Irony

"Irony"



                      Irony

   The tides of sin draw tighter and brighter,
   The hours become heavier and weighted,
   And the shadows smile, dark and wild.
   This is when hope and desire collapse,
   The arc of the dream descends into despair,
   When innocent lovers dance
   Like angels on fire.
   This is when the night comes down,
   A hammer on an anvil,
   And the only absolution accepted
   Is a legacy of brutality.
   A single note rings on and on and on.

 				-- J. O'Barr

The Idea:

I just bought the Zygote Eagle and was trying out Lyne's Raven morphs, and thought I just had to put the raven on a skull... Then I thought I would do a still life, and that a scroll would be nice. I selected a poem from J. O'Barr's "The Crow" graphic novel for the text.

Tools:

Poser 4, Ray Dream Designer/Studio 5, Vue d'Esprit 3, Adobe Photoshop 4, CorelDraw 5

Raven: Zygote Eagle with morphs and texture map by Lyne.
Skull: Zygote Neanderthal Skull with morphs by Zakiyah.
Ironwork Fleurs: Kate the Shrew (for download at Renderosity.)
Rose and Texture: Robin Wood.
Scarab: Baumgarten Enterprises.
Desktop: swiped from Baumgarten's Bookshelf model.

suggestions for improvement of the original version: the Gallery Talk crew at Poser Forum Online, and the Vue Crew at Renderosity. Thanks guys!

Raven & Skull:

This is the eagle with Lyne's morphs on it, as I mentioned. It is in the eagle's defensive pose, tweaked slightly. The skull was a neanderthal skull from Zygote's free goodie of the week, and it has a lovely homo sapiens morph by Zakiyah. This skull is much more detailed than those that come with the Poser figures.

I placed the bird on the skull in Poser, then exported both separately as OBJ files for importation into Vue. The raven sports its texture by Lyne, both as a colour map and a bump map. I painted the skull texture in 'Shop and Painter 3D (for the skull plate lines, which you can't see in this image), and gave it a bit of a paper texture as well.

Once in Vue, I found the bird wasn't facing quite the way I wanted it, so I changed it's pivot point to inside the skull, and rotated it forward a bit.

Scenery:

DESKTOP:

Originally, I had a bookcase in the background, with nice wood panelling, and I went through all the book materials and gave them nice gold-lined leather bindings -- just a quickie mix in the Vue materials editor, but they came out very nicely. I had to scrap that idea, because it wasn't working so well, and I replaced the bookshelf with a window and drape made in Ray Dream.
But meanwhile, I popped the top off the bookshelf and copied the beveled edge to the fourth side to make my desktop. It sports a texture made with the maple jpg image included with Vue, rather than my lame attempt to make woodgrain with the procedural textures. In the second composition, I added a black rubber cube under the desktop for the, er, desk.

SCROLL:

I made this in RDD, using the freeform modeller. It's a line made up of several straight segments, extruded around a curve and along a flat to make the curl. I exported this as an obj. When stuff comes out of the FFM in RDD, it has a flat rectangular uvmapping scheme on it. This way, I could make the texture without worrying about it getting distorted on the rolled up part. Cool!

The text was made in Corel Draw, using the Morpheus font. I also made a gilded drop-cap deal, with the Corel clip art flying crow, and a couple of rectangles.
I exported the text as a TIF and loaded it into 'Shop. I copied it to its own layer, rotated sideways, to fit onto the scroll's UV rectangle. I used some parchment-coloured clouds for colour, and a displacement map of crumpled paper to make it wrinkly. I also airbrushed on some tears and wrinkles, and made a trans map for edge tears on a separate layer. I exported the trans map and the colour map separately, then applied them in Vue. I also added a bump channel in Vue, a sorta meandering cracks kinda thing. I may have over done it a bit much! But some of the shadows look like ink spilled on the page, so... it's interesting, anyway.

QUILL & INK:

These are also made in RDD. The quill shaft is a freeform extrusion, and the feather barbels (or whatever they're called) were extruded flat in the Mesh Form Modeller. I used UVMapper to give me a flat front and back texture template, then painted the black feather and pale shaft, as well as a trans map for some edge imperfections (they didn't really come out in the pic.) The shaft came out too dark, so I ended up giving it a regular Vue shader, of pale grey.

The ink bottle was also a quickie job in RDD, and extruded hexagon, Symmetrically Enveloped into shape. It has a Vue thick glass shader, mixed with an ink shader at low altitudes (there isn't actually any ink in the bottle).

CANDLE & CANDLESTICK:

I made the candle a while back for "A Deadly Drink." The candlestick is new, also another quickie RDD free form model with Symmetrical envelope.

The candle has an attempt at a wax Vue shader... I can't quite get the translucent ambience of wax. The candlestick has the Vue dirty silver material on it. The candle flame... well, I tried all sorts of fuzzy/additive/hyper-ambient flame shaders on the sucker, but it just would NOT show up in the render. I painted it on after. The candle grouping also has a bulb light in the wick (actually a tad above the candle flame) as well.

MORTAR & PESTLE:

That's the background thing in the left. It was added to fill up that empty space back there. (Thanks quesswho and TinMan!) I whipped it up pretty quickly in Vue. The mortar is a cylinder with a fat torus subtracted from around it, added to a smushed sphere bottom and small torus lip. The pestle is a cylinder with a tilted sphere handle, and a sphere/cone combo on the bottom.

