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Well, Beth made the Poser4 snake morph into a cobra, and the Cat O' Nine Lives morphs for the P3 cat... So after Phillip made some cool snake textures (including a killer bump map), which I turned into a skin for the cobra.... I said, Now all I need to do is turn the 9lives cat into a mongoose.... and, tada!
MetaCreations Poser 4, Adobe Photoshop 4, Fractal Design Painter 5, Kai's Power Tools 3, Flaming Pear's Blade Pro
Well, this was fairly simple. I started with the 9Lives cat, which Lyne had tweaked into a mouse. I then re-tweaked it into a mongoose. For the texture map, I made a cinnamon and gold kinda dissolved airbrushed and KPT Hue Protected Noise mess, and copied this for the bump map. It looks kinda funny, but it is the basis of Lyne's fur painting method. (Check out her cool tutorial!)
The snake is kinda uncooperative in posing... I wish
they would have made a Curve parameter for each section! Nevertheless,
I got the tail where I wanted it, and managed to twist the neck around to
face the right way without messing up the nice hood.
The texture is one I made, based on the greyscale bump
map Philip released with his SnakeSkinz pack (available on the
Renderosity Fun Stuff page).
I rendered them with the shadows turned off. (Well, I just don't like the Poser Lights' shadows very much.)
BACKGROUND:
In 'Shop, I selected the handy figure mask of the file,
cut the critters off the background, then pasted them to a new layer. On
the background, I selected the ground area and filled with a dusty brown
gradient fill. In the upper area, I used a blue to green fill, and
then scribbled some darker green over top of that.
This is just a base to send to FDP, to paint on some
Image Hose grass and stones. Back in 'Shop, I messed with the ground
some more, dissolving dust on top of the stones, then doing a dusty-brown
difference cloud that I faded. Well, it looks pretty cool, of course,
then I blurred it all....
CRITTERS:
I used the 'looks like a spatter of paint' 'Shop brush (and my custom made variants of it) and the smear tool to brush out the mongoose's fur. I like to turn off the background and create an empty layer, and use the Sample Merged option to smear the fur up into its own layer. After that was done, I blurred the original layer, so it wasn't so dotty.
I also airbrushed the shadows on their own layer.
FX:
I thought for a background, I should have the scene done
up in the Twirl filter, making it all swirly and in motion, but having the
figures distinct above it. Well, twirl isn't the right one to use when
you want the center stable and the outsides more deformed. So I used
the Radial Blur.
First, I selected all, copied merged, and pasted and
used it on that. Didn't like that. So then copied the background
and just did the Blur on that. That was so-so. So then I copied
the figure layer, and did the Blur on THAT. Sandwiching all these swirls,
and making a layer mask to erase the distortion over the 'target zone,' and
trying different layer orders.... I ended up with this. (Actually,
I just went back and changed it again, opting for less swirl. Gotta love
multiple layers!)
Expanded the canvas for the border, and used Blade Pro for the frame. Thought of using the Black Lizard setting, but it clashed. So I hit the randomizer until this nice green one popped up.
I put the text on, and painted it up in kinda yellowish/goldish swishes. Then used a Blade Pro preset to make cutout stuff (from Web Graphics on a Budget). I kinda wanted the text to be engraved into the frame... it doesn't look much like it is, though. (Well, the alternative is to go and mess around with channel ops and other hand-done effects like in the Photoshop Wow! Book, etc. Er, I opted for the 'press one button' method ;) )
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