 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
"The Struggle Within"
Reaching out for something you've got to feel,
What the hell What the
hell
Hypocrite Hypocrite
Home is not a home, it becomes a hell,
Reaching out Reaching out
Closing in Closing in
Reaching out for something you've got to feel,
-- Metallica |
I had an idea for a double Poser figure, rabidly trying to kill itself... it's other self... um, whatever. Anyway, the Metallica song seemed to fit perfectly.
Ray Dream 5/Studio, Fractal Design Poser 3, Adobe Photoshop 4 (Bryce 2 and KPT 3 are out, because they're not working right at this time!)
I also want to thank
Dami and
Ariel for the critique
of the first draft of this image. After having rendered it and done
some painting on it, I was about ready to call it quits, even though I knew
I could probably do better. These two straightened me out, of course!
Volcanoes? Flying hair? More blood? It's all
in there, thanks to you, ladies! ;)
This is a Poser 3 figure (which I used because I needed to manipulate the facial expressions. Otherwise, I think the Poser 2 figure is a bit better.) It's the same guy, with the same hair, with his legs chopped off, duplicated and positioned to be joined at the hips. They are not seamlessly joined, because Poser figures are hollow, and making pieces invisible (you can't really cut them off, more's the shame) leaves holes. But don't sweat the small stuff that a little post-production can fix up just right.
Positioning figures so they touch is the trick, isn't
it? Use the Main, Face, and Hand(s) cameras' track ball liberally.
For example, to get a good look at the lower guy's hand pressing the
upper guy's face, zoom into the face camera and roll around a bit. Also,
for doing tight detail, turning on the Full Tracking helps. This allows
you to see your actual limbs moving around, not big, clunky boxes.
For hands, select a library hand that closely resembles
what you want, then do some tweaking. The lower guy has a push hand
and a scrape hand; the upper guy has a fist and a scratch/scrape/gnarled
thing. The upper guy's hand isn't really correctly positioned
on the lower guy's neck; the fingers stick in. You can't see that from
any angle, so it looks fine. Looks a lot better than it did when half
the palm was sticking in the other guy's shoulder.
Facial expressions are tricky, especially extreme violence/horror ones that don't come with Poser 3. And there's no dial for "Snarl" for example. Be careful with the limits on these. They are all set to +/- 10000000000, but should be set to about +/- 1. (On the other hand, you can get some bizarro melting techniques with the eyelids or lips pulled down 5000x normal....) The best trick is to use the facial dials in the opposite capacity they are meant to be used. For example, using Brow Up to move the brow down, and Brow Down to move it up. The opposite of Worry is Scowl. Be careful with inverse smiling, though, it tends to puff the character's cheeks out. F will start to bare the upper teeth, O will open the mouth wider to the sides (especially when mixed with M). You can wave the tongue a bit with the T and L. You have to just experiment and tweak.
By now, MetaCreations has a patch for RDD so you can
import native Poser scenes, with skins intact. This is a blessing!
However, there IS a problem. If you're like me, and have figures
with invisible limbs... when you save an RDD file with that Poser scene in
it, the next time you open the image, all the limbs will have reappeared!
AND there is no way in RDD to get rid of them! ARGH!! The
best bet is to write down the poser scene specs: XYZ coordinates, scaling,
and Pitch/Yaw/Rotation. Then, import the scene every time you open
the file to work on it, and numerically position it where it belongs.
Tedious? Yes! I emailed MC and told 'em to fix that.
(Note: if you don't write down the coordinates of the Poser stuff before
you save to RDD format, but instead write the numbers down after you discover
the messed up limbs, the numbers might not match up. This is due to
the limbs possibly sticking out further than the original scene's bounding
box, etc.)
(Note: The Poser 3.01 (I think it is) patch fixes this.
Thank you, MC!)
I decided to move the Poser scene to RDD when I couldn't get the Poser lighting to look quite right. Lights are easier to position and control in RDD. Besides, if I used RDD, I could set the suckers on fire!
LANDSCAPE:
The basic background began as an infinite plane with a rock texture tiled on it. It was boring and repetitive! This new, improved ground is a mesh object. It is also a plane that has been stretched, given hills and depressions (in the Mesh Form modeller, select a node, then hold CTRL while pulling it, and it will go up/down, instead of left/right, back/forward. This only works in the 3/4 perspective view, unfortunately.) I also subdivided the big mesh and made more perturbations.
The volcanoes are simple cones, with a bunch of deformers
layered on them. To layer deformers on one object, simply Group the
object by itself. The top is punched in, the cone is stretched to taper
it better, and there are small spikes on it designed to give it a rocky,
rather than smooth, appearance. (Well, they're very subtle.)
Both volcanoes are the same object, one scaled smaller.
They are not that far in the background, but they are scaled to appear
further away.
The shader for the volcanoes and the landscape is the Molten shader that came with RDD, tweaked up just a little. I tried various bumping and glowing, and inverting the colours, etc. The scale of the cellular texture is sized in accordance with the size of the object. That is, the further volcano has a smaller scale, etc. Luckily, the bump/glow/highlight channels are copies of the colour channel (using the same cellular texture), so a corresponding adjustment in the cellular scale on all channels made everything line up properly.
FIRE:
This is a.... cylinder, I think... a cylindrical fire
thing. (Just press the Fire button in RDD. I love it!)
