The Jester: Time theme came out rather well, so I started wondering what else I could do. Maybe a Space thing. So I thought, why don't I make the jester black and gold instead of black and white. And make a reflecting checkerboard under a mirror sky?
Poser 4, Vue d'Esprit 4, Photoshop 4
Jester texture, shoes, armbands, mask, and collar by
Marcabros.
Jester hat by lourdes. (available at
Renderosity free
stuff.)
This is Michael (2), dressed up in Marcabros' and Lourdes' jester stuff, again. This pose is a classic flying fairy dryad deal. I gave him new hands, and turned his left arm, because I knew I wanted him to be kinda reaching towards/but fending off the reflective sky.
I couldn't do the plain colour and reflective gold mix in Poser, so I sent the PZ3 to Vue. I took the basic texture and made it plain black and white, to use as the mixing function.
I started out putting the checkerboard function on the
ground plane. But no matter what I did, I couldn't get it to spit out
more than four squares on the whole blasted thing. Nor could I get
more squres out of a finite plane. Well, did that stop me? Not
for long!
I took one finite plane and did a Replicate on it, to
make 5 or 6 copies move back. Of course, it took some trial and error
to figure out how far to push them to get them to line up edge-to-edge (hint:
45!). I grouped that row and did a horizontal replicate to get my
checkerboard. Hah! And don't try to tell ME the runway's too
short!
I made the checkerboard squares alternate between gold
(which I changed) and air. I thought I'd do that thing from that
Dungeons and Dragons episode, where the black squares drop you into space.
So I loaded a night sky into the atmosphere. I'll tell ya something,
the Vue sky is NOT meant to be seen under ground. I messed around with
the different night skies, and a blank atmosphere, and I finally gave up
on that idea. The gold checker squares didn't look so great with black
skies to reflect anyway.
So I loaded some basic daytime atmosphere and turned
off the haze and fog (but not too much, or you can't see a blasted thing).
Turned on the stars. I edited the sky map to be the dark bluish
black changing to lighter blue in the middle, and then lowered the sky dome
starting point as far as it could go, and then adjusted the height until
I got my division where I wanted it. (Yeah, okay, so the thumbnail preview
is very handy sometimes!)
Then I tried to add my cloud and mirror sky. HAH!
I put in a cloud plane and edited the cloud material transparency to
have an underlying materail, and I chose Chrome. Hint: don't do that.
;)
Okay, that didn't work, so I just created another cloud
plane above the first and made IT Chrome. Hint: don't do that, either.
An infinite cloud plane that is not transparent is just going to block
all your light. Even a finite chrome plane, and yes, even if you turn
off shadow-casting for that material. So that sky mirror, there, that
is NOT chrome. What is it? It's water. Hah! Clear,
simple water, which is transparent, so the light can shine through. I
cranked up the "Turn Reflective with Angle" all the way up to give it a mirror
surface. I took off the sublte bump mapping it had, to make the reflections
less watery.
From there, it was mostly a piece of cake. I had
to crank up the ambient lighting and overall brightness, because the sky
stuff was kinda killing it, but after I raised my sun again (I had it lower,
under the chrome cloud layer), things went back to pretty much
normal.
I imported the jester and used my black and white textures
to mix the black and gold. This went fairly well. I scattered
some plain-coloured primitives out behind him, after I stuck him in a hole
in the checkerboard. (No, just by hand, not with the Scatter deal.)
By this time, I had a mirror sky and gold mirrored
checkerboard and gold reflective jester, and absolutely NOTHING interesting
for them to reflect. Reflecting each other was not fun, either. So
I changed the checkerboard to a yellow marble material, and I threw some
plain dune terrains all around the scene, outside the camera view, for the
gold to reflect.
Erm, and I have NO idea why the gold ruffle turned red.
But anyway, it only took about half an hour to render to screen (forget render to disk, it wanted like 3-4 hours). I saved the colour and alpha channel, and in 'Shop, I cloned some of the clouds down further into the sky. There was a big empty blue space there.
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