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This is for the PoserWorld contest... it had to be an image containing a Poser figure and something from PoserWorld. Well, the swan pic I made didn't have a Poser figure in it, so.... I decided to use my new frog and some cat morphs to make a jaguar.
CREDITS:
Cat: Poser 3/4 cat (Meta
Creations and Zygote)
with Cat O' 9 Lives morph by
Beth, Big Face Cat UVMapping and shoulder
morphs by me.
Frog: Poser 4/Zygote Animals CD frog
(Meta Creations and
Zygote)
with Big Face Frog UVMapping, Poison Arrow Tree frog CR2 and
texture by me.
Plant: Plant Studio (Kurtz-Fernhout
Software).
Title: courtesy of the venerable
JediMaster.
MetaCreations Poser 4, Ray Dream Designer/Studio 5, Plant Studio, Adobe Photoshop 4, Fractal Design Painter 5, Kai's Power Tools 3; Flaming Pear's Blade Pro
JAGUAR:
Yes, this is the P3 cat, not the P4 lion. The 9Lives morphs mold the face into a big cat's, plus I put my tiger's geometry on it. (The tiger is also a 9Lives cat, with bulked up legs and paws and such.) I used my Big Face Cat obj with modified UVMapping to make the skin. That, I painted in 'Shop. The fur has a basecoat colour, which is burned up the middle of the back (and also in the bigger rosettes), and airbrushed with paler colour over the belly skin. The eyes have a radial fountain fill fancied up with a KPT lens effect.
I put the cat figure in a crouch to show off my shoulder
morphs at work, then applied the pose to the jaguar. Of course, you
can't see how cool the shoulder morphs are from this view. Alas!
I saved the PZ3 file to import into RDD. There,
I had to apply the texture map. Miraculously, all I did was open
it as the colour channel. Didn't have to flip it or anything, and the
various UV pointers worked. However, for some reason, the entire cat
had a big rectangular white paint shape on it. I made that transparent,
but am not sure what it was for. Also, it made my cat's wireframe white,
making it almost invisible against the background. D'oh!
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. The
blue one is one of my favorite Poison Arrow colours; it looks so much like
glazed ceramic.
The geometry scaling I did to get the Poison Arrow
proportions on the frog leave it, unfortunately, rather unposable. At
least in the front leg area! (They are a mess!) Besides which, RDD
wouldn't open this PZ3, so I had to export the critter as an obj file. The
obj also took the UV texture map as a colour channel with no hitch... except
in the render, there seemed to be a lot of white seams along the edges.
The plant is a rather generic one from Plant Studio, exported as a DXF. Plant Studio is a very good shareware program (go try it!). It walks you through dialogues to creating a plant; what shape of leaves, how many, how 'bushy;' and includes flowers and fruit as well. I parsed back and forth through the dialogues 'til I got basically what I wanted, then hit the randomizer a few times 'til I saw a keeper.
Once in RDD, things become more difficult. This particular plant has 58 leaves and 20-some-odd interspacing stem pieces. Does RDD let you toss one shader on a whole group? Nooooo! But that is all they have, one organic two-tone green cellular shader. In fact, the first version had spots too small, so I cranked up the scale, and applied the shader to all the pieces... again! (Note: I also put in a teeeeeeny amount of transparency, to try to get that 'sunshine glowing through leaves' look. Make sure you do a test render of ONE leaf if you do this, so you don't have to change them all yet AGAIN! I left it, but erased out the jaguar's outlines in the leaves in post pro.)
All the greenery you see is just one plant. Most of it was stuck off the screen at the left, so I pruned those few leaf groups from it, and stuck the majority of the plant over on the right.
The rest of the jungle is implied (supposedly) by the background,
which I painted in FDP. This was another effort to do a 'blurry something
in the background' a la "I am the Lady Who Cries."
This is a bunch of layers of green chalk, vari-HSB'd autocloning of
said chalk, some image hose Small Forest and English Ivy, and lots of in-between
blurring. (Note: use Super Soften for Gaussian Blur, not Depth of Field!
It's faster that way.)
I set this up as the backdrop in RDD, but... in the render
it turned out pretty much a flat mid-tone green. ::sigh:: Anyhow,
I had also rendered a mask, so I selected the background and pasted the file
into it. I'll MAKE it fit!
Also, I put a leafy gel on the spotlight in the upper right. I don't see any leafy shading from it, though (maybe on the side of the jaguar, where the cool cat shoulder morphs are also visible... and the cool rosette's I painted...). The center of the image also turned out too shady, so I put a teeny little bulb light right over the frog.
The first thing I did was grab the jaguar (besides a mask, I also rendered an object index channel), paste it to a new layer and start working it over. First the eyes. Well... nobody's made a morph yet to make the pupils round, so I smeared and cloned the pupils away. Painted in my own. Did some airbrush shading to get better depth, and new highlights. Also painted the dark areas around the eyeballs.
The fur also got the furry treatment. I used my fur brushes and a low intensity smear tool with short strokes, in the direction of the fur, to fluff up the spots and tawny bits. The tawny bits were actually too flat, so I also used the burn tool on them. To paint with the furry brushes, you need to crank the spacing waaaay down, to like 5%. I also used some colour and the paintbrush (with a fade on it) to put some of the ear fur in. This was also burned and smeared over.
Oh, I also painted in the black lip... that didn't come out on the texture map; and darkened the lower half of the cat.
Besides that, the rest was cleaning up. Smeared over the leaves that crossed the edges of the cat, where they were a bit too transparent! And burn/dodged the dew drops in a bit more aggressively, so they were visible.
The frame is a Blade Pro setting I made for plexiglass frames. Actually, I didn't have the room I wanted to put it on the inside edge of the picture, so I copied the pic to a new layer, then expanded the background, and put the frame on THAT. The text is in a font called St Charles, that I adore (it's freeware... um... somebody gave it to me), and it's laid in white on an overlay layer.
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