Just in time for Halloween and the arrival of the Great Pumpkin, we’ve uploaded some moody backgrounds people can use for their Poser and Daz|Studio renders. Each image also comes with depth maps, and we’ve added a tutorial on using depth maps with Photoshop for compositing on this page.
Click on the image to the left to start your download.
Poser has been used primarily to generate still images rather than animations. A lot of Poser users are able to produce absolutely outstanding still images that can, and have been, used as illustrations in books, magazines, and other media.
One of the techniques that has been used by Poser artists is compositing images in Photoshop. By combining still images of different elements such as backgrounds, characters, and special effects, the artists are able to create a combined or composited image that goes far beyond what could be done in camera in Poser. This tutorial describes a technique for compositing still images generated by E-on software’s Vue. By the end of this tutorial, you’ll be able to insert a character into a Vue scene and have them blend seamlessly, even to the point of having their feet nestled in the grass.
We are going to use depth maps in order to cut out the sections of the foreground that will appear in front of the character we want to insert. A depth map is simply a grayscale map that colors objects black closest to the camera and white furthest from the camera. Using this information we can insert a character as deep into the image as we want, and ensure that elements in the image that are closer to the camera to the character will appear in front of the character in the final still.
We have uploaded a set of still images and their corresponding depth maps into our downloads section, and you can use these to work your way through the tutorial.
We’ve had to re-render one scene in Vue a few times to eliminate texture crawling. Unfortunately, the solution of increasing texture sampling pushed the render times upwards dramatically. We still have 36 hours to go on the render farm as of this writing.
Fortunately, we can keep working on other stuff as this renders in the background across our render farm. So, tomorrow, we’ll be working on Poser animations from the motion capture data we grabbed earlier this week.
Day 7 of the Officer Murphy Project was spent animating the second scene of the project, which is still cooking away on the render farm. We’re still in Vue 6, working on creating a shot of the moon as we move through the Bayou trees and Spanish Moss. It’s a nice, moody establishing shot that, unfortunately, needs to be rendered all the way through. No time-saving tricks like yesterday, sadly.
We also spent some time in the Motion Capture studio, and we managed to capture motions for Murphy and Kowalski for three separate scenes. We’ll be doing a few more days of Mocap for this project before we get right into the character animation in Poser.
Scene 1:
We put in some time today working on what will be the first scene of the film. This is an opening shot of the Bayou where Officer Murphy has his very bad day.