April 2011 Archives
Jacqueline Arianne with Shamisen
@kumimonster masked in latex.
Makes me think of Josie Cotton's new song See The New Hong Kong
I started with a photo I shot a couple of years ago of Liz Ashley. At
the time I had no further concept in mind for it, nor did I shoot it
with the intention of pulling a key and replacing the background.
Recently I was going through some old work, trying to see if there was anything worth using as an element for a larger piece. Botticelli's Birth of Venus is somewhat of an overused theme, but I noticed Wikipedia and Google had a MASSIVE scan of it available in the public domain for free, so I thought maybe I'd put my own spin on it.
Recently I was going through some old work, trying to see if there was anything worth using as an element for a larger piece. Botticelli's Birth of Venus is somewhat of an overused theme, but I noticed Wikipedia and Google had a MASSIVE scan of it available in the public domain for free, so I thought maybe I'd put my own spin on it.
I modeled the scene. I always pose a model, then hack it apart and reassemble the pieces to fit the contours of the actual model. This object does two things: it casts shadows, and it diffusely bounces skin-colored light.
Poser or DAZ Studio is useful for this.
Here's the scene with no shadow. My original intention was to use the densities from the cg object's shadow, but limit them to the outlines of Liz's real shadow - but I got lazy finally and just used the cg object's shadow.
*** Note how dark the left side of the 'wave' on the right is.
Here's the scene with the invisible cg Liz in place. I accidentally forgot to turn some of her fingers invisible, but it doesn't matter. They'll get covered.
*** Note how bright the left side of the 'wave' on the right is. It is receiving flesh-toned bounce light from the invisible Liz.
That's about it. The rest is standard modeling and texturing.
The renderer is Maxwell, because its 'light transport' algorithm is so good.
I like to use CG to make sets I would have made for real, rather than using it to make fantasy creatures such as mermaids. You can see that by the time I was done pretty much nothing was real except the model.
Final Image [NSFW}
Liz Ashley - Birth of Venus
Inspired by some lighting tutorials by photographer Neil Snape. I'm not sure I even interpreted what he wrote correctly, but I got a sense of extremely feathered softbox light and wanted to experiment.
