An autumnal mood ... and a bit of Michael 4 glam. I was in the mood for glam, snarfle. The first picture tells half a story. I call it "Relics" ... Oh, a battle was fought here -- Orcs and Dwarves, perhaps; and here's one of the scouts from the borders of the Shire, come to find out what became of friends who never returned home. Hmmm. That's not bad. The second picture ... well, I wanted to play with color casting. That is, throwing a bucket-fill into the top layer of the Photoshop post-render work, and then blending it to see how the color cast changed the mood and tone of the image. Well now! There's no reason the experiment couldn't be run with a bit of beefcake, is there?!
If you're interested -- the artists among you might be -- the location was set up first with a background landscape; here's what you could call the background plate:
That's the location without any depth of field set, though it is lit -- just one light. The terrain is was made in Bryce and exported as an OBJ, then imported into DAZ Studio, and the textures added. I did a diffuse (surface) map -- basically, a fairly small picture of leaf litter on the ground, tiled into an enormous 3000 x 3000 pixel image -- plus a displacement map (made from the diffuse map ... you drop it into monochrome, yank the contrast sky high and sharpen it a lot. This technique is pretty darned effective. The result is extremely realistic, even if you view the render at large size, in closeup ... and it's dead easy to achieve!
The sky was a custom Bryce render ... but while it was taking about 20 minutes to come up with something that was fairly blah, I thought to myself ... "You know, Terragen ought to be able to generate something better, and probably faster anyway." Soooo...
Terragen atmospheres -- no landscapes to speak of, because I just tilted the virtual camera to look UP at about 25-30 degrees of elevation, which puts the landscape on the horizon ... just right for use as backdrops in CG composite shots. Terragen skies are very, very easy to do, and fast! These renders took from 30 seconds to three minutes each! Ahem.
And speaking of autumnal moods (well I was, a moment ago!), fall has certainly arrived in this neck of the woods, about two weeks before winter is due to begin, according to the calendar. We took a hike in Belair NP this morning, and I'll share some of the photos here, and again tomorrow. I've always maintained that there's a line where photography and art blur together, and this is it:
Those are uploaded at 2000 pixels wide -- they make lovely wallpaper (you're welcome) and they do look so nice at large size -- please click so see them that way.
Back soon with more!
