Making The Magic Come Alive: A Tutorial of A Somewhat Complex Poser Render

For the longest time I've wanted to do a render of the fae folk with a human. There's but a few issues with this idea.

The little figures (kids and babies) can't be turned into faeries without their respective morph packs. As you can see below the morph packs are rather pricy files and only work for one figure type. Plus if you want a fae morph, you have to either buy or make one of those yourself. Yikes!

Morph packs pricing: K4, Preschooler, Baby.

So, when that didn't pan out I was left with little options. I tried something else, though. The figures can all be scaled up or down, so it'd make sense that all you really would have to do is pose, set up your figure and scale down the size right? Uhm, wrong.

This is what resulted in that effort. Not quite what I had in mind. Okay, okay, quit laughing, it wasn't a bad idea to try... er, well, at least it didn't seem like one at the time, lol.

The problem isn't in resizing the figure, it is instead in the resizing of the hair, clothes and props that doesn't scale down with the figure.

So, now what? I was really wanting this to work as I have a ton of renders that are based around this human/fae encounter concept. I figured a way around it, but it was one that was not going to be easy or quick by any means, but then again what is Poser is easy or completely quick? So, the idea was born right then and there.

The render I started to work on required two figures: One human and one fae. For these figures I chose Akio 4 (A4) and Victoria 4 (V4) As you can see in the below screen shot they are basically the same size as each other, so how can I make them look fae sized and human sized and pull off this render idea?

Well, it'd require two separate figures, two separate renders and a little bit of editing and postwork in a photo editing program.

First I started with Aiko 4 and the Bettine Render. Initially I planned her to be a child-like human not adding her Fae ears, but I slowly found out that she'd make a better fae than the one I had  pegged for the fae: V4. Why? Because Bettine had the fae ears I wanted and V4 didn't. Pretty simple. :) V4's fae ears were all too huge and exaggerated for my tastes.

So, I reworked her a slight bit to serve as my fae. Dressed her in another skirt and made the texture for it (see the other tutorial on clothing textures here.) Posed her, added her wings and saved the scene. I didn't add any backgrounds or anything.

Then I moved on to the human girl render. I added V4 in and chose her clothing. I changed/made her a new clothing texture as well.

Then I posed her keeping in mind how the two figures would "meet" in the render and interact with each other. This was perhaps the hardest part of the render.

I chose a smiling facial expression as she's amused and happy to find the little fairy. She's looking at her hands where the fairy would hopefully be perched.

I chose the realistic lighting with the Noir morph which is one of the higher realism morphs I have and then I rendered it to see how the figures would fit together.

When I had both the Fae rendered and the human rendered I exported the renders and saved to my hard drive.

The next step involved post work in Paint Shop Pro 7. I took each render and opened it in the program.

The fairy had some dark shadows that needed erasing, so I got to work on those since they would have been out of place on V4's hand.

This is what I had when I was done with that.

Since each render is the same size (over 900 pixels) I needed to resize the fairy so that she looked little. This was the issue as I was afraid to do as I feared the realism would go drastically down. Well, it went down, but not as much as I worried it would. She's reduced about 40-50% here in this render.

I pasted her in and found out that there was an error. The figures didn't mesh well. In fact she's sitting on air rather than the hand. Darn.

This meant re-rendering V4 and changing the hand until it fit together better.

For the fea, I changed her head position and rotated her slithly so that she was more turned toward the human. I also re-rendered the fae with different lights.

Then I went back to PSP. Erased the shadows and pasted the fairy into the scene. I added in some 'fairy magic' sparkles in PSP (tubes) and was done with the render.

This is the final render after many hours of work and 3 days.

Since Gather reduces the quality, I'm adding this screenie of the actual resolution of V4's face to show the realism that's possible with the program. Since it's smaller than Gather uploads, I had to host it offsite to keep the actual resolution clear.

Now it seems I can get to work on those other ideas I've had floating around in my mind. :)

Content Credits for the Renders:

V4 portion of the render:

Figure: V4

Morph: Noir

Hair: Goddess

Clothes: Aline dress - my custom texture added

Lighting: Portrait Studio Real

Background: Daz's Environment

Pose by Pixieluna

 

A4 Portion:

Figure: A4

Morph: Bettine

Hair & Barrettes: Fiorenza Hair

Shirt: Fae Top

Skirt: Aery Soul's Zoel - my own custom texture

Wings: The Wings

Pose by Pixieluna