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This was actually a 8x11 pencil drawing I did for my "Illustrating Personal Ideas" class. (All you people who hadda take boring classes like "Business Tax Codes 101," eat your heart out!) I decided to try it out in Ray Dream Designer, for their Creatures of Your Imagination contest.
Ray Dream Studio; Photoshop 3, PaintShop Pro, CorelDraw 5, Kai's Power Tools 2.
STAND:
The dish portion is a simple extruded circle with a
symmetrical envelope. The 3 supporting talons were created with a slightly
U-shaped cross section, and had extensive envelope work to get the sweep
and claw shape. I positioned the hot point over the center of the base
and duplicate and rotated twice to get the 3 equi-distant talons.
(Actually, I eyeballed it, so they were all crooked! Don't eyeball
it, ti'll save a lot of tweaking time.)
All the pieces have a shiny gold shader.
BALL:
This is three nested spheres. The outermost is
clear glass with a pretty decent refraction rate (remember, "20" is about
water's refraction, and everything else is below that. Don't go crazy
with refraction.) The two inner spheres have bluish, cloudlike spots
for colour, and a 'Shop Cloud rendering for transparency. White is
100% transparent. I adjusted the output levels of the cloud pictures,
so there was no more than around 30% opacity anywhere. This is to create
layers of see-through cloudiness in there.
Since the base's talons were eyeballed, that group's
center was a little, well, off-center. So aligning the sphere's to
it's center... Well, just don't eyeball things, and you'll save a lot
of time on tweaking! (Oy!)
HEAD:
I mapped this out carefully in sketches. The back
of the head is a circle enveloped to become half a sphere. The bridge
of the nose and forehead are one piece, a half-circle that matched the cranium's
diameter. The nosepad is an arc with a symmetrical in one plane envelope
to carve nostrils. The muzzle is two smooshed spheres. The
jaw is a rounded rectangle with a bit of enveloping for shape. The
cheeks were hard. They are scoop-topped wedges whipped around a short
curved path. Big Tip: When trying to line up pieces that need
to match sizes/angles/etc, choose Jump In New Window. Then you can
tweak the piece in it's own window, and see the changes updated in the whole
scene. VERY helpful.
The eyes are my own special brew. It's a full
eye, completely animatible with two lids, a clear lens, a nictitating membrane,
and a cornea inside. I painted a cat-pupil on a square gold field and
applied that as the shader. (It's ingeniously designed to line up
perfectly.) And ears are an arc enveloped to a point. The earring
is a circular swept oval.
The whiskers are one shape for each side. I made
multiple small circles as the cross section. The end cross sections
were sized and moved to fan the whiskers out. The left side was duplicated
and moved to the right side. Pretty clever, eh? (They're still
too thick, though.) They have a light grey colour and some transparency.
BODY:
The neck and body are one big shape with three cross
sections: round to start, a scoop-topped oblong for shoulders, and a round
bottom. It is extruded on an arc to get the seated position, and the
envelope was tweaked. The tail is a long, wavy cylinder.
The hide paws were build with very crude semi-circular
sweeps for haunches, and basic paw shapes stuck on. The forepaws are
more detailed, with individual toes and claws. The forelegs are molded
cylinders, and a custom upper-leg shape.
All the furry parts have the same shader. The colour
is flat black. The highlight channel is a spotted mix of grey and
bluish-grey. If you put colours in the highlight channel, instead of
just grey values, you can get coloured highlights. There are some
blue-tinged highlights in the fur. The bump map was created with KPT
in 'Shop. Got some noise, smudged right, smudged left, and voila, some
sleek furry texture. You can make it wavy with a little Shear. I
toned down the contrast so the bump map wasn't overbearing. Much.
VEIL:
This is a swirly purple/blue spot colour, with tiny spotty highlights. It is made with a squiggle extrusion path that was extensively stretched, rotated, tweaked, sized, positioned.... to get it to sweep around the body.
LIGHTING:
In the original drawing, the light came glowing out of
the crystal ball, and underlit the cat's face. With the cloudy transparent
middle spheres, I couldn't do that. I also lost a lot of structural
details into the black background. Well, the cat is supposed to merge
into the background, but not TOO much! I ended up with a spotlight
right in front of the crystal ball, beaming straight at the cat's face.
The background is plain black, of course. I tried
cloudy fog for atmosphere and junk, but it just looked wishy-washy.
Classic black was the best.
The table is a typical wood shader on a huge cylinder.
REFLECTION:
This was created from scratch in CorelDraw. I created
an eye shape with circular gold fill, power clipped a black iris inside,
and added a white circular highlight. The fangs are bezier drawn shapes
which were duplicated and shrunk to highlights, then blended with the yellowish
teeth to make them rounded. The small teeth just have circular radiant
fills.
With a black square background, I exported it as a gif.
I imported it into RDD as a reflection map, and it did reflect nicely
off the crystal ball glass. However, it was off to the side. So
I rendered without the reflection, and later put it on in 'Shop, using the
layers tricks.
TEXT:
After all the retouching, I added text in it's own layer. I grabbed a thing section of the crystal ball stand, and used KPT's 'create gradient from selection' option to make a nice, bright gold gradient for once. (It was so nice, i saved it.) I applied this to, oh, whatever that caligraphic font is! Then I used the airbrush and white paint, along with 'Shop's trick brushes, to create the specular highlights on both the image, and on the text.
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