Defending the Dream Gate

I would probably add light from the fireball, shadows for the figures and perhaps some rough highlight hairs to the lion's mane so that it pops. And maybe a bit of some lighting so that the edge of her wings are discernible from the background.

It looks a little disjointed because the ground is all in soft focus and the figures are in hard focus. Perhaps providing a few hard-focus ground details will help the focus transition from far to near.

Beyond that, I have no clue how 3D rendering actually works. I think its amazing that you guys create what you do.

Just a quick update. I changed the lighting and it has softened things a bit.

I think she looks cute but.... I like it better with the lion focusing the same direction as her, it gives it more... oomph to have them both looking at the same invader/attacker/victim. Also you should add some orange to her from the fireball, it would give off a rich glow. A soft spotlight or even a point light on her hand / arm would do the trick. Right now I see it is almost casting a shadow on her left underarm area which is very much not accurate. Also I am guessing this is a premade background you are using? Her lighting and it don't quite mesh up shadow wise or tonally. And as Wystro said earlier the lion's mane will really need a few strands defined, I'd suggest just doing some doge and some burn to give it more of a feeling of depth and fullness. Right now the mane is kind of flat still.

Lighting is forever my downfall in Poser. I just don't understand lighting at ALL. I did put a point of light inside the fireball, but maybe changing the color will add something more to it. As for the lion's mane, that's in someone else's hands completely because I have no clue how to even begin fixing that.

And, yes, the background was premade, so again I have no idea of how to fix the lighting because I just do not understand lighting that well. LOL.

Thanks for the advice, though. I'll see what I can do to correct the parts of this I do indeed know how to fix. :)

sometimes when i do the background seperate, or use a stock one you can tie them togeher better with a slight color overlay to get the tones all in sync. I did that with my Cel & Fox piece as an example. Just make a top layer in a color and try overlay, hue, color etc and turn the opacity down until the pic is harmonious =)

Now, do you do the top layer, overlay, hue, color, etc in Poser or in a program like Photoshop? Might be stupid, but it could save me a few hours of frustration in Poser. :)

gah sorry =) I meant in photoshop!

question.. are you rendering the picture transparent and addiing it over the background in postwork / photoshop or are you using the background setting and letting poser render it as well? i would HIGHLY recommend using a clean copy not rendered in poser if you aren't already!!

Actually, I am rendering in Poser because I honestly did not know you could do it any other way. I've never been able to export anything in Poser as a blank background and not have the background completely interfere with being able to grab just the image. As I said, I know very little about how Poser works other than extreme basics, and I cannot find any kind of tutorial on the program. Heck, I cannot even create my own characters or clothes because I just don't know how to do it. I know it can't be hard, but without steps on how to do something initially, I'll never figure it out on my own. LOL.

How would saving a character against a "blank" (ie, grey) background be different than just rendering the background in Poser, though?

What you need to do is render it as a tiff or png, that way when you open it in photoshop there *IS* no background, gray or otherwise.. it renders with an alpha channel that makes it essentially transparent. Then you take your highquality background pic and slide it under your render layer and bada bing...! Crisp and lovely. Then make a top layer of a unifying color, i pick blueish or blue-grayish colors for nighttime scenes or "cool" scenes, or a warner yeloow - orange etc one for a sunny / fiery piece, change the blending mode and lower the opacity to like 20% or less and all the tones will become more unified and seem more harmonious. At least that's what I do :)

So, I take it that you render props and everything else in the picture all at once, minus the background, and then you pull that into photoshop and put it on top of the background?

Okay, Temprah, how EXACTLY do you not get a background when you render, because I just did a test render, and I exported the render as both a png and a tif, and both of them have grey backgrounds that I can't delete out because it shows through my character's hair in spot. What did I do wrong?

If you are using Poser 7, you're going to need to render over black. You can find this setting in your render settings, up in the right corner where it says render over background, background color, or over black. Choose over black, then render, save as png. That should give you the transparent background once you've opened it in Photoshop. Poser 7 got a lil quirky cuz they fucked with the alpha channel stuff. Took people a while to figure out a work around for that one, let me tell ya.

if i ever get to actually use poser7 that is going to be invaluable knowledge. I'm used to dealing with the damn alpha channels....

Well I'm glad Eve knew the answer to that one because I haven't opened Poser in sooo long I just use Daz|Studio now, and even when I did use Poser it was only Pro Pack since when I got 6 was when it cratered on me.

And yes, WildHunt I would render everything but the background. Sometimes I will even render different elements seperate, like for example in this I would render the lion and the fae in two then layer it all together in Photoshop.

I've actually loved Poser 7 from the moment I bought it. I tried using DazStudios, but it just seemed SO difficult to use the few times I tried it. Poser allowed me to do what I needed without any of the hassels I found in Daz. But, to each their own.

And I will say that the pictures I did here are small compared to what I normally do. Normally, I'll render a scene at 2000 pixels at 72 DPI and get a huge picture that looks better when I crop it down to size in Photoshop.

So, when you take various elements and such, doesn't that make it difficult to make a character look like he/she is actually in the picture and not placed on top of it? For instance, I'm using at Greek Bath Set that I bought. If I rendered the bath then imported a character, how could I make her look like she's in the bath? Whereas if I render the bath and her together, she will actually be in the bath so it looks like she's in the bath.

Shoot I didn't know you could render in .png to blank out the background until this year =x I love the overall pic wildhunt, great c/c so far. I'm not married to the lion but fur and that type of animal hair is hard to render without postwork. I do like it originall next to her facing the viewer though.

Great job so far, very very kick ass!

Thanks, Roz. Yeah, I put the lion back so it's standing next to her again. I changed it so it was like a second line of defense, but with both of them together, nothing can get by them. :)

I know absolutely nothing about postwork in Photoshop. I know nothing about brushes or anything like that. I wish I could figure it out, but I downloaded some brushes that I thought were cool, but I installed them in Photoshop, and now I can't find them ANYWHERE. And the few brushes that come with Photoshop don't do anything that I can see. *shrug* I'm hopeless in postwork.

And lighting is still a pain!

Just be sure that you extracted the brushes this way:

C drive (or whatever drive) adobe/photoshop/presets/brushes

Once they're in there, then you have to load the brush itself. Brush option, top right hand corner, the little triangle, click that and it'll expand, selected load brush and then find the brush in question. You can only do one at a time. Then it'll pop up at the end of your brush selection menu thing. Just make sure you have brushes selected from the side tool bar.

I'm still hopeless in postwork. LOL.