Lesson 6 — Basic Scene Posing, Lighting, Rendering

The Assignment

Create a character. Pose, accessorize, light and render figure. Postwork to taste.

The Homework, Part I

So here's the scene. Betsy Johnson (obviously not her real name), the famous designer was ready to show off her most recent retro '60s designs. She'd hired the top model, Viatra, at $1500 an hour. The international photographer was charging a similar amount for the use of his studio and lighting experts. They even found the famous cat from Gremlins, Brandoch Daha, for Viatra to pose with, and borrowed a Saarinen chair from the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA) to rest those famous cheeks on.

Then, just at the crucial moment, Brandoch Daha decided that he had had enough. The lights were getting hot; this woman's perfume was just Too Much. He stretched out his left hind leg, found something yielding to push against, extended his claws, and ...

Bad kitty.

*Click* went the shutter!

And you are there at another Great Moment in Fashion Photography.

Poser Technical Notes

The most frustrating part of this was the damn chair. I could not get a texture, a bump map or anything to apply to it. I assume that the reason for this is that is was a 3-D Studio object, imported into the Poser scene. So, the slight texturing that appears on it is post-processed. But more about post-processing later.

So I brought the chair, opened Debbie (from Greg Crowfoot), changed her hair color, changed the color of both pants and shirt to white, and applied different textures (from my own collection) to the clothing. Sat Debbie down on the chair, her arms still extended. She looked silly, but I wanted to wait until the cat arrived before playing with them. Brought in and applied Pose 7 from the Cat Poses set in Poser.

Applied one of the lighting sets from DNA Moonlighting2. (Don't remember which one; I have to get better at taking notes.)

{Begin Repeat}

Fiddle with Debbie's arms to get her to hold the cat;

Play with the cat to get the pose better;

Render;

{End Repeat}

Work for about an hour getting the expression right, including neck angle and bend.

Finally, export the render. Open Photoshop.

Post-Processing

Use the Alpha Channel to select the rendered object(s), cut.

New Layer; apply a gradient for the background. Add some noise for texture, apply Film Grain, fade Film Grain in multiply mode. There, the background looks right.

Paste in the figure. Select the chair. Apply some noice for texture, apply a Motion Blur. Use Layers to adjust the light levels. Finally, add a slight drop shadow layer effect and save as JPEG.

Next Steps

I'd like to get at least one more done before the end of the week for critique. We'll see; it looks like one nasty week at work coming up.

Why This Is Done So Early

<see previous sentence>

The Homework, Part 2

No fancy story today, sorry. It's 12:11 a.m. Wednesday. I got up this morning at 4:30 and was at work at 6 a.m.

The Frustrations

I can't get P4 Nude Man to take a facial expression; there's something I'm missing here.

More work is needed on the texture/bump map of the tuxedo.

Obviously, I've no clue about hair textures. It's becoming apparent that I'm going to have to unfasten the money belt and buy Victoria and Michael and get some decent "hairing" (hey, there's an idea! Haring characters!! Later, my man, later.)

I probably should have anti-aliased the render, but I didn't notice it until I was well into writing this in Dreamweaver, preparing the webpage.

The Pride

The texture on her skirt is wonderful, and I made it myself.

The position of the characters looks believable (although it took a couple hours; I'll get better, I've had good basic instruction.)

Her expression is right (another 45 minutes).

I was able to save the basic positions of the characters, quit Poser, and come back an hour later and pick up where I left off. Everything to this point has been done in a single sitting. Now I know that I can take a break, do something else (like sleep), and return to a project.

The Hope

That Lyrra will give this a very hard look and be quite critical, so that I know what I have to improve.

Last One, I Swear It!

So I was called on a technicality: only a wedding photographer would call that a portrait. So here's a portrait.

I got some hair from Digital Dreams and decided to play with it. This was not a planned activity, so I've got no notes as to which body I used or any of that. Not a good idea: keeping notes, even when you're playing, will remind me of what I did, in case I want to do it again. For instance, I know I used a lighting from DNA_Noir, but which one, I don't know.

I got some more experience working with textures and bump maps, using a set lighting format but enhancing it with a light fill to remove the harshness of the shadows on her left neck and right chest. Also, in playing with reflectivity, I found out that using too high a value (for instance, on the lips) can really blow things out.

I want to open the figure map in Photoshop and play a bit with the irises, which don't have nearly enough texture to satisfy me.

Despite working with the texture and bump map of her skin, I wasn't satisfied with the result. So, when I got to Photoshop, I not only changed the lighting a bit and olived up her skin tones (Photoshop and Poser appear to use a different color space in OS/X -- the skin color was noticably different, as were backgrounds in a couple examples during the course), but also added a new layer to provide her skin with a bit more variety by adding noise, blurring it, and multiplying the two layers at about 60% opacity. I played with the idea of giving her freckles, but rejected it: her hair's the wrong color for heavy freckles.

Well, that's it for tonight, this week, and this course. It's been a good ride and -- my roommate reports -- introduced a new addiction.

 

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