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While I was working on "Irony" I went back through my The Crow graphic novels, and decided to do an image based on the story.
Poser 4, Vue d'esprit 3, Photoshop 4, Painter 3D
Original 'The Crow' character by Cyris, created from 'Pantsman' by J
Keller.
Changed to P4 by me.
Pants texture by Cyris, skin texture modified from NyroPhyte's Seth by me.
Trenchcoat from J Keller's Trenchcoatman (I think), modified to fit P4 woman
by (unknown, sorry);
Re-modified to fit the P4 man by me.
Trans-curls hair by Allereirauh.
Shotgun by Bushi.
Zygote Eagle Raven morphs and texture
by Lyne.
SHELLY & GABRIEL:
I had in mind the silhouette I wanted the woman
to take on... so I messed around in the pose folders until i found one similar.
Then I got her to fold her arms and turn her head. I used the
silhouette display mode to get an idea how the edge was turning out. I
put on the trans-curls and conformed them to her head... but then took them
off and positioned them by hand, to get the strands to go right.
I turned down two of the three lights, and put the last
down in front to render to a new window.
The cat is basically the same. I loaded the cat
and stuck it in a sitting pose, then made the mid section of the tail
extremely long to get the tip in front of the paws. Oh, guess you can't
see that here. :) And I wanted the cat to look back over it's
shoulder... had to turn limits off of course, and twist the poor sucker around.
I lengthened the neck to get it to work better. Also shortened
up the midriff to make the silhouette of the cat's back appear more
correct.
I set the eyes to golden and a golden-brown shadow colour
so they would glow. The fur is light grey. Well, it is. :) I
tried using the light setup I had for Eric and the crow, but I didn't
like that, so I did a similar lighting setup for the cat as I did for Shelly.
ERIC & THE CROW:
The Crow by Cyris was a P3 figure. I wanted to do a more detailed face texture and bump, and the best way to do that was to use the P4 figures and mapping, so I decided to see what would happen if I told Poser to replace the figure with the P4 nude male (with Traveller's morphs and my nostril material). I told it to keep the custom geometries, keep the props, keep the deformers, keep the scaling etc etc. Surprise! It worked! Except for the slight oddity whereby the hip was replaced with the P4NM no-gen hip, and I had to turn genitals on to get the pants back. Plus I kept making the penis invisible, but it would always reappear... that was disconcerting! But before I rendered, I made sure he had his fly zipped!
Although the lyrics are from "Burn," a song on The Crow Movie Soundtrack, I wanted to go back to the original graphic novel for this image. In the original story, Eric is shot in the back of the head at point-blank range -- the powder burns even set his hair on fire. One of the bullets blew out his left iris and skipped across his face, which gives him that dead-eye look and the scar down his cheek and across his nose. The wound on his chest is self-inflicted; it represents a crown of thorns. In the graphic novel, the self-inflicted wounds don't heal like the others, so Eric ends up binding himself up in electrical tape. (In the movie, it helped hold his clothes together after they got perforated so many times.)
I grabbed the P4NM (with nostrils) template and copied
the pants texture to it from Cyris' P3 texture. However, that didn't
work, because the pants geometries still took the old texture so... heck,
I just put the old map on that material! Then I decided to use NyroPhyte's
Seth skin texture, because it was nice and pale. The eyes were pale
blue; the left I lightened up, but the right I Hue/Saturation/Etc'd to a
darker brown.
I painted the face with a paintbrush and roughed up the
edges a bit. I painted the scar lightly on the colour map as well as
the bump map. I used the pencil to paint thick black lines for the
electrical tape, across the abdomen and front of the arms, and both sides
of the hands. Then I opened the P4NM in Painter 3D and marked the seams
where the tape crossed from front to back, and then painted the strips
in.
I used the burn tool to paint the scars and crown of
thorns on the skin. I then made a new layer on the skin texture map
(this is back in 'Shop, now) for the bump. I filled the layer with
50% grey, then traced the scars in black and white to lower/raise them.
Finally, I selected the colour burned crown of thorns and saturated
it a bit with more red tones.
Then I had to put his jacket on. This is actually
a trenchcoat designed for the P4NW. I got it to fit rather nicely by
conforming it, then scaling the whole thing up, re-scaling the chest, then
adding a magnet across the back of the shoulders to fill it out. (Which
doesn't work in all poses -- in this for example, his shoulders still poke
out the back.)
I turned the coat figure invisible (hid it), then worked
on the pose. First, I loaded in the shotgun obj and put it in his hand, then
parented it. Then I think I started with the rooftop crouch pose and
tweaked it from there. The legs posed more or less okay, though he
wouldn't tuck his right leg up enough. The right arm was a pain, trying
to get him to set the shotgun down like that. Maybe I should have put
the shotgun into position, then moved the hand to it! But finally,
I made it.
The crow is the raven from "Irony," swiped right out of that PZ3 and loaded into this one. The pose has been tweaked, though, to get the wings and tail and neck and head and everything where I wanted (and not intersecting Eric's skull too much).
I put a dim blue light coming from above, and a basic white/grey light from the lower right, and a warm light, very dim, from the front/left-ish. The two fill lights cast no shadows, and have their intensity lowered. The main light casts about a .8 shadow, with a size 1024 map. I tweaked the positions and intensity until I got a good shadow I liked.
BACKGROUND:
Well, how complex can a moon on flat black get? This is
a sphere in Vue that has a map of the moon applied to it as both a colour
and a bump map. It has about 300% diffuse lighting and the 'sun' shining
straight at it (slightly upper left, actually), and is rendered with no ground
on a black atmosphere.
The small moon map I had left squareish artifacts on
the final render. So I went back through the Vue Forum for the lead
on those, found the web site where the map was, and nabbed the bigger version.
Then I did another sphere... it still turned out square-ish, so I messed
it around in 'Shop to blur and despeckle and clone it up rougher. The
problem was, I didn't use a bump map on this version, so it was less... 3D
than the original. That's okay, I composited the two suckers together
(after several 'Shop crashes!).
PAINTING:
I placed Shelly on the next layer above the moon, and sized and positioned her (a few times). I smoothed and thickened her hair with my furry brushes. Also, at the end, I painted out her lower legs' edge that was below the moon.
Gabriel also has furry brushes applied to her silhouette edges for longer hair, and some touched up whiskers.
The crow has one feather duplicated into the wing on
the right, to fill in a slight gap. I also re-painted the eye to make
it brighter, and added an extra gleam on the top and bottom beak.
I strengthened the colour of Eric's right eye using various
Saturation and Brightness/Contrast controls. A few strands of hair
are smeared out here and there. I also used the smear tool to
paint wrinkles into the elbows of the trenchcoat... an interesting technique,
I think. The tails of the trenchcoat are heavily smeared out, and
airbrushed a bit. The right side had some cloning done to lengthen
it.
The ring and cord around his neck are completely painted.
(No, I didn't bother putting a little torus in his hand.) I slapped
some bright yellow-white on with a pencil, in a semi-elliptical shape. Hit
it with some dark golden-yellow and golden brown airbrush; darkened
the far curve, and slapped a bright yellow-white airbrush star highlight
on it. I painted the cord with the paintbrush, on it's own layer, then
used 'preserver transparency' to modulate the highlight/shadows. (Not
by much, though.) Then I duplicated that layer as the shadow... moved
it over and down, and then used a big smear tool to push it around so it
lays on the skin. Also lowered the opacity on it.
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