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Honorable Mention in the DAZ 2001 Calendar
This is for the Zygote Calendar contest... I would have liked to use Lethal Beauty, but the image had to be 8.5x11" (wide), so I redid the composition and all.
CREDITS:
Jaguar: Poser 4 Lion (Curious
Labs and Zygote)
with Big Face Lion UVMapping and Amazing Wonder Eyes by
me, and no-mane morph
by Emperor Ken.
Frog: Poser 4/Zygote Animals CD frog
(Curious Labs and
Zygote)
with Big Face Frog UVMapping, Poison Arrow Tree frog CR2 and
texture by me.
Plant: Dedicated Digital.
Title: courtesy of the venerable
JediMaster.
Poser 4, Adobe Photoshop 4, Vue d'Esprit 3
JAGUAR:
This is the P4 lion this time, with no-mane morph. I replaced the eyes with my Wonder Eyes prop, but that didn't seem to help. I have a hard time getting good depth in the eyes. I painted a high-res jaguar skin for my Big Face Lion template.
FROG:
This is the Poison Arrow tree frog CR2 from my Big Face
Frog pack (aka "The New, Improved Zygote Frog").
I remapped the frog obj and painted a passel of skins for it. I
tried a different one this time.
The leaf comes with the Dedicated Digital Lady Bug, with
a nice texture map. I opened that in Poser and posed the frog on it,
then exported both as an obj to Vue.
The close leaves are copies of the DD leaf. Further back, I have Vue Ferns and Tropical plants trying to block out the sky and background. The leaf uses it's colour map for a bump map for the veins, as well as a transparency map -- so the leaves are a faint translucent green. This worked a lot better than my previous attempt.
The water drops are water spheres... and a couple of stony landscapes, near the top.
I brushed out the Jaguar fur with my Furry Brushes again, using short strokes. Because the final (if it wins) image has to be 3300 x 2550 pixels, I worked at 1100 x 850 so I could shrink it to this size for the entry, and blow it up nicely for the print version. It makes it very easy to do some tight detail, but hard to see overall what you're doing. The texture map I painted had some noise/dissolved airbrush colours in it to give the fur a natural variation.
I had a group of plants up in the air in Vue for the
water drops to reflect, but... they didn't. So I painted, on a new
layer, a quickie couple of splatters for leaves, and some smeared lines for
branches and trunks, then whalloped that with a spherical deform. I
copied and rotated it several times to put on each drop. Also experimented
with blending modes; I forget which one I finally used. Overlay, perhaps,
or Hard Light.
The drops also didn't come out with any decent shadows,
so I used the pencil to draw a selection mask for the drops, then saved it.
I moved the selection to the shadow area, then re-loaded the selection
to subtract from the current selection. Ta-da! Selected shadows.
They are airbrushed.
Highlights are also punched up with airbrush.
The frog was pretty decent, but not shiny enough. So (working on a new layer, of course) I splodged down some greys with the paint brush and hit it with the plastic wrap thing a couple of times. Combined in soft light or overlay mode, it looks rather nice as wet highlights.
Finally, I had to fix the Jaguar's eyes. When working in Vue, I usually turn up the diffuse/ambience lighting so the eyes glow slightly. This keeps them from getting lost in shadows and looking dead. Sometimes it makes them too bright, so I airbrushed some shadows on the shaded eye. And some highlights on the lit eye. And put that fakie tree reflection over the lit eye. And had about five layers all combined to make it look like it does now! I had airbrushed shadows doing hard light shadowing, airbrushed highlights doing lighten only lightening, and the reflection doing some overlay, and some other stuff doing some colour burn/dodging.... anyway, through a lot of experimentation, the eyes finally turned out like this, and i quit messing with them.
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