Stormy weather: an old break-bulk freighter, a big storm running, and DAZ's Michael, lost in the middle of it. Yes, another book cover (two to go, still ... dying to be finished this weekend), but this was the assignment. I'd originally thought the background image would be the difficult part, but it turned out to be dead easy, about twenty minutes fiddling with twelve layers in Photoshop.
An ancient image of an utterly obsolete ship (probably went to the scrapyard thirty year ago. Or forty), plus one of my own stormy skies -- I grab the camera every time the sky does something extraordinary -- and then, with the backdrop done, a lot of work doing everything possible to make the old Michael 4 model render up quite realistically in a raytrace...
This is a new Michael face; he's wearing the Tosca skinmap, which I like a lot ... it has a realism which is very useful; that's the Garry hair, mussed up to make it look like there's a wind teasing it. This isn't a hairstyle I've used very often, because it's short, and my own preference is for longer hair. This time the project demanded short hair, though. Just two lights are set, one gray-green, the other pale gold, both with shadows; and the DOF is turned ON, as usual. (One of the neatest tricks for making a 3D render look a bit more realistic is to knock the "focus" off the virtual camera, just by a few percent. 3D renders, especially raytraces, can look rather obnoxious ... plasticky. There's no such word, I know. But if you whop the focus off a bit, you can get around that to a surprising extent.)
Okay: two more to go, then I can get into my own stuff. I've got this fantasy buzzing around in my head. I've actually written the first chapter of it, and would love to get into rendering characters and scenarios. The thing is, to do a full-on job I'll need to track down a 3D model of a galleon. Yes, you heard, a galleon. Or similar.
So I spent a few minutes on the DAZ marketplace, and was pleased to see you can get several ships that look pretty decent, for $15 - $40 ... good enough to get the job done, I guess. Though...
If you didn't mind laying down five...hundred...bucks you can get a Hollywood resolution model of the Golden Hind herself at TurboSquid:
Add to cart...? Uh, not today, thank you! Yes, I know: TurboSquid is where the pros go shopping for their odds and sods. But their pockets are somewhat deeper than mine! So we'll have to see what we can do, with what we an afford. That comes next, when I start to render the fantasy that's been buzzing around in my brain.
For now: back to work! I have two more book covers to do before I can call this assignment done, and they're not going to render themselves! (Wish they would...)
