{"id":336,"date":"2004-07-07T22:32:51","date_gmt":"2004-07-08T06:32:51","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=336"},"modified":"2007-07-30T15:49:58","modified_gmt":"2007-07-30T23:49:58","slug":"how-i-fulfilled-my-passionate-destiny","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aprilgem.com\/log\/?p=336","title":{"rendered":"How I Fulfilled My Passionate Destiny"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s been ages since I’ve posted a tutorial—since I’ve posted anything at all, actually; I’ve been busy doing book covers and various other things for e-publishers and authors. And now that I have more than a handful of samples to show, I figure I should do a half-assed tutorial and share one of my favorite covers—Passionate Destiny<\/a> by Dee S. Knight<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Dee is a dream to work with. She provides a lot of book detail and cover ideas in her cover art requests, but she’s open and flexible as well, which I like because it gives me a lot of wiggle room when I work. She even let me read her manuscript, which is one of the cooler perks I have—especially considering how well she writes; Passionate Destiny<\/a> has been getting some great reviews.<\/p>\n

Anyway, Dee’s request read:<\/p>\n

Large house, ghost. The house is a large wooden frame farmhouse with a front porch. The lawn leads from the house to a bluff overlooking a Virginia river, but the house is primary. I would like a ghostly figure of a woman in a long, flowing yellow dress with sprigs of flowers in front of steps and a porch. Dress circa 1860s.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Easy enough if I’m lucky, and I was. I found two really great stock photos around which I could build the illustration, and here they are:<\/p>\n

\"20040707-stock1.jpg\"\"20040707-stock2.jpg\"<\/div>\n

The only thing wrong with the stock photos were that they needed more, and I couldn’t find that “more” elsewhere. Somehow, I needed to add banisters, railings, and floorboards to the porch, and I didn’t want to ruin the photos by painting all this additional detail onto them by hand. So I opened up Bryce 3D and created a plane with a floorboard texture. Then I had H.E., who had years of experience as a professional photographer, help me figure out where to place the camera within my sparse 3D world so I could match the angle in the photo.<\/p>\n

After that, I created a render … then I modelled the frame of the porch with Bryce primitives and rendered that as well.<\/p>\n

\"20040707-floorboards.jpg\"\"20040707-columns.jpg\"<\/div>\n

To make life easier on me, I also rendered an alpha mask to help me isolate the porch frame and an untextured image to help in adding the shadows. Notice that I kept the sun in my 3D world in relatively the same position as in the first stock photo.<\/p>\n

\"20040707-mask.jpg\"\"20040707-shadows.jpg\"<\/div>\n

Next, I opened up Photoshop and composited the images with a dash of pepper and a touch of salt. And voila—this is what I got:<\/p>\n

\"20040707-final.jpg\"<\/div>\n

Next time, an actual tutorial. I promise!<\/p>\nShare this post:

\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"reddit\"<\/a>\"pinterest\"<\/a>\"linkedin\"<\/a>\"tumblr\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"reddit\"<\/a>\"pinterest\"<\/a>\"linkedin\"<\/a>\"tumblr\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s been ages since I’ve posted a tutorial—since I’ve posted anything at all, actually; I’ve been busy doing book covers and various other things for e-publishers and authors. And now that I have more than a handful of samples to show, I figure I should do a half-assed tutorial and share one of my favorite covers—Passionate Destiny by Dee S. Knight. Dee is a dream to work with. She provides a lot of book detail and cover ideas in her…<\/p>\n

Read More Read More<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-336","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-illustration"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aprilgem.com\/log\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aprilgem.com\/log\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aprilgem.com\/log\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aprilgem.com\/log\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aprilgem.com\/log\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=336"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.aprilgem.com\/log\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aprilgem.com\/log\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aprilgem.com\/log\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aprilgem.com\/log\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}