The settings are tweaked to I don't know what. I like having an edge
fall off, and the completion/density and stuff are adjusted to scale.
The most important thing about a fire is sticking a light
in it. This fire has four bulb lights of limited distance, positioned
around its edge. Further, two or three of these lights have a gel on
them. I made a KPT flame-ish looking texture in 'Shop, then tiled it
on the bulb lights. This gives a slight variation on the orange glow
they cast, giving the light a more realistic, uneven coverage. (Okay,
so KPT3 was working at one point in time while I was doing this. It
ain't now.)
As an interesting aside, I had the Poser scene centered in the fire. As you know, I had to re-import it the next time I opened the file. Somehow, one of the numbers was screwy and the scene was on the edge of the fire, but I'll tell ya, the lighting and shadows were SO much better, I kept it this way. (But, MC, that ain't an excuse for you to not fix this fool problem!) (Note: They did. Now, if they would just fix KPT....)
SCENE SETTINGS:
Besides the fire lights, there is a reddish distant light over the whole scene, as well as basic grey ambient light. I tried different styles and mixtures of clouds, fog, distance fog, and height fog, to make the background volcano appear further away than it was. Nothing looked good. Finally, I just left the sky a basic black-red bi-gradient (with a very low horizon), and rendered with a distance mask so I could put in my own atmosphere.
Positioning the rendering camera is always a pain. I like to use the camera joystick window, but you can't control it very well. This time, I positioned the camera close to where I wanted it, then grouped the whole scene and rotated it around in front of the camera. It's quicker and easier! I didn't rotate the working box around to the new position, though I could have.
Here's a Weenies 98 rendering tip! Don't start
rendering a few-thousand pixel wide/high image and leave it working for a
few hours. No no no. After 1 hour, it was 1/3 done so I figure,
hey, three hours, and it should be complete. No no no. Four hours
later, I come back, it ain't half done. It ain't rendering. It
ain't working. Why? I click on it. The hard drive spins
up, and it goes back to working. Weenies 98 turned off the hard drive
while the renderer was trying to use it! AAAAAAAAAAAARRRRGH!!!
Turn the Power Management OFF!!!!!
Not only that, but I couldn't fix it right then. Why?
During the first hour, Explorer crashed the KRNL386.DLL. But
I didn't hit Close on that particular error, because the renderer was
still rendering, and NOT having to restart the computer, reopen my file,
re-import the Poser scene, reposition it, and re-do the WHOLE render all
over again was MUCH more important. So, heck, I just stuck that dumb
warning down off the bottom of the screen.
So here I am, rendering, with Explorer crashed all day,
and waving my pen at the screen every five minutes, just so the hard drive
keeps spinning enough to finish this sucker.
Thank YOU, the marketing division of Micro Soft Incorporated! "Let's build OS's with power management based on the user activity instead of system activity," they said. So they tried it out with me. I'm a power management prototype. You can tell, can't you?
FOREGROUND:
Well, I painted some scratches on the Poser skin (and
just whose bloody stupid idea was it to make the version 3 skin's back smaller
than the front? Like how the heck am I supposed to draw
scratches/stripes/patterns around the SIDE of people?? Duh!!), but
they didn't come out in the render. They probably wouldn't have looked
so great, anyway.
All the blood and bruises and stuff is painted on in
'Shop. I used multiple layers (read: removable). For the blood
and stuff in shadow areas, I used a Hard Light layer, to get the proper shading.
But most of it is normal. I painted the scratches with an airbrush,
tweaked the shaping with the smear tool, then burned down the middle.
Dripping blood was then painted with the airbrush, following the body
contours. The bruises and blood smears are airbrushed on, using some
of the weirder, random-dot kind of brush tips. They are also partly
smeared.
I also used the smear tool to whip around some strands of hair, so it doesn't look like a 3d model. The eyelashes on these guys are insane, too, so I thinned them out. They looked like big, black, clam shells! Also, I don't know why, but even at high resolution and size, RDD still renders with some weird edge artifacts. These were all smeared smooth. (At least there weren't any weird dots on the guy's back this time.)
Also smeared and airbrushed was the hip area. As you may recall, the hips had a big hole in them, and they didn't even line up so well. The top guy's posterior stuck out way too far, so I painted it over with clones and smearing of the background.
BACKGROUND:
I flattened all the layers into one big picture.
I selected the sky area, using the object index mask. These clouds are red and black Clouds/Difference clouds. They have an orange/yellow Artistic Diffuse Glow on them, which was faded somewhat. The Fire was not indexed, so I changed the mask to a red frisket, and un-painted some flames sticking up with a semi-transparent airbrush. After the clouds were done, I went back in with an orange airbrush and re-did some of the flames overlapping the sky.
Then I selected the distance mask (after fixing the sky so the top was closer than the bottom) and applied a Gaussian Blur.
Finally, I wanted a heat distortion ripple effect. After playing around with several different selections and Distortion filters, I settled on one I liked. I used frisket mode to paint over the parts I wanted to select: a general airbrushing over the foreground, and some areas above. This made a kinda random, blobby, elusive kind of mask. Then I applied a tweaked Ripple effect, with low Horiz/Vert scaling, and tamed-down frequencies and amplitudes.
The text I stuck on at the end, of course. The two text layers are merged, then I hit "Preserve Transparency" and airbrushed over them with red and black.
copyright: ©1999 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. It will be soon, however. It will print about 6" wide.