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I wanted to do a totally blatant promo pic for my 3D Menagerie catalogue: Dragon Factory, Heavy Horse, and Barding Pack I.
Poser 4, Vue d'Esprit 4, Photoshop 4
Dragon: Dragon
Factory
Horse & Armor: Heavy Horse
& Barding Pack I
Knight: Lords Warrior
Shield, Sword, Scabbard: PhilC's Horse Armor
Set
I started building this in Vue 3, then Vue 4 arrived.
The cave is built with one inverted mountain terrain as the interior,
and a large, flattened terrain, tipped sideways, as the cliff wall. I
used the terrain tools to paint a hole in the wall, then shoved the interior
inside it.
Around the side of the entrance are some rocks shoved
into the cliff wall, with the same material. A copy of the cliff wall
is used for the floor of the whole thing. There's another terrain of
some rocks stuck into the floor to create some... well, rocks.
The gnarly tree is a dead tree with some fir tree scraggly
green clumps on it.
The atmosphere is some cheerful sunshine atmosphere, that had the shadows of the scraggly tree looking fairly nice. I put in some thick black fog to make the interior of the cave darker, as well.
DRAGON:
I built a new dragon head based on my sketch. It uses the Spoonbill head for a base. There's five short whiskers on the chin, and sets of swept-back cone teeth and fangs for the teeth. Forked tongue (and the jaw's serpent tongue base morph). Then the horn bases with... er, I forget which horns those are: horns #4 or something.
I was going to use a #1 body with the #3 legs for the
bird-like talons.... but I had a #3 Body with #3 legs lying around, so I
used that. I was worried with a #1 body, the neck wouldn't be long
enough to snake around the way I wanted it to go. I probably should
have used it, though, as I think this body is too small and skinny. I
put on the #3 wings.
I kept the tail fin, but exchanged the neck decorations
for these backward scythe bits. Attatched the head, and posed, and
was all ready to go.
All the materials on the dragon are Vue proceedural. Most of the colours are a mottled greenish colour. The skin uses an inverted 'chipped' function for a bump map. The wings use an inverted 'dry cracks' function to attempt to simulate a few veins here and there. The belly scales have a yellow/brown agate colour for the banding. The mouth parts, tongue, teeth, horns, claws, eyes, deocrative bits.... all have fairly simple colour shaders on them.
I tried making a swirl of smoke coming out of the
mouth/nostrils, using a swirl object I had created, and the volumetric (or
even normal) smoke/cloud stuff. It didn't come out right, so I ditched
it and just painted the sucker on.
KNIGHT & CHARGER:
This is a serious choreography of Poser stuff. First
up, a Clydesdale Heavy Horse, without mane. Then, the Caparison 1 conformed
to him. Then the SCA (Swappable Conforming Armor) conformed to the
Horse on top of that. Armor types selected and adjusted to fit over
the Caparison. Then a saddle figure, parented to the abdomen. Rein
figure, parented to the head.
Then comes in LordsWarrior's knight. Fit him into
the saddle and parent him to it. PhilC's medieval smart props glom
right onto the knight with no adjustments necessary. Then comes the
posing!
I posed the rider first, then hid all the extra figures,
and posed the Horse. (Much easier that way!) Everything (except
some parts I knew would not be visible: the Horse's right eye, the knight's
right leg....) exported to one monster obj, and imported into Vue.
I threw all the textures into one directory with the obj, so Vue could load them automatically. Except for Vue not liking 89a interlaced gifs, everything went smoothly. I increased the armor bits' reflections to about 20%.
The Dragon was textured by itself in a separate file, then saved as vob and imported to the scene.
I added two fill lights. One is a light brownish point light between the horse and dragon, brightening up the knight's shadowed side. I also put a darker brown spotlight pointing up at the dragon's chest/neck, to fill in some shadows there that were a bit too dark.
I tried to see how little I could get away with. I painted
in the smoke bits, as I mentioned earlier. I didn't bother doing anything
to the hairy bits this time, though.
I cloned some un-stretched bits of the chain mail to
the two spots near the legs where the texture stretched unmercifully. I
smeared out a bit of ivory where the Dragon's horn was poking through the
base. I also smeared the belly scales into somethimg more of an arc,
instead of straight across. I also lightened up the edge of the sword
blade, and darkened the cave.
For some reason, the Horse's eye had no texture, so I
painted in the iris and pupil. I also put a pupil in the Dragon's eye.
Text in overlay mode, and that was about it.
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