(Have blown off way too much time dealing with a difficult, pig-headed client who seems determined to make me the villain if I don't give him his own way in a situation where he's clearly dead wrong. How do you deal with such people? Have tried being polite, diplomatic and courteous!! Seems I'm just a villain, and a moron to boot. Well ... damn. And this, folks, is what happened to my art time today.)
Anyway -- I did get the time necessary to do the TLC on these renders. I could have done the whole thing with 3D model plants, but by the time I got about halfway there the computer wouldn't handle any more, not even the 2D/3D kind, which are actually 2D images artfully stacked in the background to save RAM. So ... compromise
Basically, I used Photoshop brushes, in GIMP, to paint ferns, grasses, little plants, into the "seams," where you could see where the joins were! The character is sitting on a plane, not in the grass, and you had a hard line, like the edge or a ruler. This is the absolutely perfect use for painting in GIMP, and as long as you're just doing a painting, not an animation, you'll get away with it.
But I gotta tell you, all this gives you a new perspective on the big CGI movies! Look at the forests in Avatar ...!
Can you even imagine the computer power it took to do that stuff, and have Jake in among the little grasses and plant and tiny animals, and ...! These shots of mine have about six trees, maybe ten bushes, a ground plane with texture, a JPG in the background -- and a Quadcore with 4GB of RAM and a Gig on the GeForce card gets the herkie-jerkies. Ye gods, what are they using to render movies like Avatar?! Drool, drool...
Oh -- quickly, before I have to dive back to work: that's the JM Falcon skinmap, the Daniel hair by Neftis set to black; the Troglodyte horns resized an fitted to M4, and nice subtle displacement added. The face ... is one of mine. He's a rare beauty, isn't he?! The trees are props from Merlin and DM; the bushes are PNature props, and all the little grasses and herbs and whatnot, were painted using the DesignFera plants Photoshop brush set. Result: gorgeous!
I'll try again tomorrow to get the other artwork up to the Exotic blog.
Jade, 13 November
NOTE: posted using MK's logon because this afternoon, I cannot connect -- how weird is that?
