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First Place Winner of the Fantastic Animals Contest at Ripple-Effect Online
I was TRYING to do a simple image of the eagle flying past an early morning sun and catching volumetric light rays through its feathers. Vue 4 was not cooperating, so I decided to try messing with the replicate command to make a squadron of cybernetic silverhawks.
Vue d'Esprit 4, Photoshop 4
This is fairly simple, really. I nabbed the atmosphere
"Airshow." The ground plane has a 'suburban' proceedural texture on
it. The beauty of the city is... it is NOT modelled at all! Nope,
no messing in Max (or Rhino or Lightwave or Ray Dream or anything) to get
all those cool futuristic curves, and all those killer panes of glass.
Nope, those suckers are a terrain! A terrain with a function
applied to it: one of those square criss-cross kinda functions. The
city is actually made of two such functionized terrains, slightly offset.
One has shorter buildings with a warm pink kinda brick building material
(complete with proceedural windows) and one tall terrain with the mirrored
skyscraper material. Yes, all those fantastic windows are proceedured
right onto the terrain. I'm impressed, at least ;)
The city group is replicated and duplicated into a 3x3
array, for a bigger city.
The explosions are made of rocks. The lower rock bits have a glowing lava-ish Vue material, mixed in the upper portions with a modified smoke/sand/dust material. Above that are more smoothed rocks with more smoke.
This is the DAZ eagle, which is included as a Vue vob
static object. (Actually, the pieces are still separate, so you can
tweak the pose slightly, but it is not fully poseable.) I decided to
try for a silver metallic material, with some seams/rivets kinda construction.
So I nabbed the... one of the mixed space-ship kinda materials Vue
has. I was just going to swipe the bump map and throw it on the
silver material, but I thought, ah what the heck? How about some glowing
red streaks through the silver?
So I copied the 'metal' parts' bump/filter, loaded the
silver material and placed those on it. I edited the red bits to glow
just a little, then tweaked the mixer function to make the red lines a bit
more thin and sparse.
I messed with the new replicat function (sorta like scatter, but you control the exact placements), to get the eagle copied and positioned/rotated into the swooping squadron. The lasers are two cylinders, made very long and very very thin. I had them glowing, but the glow was too overpowering, so instead they just use the standard 500% ambient light kind of 'glow.'
The hardest part was getting a good composition and positioning for the squadron (and camera!). I set the camera to 8mm lens for a wide view effect. I got it into a pretty good angle on the squadron, then moved both the squadron and camera into place in the city. Then it turns out the city was too small (or figures too large....) so I shrank the birds and camera. Which for some odd reason kept setting the camera back to 16mm lens, but I put it back on 8.
It didn't need much. I painted a red glow on the eyes (well, a subdued red glow). Smeared the tip of the one laser where it didn't meet the bird's head properly. Oh, I made a copy of the birds and did a motion blur on them, on a new layer. I erased most of it but the trailing edges, and used an overlay composite. Then I selected the depth mask and did a little bit of gaussian blur for depth of field. Oh, and I did a little smearing in the distant explosion's smoke, where it meets the glow (the line was too straight between them).
The text is Pastor of Muppets font. It has a KPT3 blue-silver gradient on it.
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