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While trying to think of an animal model I had to put in my Golden Pear snow scene, I forgot all about the baby polar bear! So I thought of a little scene with a little baby polar bear and a really BIG musk ox. (And it is a polar bear, not a seal!)
Poser 4, Ray Dream Designer/Studio 5, Vue d'Esprit 3, PhotoShop 4, Kai's Power Tools 3, Blade Pro
Musk Ox figure for Poser by
Debra
Baby Polar Bear figure for Poser
by Dedicated Digital
A default Vue sky, some Vue terrains. I mixed the mountain snow with some purple-coloured slate like rock, because I wanted purple mountains, not gray-green ones. The foreground terrain is big and flattened, with a few stones for lumps in the snow. I also painstakingly lined up and drew a Bugs Bunny style mole tunnel in the foreground, where the polar bear cub walked through under the snow. It's not in this shot, which is probably a good thing. ;) I used another tiny terrain for the mound where the cub pops up.
I did not have any luck with my first shot at doing a Vue scene with camera focal length and depth of field... so I just ran the blur brush over the background mountains in 'Shop. MUCH faster!
I posed them in a scene together in poser. I changed
the joint parameters on each; I fixed the musk ox's head twist so it wouldn't
deform the ears and horns, and I put spherical blend zones on the bear's
haunches, to get him to sit better. (You can't see it in this shot,
but at least I have it for the future!) Each is exported as an obj.
The polar bear took a detour to Ray Dream, where I built
a pile of snow on his head, and a snow cup around him, so I could boolean
subtract it from a Vue terrain to get him to sit in a hole. Oh, and
his tongue.
If you uncheck "resize and center" imported objects in Vue's options, you can import each figure and they will retain their relative size and positioning. I tried exporting two poser figures as one obj, but it choked Vue. I'm not sure why, maybe it has to do with the grouping (and or naming of the body parts being the same in each figure?).
This texture map for the musk ox has been sized up and
sharpened a lot for it's close-up. The polar bear cub's texture map
is it's default. His tongue has a coral to white noise shader, and
the snow parts have snow, naturally.
I took the snow cup out of the polar bear group and
subtracted it from the terrain. Worked great!
There wasn't going to be a whole lotta this... but the image needed work! The piece of snow on the cub's head wasn't looking right. I copied and pasted it to a new layer to break off some chunks and make them fall. I also put some more duplicate chunks over the cub's back and side. Thanks for the tip, Maz!
I put some KPT hue protected noise on a duplicate of the cub and brushed out the fur with my furry brushes. I also selected and duplicated the ox to smear out her hair, using furry and hairy brushes. I also sharpened these up a lot, to make them look coarser. I repainted her eye to look at the cub. And also, I painted on some steam breath with the airbrush, eraser and smear tool.
The text is Zaph Chancery (I think). I set it in a pale blue from the background, perspective-ized it with the Layer Free Transform, and ran some ripple filters on it, to get it to sorta lay back in the snow.
The frame is made with Blade Pro... I forget what setting. I turned down the saturation to get charcoal greys and lose the colour that came with it.
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