Since we’ve been looking at a lot of my early Daz renders, let’s now take a look at the renders I have of Lord Cafrash Menchtoteale, one of my characters from the Wishing Blade series. (He starts as an antagonist… then kind of ends up in as the questionable mentor… whether he wants to be a mentor or not).
So a long, long time ago when I was playing around with Daz, I rendered Cafrash, the creator of the Wishing Blade (the series’ namesake). I rendered this image a couple times, since I apparently designed it on my older laptop, whose graphics card that would have made rendering nice went caput before I found Daz. Then I rendered it again once I got my then-new laptop (which now mostly lays in rest because I used it a lot for rendering and that’s… very intensive on a laptop, unfortunately. Renders now happen on a desktop with much better fans and airflow.
That first render took 7 hours, and didn’t have nearly as good as the results of this 2-hour render.
Needless to say, I was quite happy with the capabilities of the then-new laptop. (And I suspect the new desktop would render this much faster… though we’re on a new version of Daz now so the lighting system would probably have to be readjusted).
Anyway, enough about laptop capabilities. Lord Menchtoteale was a blacksmith before getting involved with the trickster god. Long story short, he forges the Wishing Blade, the weapon used to steal magic from Cirena in Magic’s Stealing.
Here’s a render that Isaac put together from a later version of Cafrash’s character design, which I then polished:
But did Cafrash actually want to forge the sword?
Is he really the warlord everyone thinks he is?
Or is there more going on behind the Trickster’s plans than meets the eye?
Cafrash’s backstory is one part of the story I’m having a lot of fun working with, and first started showing up in The Shadow War, and has a much larger role in Magebane.
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Meet Lord Menchtoteale in all his grumpy “I’m going to give you advice whether either of us want to deal with this,” in The Wishing Blade series…
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Happy reading and writing!
Stephanie Flint - Author and Artist 