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Um... Just an idea/vision I had in mind. I thought it might be fun to try to create the fairy in Ray Dream. (Fun? Frustrating? One of those...)
Ray Dream 5/Studio, Fractal Design Painter 5, Adobe Photoshop
4, Fractal Design Poser
(no KPT? Kai's glad, I won't get to yell at him
in this one...!)
Build an entire forest in RDD? I don't think so!
This photographic collage image brought to you express from Fractal
Design Painter Image Hose! With Garden Hose CD to boot!
In Painter, I made a sky/ground gradient with 4 steps
of blue and green. Sprayed on cumulus clouds. Small forest.
Wildflowers, Forget-Me-Nots, Poppies, whatever those yellow things
are, and those orange things. (I'm an artist, not a botanist!) Spray
spray spray, la la la. Then some of those oak leaves; some behind the
flowers, then more in front.
I didn't know what size my final image was going to be,
so I just winged it. I knew what size the background turned out, and
for some test renders, I used it as a backdrop (with the output image size
to match; see: Future Fantasy). However, for
the final image, I composited with 'Shop.
In RDD, I rendered with a mask in an alpha channel, to
a native 'Shop format. This let me select the fairy and foreground
flowers, with transparent wings still transparent. Then I pasted that
on top of the background.
I made an alpha channel with a radial white to black
fountain fill, to create a soft mask to select the background and party select
the foreground. Then I applied Gaussian Blur to give it that nice
out-of-focus touch.
Later, I also used a darkening layer made out of the
leaf-shadow light gel, to darken back patches of the background. I
also adjusted that layer's brightness down further, as needed.
FIGURE:
Posed in Poser, naturally. I used a fashion-model body type to get that long, slender, fairy appearance. Exported as a DXF, no groups, you know the drill. The wings, I swiped off a Cicada on the RDD CD.
COSTUME: (Soon to be a Corel Magazine article... I hope!)
The blouse is a mesh form object. I started with
a box the size and general shape of the fairy's chest, then slowly added
nodes to shape it. Once you add nodes to define points, remember to
link them to other nodes so you get actual polygon faces on your object.
Otherwise, it won't work too well. Also remember to work up slowly!!
The more you subdivide, the smoother your object will be, but the less
control you will have over it. I don't know how Kai-- OOPS!-- RDD
expects you to be able to find and select the node you want in this modeler.
(Just kidding, Kai!)
The dress petals are simple free form objects, made up
of a wiggly line cross section and a tapered envelope. I positioned
the base of the pieces on the fairy's hips, then jumped in a new window to
mold the fabric the way I wanted it to go.
The shader for these is a sheer silk I created (modified from the one I used in "Behind Golden Eyes.") It is a pink and blue psychedelic pattern, with a good amount of transparency, and tiny spots for the highlights, to give it a textured fabric appearance.
HAIR:
Since this hair was going to be a little more close up
(and less wet) than my mermaid's hair ("Touch"),
I tried a different approach. It wasn't a mesh object (see above for
complaints on THAT). It was going to be a bunch of curly locks kinda
grouped together. I made one weenie little curl that didn't even have
a pipeline extrusion. As a test, I duplicated a row, then duplicated
the row a couple of times. Then I grouped the whole enchilada and tried
to use deformers to wrestle it into shape.
Actually, it didn't turn out too bad. There are
several layers of Deformers. Since you can't have more than one Deformer
on a thing, you can grab your group and group it again. This will allow
you to stack Deformers. First, there's a spherical deformer, which
molded the locks into a kinda dome shape to go on the skull. Then some
wave deformers to give it that bend. There's a Bend & Twist or
two, then another wave, this time a cylindrical one. It's not half
bad...
I have this awesome hair shader, too. It's the blonde shader from my hawkman ("Touch") with a psychedelic transparency to delineate the strands. Um, unfortunately, I can't actually render it without crashing my computer..... Well, hey, if you had to calculate 30 curls in 6 deformers layered with psychedelic transparency, you'd give up, too!
FLOWERS:
Oh yeah, I swiped the Pansies and Hexapetal Something 3D models off the RDD CD.
PIXIE DUST:
In RDD, I created pixie dust using fountains. They're
upside down fountains in two different stages of completion, with small
particles, and they also have a deformer on them. They spray glowing
yellow-orange pixie dust out of the fairy's hands. There's also a little
yellow spotlight hidden in her hands, to shine down on them.
The 3D pixie dust turned out kinda subtle... So I slapped
on some yellow Dissolve airbrush. (Dissolve is anything but subtle.
Actually, it's exactly the same as that ancient airbrush in those 16-colour
paint programs!) I put it on its own layer (in case I hated it), then
changed the style to Hard Light and the Transparency to 75%.
LIGHTING:
As I mentioned, there's two limited-distance spotlights hidden in the fairy's hands. The main light is a spotlight in the upper left, with a leafy-shadow gel on it. (I created the gel real quick in 'Shop, with the airbrush and some of those silly alternate brushes, the squiggle ones.) There is also a bulb light in front of the figure, for a bit of a fill light. These two lights are relatively normal; grey tone, shadow casting, etc.
EVERYTHING ELSE:
I made a layer (in 'Shop) for each effect, then tossed
the ones I didn't like. I copied the wings and gave them a Radial Blur,
then put this behind the wings to give them a kinda motion blur.
I also copied the whole fairy and gave it a Motion Blur
a few times. I set this up behind the real fairy to give her some movement
and glow.
I experimented with the Diffuse Glow on the fairy, because a test image I had done with a low res render seemed to look good with it. Not this time. However, The edges of the flowers looked good lit up, so I used a little golden airbrush to make them glow. I painted in Behind mode, except under the HexapetalWhatsis in front, of course.
The text is the same pale yellow, in Van Dijk something font (one of the few that survived my Great Font Disaster (see: "Worlds Within Worlds" for the heartbreaking story of THAT mess!)). And it is in Soft Light mode.
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