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I decided to make a picture to show off my new cloven hooves morph for the Poser horse.
Ray Dream Designer/Studio 5, MetaCreations Poser 3, Fractal Design Painter 5, Adobe Photoshop 4, Bryce 2
This is the Poser horse, with the cloven hooves morph (created by me, and available at PoserWorld.) I also shrank and tapered the feet and legs for a more unicorn-y body. The open mouth, nostril flare, lip curl, and the mouthparts for the horse are also all done by me and also available at PoserWorld (under Misc section 1). Oh, and the nice head definition morph is by Lyne! Hopefully, she will make this available soon. I put the target on, turned the dial to 1 and said, Wow! This is starting to look like a real horse's head! (Gotta do something with that sleepy eye, though.)
The horn is one I created in Ray Dream ages ago. There is no texture, this is just the primer of the horse set up as white with bluish shadows. The hooves and horn are a golden yellow colour.
I threw this together in Bryce. I tossed out a terrain and stretched it on the X and Z axes only, then threw on the storybook fantasyland shader. Put some clouds in the sky. The background foliage is another 'trick' shader with transparency, and it is on a hugely stretched rock, a lesser stretched rock, and a terrain object, to make a background forest. In the far background is another terrain with some default rock texture on it, and its twin. They are stretched and positioned wherever they look good.
The log is a symmetrical lattice. Okay, I admit, I don't get symmetrical lattice object creation. In fact, I'm pretty terrible at drawing things in the Terrain Editor at all! My stuff always turns out lumpy and unsmooth. ::sigh:: This lattice is a bent trunk, and two lesser branches (um, one of which got changed into a rock in post production.) By the way, it doesn't look nearly that cool in Bryce, that's Photosop working on it there. I tried using a decent bark shader.... it just turned out dotty, and the bottom was all flat brown. Ugh.
BACKGROUND:
So with background in hand, I went to FDP. I read how you can paint on a transparent floater, so I figured I'd doctor up the Brycescape with some image hose work. Well, apparently, the trick of using the Plug-in/Transparent Layer method with the image hose doesn't work. ::SIGH:: I put in some small forest in the background, grass in the front, and some branch clumps from the Garden Hose CD on the background trees. Then I dared to copy and paste the top half of the picture as a floater to put on some apple blossoms and leaves in the upper corners. But I don't know what happened to THAT, because when I opened the picture in 'Shop, that layer was blank.
But anyway.... Opened the background and the unicorn
render from Poser. Loaded the handy Poser figure channel to select,
copy and paste the unicorn onto it's background. Then I positioned
the unicorn, and airbrushed a shadow on a new layer under it, over the log.
The log sucked, as I may have mentioned, and you can't
imagine how bad. I used the magic wand to select the log (it did not
select between the grass very well) and tried some artistic stuff on it.
I put on a.... um... some kinda diagonal brushy stroke things, and
they looked cool. They especially evened out the colouring of the fallen
tree, which was divided between the light upper half and the brown lower
half. Then I put Lighting Effects on it. One of my favorites!
The lower branch of the log was cut up by grass, so I
didn't bother selecting it for all this filter work. I did, however,
select it with the magic wand, and de-saturate it to make a rock.
Airbrushed on some dark and light grey, and some blue, and dissolve
airbrushed some black dots on it. De-selected and airbrushed some shadows
over that whole area.
Under the left side of the log, some flat green "storybook forest" texture was left over. I zoomed in and selected with the magic wand in between the blades of grass. (Surprisingly, it worked well, despite the fact that everything was green!) I put in some noise and used a vertical motion blur to create grass blades. This didn't work so great, so I made a new layer and dissolve-airbrushed some various greens and browns on top, then motion blurred THEM. This seems to work a lot better.
Finally, for some depth of field, I created a new channel with a white to black fountain fill, and then Gaussian blurred the top/back half of the picture slightly.
Oh.... and I don't want to spoil it for you, but if you look closely at mid right, the unicorn is being menaced by some vicious pixels. I painted them in when I put on my name, using the paintbrush and some basic colours. They started out smaller, but I sized them up a bit.
UNICORN:
The mane, tail, beard and ankle tufts are a bit of
post-production wizardry. I created a new empty layer and used the
smear tool with the sample merged turned on. This will smear the underlying
image up into your new layer. (See also: "Kai's Power
Horses.") This was augmented by a bit of paint brushing. And
here's a fun tip from Lyne: use the custom brush shape that looks like
a little paint splatter to smear out hair and fur in big locks. (That
brush is in the extra brush library that comes with 'Shop. I just add
that library to my regular brushes, so I have all of them all the time.)
After all that was done, I put the Lighting Effect on
the hairy layer to try to get some dimensionality in it. It looked
terrible! But I used the Fade Filter thing (gotta love it!) to put
it in darken mode and make it less blatant.
The leaping unicorn has a motion blur applied to it, or rather to a copy of it. I used a new channel to paint out a fuzzy area around the rearward facing areas of the unicorn, then loaded that as a selection. I made a big motion blur, then copied it to a new layer, to try it out on top of the original unicorn. That was a bit much, but I did combine the two motion blur layers to strengthen the effect somewhat.
I resisted using a big lens flare on the horn (aren't you happy?), but I did paint on some white glints with one of those 'Shop extra brushes.
TEXT:
This is a no-brainer. Make the background colour dark green, enlarge the canvas on the bottom, pick a lighter green, make the text.... And no, I haven't the foggiest what the name of that font is.
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