Lesson 2 — Top Bar

Working with Poses

I realized that I needed a lot of practice getting poses correct. After all the name of the program is "Poser," not "Getting Figures You Can Use." The approach was this: I took several photographs from the portfolio of a model at OneModelPlace and attempted to get Zoë to imitate the body position. Once I got that right, I played with the lighting in an attempt to improve the render and exported. In Photoshop, I opened the original photo, resized so the two parts would be the same height, doubled the canvas size, and pasted the Poser render into the newly-created right panel. Then I duplicated the background of the original model onto a layer between the Model and the Poser layers, flattened and saved as jpg.

Here are the results:

This was the first try. The waist bend is not right and the hands don't really mimic the photo. At this point, I was working for large-body placement. It's not really very good. I can see that, now that I've done two more.

Looking at this one several hours after I completed it, I realize that I should have done more work with the eyes.

However, in all modesty, I think my light source is better than the photographer's — if I could only get rid of that dark shadow at the base of her neck.

The face is obviously not right, because I still need some work on the Magnet. Because of this, I wasn't able to do as good a job on the smile as I wanted. A smile that broad on Zoë's face looked like a cartoon.

I was able, however, to figure out that I wouldn't be able to do the shoe trick, because Zoë's foot is brown: she's not wearing shoes. That would require a prop and "Controlling Props" is not in George's Bag of Tricks.

The right forearm looks weird to me, but a half-hour of fiddling didn't make things any better. Suggestions would be more than welcome. What am I doing wrong here?

 

Working with Backgrounds

The first bit of business is learning how to import backgrounds and discovering the special problems involved there.

Step 1 was selecting some pictures. I wanted to choose some where the character (I'll call her Zoë for the time being) could appear to interact.

Step 2 was the actual import. That was simple enough.

Step 3 was adjusting Zoë so that interaction looked reasonable.

Step 4 was adjusting the light so the scene didn't look like that Magritte in which there's no real light source but the shadows are somehow all wrong.

Here are the results:

Zoë Meets C. Balit's Neptune

Well, apparently in my steps I forgot to list such things as scaling x, y, and z so that Zoë would fit the scale of the picture

Zoë Meets Simon Bisley's Untitled Monster

In this one, I also had to move the camera a bit, rotate Zoë's body, change her facial expression, and add another light. I'm really not satisfied with her "hailing a cab" left hand, but the purpose of this exercise is getting the figure to conform with the imported background, so I'll let it be.

The inner border, by the way, is part of the original background picture. Since this isn't a class in Photoshop re-touching, I left it.

Zoë Joins William Blake's Puck For A Dance As Oberon and Titania Watch

On this one, I really cheated. After I got the scale right and rotated the body so that the pose was at least not grossly inappropriate (unlike her wardrobe), I fiddled for quite a while trying to get the camera to show at least part of the front of her body.

"I gave up," said the Master of the Obvious.

I'll learn more about camera placement later. Remember, the purpose of this exercise is "working with backgrounds."

The height is right; the arm is right; even the feet and legs match Puck's. It's not great, but it's a start.

 

Onward

That will have to be it for this week. Real life intervenes again.

Let the Little Girl Dance!

I'll get back to the poke-through problem in a bit. Now on to the homework. The first trial was to get the Default Gal to walk forward with the left arm extended and the right arm raised with the hand positioned in a kind of "Royal Wave". Viewed from the Main, Right, and Left Cameras, I got this:

It looked alright from the Main and Right camera, but the Left camera revealed that the right arm was a bit unnatural, so I worked with it a bit and got this:

Here we have an example of the type of novice you're dealing with. I managed to import the fedora. It came in a bit above the woman's head, so I altered the y-trans to move it down. But, as you can see from the pictures, her hair shows through! How do I fix this? If I'm jumping ahead, just say so and I'll try to be more patient.

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