Fantasy horses ... fantasy warriors ... the possibilities have become endless with the addition to the CWRW Pro Pack of textures of the Millennium Horse. In days and weeks to come, you're going to blink as you see some of the images appearing here -- I'm astonished myself, and I'm the one driving the software!
This series of renders is a little special: I wanted to make them look like paintings, and if you click on them and see them larger, you'll see that they do look like paintings rather than photographic 3D images...
The background started out as one of Mel Keegan's Fall 1998 photographs of Stampede Trail in Alaska. To make this into a painting, you apply the median filter -- heavily -- then sharpen the image incrementally till you get the effect you want...
The background becomes a painting ... but what about the foreground?! That's still a 3D model. (This guy started out as the Gil Cronin model, and I worked from there to make something new. I was actually trying for a more "Rogan Dahl" look ... remember "tall, dark and gorgeous" from The Lords of Harbendane?! Well, I didn't get anywhere even close to Rogan, but I did get this guy, and he's a knockout too, so, what the heck?
And then ... the cream on the donut, the icing on the cake, the Bailey's in the coffee ... the horse. Oh, my goodness. This is a type I haven't even heard of before. He's a Grulla, and this is so beautiful! The textures pack also has the most gorgeous Palomino, and blue roans, and -- have a look at these:
The top is a buckskin; the bottom is a Smokey Grulla ... and then to top if off, I spent a couple of minutes tweaking the body morphs to make the mustang (above) over into something a lot like the Fresian breed. It's amazing, dazzling, to work with such images...
I can't wait to do more -- but I got slammed with work today. My art time was seriously chewed into, and everything else went right up in the air. So there's not much reading on today's post ... no time, and I figured everyone would FAR rather have glorious images rather than me rattling away. I'll be back tomorrow with something on the edge of imagination, if I can figure out one or two technical items ... and I think I know how to make it work.
Join me then!
Jade, 5 February
