business negotiations)
The two main issues I had this time were the only buttoned shirts I had for Karen clipped through / over her pants and blazer (pretend she is wearing a tailored blue suit with a silk shirt), and the trick I used for changing the models’ skin colours no longer worked (pretend they have Israeli / Mizrahi complexions)…Halfway through the render I also noticed Zorik’s belt clipping into his jeans (now fixed)…
Update: just noticed their strange eye textures. They were unusual colours and (poor) resolution in the Daz Studio too.
Oh, I based the character Karen’s appearance on Gemma Atkinson* (before I knew who she was), but I don’t have any character presets that look like her and I was getting too annoyed with Daz (the mouse cursor insisted on highlighting / selecting every object EXCEPT Zorik’s hands) to mix-n-match the presets I do have. Another future project…And, yes, Zorik is a giant: a 7-foot-2, ex-Golani Brigade heavy-weapons expert…
Great render! Love the poses - your patience definitely paid off.
As for brows, download a skin with no brows (Mousso’s characters usually have a no brow option) and then use different brows. There’s the Beautiful Brows product which is great. 
As for noise, Ghost Lights can help a lot. You don’t need to buy the product, but they can speed up render times without any noise (although the default denoiser is fine. If you have tons of noise, I see no reason why you wouldn’t use it, just find a start iteration that works for your scene, I usually keep it quite low!).
Every time I see his name, I think of this chant:
I havent sung this in about 20 years.
Dunno if I’ve said before, but I really like the way you draw eyes.
Working on birdlord’s ref sheet for Artfight. He is a fancy man with many fancy outfits. (He has five more iterations I need to draw lol)
Bonus:
I don’t know if that’s a bird, but it looks mighty spiffy in that smart red bowtie.
He is a very dignified gentlebird 
I challenged @Churro to use a very limiting dressup game to make his character, Alicia, so I tried to draw her in a way that is more coherent.
She looks cool!
You should draw Max and Alicia dressing up for a couples event.
Another test render with Karen and Zorik.
The more I wrestle with Daz-3D’s color / opacity sliders, the more I contemplate cutting my losses and buying a air-ticket to Israel (camera in tow).
Next time I’ll find a better way to emphasise their height and size difference…Karen is about six-feet tall, Zorik is comfortably over seven-feet tall (and he can lift her with one hand)…and I’ll find a non-goofy smile for Karen too.
Wow, these are amazing!
