 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
This was for the Zygote Calendar contest... I wanted to do a typical rugged mountain, high air, cumulous cloud, eagle-in-flight pic, but... I didn't want it to be typical. So I watched "Rescuers Down Under" again for some ideas, and thought it'd be neat to do an eagle preparing to launch. Plus a second one in a later stage of take-off.
CREDITS:
Eagles: Zygote eagle.
with new texture by me.
Vue Larch: Daffy
Vue Puff Clouds: by
me.
Poser 4, Vue d'Esprit 3, Photoshop 4, Painter 5
Nothing fancy, just posed in Poser. The texture
map came out a bit fancy, though. First, I was using a photomap texture
by Mark B. Then I wanted a higher-res map, so I clipped feather bits
from the map as patterns to make a new map. Then I couldn't find Mark,
or his web site, or his email to ask about permissions for using the texture.
So I said the heck with it, I'll make my own. Well, I had a terrible
painting week, and couldn't paint a simple feather pattern to save my life!
It's just a dark base colour with gold-ish outlines!
But finally, I figured out how to do it, AND how to
do it one better! I painted individual feathers on different 'Shop
layers, complete with underlying shadows, and then I took it into Painter
to make an image hose! Then I sprayed feathers on the body, wingcovers,
legs, and head. Forget repeating patterns!
Also, it was a fun (frustrating?) trick to get the launching eagle to sit on a branch. I used to fake creature poses and then export them and try to get the terrain to match what they were standing on. That's the dumb way! I could easily export a terrain as an obj, and pose the character on it. However, I couldn't do that with the dead trees, so....
I managed to get a relatively simple dead tree/branch and slip it through the eagle's talons.
I wanted those craggy, snow-topped mountains, like you
see in a Bob Ross painting! All mine were turning out nice and smooth.
Ick! Then I upped their resolution and eroded and gritted them
a bit; that did the trick. I messed with my
Whole Mountain Vue
texture to get the 'purple mountains' majesty,' and the snow-line where I
wanted it.
I made 3-4 receeding mountain ranges. They were
all too sharp, so I upped the haze and fog to fade them out.
The river is a long plane of turbulent water, tucked into a bunch of low terrains to guide its course. The pine forests down there are other terrains, with the pine tree function used on them a few times, and a dark piney texture. Pretty effective, huh?
The clouds are a few of my Puff Clouds, with textures slightly adjusted for colouration, transparency, scale. etc. The sun is actually below the horizon, but there's no ground plane to block it. (I tried using a ground plane for water, that messed everything up!) The light is warm golden-ish and the ambient light is somewhat pinkypurplish.
The close up trees are made with Daffy's method: a long, tall cone is the trunk (except on the far right, where I used a dead tree), and the branches and roots are dead trees sticking off the sides. The pine tufts are pine trees, scaled down and attached to the dead trees. A lovely complex old tree can be built up out of these things.
I wanted to do a depth-of-field blur on the background (thought NOT in Vue, the huge render took 6 hours as it was!), but the z-buffer channel of the render came out... rather odd. I tried fixing it up to select the eagles, but they always ended up with an icky halo around them, so I gave up the idea.
I touched up a spot or two where the leading edge of the wings was too bright, and made sure the eagle's eye looked alive. Darkened in the background down by the lower right, and cloned out some stray bits of water showing through the ground as well.
That was it.
copyright: ©2000 All rights reserved. You may download this image for viewing on your computer. You may NOT print it, upload it anywhere, use it for a commercial or non-commercial illustration or companion piece, place it (or a link to it) on your web page, without requesting and obtaining PRIOR permission from the artist. For contact details, click here.
price list: This image is not currently available as a print.