 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
I wanted to make a fish tank scene, but was working on a campfire.... Well, wouldn't a fishie like some toasted marshmallows?
Vue d'Esprit 3, Adobe Photoshop, Flaming Pear's Blade Pro
Fish from Zygote
Masked Butterfly fish texture by
Mitch
Campfire by Nerd
The Zygote angel fish (actually a diskusfish, according to experts) comes with Vue 3 as well as Poser 3/4, so I didn't even have to export the obj. I even posed it in Vue; you can change the body parts' rotation center, so I put the fin centers up at the joint and rotated them down to hold the stick. The same texture map can be used on the obj in Vue, if you flip it (or use the mirror Y control and offset the Y control the same number of Y pixels). I did grab the fins and bump up their transparency slightly.
The marshmallow is a cylinder... wish Vue would let you edit the smoothing on the primitives. It had the default off-white shader, but I mixed it with a quickie toasted marshmallow texture along the low altitudes. The stick is a dead tree. I was lucky, I wanted a relatively straight, branchless tree and got one right away. Can Vue read your mind...?
I imported the campfire to work on for another scene.
The logs have a black and red gradient on a cracked earth type of function
to simulate burnt log embers. The soot pile on the bottom (there is
one) had my soot material I swiped off my sooty bricks material.
The flames were the hardest. I made a fuzzy additive
flame shader, but it wasn't working well on these shapes. Finally I
ditched the fuzzy and the additive and tried to use only full ambient light,
zero direct light. It made the material a really dark, dull orange.
Ugh! The solution? Type IN the Ambient percent box.
These babies are set to 500% ambient light. (The flame group
is duplicated and rotated 3 times for layering.)
The fishbowl is an assemblage of primitives. Spheres with cubes to chop the tops, torii for the rim and bottom. I had a second glass sphere also cutting out the bowl, but the double refraction was making things insane. I also lowered the refraction rates of the glass and water used here, just so the fish wasn't hugely distorted. I added some light blue murk factor to the water, just a tad. Otherwise, it is plain water.
The gravel is a terrain that was peaked, gritted and gravelled, and clipped to a rough circle, then tucked into the bottom of the bowl. It has that 'surprise easter egg' material on it, without the egg.
Thank goodness for 3D apps that come with interior scenes. This is the waiting room scene. I was tempted to put the fish bowl in it, but said ferget it! I opened the scene, rendered it at 320 x 240, then used the render on a giant cube as the background. (Hey, at least I didn't post-render composite!) The hugely complex scene with a buncha lights, furniture, plants, etc took a whopping 12 minutes to render. (Did I mention Vue is FAST?)
Face mapping put the image on the cube correctly... except
for some reason, Vue likes to apply the bitmaps to the objects sideways...
Oh, and the 6000' cube had the picture tiled on it about 300 times. I
don't know how you tell Vue not to tile things. Luckily, setting the
material scale to 600 worked okay. (I also rotated the material in
its Effects tab. This seems to mess up all but the 'front' face,
though.)
I duplicated this cube and put it behind the camera,
to also give the bowl something to reflect. I made the sky off-white
for a ceiling instead of blue. The water is still blue at the top,
that might be it's murkyness setting.
The table is a giant cylinder. The wood grain I finally got to NOT look hugely psychadelic by two wood grain functions in one material, and adjusting the size of the material on the object. Wood shaders still need work, though.
The fishbowl scene took half an hour to render and forever to anti-alias. I saved the colour channel and z-buffer, and used the latter to blur up the background a bit for a depth of field effect. (A fake one, but much faster.) I made a nice Blade Pro plexiglass frame around the edge, and got some decent looking text effects with the Blade Pro recessed filter. The text is Zapf Chancery, or something. A little Brightness/Contrast and Layer Luminosity, and it looks carved into the wood background. (Which is technically plexiglass, but hey....)
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 currently available as a print.