Wednesday, June 29, 2011

In the mood for fantasy




Am in a fantasy mood today, so my imagination is drifting in that direction. He's "one of them rangers," come into the pub for a pint of old ale, and a warm hearth beside which to smoke a pipe or three. No reason ... just CG doodling.

That's the Yannis skin map, but not the Yannis face. I wanted to see what the skinmap would look like, wrapped around one of my own faces -- and it's actually pretty good. I like this character.

He's wearing the Elven Prince hair, and the Supreme Armor shirt (by Powerage), but I changed out the diffuse, opacity and displacement maps to make it look very different...

And the snowy owl is so cute. I got the prop from Content Paradise months and months ago ... they were having a sale at the time, and I got a nice swag of stuff, including the Elven trading ship you saw a few weeks ago. The bird is really lovely -- adds just the piquancy the character needed. Aragorn might have had a hawk or a falcon. Can anyone remember back as far as the 1984 fantasy, Ladyhawke? I looooved that movie. Rutger Hauer's best, I think.

The set is one tiny corner of Merlin's Medieval Tavern. The set is a whole building, it's so huge, you could stage a whole Gothic story in it ... with a lightning storm raging on the haunted moor outside, and one of the people sheltering inside is The Killer, and has a reason to kill just about everyone else! Agatha Christie meets JRR Tolkien. What a thought.

What I want to know is, where did June go? The last time I looked, it was May! Must take an hour or two off tomorrow, get out in the fresh air, under the blue sky, while it lasts. It's the middle of winter here now, and even downunder it's inclined to be gray and drizzly between now and September...

Jade, 29 June