My own personal Caldwell

[marcin wuu]

Howdy good fellows Wingers, and long time no see

It's been quite some time since I tackled anything remotely 3d. But, as I get older, I'm beginning to get those nostalgia attacks that are so common in the elder folk. One of them is missing the good ole RPG times. And I really mean OLD RPG, back from the day Gary Gygax was the man and D&D was the s**t. So I ran through my box of ancient RPG handbooks and lo and behold - I found the original "Marvelous Magic" D&D Accessory Module. With this marvelous cover art by Clyde Caldwell.



And it's just perfect. It embodies everything that that the eighties brought into the fantasy genre. Namely, magic chicks. Dragons. Magic lighting. And a dress with awesome thigh split! (not much in the cleavage department though - I guess nuthin's really perfect).

So I decided I will do it. That is, I will recreate this image in a photo - since that's what I do nowadays. I take photos. The only problem is, I'm kinda short on resources of the kind you need to built realistic fantasy sets. It's time to dust off my 3d skills and make it happen - virtually. Or partially virtually. I'm still going to shoot the girl, but on greenscreen, and composite her into the virtual set built in wings and rendered in Lightwave.

And this here will be my W.I.P. thread. I'm a bit rusty, so be patient. I'll start posting wips as soon as I'll have anything to show. Wish me perseverance

[Nova]

Very cool! Looking forward to seeing what you come up with. What will you do about her accessories? Will you model those or will you find something similar for your model to wear?

[marcin wuu]

So, as a warmup I modeled the box that's standing on the table in the lower left corner. And, right off the bat I'm stumbling upon quite unpredicted problems. The perspective of the painting is all over the place. There's no lens that would give me those angles... So the box looks slightly different, because it's weirdly deformed in the painting. If i'm gonna do it even remotely like in the picture, I'll have to render several passes and combine in photoshop.
Second thing, the lighting. The lighting is so wrong. I'm going to have to light everything separately, because nothing works here... Looks good, but is so totally unrealistic.
Also, I didn't think modeling a simple box with skull ornament will take me so long rusty, rusty, rusty

Here's the screengrab:



I'm going to tweak it a bit yet - it should be a bit longer and flatter.

Very cool! Looking forward to seeing what you come up with. What will you do about her accessories? Will you model those or will you find something similar for your model to wear?

We'll try to find or make the accessories - I want the girl to be strictly photo. I don't think I'll be able to recreate them perfectly, but will do my best. For one - the model I booked for this shot is much prettier than the one Caldwell used for his painting

[oort]

Marcin,
I too look forward to seeing the finished product. The box you started with looks good. The skulls and the dragon would be the biggest challenges, I think...

I checked your "Things I do" link and your portraits are very impressive. I see you are a perfectionist. It is always good to see your Wings3D work...

oort

[marcin wuu]

Yeah, the dragon in particular is gonna be troublesome, so I'm leaving it for last. As for the skull, I have a realistic skull sculpture laying around, will use it for reference and photorealistic textures. Shouldn't be too hard, but yes it's place two on my complication level list. The caged imp worries me a bit, too - but I think I still have some of my male body models I used to do back in the day, so I'll just go down the easy road and reuse them (come to think about it, I might use the dragon that's on the frontpage of wings3d.com, it would save me a lot of work)
In the meantime I modeled the coins, dice, gemstones and the inkpot. The dice and gemstones I'll probably not even subdivide.
And made first mistake - smoothed the skull motif on the box and overwritten the original file. Good thing I'm not going to uvmap this - I'll use Lightwaves procedurals, they're good enough for metal stuff.

here's the screengrab.



And thanks, happy that you like my photos, I put a lot of effort into them

[Nova]

How will you be doing the magick effect?

[marcin wuu]

I'll draw it over the photo in photoshop, shouldn't be too hard. Actually, now I think about it, I did something like this before, for the cosplay shot of Tifa Lockhart from Final Fantasy VII:



I think I'll do something similar here. But that's far future, weeks of work at least - still gotta do the mundane daily stuff to keep the bread coming

[Nova]

I can imagine, I was just curious though. The Tifa shot looks great, btw.

[marcin wuu]

The gong:

[Fonte Boa]

Great work!