And then I had to put it on a a shirt to see what it looked like ... and I created a character around the shirt. He looked a bit like an informant on the run in city bottom, with trouble ... like an Angel packwar? ... not far behind him. So you task a gunship -- Blue Ravens to the rescue, right?So the next thing is to put said gunship in the sky over the city ... and then the figure shot was begging for the same ship seem from below.
The toughest part of doing the shot from the ground, where the character is signaling the ship, is that there is no way that both the figure and the ship can be in focus at the same time. Any photographer will tell you that at that aperture, and that close to the figure, with the ship in the same shot, one of the two is going to be blurred out of focus...
I wish I could tell you I did it in DAZ, but in fact I still have to figure out how to make DAZ do as it's told in that department. What I did was to render the elements for the shot in two layers: the background with ship was rendered first and saved ... then the foreground and figure, with everything else dropped out:
Then they were recombined after the foreground had been blurred to the right degree. You might have to click on this, above, to see the difference it makes. You could combine the two pictures as layers in something like GIMP, with white set to transparent in the top layer ... or you could select all the white pixels, create a mask from them, then invert the mask and cut out the business part of the shot, and just drop it right onto the original image. Six of one, half a dozen of the other, technique-wise...
Then a few zaps with the Bokeh brushes to bring up the gunship in a storm of its own lights, and it was done.
Digital musing ... nice results.
Jade, 12 December