They started out with the basic clay material, but it was too... orange. I changed it to pale grey, and gave the mortar some ridges... I dunno, as if it were thrown on a wheel?

ROSES:

These are freebies by Robin Wood. I opened the OBJ, then rotated the leaf bit so it was up against the stem, as if the rose were lying on it and getting flattened. Then I made a few copies and positioned them around in a bunch. Robin made the texture, too, though it's a bit dark in the scene to see it very well.

SCARAB:

I wanted a gold bug hiding in the shadow of the skull. Why? I dunno. So I dug out my scarab model from Baument and tossed it in there. It has the Vue brushed gold material with some striations to kinda fake... um, a striated kinda bug carapace deal. Well, anyway, if you were wondering what that thing was over there, it's a bug. :)

WINDOW, DRAPE, MOON

I built the window in RDD's Mesh Modeller. I made the window casement shape, then tried boolean subtracting it from a cube for the wall. Bleah! So I built my own cube with corresponding vertices to attach the frame to. MUCH better!
Then I made the sill, an extruded silhouette. So it didn't chop off abruptly, I also extruded the ends, rotated them to the wall, and shrank them so it has an angled taper. None of which you can see in the picture!
Also not very visible are two iron fleurs Kate made for her Vue ironwork set. These are loaded into the window at the top. The crossbars of the window are simple cylinders scaled to fit.

The drape is made in RDD with the FreeForm modeller. It's a buncha wavy bezier curves extruded down a smoothly swooped path. That nice texture on it is a Vue fabric thing, shrunk down. The material is also set to about 15% transparency.

That is the moon out there, sorta. (Well, if you peer at it, you can see the window, sky and moon through the drape.) I tried the Vue moon... I tried my moon map on it. Man, additive things just do NOT work for me. So I used a regular sphere and slapped the moon map on as a texture and bump, then cranked up the ambient setting. Since there was no ambient light in my scene to speak of, that didn't do much. So I shined a spotlight on the sucker to get it to light up. Then I shined a spotlight into the window to simulate moonlight. I took that light out, though, because it didn't make any difference in the render.

There are also walls and a ceiling (otherwise, my candlestick and ink bottle would be reflecting a flat blue sky). Simple cubes with a grey marble material cut with the brick texture as a bump map.

LIGHTING:

Besides the (absent) moonlight, the moon's light, and the candle flame light... There's a small bulb light in front of the roses to light their blooms up a bit. One to the right near the corner of the desk to fill in the skull's shadow side (and sorta the underside of the raven), one by the raven's head to get that blasted thing to show up... and a bluish one above the raven, so it isn't all flat black. All these had shadow casting turned off, as not to confuse the situation.

Then I went and rendered extremely huge (I was hoping the text on the scroll would come out readable, but...). Not only that, but the fool thing took four hours and some odd to render to disk, across a couple of rendering sessions, AND when I finally opened my masterpiece, the top third was messed up! ARGH! But then I said, hey, I'll just select a render area around the top third and do that, then paste 'em together. So, a few hours later... I open my top piece and find out... it doesn't go all the way across. Plus, it isn't the right size. After trying several MORE times, and trying to render the slice down the left it kept missing... finally, I found out that the render selection box didn't want to change shape or size! I had to render a specifically proportioned piece. GAH!
So, another hour and a half later.... I finally got three pieces to overlap into one picture. WHEW!

Post Production:

The second thing I said after opening the rendered pic (and seeing the big mess at the top!) was, "Why is it so bright?" Maybe I turned up the lights too much... But after experimenting, I saw I could copy the picture to a new layer and multiply it with itself to get a decent likeness of what I wanted. I also de-saturated the copy, because the desk was turning very red!
And here's another cool trick... I selected the dark raven and pasted it to a new layer, and used Exclusion compositing. This made the dark (doubly dark, with the multiplying layer) raven's highlights reappear.

I painted the wick and the melted wax drippings on a new layer. The wax uses sampled colours from the candle, painted on with the paintbrush, and smeared around with the smeary tool. I painted the candle flame on it's own layer, and brightened it up a lot. The candle's glow is also on it's own layer. I tried flattening the image and selecting a feathered area around the flame to brighten, but... it didn't look right. This glow is airbrushed on and is using the Colour Dodge compositing.

The mortar wasn't really hollow... so I selected the top flat bit and darkened it for the interior. I also smeared the pestle handle down into this new fake space.

The gold bug was even more hidden and blended into the desk than it is now, so I just erased the multiplying layer above it to return it to its lighter state. I also touched up the roses and candlestick in this manner.

The scene was still a bit too evenly lit, so I created a new layer and painted some black airbrushing around the edges and by the skull and candle to darken the place up a bit.

Finally, I cloned in part of the drape by the shadow of the raven's foot... the talon isn't really resting exactly on the skull's surface, so there was a space in the shadow... I got rid of it. The foot also got smushed in posing, so I cloned the toes up to the leg to make it look right.

Lastly, I put the Morpheus title and sig on, in a sorta orangy colour. The title is doing a Colour Dodge bit on the front edge of the desk. The sig is doing a 75% opaque Lighten thing, with dark airbrushed variations. Here's a neat trick I learned for text: To get the right size, select a rectangle roughly where you want the text, and the exact height. Copy, then hit File:New. Don't make a new file, but read the pixel height, which will equal your selection you just copied. In the text dialogue, change the letter height from points to pixels, and enter that number. Much faster than eyeballing, guessing, trying, failing, re-trying... or trying to size the layer and blurring it up...!

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