Facial A-Hairness 2. Thank you for purchasing Facial A-Hairness 2. We hope you enjoy this product, and appreciate any feedback you may have. This pack is intended for use with Poser8 and newer, though we would recommend Poser9 and newer for best results. For the purposes of this guide, we'll be using PoserPro 2014, but there is nothing we'll be doing that can't be done in Poser 8 and above.  And initially, pretty much everything is in default, except Render settings. Once you've installed the product, your new Facial A-Hairness items will be in: Runtime:Libraries:Hair:MortemVetus:FacialA-Hairness2 Runtime:Libraries:Material:MortemVetus:FacialA-Hairness   This pack can be used to apply beards to any character for Michael4, but for best results, we would recommend using Michael4 characters by Mortem Vetus, as these beards have been designed to work best with those. These beards include fits for many of our more rugged men. In thus guide, we're going to make the gnarly necromancer in the top image. To get started, we'll need to load Michael4, and we'll dress him, but we're not going to put a character on him just yet.

Image 1: Michael4 loaded and dressed

So we've got Michael loaded and dressed, as seen in image 1 above, and we've put the Mortuus Domine outfit on him, except for the hood, because that will create shadowing on his face and obscure the beard we're looking at. Next, we want to put a beard on him. Go to your Hair library and select a beard to put on. We're going to use FullBeard07. Select the thumbnail of the required beard, and apply it to Michael4, by either doule clicking the thumbnail, or clicking 'Apply Library Preset', the single tick symbol. NOTE: Make sure Michael4 is selected before applying a beard. These are essentially parented props, and loading them parented to another figure in scene may cause unexpected results.

Image2: Load a beard from the Hair library.

We've found the preview representation of the beards to be sometimes mis-leading, and the best way to see the beards is rendered, as we can see below in image 3. That's straight out of the tin, on a default Michael, using PoserPro 2014 default lighting. Not bad, he's looking a lot more rugged already.

Image3: Everything in default

You remember we said, back at the start, that these beards were designed to work best with our characters, so we'll take a look at that. We've applied Daemones morph and materials to Michael. Next we need to select the prop 'M4-FullBeard06' and we can see in the parameters tab, a dial group called 'Mortem Character Fits'. Find the dial named 'Daemones' and dial it to 1. This just lines the beard up better for the morph. All our more rugged men to date are included in the fits.

Image4: Daemones character applied to Michael, and corresponding morph applied to the beard.

In addition to the fits for our characters, there's also a group node called 'Style'. This contains a small selection of morphs to change a few things up. You can change the shape a little, as well as make allowance for mouth movement, in the morphs under Expression. All the beards in this pack contain Mortem Character Fit, Style and Expression morphs. One particularly notable Style morph is 'Lower Forward', which is very useful for getting over bulkier clothing, such as the Mortuus cuirass, which is very useful on the bigger, longer beards.

Image 5: Style morphs

Ok, so Michael is looking like a pretty fair Necromancer now. Normally, we'd use one of the grey/white/grey-mix materials on the beard, simply because we tend to make older characters, and where they have facial hair on their textures, these tend to be in the grey-white range. Daemones who we've used here has an underlying salt and pepper facial hair on his texture, so we'll go for Grey Mix 2 from the beard materials. NOTE: When applying materials, make sure the beard is selected, not the base. In image6 below, we've applied Grey Mix 2 to his beard. We've also added the Mortuus hood, which as we suspected, is causing more shadowing, but as we're approaching the finishing line, that's fine at this stage.

Image 6: Beard materials

To further expand the looks of your bearded men, try adding a second beard, although this will increase rendering time and load. When adding a second beard we can make it more or less prominent by adjusting the zTranslation dial on the second beard. Bring it forward to make it more prominent, and back to make it less. Try adding a different style beard, with a contrasting material. Apply the same charcter fit morph, and then position to taste. In image7 below, we've added Goatee04 and applied the White material to it. We dialled the Daemones fit to 1, but we've not changed it's position, so it blends in nicely and gives a subtle touch of extra white, most notably over his top lip and down the sides of his chin. *IMPORTANT* When moving any beard, select the Base that it is attached to, and move that. Only very small movements are required to create quite large changes in appearance. As always, we would advise just playing around with stuff and seeing what works best for you

Image7: Adding a second beard.

So all that's left now is to build a scene around him, pose him up and we're done. For the scene in the final image, we've added a couple of props from our personal library and changed the lighting to suit the blue light being cast by the orb from our Orbis Magicae set. We hope you enjoy using this product and we look forward to seeing what images you make with it. Happy Rendering Andrew and Tracey (Mortem Vetus) :)

Mortem Vetus store for the dark side of Poser.

Braided Hair	Daemones	Mortuus Domine	Facial A-Hairness