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When I saw -3-'s very nice casket, looking so solid and heavy.... I thought about the weight of grief bearing down on the mourners, and a man who could not go on. DD's Wedding Dress also inspired the ghost of his dear departed.
Poser 4, Bryce 2, Adobe Photoshop 4, Fractal Design Painter 5, CorelDraw 5
GHOST:
This is the Poser 3 J2 Nude Woman, with the magnificent Wedding Dress conforming to her, and JeffH's Fantasy Flowing Hair. She is positioned in P4. The skirting of the dress has two deformers on it. First, a magnet, set to affect the three parts that make up the bell of the skirt (hip, left and right thigh). The magnet is spun around it's axis to give the dress a twist, to make it look windblown. The other deformer is a wave, to make the hem... well, wavy.
PALLBEARERS:
I began with the casket, and positioned a P3 Nude Male
at the front right, and set his arms to hold it. Hint: after you get
the hands where you want them, turn on the IK for the arms. Then as
you move the figure, the hands will stay glued in place. I saved the
basic pallbearer pose to use on the subsequent figures (and used
Figure:Symmertry:Swap Left & Right for the guys on the other side).
Then I grabbed the guy's hips and pushed him down so he was kneeling.
Fixed the feet, placed the hands, dialed a sad facial expression. He
also has Male Hair Number IdunnoWhat, and a P4 conforming Tuxedo.
That made 3 figures in my file, and I wanted six
pallbearers.... Hmmm, six guys, six tuxedos, and one casket, that makes 13
figures. Well... To make my life simple (and less unlucky ;) ) I
posed the other guys without clothes. Then I changed the far figures
and the middle guy to Businessmen, instead of dressing them all out in tuxedos.
For some reason, the Business Man is bigger than the Nude Male. Go
figure. Mr R2 had to be scaled down and moved back, so he didn't step
on the main guy.
They all started in the Pallbearer pose I saved, and
I just moved their feet and hips to position them. In the Render:Surface
Materials, I used the Business Man texture on them all (well, the businessmen,
I mean), but changed the shirt, jacket, pants, and shoe materials to various
white, blue, gray, black, etc, for a tad of variety.
I rendered the scene twice, first normal, then with depth cueing on. The depth cueing helped emphasise the main guy, as he was closest to the camera, but the other guys faded out as if in a thick mist. Of course, a composite of the two renders allowed me to adjust the fading to my liking.
This is a Bryce scene, fairly simple. There is
a very large, very de-heightened terrain with a path dug through it as the
main ground. A primitive with one of those stone textures is under
it, paving the path. Behind it is another subdued, distant terrain.
The trees are Bryce trees made of either flat planes with alpha channels,
or of three intersecting planes with alpha channels. Oh, except the
dead, light grey tree in the middle, which is a real mesh.
I knew I wanted to paint more trees and such into the
background, so I tried rendering an object mask. Hint: this doesn't
work so hot when things are made of flats, because it masks out the invisible
rectangle, not the picture on it. I got around this by rendering the
scene with only the trees on a white field. Tada! Tree mask.
I rendered very large, and very wide. I thought
I wanted a sorta panoramic scene, but in the end, I ended up cropping the
image closer to the figures.
I almost forgot! Forgot to put in the crows that
I wanted. Even if I couldn't do blowing leaves, I could do them.
(Thanks, Pan!) CorelDraw's clipart collection had a whopping
two crows. I grabbed them off the CD and saved them as TIFs. Copied
and pasted into my much-reworked PSD file.
One crow was perched... I really wanted him to face
the other way and look over his shoulder, but... at this point, I am
NOT picky. I shrank him down (waaaaaay down) and perched him in a tree.
Then I even painted him up a bit, tweaking his beak and putting a faint
sheen on his feathers. Well, nothing too fancy, just a pixel or two
here and there.
The flying crows are the typical clipart flying crow.
I hid them in the branches, because I didn't want them to be too obvious.
They are also a bit transparent so they blend into the scene. Most
are just duplicates; one is Free Transformed a tad. Then one, I lassoed
the top wing and flipped it, to make a flapping crow. This crow was
duplicated and flipped and put on the other side of the pic.
I opened the Bryce scene, and it's tree-only twin, then pasted the latter into the former's alpha channel. Am I good, or what? ;) I then promptly forgot about wanting to paint stuff in the background, and couldn't wait to put the figures in.
I opened the ghost's file and pasted her onto the background.
For most of the work, I had her set as Screen, because it made a nice,
bright overlay to the background. However, towards the end, I changed
her to a 75% opaque Normal layer, which I brightened considerably.
I copied and pasted her hair to a new layer, so I could
brush it over her without disturbing the dress and all. I used some
new brushes I made from the 'splat' 'Shop brush to comb the hair out and
around. I also burned some strands back into it as it got to be too
flat in colour.
I also airbrush-erased the edge of the gown, and used
a big smear to whisk it outward.
I opened the two pallbearer files, loaded their masks
and pasted them into the background. They both came in centered, so
they were lined up. I linked and grouped the two layers so I could
move them as one, and also size them down to fit into the scene. I
set the distance fogged one on top and faded it about 50% or so.
That big ugly tree is in front of them, and I should
have thought to render just THAT tree so I could select it, and not the ones
behind it. But I faked it and copied and pasted the foreground branches
as the top layer. A little smearing and erasing handled it pretty
well.
I airbrushed a shadow under the figures, and smeared
the clothes where they didn't fit quite right (the inseam of the tuxedo
particularly didn't fit the P3 Nude Male's thigh very well. Yikes!).
I also remembered (finally) to smear out the men's hair a tad.
Then I used FDP's image hose to spray in some background trees. I wanted an autumnal feel, but all FDP and Garden Hose had were full, green trees! So.... Back in 'Shop, I drew a couple of trees on empty layers, copied, scaled, flipped them... Sent them to FDP and made the floaters into a new nozzle. Hah! Then sprayed them into the background.
I also used a fading gradient mask to de-saturate the background, so it is colourless and dreary. I cropped the image (in two versions, this is the second). Then I used a radial gradient selection to darken the outer edges, but brighten and sharpen the center, between the two main figures. Subtle, but effective for concentrating the focus on the important part of the picture.
The text is ... oh! Cloister Black. There are three copies of it: Normal, Blurred and Sheared, and Motion Blurred, to give it that ghostly effect. I also "enhanced" the motion blur with some judicious smearing. Finally, the text was ghosted even more, to keep its brightness from competing with the figures. (Thanks, Cybor!)
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