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This was for the Zygote Calendar contest... I was messing with the Lion one day, making some morphs, and trying to get my kitten to turn into a lion cub, and I kinda wanted to do a lioness/cub picture... so I came up with this.
CREDITS:
Lioness: Poser 4 Lion (Curious
Labs and Zygote)
with Big Face Lion UVMapping by
me, and no-mane morph
by Emperor Ken.
Cubs: Poser 3 Cat (Curious Labs
and Zygote)
with Big Face Cat mapping, Cat2 body, cat/kitten morphs by
me, and of course,
9Lives morphs by Capsces.
Poser 4, Vue d'Esprit 3, Photoshop 4
LIONESS:
Standard P4 Lion, basically, in a lying-down pose I made. She's using one of my new Lion head morphs to close her left eye, though you can't see it very well at this angle. She also has a new hi-res BFLion texture map, and is using a transmap on her tail tuft.
CUBS:
I shortened up the cat's body and legs, and bulkified
the paws to make a kitten/cub body. The head has several morphs on
it: mainly Big Cat by Capsces, with a touch of pug, inverse long muzzle,
some bigger forehead/cranium morphs, rounded ears, etc etc. The cub
texture is cobbled together from the Lion texture I made. I also spawned
the Lioness' tail as a prop, and added the tuft to the lion cub kitten
figure.
They are posed in Poser, naturally. First the lioness,
then the HugCub (I think you can guess which one is which), which I turned
invisible while I did the next. TrapCub is trying to pounce PounceCub,
though mom is holding her back. PounceCub is using a pouncy prep pose
I made a while back. I used my cat eye-moving morphs to make the cubs
look at each other. Then there's ClimbCub, and TailCub; the later of
whom is parented to the Tail3, so I could get them both into position.
TailCub also uses a modified curled-up cat pose, created by Debra (and
included in Poser 4).
Once finished, I exported the Lioness as one obj and all the cubs as another. Since they all use the same texture map, there wasn't much sense dividing them out. (I didn't merge them all in UVMapper before Vue import, so they ended up as groups of HugCubhead and HugCubtail1 etc etc, anyway. But I did fix them so they automatically loaded their textures on import to Vue, and only had to pump up the eyeball lights and copy that texture to all the eyes.)
This is a very simple Vue scene. I didn't even use a landscape for the ground, just the flat ground plane. It is covered with plants, though!
The first thing I did, which is odd, but might come in
handy... I had a render of the group from Poser (with no new texture maps),
which I placed on a plane in Vue, and used the TIF alpha channel as a
transparency map, so I had a fake lion group in the scene. I used that
to position the plants to see how everything would look, approximately. It
was rather handy, as the plane takes up much less space than the actual
figures!
The down side of it was, I rendered the pic from the
Left camera, so the figures were flat across. Plus, I left the Vue
camera at 35mm aperture. When I brought in the obj groups and positioned
them, the TailCub was very far away and kinda small. When I set the
camera at a more decent 50mm aperture, I accidentally included more foreground,
where I hadn't put plants down. Those way in front are cloned from
the midground grass.
There isn't a whole lot of this, this time. I didn't
furrify the fur... the noisy dotty fur looks rather good the way it is. I
did have a huge problem with it stretching on the lioness' paws, though.
These I brushed out. I also cloned some areas on the neck and
flank where the texture map got stretched, or the pose caused some anomalous
sharp edges.
The cubs' tails turned out horrendous (they're shortened
very much, and so don't pose well). Those are cloned and airbrushed
over. The black lips of the cubs had some 'holes' in them, so i fixed
those. There are other fixed patches here and there, and all the ear
fur is furry-brushed out. I also added some whiskers, and a strong
highlight for the lioness' eye. Plus the foreground grass to cover
the bare spot I left. Oh, and the distant birds.
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