thespaceinvader's portraits - Ancient Wose

[Turuk]

Perhaps, making it thicker yet keeping the height it has now?

Not only a bit late in the process, but it also would take away from the height effect that is emphasized by the long trunk.

[cobra]

Yeah, thats true. Most thoughts of ents, or woses, would bring to the mind huge towering trees. But that would be hard to emphasize the pure height, and such, in only 500 pixels.

Just a thought, but maybe to get the whole thing in there, maybe you could make it to looking up at the ent, from ground level, looking up?
Like this?

[thespaceinvader]

No. The basic layout is not going to change. And getting that sort of angle would require a layout change, mean we couldn't see the face, and still wouldn't fit inside the 500x500 limit. Nope.

[cobra]

No. The basic layout is not going to change. And getting that sort of angle would require a layout change, mean we couldn't see the face, and still wouldn't fit inside the 500x500 limit. Nope.

Oh well, I was just a thought anyway.

[Turuk]

Oh well, I was just a thought anyway.

An oak, stretched and skewed to fit into the frame and still look tall.

Just a thought, but one that has been already discussed and answered previously. If you are going to post in a thread, make sure you read all the previous posts first.

[cobra]

Oh well, I was just a thought anyway.

An oak, stretched and skewed to fit into the frame and still look tall.

Just a thought, but one that has been already discussed and answered previously. If you are going to post in a thread, make sure you read all the previous posts first.

I did not know what, stretched and skewed was.

*runs off*

[kitty]

I've tried to improve the feel of the canopy by making us able to see right through it in some areas, a feature which even the most densely leaved trees tend to have. I've begun a render test for the leaves - look at the upper right corner to see it. If this looks reasonable, I'll go ahead and render the whole thing,

Making the canopy see-through in places is great - the whole impression is much more tree-like because of that, now! You could do that in many more small spots, not only in four or five big ones.
The rendering of the leaves doesn't convince me, yet. I'm not sure after what kind of tree you are modelling it but the rendering is too soft. Leaves tend to look much harder, even if you can't make out the single ones from a distance - they need a real lot of contrast. Think of painting texture, instead of blending too much. Yours look more like soft clumps not chaotic little thingies reflecting the sunlight and overshadowing each other. Apart from that the shadows could stand to be a lot bluer.

Here are some random canopy pictures:

http://www.hotelesdepeten.com/admin/ima ... 5B1%5D.jpg
http://www.artcafe-hegau-jugendwerk.de/ ... ne_Mai.JPG
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_JFm0wnp-Dr0/S ... mkrone.jpg
http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1405/865 ... 55.jpg?v=0

[LordBob]

Just a passing thought on the rendering of tallness: where sheer size is difficult to convey, do not hesitate to use background or details that will show the scale.

For instance, in the case of the Wose, there could be the remains of an axe buried somewhere in his trunk, squirrels or small fairy-like people running along his branches, birds flying round his foliage...There are limitless possibilities to give a scale to the picture, while portraying the Wose as an herald of life : trees are home to a whole swarm of living creatures and I feel that the Wose portrait could become extremely interesting that way.

[thespaceinvader]

I did originally have a wee squirrel perching on his hand, but it felt a little twee and goofy when I started the render, so I left it out in one of the revisions to his arm structure. I'm not averse to putting somethign back in, but I don't want to detract from the unit itself. It would need to be something with a recognisable scale, which would be large enough to appear in enough detail at the scale shown, and yet small enough not to overpower the rest of the image. Which fairly dramatically limits the options...

Similarly, an axe embedded in him would feel a bit odd - why would he not have removed it...

[LordBob]

The axe (or any other item embedded in his trunk) might have remained there simply because he doesn't feel, or mind, it. It's a human thing to remove the object that created a wound, but trees sometimes have a tendancy to simply grow over it and swallow it.

Anyway, in your case I'd definitely suggest the birds : V-shaped silouhettes in and around the foliage would be easily recognized and simple enough not to distract the viewer.

[thespaceinvader]

Another full render test - this time, trying for a much more dappled appearance. I started out with large scale shading, then progressively used smaller and smaller brushes, some jitter, and a good deal of jittered erasing, not to mention a bunch of references. Hopefully, this is an improvement. If it works, I'll work out just how to do the linework, next...

I've not tried for adding any more detail/scaling stuff yet, either. I want to get the canopy render sorted before I do that.

[Turuk]

What are all of the really light bits? Not a critique, just a question, just curious what you are using for reference.

[Zerovirus]

I think the spots are either reflective leaves (but then they'd be facing in the same direction to reflect light so evenly throughout the branches, highly unlikely) or spots of light that are filtering though the minute passages unblocked by leaves (also not likely due to the fact that apparently we're viewing the tree from front and the said phenomenon usually only occurs below the tree's canopy)

[ancestral]

I wondered what the white spots were, and then I guessed it might be transparent.

Turned out I was mostly right. Are the rest of the spots reflection of light?

Ancient Wose as above but on a black background.

Very nice! My only critique is the black horizontal outline around his eyebrows and a line stemming to the right of his head seems to stand out in an odd way. Perhaps you're already aware of that.

[LordBob]

There's a very clear progress compared to the previous canopy, but still room for improvement :

- Leaves are seldom this reflective. Instead, under sunlight, they tend to get an intense greenish-yellow tint. In HSB values, this means more saturation and less brightness (especially for the white-ish spots that many viewers noticed)
- The canopy currently feels like a background pasted behind the wose. This is due to a/. different light angles between the canopy and the trunk (whose lightsource is further to the right) and b/. all the leaves except the "hair" and "beard" being drawn behind him. Branches grow in every direction around a tree, so it'd feel more natural if some of the foliage juts out randomly over his shoulders