"Anasha Remembers"

AR.JPG   © 2001     1000 x  1000

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The Idea:

     I think this is fairly obvious.

     The name Anasha has no significance that I am aware of; I made it up.
You can read more about orphaned elephants at  The David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust.

Tools:

     Poser 4, Vue d'Esprit 3, Photoshop 4

Poser Elephant Family by Debra Ross
   available at Vista Internet Products

Background:

     The flat ground is a mixture of shattered fields (without the fields) and dry grass turned a bit more brown than usual.  The original material is on the terrain in the background.
     The city is a pair of terrains with square functions applied to them to create buildings, and two types of windowed building materials.  The smog is build with three spheres.  I forget which atmosphere this is, but when I found dark clouds on the far right, I kept it.
     The trees and weeds are Vue plants, scattered about.

Figures:

     I remapped the elephants' heads for more detail and less texture stretching.  They didn't turn out very well.  They are posed in Poser, and then each figure was exported as an obj with one group and the various materials.  Centering and resizing object import was turned off in Vue, so the figures lined up.  They were imported and grouped, and set in position.

     The groups are roughly all in the same spot, but on different layers to be turned on and off for rendering.  I rendered all three groups from the same camera location (the bottom), then cropped in 'Shop to see what sizes I wanted the final images to be.  After I decided on those, I went back into Vue and re-rendered the first and second images with the proper image size, as well as new camera positions and focal lengths.

Post Production:

     I expanded the canvas and pasted in the second and first images above the third.

    I cloned in some wrinkling in some bare patches on the baby elephant's skin, and touched up the ivory of the mother's tusks.  The second image also needed some  smoothing of the trunk's curve, which was done with cloning.  In the first and second images, I tried to get the wrinkled edge of the trunks by dot-cloning bits of wrinkle from the head.  It's not very realistic.
     The eyes turned out nicely.  They are painted with bluish shadows and white highlight on the texture map, and also given sharp highlights and slight reflectivity in Vue.  The eyelids on the first images are cloned on.
     In all the images, I cloned plenty of midground rock/pebbly texture on the foreground bare patches, where the texture came out all square and choppy.

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.

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