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He may be small and puny and a slow developer now, but just wait 'til he's fully grown!
Poser 4, Vue d'Esprit 3, PhotoShop 4, Blade Pro, Ray Dream Designer/Studio 5
Baby Dragon figure for Poser by
Debra
Swan figure for Poser by me (available
at PoserWorld)
Nest Prop by Zygote
There's a lily-pad dotted lake and a distant vista with distant
trees... really! But I wanted a close-up family scene, so the nest
and a buncha reeds make up most of the background. There's also a dry
bush behind the baby dragon; I didn't want all the green to wash him
out.
The sky is a typical Vue preset, but I did move the sun, and
I did kill the all-over ambience and put in a greenish fill light on the
left. So I am getting better. A little!
I posed them in a scene together in poser. Then
I exported the Mom, the Dad, the baby dragon, as one obj each, and the three
cygnets as a whole group. I wasn't going to get fancy with the materials,
so I didn't change the materials into groups in UVMapper, as I sometimes
like to do.
With the "resize and center" imported objects preference turned
off, they all arrived in place. I then imported the nest and
positioned/sized it in Vue.
I hand-applied the textures to each figure (and figure
group) in Vue. If you want Vue to do it automatically, you have to
export the objs to the same directory where the textures are, or else edit
the mtl file to point to the directory where the textures are acually located.
I wasn't going to do anything fancy (like make the eyes bright and
shiny, or glowing, or make any pieces transparent), so I didn't bother with
that; I just grabbed the whole figure and slapped one texture on it.
I *did* change some pieces, however. I gave the cygnets
a noise bump, but only on their feathers. I had to use a copy of their
material, sans bump, on their beaks, eyes, feet, etc. (Note: I didn't
export all the cygnets' feet. Or all their wings. I only exported
body parts that were visible, to save some space.)
I also changed the baby dragon's textures. The head was
getting some kind of weird shadow on it, so I turned up it's ambient setting.
I set the wings to 15% transparent. Then I went back and turned
them all to have colour reflection, for metallic highlights.
The egg was whipped up in RDD. It's a freeform with a polygon cross section of 16 sides (not a circle, I let RDD do all the in-between dots for me!), and a symmetrical envelope. I made it that way, because I've discovered that freeform objects come out of RDD with perfectly square, unwarped UV maps. Very handy, because to break the egg, I just painted a black and white image with a jaggy line down the middle; white on one side and black on the other. I used that as a transparency map. There are two copies of the egg, with the trans map inverted on one.
There are two small fill lights, one by the baby dragon, and one in the eggshell, to keep the white from being shadowed and greyed out.
Some of the nest sticks came out with white or odd stripes
on them, although I'm sure the map was on right way 'round. I smeared
and painted those with wood colour, and rubber stamped on some of the thinner
thatch.
The Dad (he's the standing one) had a gap in his wing
where the two sections' feathers split, so I cloned one into there.
The cygnets' noise bump map ended up as huge squares
on them, so I probably shouldn't have bothered (or should have double-checked
the scale!). On a new layer, I sprayed some white and dark grey with
a dissolve airbrush, then used the smear tool with my furry brushes (and
sample merging) to fluff them out.
The adults' feathers are also smeared and
smoothed.
I also did some airbrushing of highlights on the beaks,
and eyes. I made the baby dragon's eyes brighter and yellower, with
blacker pupils.
The frame is some Blade Pro random thing. The text is Zapf Something.
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