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I had this image in my head of a white Siberian tiger prowling towards the viewer in a snowy mountainscape, and it was very insistant about being done.
Poser 4, Bryce 2, Painter 3D SE, Kai's Power Tools 3, Flaming Pear's Blade Pro
This is the P3/P4 cat, with the 9Lives morph by
Capsces, and some extra cat morphs
by me (available at PoserWorld)
-- especially the cat shoulder morph. Gotta love it! The geometry
is also bulked up with the scale dials.
Getting a 3D cat to match my 2D mental image is somewhat
of a trick. If I were drawing this, I'd place the head and spine and
tail and legs all in a nice, neat, very pleasing arrangement. You can't
see how I had to kink this cat to get it to look like this. :) Then
finding the right camera angle... oy! This was fun, though: I grabbed
the head and told it to point at the main camera. That way, whenever
I moved the camera, I didn't have to adjust the head to get it to look out
of the picture. Cool!
Also, I imported the background Bryce render, to give
me an idea of what perspectives I might be able to get away with. I
did not render the background in Poser, however.
The stripes are painted on my Big Face Cat UVMap of the Poser Cat, utilizing Painter 3D. I didn't paint on the actual model, but a copy of it with all one group. It's a smart idea to use the lasso on the UV map to select the part you are working on, if it has seams. Otherwise, as you draw across the model, the line will zap across the UV map, drawing on any other portions of anatomy that are in its way. This can be annoying, but with pencil on the model and eraser on the map, I wrangled it into shape.
Other than the stripes, this texture map wasn't very
fancy. Basic light yellow-white over the teeth, pink over the mouth
and paw pads, and powder blue over the eyes and pupils. In Poser, I
had the eyes set to render as powder blue all the way across (colour, highlight,
and ambient), since I knew I would have to paint the eyes in anyway. (The
cat's eyes could use a lot of improvement. Like looking side to side,
and even just totally smoothing out the pupil slit. Yes, one day I'll
do it, if nobody beats me to it.)
The lights started out as the Country setting. I
put a bluish one down on the lower left to reflect off the snow, then white
and grey on the upper and right areas. I turned down all the shadow
intensities to .3 to .5 or so.
This is ol' Bryce 2. Is it just me, or is it a
real pain to try to get the Bryce camera to sit on the ground? Oh
well.
Tossed in a terrain, put this snowy shader on it.
Stretched it sideways, shoved it way in the background... Duplicated,
rotated, built a background mountain range. (And boy, is Bryce quick
on my new Celeron 466! Wohoo!) Made another terrain for the
foreground, squeezed it along the Z axis a bit too much. Well, it looked
good as a mid-ground mountain, so I made a new foreground. Went to
the terrain editor and selected a nice hilly area. Tried to crop to
the small area. It turned into a big lump. Yuck. Smoothed
and lowered it and put it in place in the foreground. It looked good.
It was backwards, but good. Added a copy of the midground mountain
for some variety and the landscape was done.
Grabbed a preset sky... I forget which one. Something with yellow-brown cumulous clouds. Tweaked the sky, put the sun in the upper left (the opposite of the cat's lights, since I was going to flip the landscape). And UGH, Bryce rendered some weird, ugly, flat grey rectangles all over! So I turned the shadows almost all the way off. It looks better that way. Some nice blue haze, and render and done!
I flipped the landscape and pasted the cat into it's
own layer, adjusted size. I touched up the stripes by painting some
new ones in, and dodging randomly here and there. Also fuzzed them
up a tad with the smear tool and my furry
brushes, especially on the chest and cheek ruff area.
The eyes came out almost flat blue, as I had planned.
Magic Wand-ed those and saved the selection. I put a KPT Glass
Lens on each, then painted the pupil on top (around the highlight). I
also had to tone down the saturation of the blue.
For the foreground snow, I made a new layer, and cloned directly from the background to cover the cat's paws. There are two shadow layers as well, one behind the cat, and one in front of the snow cover. They are just airbrushed in freehand. I tried to make tracks in the snow by airbrushing and burning with the furry brushes back there. I also Darkness/Contrasted the shadows to give them a bit more punch.
There are two snow layers. In the background are a couple of swirls I made with the dissolving airbrush and a light blue sampled from the picture. I put a touch of Twirl filter on it, made it look real swirly. The foreground layer has bigger flakes. I made this by using the clone tool again, in dissolve mode. I dissolved some white/blue dots onto a new layer from the left background, then selected that layer and scaled it up. Also tossed a bit of Twirl onto it, since it worked so well the last time. ;)
The final special effect is a puff of breath coming from the tiger's mouth. Boy, was this a pain! I lassoed a rough area where I wanted it, feathered it (which was probably a mistake) and tossed some black and white Clouds in it. Differenced it a buncha times. It did not turn out the way I wanted. (The Difference Clouds can't work at full power in the feathered areas of the selection, so they end up turning almost solid grey. Yuck!) Then I doctored it up. A lot. Oh, I Twirled, I Ocean Rippled, I burned some wiggles into it, I smeared it around, I tried Rendered Lighting to make shadows, I tried umpteen different Layer modes... I did just about everything but erase it and start over! Finally, it ended up looking like this, and it ain't half bad. It's Normal, but about 80% opaque. ::shrug::
Then I cropped the image, expanded the canvas, and stretched the picture into the background (after copying and pasting it to a new layer). That's so I can put on my Blade Pro plexiglass frame without losing any of the picture. Put on my favorite new font, St Charles (wish it had a copyright symbol in it), with a little Blade Pro random setting and tweaking for some nice blue text.
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