There have been too many fun contests recently... I've gotten a little side-tracked from modelling.
Right now, Rae, I am still stuck in Poser-only mode, since I haven't figured out a good way to make it drape convincingly in Studio. HOWEVER... I am looking at a new plug-in script on Renderosity which supposedly can turn a random prop into a DAZ dynamic object. Since I already spent too much this month, I'm waiting til next month to get it, but hopefully it will work out. That way I won't have to rig and add movement morphs to each tassel. The multiple layers option is a really good idea. I think (at this point, anyway) that it would be more efficient to have three separate props rather than to use trans maps to hide various levels of tassels, since otherwise you give Poser extra work to do for no purpose. However, when it comes to rigging, there is no way I would subject myself to all that extra work, so a rigged version would DEFINITELY use trans maps.
I had another thought, too, while I was doodling out my rough texture ideas for the blanket. Supposedly, the fewer UV maps your computer has to load (especially when there are four 4000x4000 images per texture), the faster the render time (it has something to do with the memory cache, I think). Soooooo.... I figured it might be a good idea to model a bridle that uses the same UV layout before going through and painting all my textures. Then a bunch of fun contests came up, and I got sidetracked... Right now I'm trying to finish entries for two different contests, but hopefully March will be a more productive month.
In the meantime, here is an photo of an old blanket that I am using for reference. I want my texture to be pretty much the same, but I'll probably do a gold option and a silver option, with various blanket colors besides red.
