Despite sore eyes, a couple of weeks ago I made a Zebra poster for one of my daughter’s friends. He had expressed great delight at my art works and had a birthday approaching. I asked him what he wanted and he told me that he wanted me to make him a black and white poster of a zebra. As I am having a good-eye day, I thought that I would share a little of that creation with you. My assumption, however, is that anyone reading this has a fundamental of DAZ Studio and Photoshop (two of my favourite applications).

To be honest, the entire process was really, really easy. I’ve had a Zebra in my DAZ Studio library from the very beginning. I suspect that it is part of the basic pack that you get with DAZ Studio (I’m sure that a couple of you out there are capable of confirming this).

So step 1 merely consisted of opening DAZ Studio and placing the Zebra in the scene.

But what end-result was I aiming at?

Something dramatic. What about a black background? Sounded good. So for step 2 I created a black plane and placed it vertically behind the zebra.

Lighting next.

I must admit that I love spotlights, so step 3 was placing a few spotlights around the head and upper torso.

So this is what I ended up with:

You can see my camera placement too.  I rendered the camera output into something around 16k by 10k pixels.

Step 4. Then added some more zebras and arranged them further back in different poses. These would be the background zebras.

I rendered these appropriately and then pulled them all into Photoshop (step 5). The result (once I got the two layers working together) was:

Hmmmmmm. It needed more.

So step 6 was to duplicate the left hand side zebras and flip the copy to be on the right hand side behind the running zebra. Actually, I ended giving the running zebra it’s own layer to accommodate this.

Now I wanted grass and I did not want in this instance to use DAZ grass. Why not? Because I wanted the grass to look “scratchy” on the black background and I felt that DAZ Studio’s realism would not meet what I was trying to achieve. NOTE: I’ve done grass in Photoshop before and I’ve always found the following tutorial and brushes by Explode Creative to be useful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQLQFj8kt-M

So step 7 for me was adding the grass. I essentially did three layers of grass representing the foreground, middle grand and the grass at the back.

Below is a screenshot of Photoshop showing my layers on the right.

Here is the result:

All in all very straightforward.

Hope you got something from this and hope to be seeing more of you all as my eyes recover.

Greg