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I was reading about the Ray Dream Designer 4 Glow channel for its shaders, and came up with a cool experiment to try to create a moon (see below). Once I envisioned some moons, my brain tossed out a chrome unicorn image to go with it.
Photoshop 3, Kai's Power Tools 2, VistaPro 3D, Ray Dream Designer 4, Paint Shop Pro
MOONS:
The moons are my very successful experiment. First,
in Paint Shop Pro, I created 6 KPT Texture images. Then I painted some
big black circles on a grey background, and edged them with white and blurred.
That was to be the crater bump map for the moons (you can see it best
on the light purple moons).
In RDD, I just created a simple sphere. The main
shader has one of the KPT textures for the colour, the crater image for the
bump map, and a glow of about 5-15%. RDD4's glow channel gives an object
it's own light, but that light isn't cast on anything. For example,
an LED in a dark room. I also set the highlight and shininess channel
to moderate levels.
To eclipse the dark side of the moon, I used the paint
shape thingy to create a circular shape. For that shader, I set the
colour to value 0, as well as the highlights, shininess, and glow. This
created the deep black.
The other moons are duplicates of the first, with different
KPT textures, and resized.
SPACE:
This image was created in Photoshop. I used my
usual space-creating method (see "Mother Earth/Crucifixion
of a Planet"). For the nebulous cloud stuff, I used my Wild Abstract
Background colours method (see "NIN
Wallpaper"). I put the colourful clouds in their own channel, then
fiddled with the hard/soft light, transparency, and layer options so parts
of the clouds faded out, while the strong pieces became the nebulous cloudy
things. This method also has the benefit of imparting some various
colours to the stars, which were an otherwise uniform white.
I used that image as a backdrop in RDD, then rendered
only the moons as a PCX.
LANDSCAPE:
This was created in VistaPro, obviously. I used
a randomly-generated landscape, and a custom colour palette to get the weird
purple-reddish rocks and purple ocean. I placed the light at an angle
that would match the lighting of the moons.
I left the sky blank when rendering, and then used 'Shop
to paste the moon-space scape behind the landscape. Lots of fiddling
with scale and placement, blah blah blah.
HEAD:
This is a relatively simple shape (the silhouette of
the head), extruded along a slightly curved path. I didn't even draw
it in Corel first. :) I did have a heck of a time getting both
the nose and eye holes to clip the main curve right. Finally, using
only 3 nodes for each, and drawing them in the same orientation as the head
(clockwise), they clipped the proper holes. In the final stages, I
tweaked the envelope across the top of the head to make the brow area bulge
out slightly. This was in effort to make the flat reflection of the
head more interesting. (No, it didn't do much.) Note: I
just changed the head by using the rubber stamp to copy the shoulder.
Looks MUCH better!
The nostrils have a glowing red cylinder inside the head cavity.
The eyes are two squashed spheres, with a blue glow.
The horn is a rounded rectangle that I twisted through it's
extrusion. It has a shiny gold finish.
NECK:
Each section of the neck is a modified version of the
original, which is an inverted tear-shape extruded on a slightly curved path.
I added envelopes: the side envelope imparts an arc to the top
of the piece, and the bottom envelope makes the piece expand from front to
back, so that each piece tucks into the one before it.
When working with envelopes, remember to work from the
top of the hierarchy to the bottom. If you want a free envelope on
one side and a symmetrical in plane envelope on the other, do the symmetrical
one first. Once you change to free, the symmetry links are lost. And
don't even change from free to symmetrical! Zap, you'll symmetrical-ize
your complicated free envelope that you just spent an hour fixing.
The mane was much easier than assembling the neck pieces.
This is a silhouette with a small extrusion. I also added a pointed
envelope to the top to give it, well, a point. This shape is duplicated,
sized, rotated, etc, for each neck piece.
BODY:
This started out as a big cylinder, but the flat end gave me a lousy reflection, much like the head. Too boring! So I created a Wizard extrusion of a circle, and copied the measurements of the cylinder to it. Then I used the envelope to round the ends. With the align command, I easily replaced the old body with the new.
The shaders for all these pieces (except those mentioned above) are a modified silver: very reflective and a little violet in colour. I created a reflection map for these items in 'Shop. I used a slice of the same space image, and added a purple sea with KPT's textures. I also created a yellow/orange glowing sunset which was cool, though you can't see it in the reflections. I also turned the image and gave it a wavy horizon with 'Shop's Shear filter, in an effort to get rid of that ridiculous flat horizon reflection on the unicorn's nose. Yes, I gave up.
I set the production frame (the camera viewfinder) to the same size as the moon/landscape image I had created, then used that as the backdrop for rendering. I experimented with some of RDD4's cloudy fog, but it only has horizontal limits. Now, if they combined cloudy fog with distance fog....
This was created in 'Shop. I tried doing a 3d Chromium
frame in RDD, but the fool thing wouldn't keep the cross section the same
size during the square extrusion path. I expanded the canvas then,
using another layer just in case I ruined anything (SOP for me), I added
noise to the white area and motion blurred to get streaks. The text
was just typed in, nothing fancy. It's that Revue font.
I used rectangular selections in an empty channel to create
the rounded frame pieces. (The horizontal pieces are plain rectangles,
but for the side rectangles, I judiciously chopped 45% ends on 'em.) This
wasn't anything fancy, either, just the 'Shop gradient tool from white to
black, and in darken mode, so I could cross gradients to get the
black-white-black.
I copied and pasted this rounded frame to a greyscale image
to use as a displacement map for the flat text and streaks of the frame.
These items were to appear as if being viewed through rounded glass.
This did not work out well. I changed the top text so it was
less distorted: I put it on a new layer, then skewed the top and bottom
separately. I also pasted a copy of the greyscale frame to another
layer and colourized it. I used hard light to create the rounded purple
glass.
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