Here is something I finished in a hurry (is there any other ways?) [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]
There's been some compairing of graphics software and rendering lately (the salt & pepper thread), so I though I could show this one, whitch is something of a new approach (I hope) that I have been experimenting with now and then (inspired by the good old Paddington cartoons).
First of all I drew a sketch (with paper and pen - I usually start out my projects with doodles).
Then I proceeded with drawing the character by hand and scanning it.
The circuits, flag and colouring was done in Xara. I also made all the transparency maps and bump maps in Xara (quite intriguing(sp?) to try bumpmapping a 2D character).
The bridge was modelled in a freeware app called sPatch, and was exported as a DXF-file.
Then I put it all together in a Bryce-like 3D-landscape app called Vue d'Esprit. The character and USA is actually two 2D-planes faced to the camera.
I opened the 3D-rendered image in Xara and some touch-ups, added the light beams and the text. I then exported it as a tif, whitch was opened in Photoshop where I added the lens flare (whitch could actually be left out) and some unsharp masking.
The process might seem complicated, but it went actually really smoothly and fast. I would approximate the work hours two about four hours, not including the 1:47 hours it took the computer to render the 3D-image. The original image is size A4 at 300 dpi.
-Paul
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