THis will eventually contain a male and a child and some background things like a tree or two. :) It's meant to illustrate what the people of a certain region of my fantasy world look/dress like. I'm not sure I'm happy with what happened to her loincloth there. It's tight to the waist but seems to flap away from her body down below. Gives an erotic look that is not intended. So I may go back to Poser an adjust that. Main concerns here in Carrara: I'm using LHS wood and stone shaders on that castle but you can't see it. I dragged em out of the browser presets so I wouldn't have opportunity to mess them up wih the wrong values. :) They still just look grey and brown even on a close up. Also her feet. They're actually sunk into the ground right now. If I put the camera below ground I can see them popping through the terrain. But she looks like she's floating... She might not have those boots in the end... I want a set of useful outdoor boots... I may have to model them if I don't find such on the Zygote costume CD that is a few days late in the mail still... :) Also no matter what I do that grass just looks flat... No matter the angle I shoot from... I don't have Bryce/Vue. I've decided that until I learn to do it right in Carrara I won't be buying Vue. Once I get myself proficient here I'll add another 3D app to my collection. :) Ideas? I'll be working on this one for a while I think...

Looking nice! Keep it up and keep us updated on the progress. I enjoy seeing images as the progress. Grass, Yea - it can be a bitch. If you are looking for deeper/taller grass you might have to add that in with post render in Paint Shop or Photoshop. Here is just quick example of the Grass "Picture Tube" from Paint Shop Pro. You can scale the size of the grass. Top grass is about 45% and the lower grass is 15% scale. Clint

Here's an update of my project. Today I'll start on the male.

I can't figure out why that castle won't texture right. I use a proceedural shader from the LHS collection for stone on the walls and one for wood on the tops. All I get is solid colors. Odd how the grass is darker in the closeup terrain and lighter in the background infinate plain. ALso I tried to apply waves and other items to the infinate plain via it's properties menu and I lost the shader for it by doing so, so I just settled on flat... Plans: add a male and child, and some animal with person in the background. I may make the infinate plain into a limited plain so I can have it intersect a plain of water...

Hey Arcady - Looks very cool. For some reason the update you posted yesterday didn't show up in my browser. I don't think the boots (or the rest of the costume, for that matter) are particularly practical, but as you point out, it's your fantasy world, so I'll work with you, here.... I think the grass works pretty well, although I'd agree with Clint that you might want to dress it up in post production somehow. Also a degree of randomness helps a lot in making something look more Real World. You might model a few blades of grass that are taller, or some of those little seed pods that look like skinny palm trees, and spread them out in the landscape. You'd probably put more up front, since they'd read better closer to the camera. As for the castle, I don't know Carrara yet, but I'm sure you'll figure out how to get the texture working. I'd suggest some kind of light fog in the scene; I always picture those medieval scenes with some lovely fog misting up the distance. I'm looking forward to seeing the new distant stuff in the shot, as well. - Chip

That second pic's on a server in L.A. owned by a friend. For some reason L.A. has one of the worst bandwidth's in the world... But I don't have any 'service agreements' I have to follow in terms of what I put up there. You'll see the 'fog' and such in the second pic. Or at least a blurred haze in the distance. It's not a medival setting but it is a fantasy one. On refelction I think I will change the pose of the woman away from what I used in the second pic. Her hips don't look right for this scene. It's a pose that had one foot about 1.5 foot heights off of the ground, and even though I spent a few hours getting the terrain so that both feet would be on the ground it just doesn't work for an outdoor plains scene like this. I'll need to get that castle more and more stone like. I'm actually more satisfied with it's position in the first pic. Although in the first pic it's actually only 3 figure heights away and scaled down. When I moved the camera up in the second pic the castle was so close it got half covered by the woman's shadow, so I played around with moving it out. It's now a few hundred figure heights away. The people of this setting are in a hot and humid bronze/copper age world. The stone settlements is something I'm considering as a development they would have not so much for protection in war but to keep out wandering dinosaur herds (of which I may put a few critter way into the backdrop somewhere if I can figure out how to add them after they've been rendered seperately and still keep my sky effect. Anyway, the male model I'm working on is similarly dressed. As for grass, I tried using a spiky terrain with the x and y compressed in but I wasn't quite able to get the effect I desired. I may play with it somemore. I like to get as much in pre-render as possible so I can reuse it from multiple camera angles.

I can see the second post today! And she looks great here. Couple comments about the composition. If you want her (and the other figures) to look more cinematic or heroic, try dropping the camera down to about their waist height. I liked the camera placement in the first image better because it was more dynamic. The castle seems to be kinda pasted on the scene. If there's some way to make it much bigger and farther away so it juts over the horizon line, I think it'd look more real and distant. (Unless we're standing on a hill looking down at it, in which case the perspective on the castle itself would be different.) Do you have control over how far away the haze or fog starts? If so, I'd bring it a lot closer. (And the fog or haze would emphasize that humid effect you were talking about.) Do you have Photoshop? If so, compositing pre-rendered dinosaurs or other creatures would be a snap, even with the distant fog or haze. If not, I'm sure PSP or other packages have similar features.... Ask me about it if you'd like detailed info. (I know that I can get a little long-winded some times; it's the curse of typing fast.) I'm looking forward to seeing more and more!

My Zygote costume shop CD showed up last night. In it I found a pair of women's boots that looked exactly like what I was procrastinating trying to model on my own... :) And a great cape/cloak thingy. So I have reposed her but not imported into Carrara yet. Only had about an hour of free time last night due to a bi-weekly gathering of friends. I think I agree with you on the camera angle. The first shot is a little below waist. In fact it's almost at ground. The second shot is at eye level or near abouts from 1-2 figure heights away. Before I post up a third image I'll be adding in at least one more of the planned figures. Oh, and I do have photoshop. I suspect I could do it with a bit of masking or rubber stamping... I'm envisioning a herd of triceritops (sp?) in the background. I don't see large predators existing on an island that is heavy human populated. But even still at their size you'd need something to convince the herbivores (sp?) not to trample through town. :)

Herds of herbavorious dinosaurs; I can't wait to see more of your fantasy world! Yep, I'd use the cloning tool, but I'd also use layers. Bring your dino image into Photoshop as a layer atop a transparent layer. Erase everything that doesn't look like a triceratops. Make a copy of this layer. One of the copies can then be manipulated to have no contrast and be a solid silohuette of the dinosaurs. You should fill this silohuette with the same color you use for your fog. Then, plant the silohuette layer over the complete scene. (You can fiddle with the transperancy of the layer, too.) Finally place the Dinosaurs over the silohuette layer, play with the transparency and lo! you've got a faded dino layer. You'd probably also use the erase tool to get some variations on the degree of transparency of the Dino layer. I'll stop now.... :o)

I'm one of those people who remembers that fantasy didn't begin with Dragonlance. Nor even with Tolkien. I like to use a mix of Fairy tale and Conan-inspired concepts. I'll play with that Dino-stuff. While the concept of this image remains constant, I Think I've swapped out and redone every item in there at least twice, if not more. :)