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BBay sponsored a Fantasy Book Cover contest, and so... I came up with this for an entry. The title can have... different interpretations, depending upon whom you think is dark and whom you think is actually dominating.
Poser 4, Vue d'Esprit 3.1, Photoshop 4, Ray Dream Studio 5.02
Poser 4 Nude Woman, Joint Version 2. That's the Formal Gown she's wearing, flared and twisted up with a Magnet or three. She's wearing the trans-mapped curls by Allereirauh. I posed her first, as I knew pretty much how I wanted her to look. The staff in her hand started out as a cylinder in Poser, scaled to staff proportions.
The horse is the Heavy Horse, with flowing mane and tail, and wings from Dragon Factory. The horn is a quickie done in Ray Dream. Started with a rearing horse pose I have, then tweaked thus, plus of course, the fantastic morphs for the expression.
I exported each figure-group as a separate obj. This was handy halfway through the project, as I decided to switch the horse's front legs. I didn't have to re-export/import the woman figure as well.
BACKGROUND:
I created a glade area that is basically the ground
plane, with a horseshoe of a terrain giving it a slight rise around the edge.
The material is shattered fields mixed with a grass texture I created
from a KPT photo. I had just grass, but the place looked like sombody's
lawn!
The beautiful bushes on the left are actually plum trees,
sunk into the ground until only their canopies show. I really like
plum trees as bushes, I can see I'll use these often. On the right
is a hugely scaled maple tree, with some of Vue's dry bushes at its base.
You can see those look spiky and scraggly compared to the plum
bushes.
Lastly in the foreground is a terrain to create a couple
of rocks and a dry weed to accent them. The rock terrain uses that
wet/mossy rock texture, but it was too light, and competed with the main
characters. So I ditched the moss and mixed the light grey rock with...
well, nothing. I told it "mix" and Vue automatically sticks in a default
black material. Mixed 50/50, it darkens the light grey rock nicely.
The distant background is one mountain terrain with a distant mountain texture. Duplicated twice and sized up and stoned, and with the distant tree material to create the treeline. There's another even more distant mountain back on the right. The fog/haze is set to make these distant terrains muted and seem a little blurred. Looks nice with the sharp edge of the foreground terrain, makes it look like a ridge there or something. Anyway...
The atmosphere is one of the stormy ones I loaded. I had an extra cloud layer doing fake lightning with the sparse cracks function. It was pretty fake looking, though, so I took it out and just painted lightning on later!
FIGURES:
The objs were imported and positioned. The woman
has no texture, she's just plain white. Actually, I had trouble with
blue glop on the trans curls, so they're... not trans any more, either.
The dress was set to partially transparent in Poser. After I
deleted some interior material that was messing things up, it came out...
just the way I wanted, really.
I created a boolean thing with a bunch of pyramids to
stick on top of the staff. You can't really see it due to the flare.
Which is fine, it wasn't that spectacular. There is a point light
at the tip of the staff (just above it, actually). The flare is created
with a flat plane that has a glowing material and a transparency map made
from a lens flare in 'Shop. (Modelled after Silverbranch's SunFlare
for Vue.)
The horse has black (dark grey) skin and large bluish highlights. I adjusted the inner mouth, nostrils, and eye materials to get them to properly light up and/or glow as I wanted. The hooves are brushed silver. The horn is also, but with the reflections turned down so it doesn't vanish into the background leaves.
Brushed out the hair, naturally. I also smeared out bits of the dress to paint it into a proper shape -- it didn't look like that straight from the render! The part right below the hip was kinked up and bent something awful. Judicious smearing and airbrushing fixed all that, though.
The edge of the horn's blade is enhanced, so you can see the blasted thing. Also, the light areas on the tree came out looking awfully washed out, so I messed with that, too.
Oh, painted the lightning on, of course. I just used white with a fading paintbrush, then the smear tool to tweak out the points and little arcs. Some airbrushing where the lit up clouds are. Rather simple, really.
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