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I wanted to do a scene with the child's hearse by Funky Bob. And I just made a harness for the horse... and, well... this happened.
Poser 4, Rhino 1.1, Vue d'Esprit 3, Adobe Photoshop 4
child's hearse:
Funky Bob
lantern: Joerg
harness: me
Thanks to the crew at PFO Gallery Talk and Renderosity Vue Forum for critiques and helpful suggestions to improve the image.
This is a business man, with a fedora. The hat is expanded a bit to keep off the rain and to cover his hair. I got the hair to get inside the hat by squishing it a bit. He'd have icky bald spots if the hat were off, but it works the way it is. He has no textures, just some basic colouring, and his business suit turned to mourning black.
The horse has no texture, either. In fact, nothing does... The horse has a walking, head down, pose from Daio. So does the harness. (Later, it was made conformable by ScottA!)
The harness was built in Rhino. I imported the horse and drew some lines across it where the straps go, projected it onto the horse's body, then extruded little ovals along the line to make the straps. Easy! The yoke is a loft of the cross section, in two sizes. The saddle part (on the back) was another oval-ish extrusion to a point that I bent into shape. I also made little buckles and strap ends and tongues and poking-through-things. The whole cartload was then mirrored, which worked marvelously, except on the back strap and crupper. I didn't make those in half, so they were rather doubled... I tried to reduce the point count in RDD, but it was a mess. Still, it looks and works okay.
The rein is my Amazing Bendy Rein, stretched beyond all sane limits. The hearse doesn't have shafts to put the horse between, so those are made from another Amazing Bendy Rein. Amazing!
Since there were no texture maps in use, it was
a pretty simple affair to import all the objs of the figures and such. The
horse needed it's skin adjusted... I was trying Lorraine's technique of using
reflection maps to get sleek black horses, but not having much luck. This
is a sorta dark bluish grey black horse.
The bits of metal (cross ornaments, rings on the harness)
needed metalic shaders loaded, and the glass in the hearse needed a smoky
glass shader.
The ground is pretty basic, with dark grass on it. The
road is the ground plane poking through the terrain. I mixed mud with
some cracked concrete stuff... then I thought the concrete bit looked kinda
like rain puddles, so I messed with the reflectivity of it to try to make
a mud and puddle mixture.
There is another terrain off back there with the hole-y
grass/fake distant tree texture on it... I think. It is standing in
as a distant forest. I wanted the forest to be thick, so I dropped
in several dead trees, a yellow maple or two, and some winter pear trees.
And lots of bushes. For some reason, the bushes don't seem to
appear too well. I wanted the lantern light to make a yellow glow on
that near tree trunk and on the bush branches. They didn't cooperate.
The lantern is a Vue vob by Joerg. I put a yellow light in it and sized/positioned it to the guy's hand. I had a terrible time getting it to cast any nice shadows OR light, until I figured out that the glass panels had cast shadows turned on. I turned that off, and things got much better!
There is another fill light near the top of the hearse to light the ornaments on top. There is a shaft of light as well, breaking through the clouds and trees. It is a cylinder with a fuzzy additive light kinda material (I swiped it out of the sample/tutorial object folder). It wasn't strong enough, so I duplicated and offset it to stack them and make them brighter.
I loaded a rainy grey dreary atmosphere, and messed with the clouds. There's one thick layer, and there is one opaque layer. The sun is overhead a bit behind the camera. It is a daylight scene, not a night time one; it's just very overcast. I increased the fog to creep up into the background trees. I tried ground fog, but didn't like the way it turned out. That foreground ground fog is a few big spheres with cloud material on them. Lastly, I loaded the rain cylinder from the sample/tutorial objects and positioned it so it could be seen in the image.
In a Vue image!? Oh dear! I enhanced the brightness
(darkness?)/contrast a bit. I also sprayed some blurred gold dots on
the tree that is supposed to be lit by the lantern. The background
between the trees came out with some awful vertical line glop things... I
tried blurring them out, but that was a bit too blurry. So I tried
fogging them out by airbrushing on some more fog. I also cloned some
clear bush branches into the background, and darkened stuff up a bit.
I painted some mud on the wheels and legs... can't see
it much, but I did, honest!
Put on a black matte and came up with some title.
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