Imagine my surprise ... installed and opened a new model from one of my favorite designers and -- no textures! They packed the templates for painting a set of textures, and forgot the ready-made textures. I think, actually, what they did was pack the templates in error, when the textures were supposed to have been packed! The model is Elven Rock, by DM, from Renderosity. Normally DM is absolutely trouble-free. The models are great and there isn't a hiccup. They were batting a thousand till this little hickey.
No matter. I've been collecting textures for more than six months now, and making displacement maps to go with them, so I just slapped on a set of my own textures and called it good. And it's a terrific little set. A menhir standing on a big flat rock with some small stones, some plants, some fallen branches. In fact this set will actually break down into its component bits and pieces and add to numerous mix-and-match scenes.
The backdrop is the treeline scene I did the other day, but here I processed it into nighttime. (You do that to an image by flattening the contrast, then taking the gamma way down and un-saturating the colors, then bringing a teeny bit of contrast back up right at the end. You can also add blue to the image, which helps give the illusion of darkness -- but it's a fact that this is just an illusion. Darkness is not actually blue. We just often see it that way because of the way our brains and/or eyes process color.)
The set you see above has the rocks, pebbles and branches form Elven Rock, plus the big ivy thickets from Nike Image's The Path, plus ... well, I want to say the "lamp" from the Pirates of Tortuga set, but the fact is, it's actually a whole honking great street lamp, and what I did was just resize it and bury in in the rock to get rid of the post and footer and make it look like a lantern! I also hand-painted the candle into the lamp housing...
...because the original streetlamp is a gaslamp. There's no candle in it. This is the same lamp I used in the "angel in a bottle" series of renders:
That series of renders is on this blog somewhere, but I've "lost" them! There's almost 500 posts online now, and I confess, I've forgotten half of them. I need to go back and find these, and add a link here. In fact, I need to catalog this blog ... uh huh. Like I'm going to have the time to catalog 500 posts? In which lifetime is this going to happen?!
UPDATE: got it! Angel in a bottle series? No problem. It's called 3D Magicks. Neat!
So anyway, here is the Elven Rock set...
...and it's a great set of "geometries" (meaning, OBJs), but you'll be on your own as per the textures and displacement maps. If you're a newbie, that could be problematical, but you can also cruise this blog (search on the "textures" label) and there's every morsel of info you need about working with textures.
And now, a Jackie Chan movie, which I'm hoping is going to be one of his full-on laugh riots, because that's what I need right now ... gotta see my doctor on the morrow, and I am not looking forward to this. Test results and all that fun stuff.
Jade, 10 February.
***Posted by MK again -- as I've said elsewhere, at the dialup speeds I'm getting, it would take a week to post this. Sigh.
