Lesson 4 Adding & Removing Content; Organisation; Sharing Files

The assignment this week was to

Create a character, based on any poser figure in your library, to use in your scene. Render in neutral lighting, nonposed. Build and light the scene. Go ahead and try different light sets. Make a final render, and postwork if you feel its neccasary.

Leftovers, anyone?

Prior to getting to the assignment itself, there was some left-over business that needed to be cleaned up. I was unable to access a number of props and figures that I had downloaded from various sites, so I wanted to make sure that I was able to take care of that before proceeding. Lyrra was kind enough to provide me with her usual expertise, leading me to a set of utilities which enabled me to make the following set:

Main Camera
Face Camera
Left Camera
Right Camera

What was the point of this? The hearse is an external character which I had not previously been able to access. Obviously, now I can. The tree was a prop, previously inaccessable; now accessable. Also, prior to this attempt, I had not been able to make use of clothing, because I was using a character which was already clothed. Now I know that I can make use of clothing and conform it to the selected figure. Finally, the hair: I now feel confident in my ability to position hair and parent it properly to the proper figure's head. Some of the messiness of the pictures are artifacts of using a 3 setting when exporting the renders to jpeg. Some mistakes you have to enshrine where you can look back at them; that way it's less likely you'll make them again.

A couple of side notes: I did not expect the top coat to be camoflage; I'm not sure why that occurred. The figure is barefoot. That's on purpose; there's an old Irish folk tradition that dead wagons, especially in times of plague or epidemic, be driven by barefoot coachmen. It reduces the chance of spreading the infection. Finally, each of the shots was post-processed in Photoshop, using the Levels command set at 0, 1.73, 168. (The numbers are as much for my future reference as for informing readers.)

Now, with my confidence enhanced, I can proceed.

First Effort at a Scene

Below are several views of an admittedly amateur scene of a woman operating an old-fashioned console. First of all, I'm happy that I've been able to use the console, which arrived from the download as a 3DS object. After converting it with an Applescript, I imported it and placed it — right on top of the woman. I then moved it back to a more reasonable position. Because most people don't operate consoles while facing away from them, I turned the woman around, so she faced the console, with her back to us. The next step was positioning her arms and hands so they were on the console, not inside it, above it, or some other inappropriate location. She still looked wooden. Looking again, I saw that her legs, although positioned kind of correctly, were in exactly the same position with respect to her center of gravity. Most people don't stand like that. So I moved the left one forward and bit, and bent at the knee. Finally, I moved her head so that she appears to be looking at something on the console, rather than staring straight ahead. That finished the posing.

Now came the rendering. I decided that, because this was being presented for evaluation, I should take a number of six different views to given Lyrra the kind of information she would need to make an involved critique. These are presented here. Each was rendered and exported as a TIF, then brought into Photoshop CS and saved as a JPG. No other post-processing was done.

Main
Back
Left
Right
Top
Posing

What needs to be done: lighting, perhaps a change of clothing, perhaps some accessories?

A Different Scene

This time we've got a background: Hopper's "Nighthawks". With a working girl, tired from the night, her clothing dishevelled, leaning against a lampost. Working with the clothing this time was a pain; I need more work. Eventually, I gave up trying to conform the clothing (there's a miniskirt and there was supposed to be boots, but I couldn't get them to work at all), and went with just the face camera. I was able to get the lighting of the type, placement and color I wanted. It's supposed to be coming from the lamppost she's leaning against and from the diner. Does it work if you don't know that?

Final

After strong, repeated (but kind) suggestions, I finally conquered my Fear of Failure and ventured into the unfamiliar territory of lighting sets, downloaded a number of sets from Runtime DNA, and was surprised at how easy to use they were (previous attempts to use downloads had not prepared me for this). So, using one of the downloaded sets from the Noir collection (I forget which one and didn't save the .pz3 file — still wet after all these years), I have finished the assignment for lesson 4.

The background, by the way, is Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks" which comes in at number 18 in the list of 100 Most Important Art Works of the 20th Century, as compiled in the Historical Atlas of the 20th Century. But now I see I'm beginning to turn this into a blog-entry, so I'll just shut up and show the picture.

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