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I was working on "The Apparition," and the sad ghost of the scene reminded me of this line from a song....
Poser 4, Ray Dream Designer/Studio 5, Adobe Photoshop 4, Fractal Design Painter 5, Blade Pro, Kai's Power Tools 3
This is... the P3 Nude Woman J2 (whose joint parameters and limits have been lovingly and painstakingly reworked by Torino), wearing a conformable P4 blouse, and with JeffH's Long Flowing Fantasy Hair. The hair has two new morphs on it, which I made from P4 magnets. One pushes the hair down in back, and the other pulls it forward so it flows over the shoulders. The figure also had the formal dress on, but I did not export that, or her lower body, as it was not going to be in the picture.
I exported the parts I wanted as an OBJ file, and put it in RDD, to get some marble texture for it. This is a deep texture with a global mix of two different marbles. I made the distant light of the scene a bluish grey, to try to simulate moonlight. I also opened the OBJ in the MFM and hit it with a Polymesh:Smooth Edges, to try to get it to look more carved (and hopefully to get rid of the buttons on the blouse, which it did not do.)
I rendered the scene to a PSD file with a mask, opened in 'Shop, selected, cut and pasted the figure to its own layer, as usual. I had to smear out or blur those annoying little black dots that RDD renders always seem to have :/ I also smeared and cloned away some parts I did not want, such as the buttons on the front of the blouse, and some strands of hair sticking off the front. They did not go well with the heavy stone sculpted look I wanted. Also, the front curve of the hair on the side was a separate strand. I drew a lasso around the 'hole' between it and the main hair, then shaded it to look as if the hair was all of a piece. (It still looks separate down near the bottom, if you look closely.)
The shadowing wasn't quite what I wanted... I wanted
a moonlit night scene, and the shadows were pretty tame. I airbrushed
some more on, on a separate layer (in case I hated it ;) ). I also
copied the figure and shadow layer (Copy Merged, gotta love it) to a new
layer and put a threshold on it, to get stark blacks. I messed with
this layer, so the white parts were invisible, and thedark parts... well,
darkened. You can see the effects of this maneuver best in the hair.
The dark part that looks like perhaps a shadow of a tree branch and
leaves is the thresholded shadows.
I also hit the marble with KPT hue protected noise,
to make it look a bit more stony than it did.
The tears of blood are painted on, of course. I used a dark red and the paintbrush, on a new layer. Oh, touched it up with a smear here and there, some airbrush erasing of the edges, some white flecks for highlights, a touch of black on the edge for depth... The final effect is really a blend of two layers. I copied the tears, and changed the main layer to multiply mode. This darkened the blood (remember, it IS night time), and helped make it look more a part of the image. The copy is in hard light mode, which helps reassert some of the colour and glow of the blood. Both are tweaked to whatever transparency looked best.
Finally, I ran the blur tool all along the edges, so the entire figure was not all in sharp focus, and maybe gave it a little more depth by having the far edges start to blur.
Oh, I hate backgrounds.... It's supposed to be
a VERY depth-of-field blurred kinda suggestion of a graveyard or something.
First, I tried just spraying blobs of black and white over the mid-grey
background with the airbrush, then running a bunch of blurs and ripples and
pixelations and... just stuff to try to shake it up and make it look as if
it were more complex than it really was.
This did not work so hot.
So.... I took the PSD into Painter and... made the
background purple as a sort of purplish night sky kinda deal... (yeah, well,
I fixed the colour later, so sue me!) I sprayed in real foliage with
the Garden Hose Nozzles for the Image Hose. And then airbrushed in
some white blobs of 'supposed-to-be-somethings.' (Gravestones, if you
will. Actually, I don't think the statue of the song is in a
graveyard, but I really don't know for sure.)
Back in 'Shop, I messed with the colour and the darkness
and the blurring and the contrasting and what-all, to come up with the way
it looks now. Which I guess looks like what I meant: a very
blurred-beyond-actual-recognition photograph background.
Then I thought it would look nice in a matching marble
frame. ::SIGH:: Of course, I did not have any matching marble
lying around, and I didn't feel like rendering some, sooooo....
I expanded the canvas and selected the frame area. Hit
it with some noise. Then.... a lot of different filters. :)
One was... um... some kinda edge-detecting thing, which made the noise
turn into veins like marble. But no Clouds/Difference Clouds. And
I think the same KPT Hue-Protected noise.
Then I hit it with Blade Pro to make a rocky slab kinda
think. Doesn't look much like polished marble, but it is rock.
I set the text in I haven't a clue WHAT font, and hit
it with the BladePro cutout filter, which is SO fun for making carved stuff.
The letters didn't stand out from the background enough, so I coloured
them slightly red.
The signature stuff is another font just... stuck on,
in the corner.
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