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I just got the DAZ rhino, and was playing around with the morphs and stuff, and created a baby rhino. Then, of course, I had to do a mom and baby... then I had to make a Vue scene to put them in...!
The name Kotaba has no significance that I am aware
of; I made it up.
You can learn more about rhinos today at
The David Sheldrick
Wildlife Trust.
Poser 4, Vue d'Esprit 3, Photoshop 4
This started out with the Vue Sample scene of the African Sunset. I changed the sky colours to blue, moved the sun to midday and changed the light colours. I raised the clouds up to their current position. I moved the acacia trees around, as well. I ditched the rest of the scene. The foreground is made up of a large double-sized terrain. There are two cubes under it, one for the river, and one for the path. I edited the terrain to dig channels for both. It was pretty much guesswork as to where to dig, but after probing around, I found the spot for the path.
The ground uses the dried grass material, I don't think I edited it much. Then I added several clumps of dried grass (with a new, drier colour) and scattered them. I ended up with four big groups of over a dozen plants each. The rock is a stone object with a typical stone colour, shaded darker by mixing it with a plain greyscale material. The path is made of wet mud, which looks quite good as dry dust to me. The water is a dark blue water material, to get it to show up properly. Oh, there's also three dust cloud spheres behind the rhinos, where the dust was disturbed as they walked. It's subtle, but you can see it.
Besides the sun shining brightly from the upper right, I created a brown spotlight to bounce light back from the path onto the rhinos' front ends.
There are 117 objects and 2 lights, and this sucker was gonna take 9 hours to render to disk in Final mode at 4000 pixels wide. Er, so I didn't do that. Smallspace clued me in, and I rendered a half-size Ultra mode image to disk in only 4 hours and then enlarged in 'shop.
The Rhino is an excellent figure; I'm glad I got it. The texture map is superb (and I usually don't bother buying texture maps). For the baby rhino, I used a bit of negative "white" rhino morphing, scaled down the head and legs, and made the feet bigger and the tail shorter. In Poser, you can set the horn materials to be invisible. For Vue, I assigned the baby's horns to a new group so I could delete them after import.
The mother rhino has the standard texture map, doubling also as a bump map. The baby rhino has no bump, and the texture map is mixed with a pale grey basic material to lighten it up.
They were posed in Poser, exported as obj, and imported into Vue.
For some reason, I got a serious moire pattern in the cloud spheres. Luckily, the blur tool took care of this with no problem. The ground was another matter. The entire area in front of the rhinos had a teensy brickwork looking texture on it. I should have re-rendered it and turned off the material's bump mapping... but instead I blurred and smeared between the grass stalks. Then I even rendered just the foreground grass to get an alpha channel to select it and mess with it even more. Fortunately, at the smaller sizes, you can't really see how terrible it looks.
I also cloned and smeared some cloud bits up above the
sphere's demarcation line.
The background behind the fore/midground grass and trees
was... empty, so I scribbled in some distant trees and grass lumps with the
paintbrush tool. Blurred that up.
There's some seriously subtle tracks behind the rhinos.
Well... it's hard-packed dust.
I did have to retouch the rhinos' cheeks. For some
reason, the gums were sticking out of the skin. I also adjusted the
mother's eye to open it wider, and painted in some earhair, as well as fluffing
up the tails a bit.
Text is Honda font. After I put it on, I thought the border looked too dull, so I grabbed the central section, inverted, and slapped a texture on it.
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