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Just a fleeting vision I had many, many years ago.
Poser 4, Vue d'Esprit 3.1, Photoshop 4, Kai's Power Tools 3
Wings by Virus/Hokusai
The man is Michael from DAZ3D; his hair is the P4 Curly Man's Hair (Man's Curly Hair?). His texture is the one by DAZ, but lightened in 'Shop. (It doesn't look very light any more, though.) The horse is the Heavy Horse by 3D Menagerie, with the flared tail and right-handed long mane. Those are the wings by Virus/Hokusai.
I first posed the horse, which was relatively simple. Then, fearing my measly RAM couldn't stand handling both hi-res Michael and the somewhat-hefty-res horse... I pasted the outline of the horse on the background, from the left and top. Then I deleted the horse (after I saved the file, of course), and put Michael in. I posed him against the outlines on the background (remember not to move the camera(s) you pasted from as you do this). Once he was pretty much in place, I imported/merged the pz3 document to get the horse back. Remembered to add hair to Michael, and wings to the horse... then rendered. Used my standard daylight lights. There's a pale blue overhead (no shadows), the white main light (that casts shadows at about .8 density), and a low-level grey fill light, no shadows. Rendered at 1500 x 978-some odd, with shadow maps at 1024; once with Michael's textures loaded, once without.
This was created in Vue. I didn't want to mess around with importing the Poser figures... I didn't even want to mess around with creating an alpha channel for the Poser renders, to stick a fake flat into the Vue scene. I just wanted puffy clouds! :) (I did try importing them into Poser and using trans maps on them. The puff cloud terrains, I mean. No go.)
Those are two spiky landscapes, of course. The sky is.... I started with one of Varian's skies... then messed with the cloud layers. The foreground is made of a few puff-cloud terrains and some spheres with cloudy material on them. Trying to render in ultra mode at 1500x was going to take.... well, it took 4 hours, but then some how it wasn't done, so then I tried to do it again, and it said 12 hours. I said the heck with ya, and rendered a bit smaller at Final mode. It took less than 1 hour. :)
If you plan to insert a background behind your Poser figures in the render.... Remember to cut them out of the background BEFORE you start smudging and hairy-ifying around the edges. And turn off the background grey when you're using the smudge tool in sample merged mode! And I used my new hairy brushes to brush out the mane, tail, fetlocks (which you can't see through the clouds), and hair.
Michael's skin came out too pale, so I messed with
compositing the textured and un-textured versions. I put on a difference
layer, and copied that because it was all green... and I used that to add
a tinge to the shadows. Turned out too green. So I copied the
textured Michael and turned up the saturation to bring back more red. The
highlights became too washed out, so I darkened everything. Lastly,
I added a bit of KPT3 hue-protected noise to his skin.
I put a generic hair bump/texture on the hair, which
gave the colour some variation at least, even if the strands didn't follow
the contours of the hair. Using the smear with the hairy brush gave
it some definition. I also added another layer to multiply over the
hair, to give it more definition, and make it a bit less washed out and light.
Of course, I had to paint in the shadows. By this time, 'Shop was wheezing and coughing on the 10 meg file and failing to save it properly. ARGH! Fortunately, I saved in steps, so I could go back to the final-except-shadows version. The shadow shape is just painted on with a pencil (on a new layer, of course!), over the background cloud contours. The near edge is burned darker, and the whole thing was Gaussian blurred. I also loaded the selection for the figures to erase the shadow out from in front of them. I could have just put the shadow on a layer behind them... except I couldn't. :) There's a copy of the background's foreground clouds on a layer above them, semi erased lightly to cover their feet. (And some cloning to patch up some holes in the clouds.) So the shadow had to go on top.
What else? Smearing empty space into the feathers for that realistic slightly raggy look. Smearing with a furry blob brush on the wing edge to create sorta those little feather rows. Painting up the horse's iris for dark/light areas; darkening the pink nostril, and painting some pink colour on the nose and cheek. A faint vein or two on the head, also. Some airbrushed clouds over the background spires, where the sphere clouds leave a sharp edge. Some smearing and blurring of that edge to un-edge-ify it. Um... the title.
And that's it!
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