 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
I was wondering how the eye sockets would look on my Dragon Factory figures... most actually have holes in the head instead of eye sockets. Which is a good thing, it turns out the eye sockets are a pain in the butt, while using the inner eyelids for a gaping socket works fine. Anyway, to test the eye-socket theory, I thought I would make a dragon with one eye... and, of course, he would need a big scar... and how about a broken horn, like Larry Elmore makes on some of his dragons?
Poser 4, Dragon Factory, Photoshop 4, Painter 3D
This is the Square Head from Dragon Factory (my personal
commercial project for Poser --
click here for info if you
haven't seen it yet). It only has some minor sculptural morphs
to shape and position the nostrils. It has the universal Upper/Lower
teeth and the forked tongue; and the horn base with the Horn 2 style horns.
To make him look meaner, he has a bunch of expression
morphs: Brow knitting, snarling, front lip lifting, nose wrinkling, muzzle
wrinkling, etc etc. The cool thing about Dragon Factory is you can
make symmetrical expressions, then tweak the left and right sides individually.
Here, the left side expressions are turned up, so he is snarling more
on the scarred side.
He doesn't actually have a body, just the extra neck.
It is decorated with groups of serrated spines, and the 3-spined fins
down the sides.
The textures are really quickies. I hand-painted
the scalar bump map on the head, by following the mesh lines. After
panting them with a soft brush, I duplicated the layer and did a blur and
minimum filter on it to get a greyscale deal, with the darker lines preserved
with the original layer. Everything was flattened, and the Levels adjusted
to limit the output to a light grey rather than full white. I was saving
full white for the scar to be overlain on the scales.
The scar is drawn in Painter 3D, just using a pencil
on a new texture map. Then I saved it and composited it with the bump
map I had painted. I did some trickery with the scar, embossing it
and other stuff.
The colour is basically some airbrushed burnt orangy
kinda colours. The scar didn't stand out enough as a bump, so I loaded
it into the colour map and lightened/whitened (and kinda pinkened) the colour
of the scar tissue.
The neck is done pretty much the same... in fact, I copied
and pasted a chunk of the head texture to the neck. The bump is also
copied and pasted, and the belly scale bump (which you can't see here) was
made with the gradient tool. I selected the neck area, and made a short
gradient from black to white near the top. Then I selected the large,
leftover white area with the magic wand and did another short gradient...
and kept doing that down the line, til the neck was filled in.
The serrated spines have a custom gradient file, and
the fin things have a copied, pasted and stretched piece of the head skin
on them. Well, you can't say they're not colour-coordinated! Oh, and
the horns I think are a plain ivory colour, but the left one has the horn
break transparency map on it.
I used the Face Cam in poser to get the angle on the head I wanted (after fixing the focal length so it isn't fish-eyed). Then stuck the head on the neck and got everything into place. The tongue is actually sticking very far out of the mouth, but you can't tell at this angle.
I did three renders. One with the bump map normal
(which looked right on the head and scar, but not the brows), one with the
bump inverted -- and the lights moved about a tad (well, I thought I'd try
Anton's mixing technique while I was at it, here), and one with the depth
cueing on, which made everything dark and dull.
I opened the three renders in 'Shop, and then copied and pasted them all into one file. Then I messed with the layer compositing. Um... I can't remember exactly what I did. I do know I erased part of the original render to show the second render on the brows and down on the jaw where the shadows came out better the second time around. I think I also erased out the head area of the distance render. Well, the fancy luminosity and burning and whatnots just didn't cut it.
I fiddled with the broken horn edge, because the render
angle and all made it come out a tad weird. And it didn't show the
hollow inside of the horn.
I airbrushed some black over the right side of the face
to put that more in shadow and make the yellow glaring eye stronger.
The scar was looking kinda flat near the front, so I
painted it to overlap itself. I also chilled the extra dark line it
had underneath it. Lastly, I never got around to painting a bump on
the horn base map... So I creatively cloned a bit of the scar line onto that
piece.
I decided I wanted to try some drooly saliva strings in the mouth, it was looking kinda dry and boring and dead. I scribbled on some lines with a pale gray paintbrush (on a new layer, of course!), then touched it up with some white. Then I hit it a couple of times with the plastic wrap filter. Changed the layer to hard light, and it glistened up rather nicely. I used the smear tool to string out some of the highlights even more.
Nothing fancy for the frame/name this time. Just some Cloister Black (I think) text in dark red, with faded edges.
copyright: ©2000 All rights reserved. You may download this image for viewing on your computer. You may NOT print it, upload it anywhere, use it for a commercial or non-commercial illustration or companion piece, place it (or a link to it) on your web page, without requesting and obtaining PRIOR permission from the artist. For contact details, click here.
price list: This image is not available as a print.