 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
Some "fair" maiden coaxed him to lie in a peaceful glade, then held fast to his head while men and hounds leapt out of ambush and cut the magical horn from his brow. Now, he's P#*$(#ED!!!
Poser 4, Vue d'Esprit 3.1, Photoshop 4
This is the Heavy
Horse for Poser, with the horn base morph and cloven hooves. He
has the regular mane and fetlocks 2. This is a custom texture map I
painted for this image. Posed in Poser, the facial expression morphed
in, etc. Then the figure is exported as an obj to go to Vue. When
I export for a single image where I have a particular camera angle, I try
to uncheck all the body parts that won't be seen. The figure has no
tail for example, and also no hind legs.
After exporting from Poser, I like to open the obj in
UVMapper and make sure the groupings and materials came out right. The
Horse is fairly simple, so I tell Poser to export without body part names,
only figure names. That way, the Vue obj doesn't have 20 horse groups
(with each material as a sub-group). I also conglomerate any materials
I can. The skin, inner ear, teeth, gums, etc can all be assigned to
one material, that will use the texture map. The eye parts and hooves
are left separate, of course. Lastly, it is helpful to either put
the texture maps into the same directory as your exported obj, or to edit
the Poser-generated mtl file to point to the full path of your texture maps.
This way, when importing to Vue, Vue can find them, and you don't have
to set them up by hand.
I re-used a glade I had created for "Dark Dominion." I added another little terrain for the foreground pebbles, some ferns, and some patches of grass. For the distant forest, I added 1 plum tree, 2 maples, 1 yellow maple, and 1 fir tree. Then I did a scatter that made several copies and scattered things horizontally. Ta-da, instant forest background. The string of trees was placed between the foreground and background terrains, and scaled appropriately.
Once I had the background ready, I imported the obj, and worked on positioning and scaling, plus the camera angle. I made the hooves brushed gold, and I copied the hide colour channel as a bump function, with VERY low gain (.002, I think) to rough up the hide. I had to load the trans maps for the fetlocks and mane, of course.
I rendered a standard PC size at 1024x768. There was a lot more space around the unicorn, showing more of the bush and ferns and midground tree trunk. However, most of that got cropped out in post.
First, of course, I brushed out the mane and fetlocks
with the smear tool and my new Hairy Brushes (and some old Hairy/Furry ones,
too). I airbrushed in some darker shadows under the unicorn. Vue
shaded all the shadows pretty much the same intensity. I also darkened
up some of the undershadows of the unicorn's body, especially behind the
jaw.
I enhanced the brightness/contrast of the eye, and painted
on the highlight and eyelashes.
I created some saliva and glistens for the blood and
nostril area with my Plastic Wrap technique. For the tongue, for example,
I sampled a dark and light colour from that area. On a new layer, I
painted on a splodgy shape where I wanted the glistening to take place, using
the darker colour and the paintbrush. Then using a smaller paintbrush,
I dotted and streaked in some glisten points. Then I hit it with plastic
wrap twice and used Hard Light mode. Same deal with the dripping blood.
I wanted the nostril area to also look wet, so I did some more subtle
Plastic Wrap lighting on it.
I created a new layer and used some dark sampled blood
colour and the paintbrush to paint on splashes and smears of blood on the
ground and unicorn's skin. Changing this to Hard Light mode made it
appear to overlay the background. Blurring and smearing made the blood
smears on the hide a little less thick.
Lastly, I used the z-buffer to select the background and blur it a bit... and also darken it. (Actually, it was more complicated than that, since the 1024 z-buffer didn't come out right and I had to use the old z-buffer from a smaller previous render... but I don't wanna get into all THAT.)
Text is Cloister Black something gothic looking.
copyright: ©2001 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.