Attached Link: Divine Poser

This post is about a new product in the marketplace I'd like to introduce called Divine Poser, designed to help create balanced and aesthetically beautiful renders in Poser.

As an artist you’ve probably spent months, possibly years, studying your craft. You’ve invested substantial amounts money in obtaining all the software to create stunning digital art, not to mention the countless hours of free time spent in learning how to operate it. As an artist you’d like to expose your work to as many people as possible, and do everything you can to showcase your artwork in the best light, and ensure that it’s not lost somewhere in cyberspace amid the millions of other images floating around unnoticed…not attracting any attention, not catching anyone’s eye…

Whether you’re talking about photography or painting or digital media, you have only a few seconds to capture someone’s attention. Art is all about communication. When a person looks at a picture the first thing that happens is they’ll automatically try to extract meaning from the image. There’s usually a focal point, which some artist’s call the “sweet spot”, that draws your gaze to a subject and stands out – a figure sitting at the water’s edge, a sunset, a lone ship drifting on the horizon, in a portrait it’s usually the person’s eyes. The subject is what the picture is all about.
 

Composing your picture is just as important a part of the artistic process as designing and drawing it.

How you compose and frame your picture is crucially important in how it will be perceived. A poorly framed or unbalanced picture, even one created with the most sophisticated digital techniques, may unintentionally create dissonance or tension in the viewer.

You’ve probably experienced this first hand yourself. You’ve spent hours setting up a scene in Poser using some new models and characters you just purchased. But after rendering it something about it doesn’t quite feel right? The models and landscape are beautifully detailed. The lighting is gorgeous, and the contrast of shadows realistic. But something seems strangely “off” about it, the picture’s conveying a certain unintended tension which shouldn’t be there, it doesn’t feel ‘balanced’, but you can’t quite understand how or put your finger on it.

In all likelihood this probably has something to do with the framing and composition of the scene. Poorly framed pictures can lead to a breakdown of visual communication, and create unwanted tension in the viewer.

For centuries artists have studied how to best frame their subjects, and exactly where to place the focus of their compositions. While there are no definitive rules when it comes to artistic expression, there are techniques that are well worth looking at.

That’s where using the Divine Proportion comes into play. Incorporating its’ principles into your picture helps creatively draw the viewer into your composition.

I came up with Divine Poser quite accidentally while trying to figure out a better way to compose some of my own scenes. I haven’t been a student of this technique for very long, but recently, I had been working on some scenes and nothing I was doing seemed to work, no matter how much I fiddled with the lighting or modeling or rendering, I wasn’t happy with the look of it. Sometimes I became so frustrated that I scrapped the whole project and started again from scratch, only to find myself once again - after more tortuous hours of post-work and trying different things out -  unhappy with the final picture.

I became frustrated enough with the whole process that I went back to studying the fundamentals of art and photography (something I should’ve been doing from the very beginning). That’s when I hit upon the idea of using techniques like the Divine Proportions and Rule of Thirds inside Poser, to compose my scenes using visually created graphs and diagrams as background templates. No such diagrams existed for Poser, so I decided to remedy the situation by creating my own. I never really had any plans to develop this as a Marketplace product, I created these templates primarily for my own use. But after experimenting with them for a little while, I wondered if this was something other digital artists could use in their own projects.

One interesting aspect about the Divine Proportion is that many great artists possess an innate sense in finding the focus of their compositions, seemingly without being aware of it. It’s impossible to know whether some of them used the Divine Proportions as a visual guide intentionally, or if the placement just felt natural to them. But knowing how to create a structured and well-balanced composition is an indispensible tool of any artists’ repertoire. Like anything worthwhile it takes some practice, study, and patience to master. Instead of haphazardly plunging straight into the scene you’ll have to invest some forethought into how to frame your composition, and figure out what you want your picture to communicate both visually and emotionally to the viewer.

Thanks for looking, and if you'd like to try out the "Rule of Thirds" template from Divine Poser its available in the "freestuff" section on my homepage here at Renderosity.

I have to say that when I saw this in the MP I had to think why had someone not come up with this concept sooner.  It takes so much guesswork out of composition, especially for those that have little raining in design and composition.

Nice idea. The golden ratio is always fun.

Hi, and thanks for looking and leaving comments. If you'd like to try out the "Rule of Thirds" template be sure to check out my freestuff section, it's a handy little tool.

By the way . . .

Sometimes I use the backgrounds from Divine Poser inside Photoshop when I'm figuring out how to compose a scene. I load all the elements of the scene as individual layers in Photoshop so I can shift things around, and figure out how best to set up the picture. Then I load one of the templates and adjust the opacity, which allows me place each element of the scene with a great degree of precision before I start working on the final version.

This is a rough work-up I'm working on now which illustrates another way you can use these templates.

im not sure what your trying to show in that mock up.

You can't just apply the rule of thirds to a PORTION of your frame and come out with a balanced composition.  The widescreen frame is quite still quite out of balance.

Also, the brightness and color of objects also need to be taken into account when thinking of composition.  You can apply the rule of thirds all day long, but that big bright moon in the center is a vortex that grabs the eye and will never let go.  To balance the frame, you need to have bright highlights on the dragons as well.  Where is your rim lighting from the moon?  If you didn't do it in your render, then you can paint on a rim light in photoshop.

Thanks for your insightful comments. This example is just a mock-up of how I begin to experiment with designing the scene I have in mind. It is not lit, cropped, or rendered yet. And no post-work has been done because I haven't decided upon a final composition. All I meant to illustrate is how I use techniques like the Rule of Thirds in a visual way before I start putting everything together inside Poser.  Some people might do this inside their head before they begin a scene, or sketch it out on paper, I like doing it in Photoshop.

I would imagine you work out your scenes with story-boards before you start working on your animations, that's mainly what I'm doing here. You're right in that the moon does dominate the scene and I'll likely try a number of different things before I get to doing the final version.

I should have been more clear in pointing out that this is intended to be a mock-up of a work-in-progress and not a completed project.

 I kind of like it - you see the moon and then you think hey, what are those flying things.
Love esther