![\"2016-10-01_13-56-36\"](\"https:\/\/greole.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/2016-10-01_13-56-36.jpg\")
<\/p>\nDespite 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).<\/p>\n
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).<\/p>\n
So step 1 merely consisted of opening DAZ Studio and placing the Zebra in the scene.<\/p>\n
But what end-result was I aiming at?<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Lighting next.<\/p>\n
I must admit that I love spotlights, so step 3 was placing a few spotlights around the head and upper torso.<\/p>\n
So this is what I ended up with:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
You can see my camera placement too. I rendered the camera output into something around 16k by 10k pixels.<\/p>\n
Step 4. Then added some more zebras and arranged them further back in different poses. These would be the background zebras.<\/p>\n
![\"2016-10-01_13-56-27\"](\"https:\/\/greole.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/2016-10-01_13-56-27.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
I rendered these appropriately and then pulled them all into Photoshop (step 5). The result (once I got the two layers working together) was:<\/p>\n
![\"2016-10-01_14-21-26\"](\"https:\/\/greole.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/2016-10-01_14-21-26.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Hmmmmmm. It needed more.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 <\/a><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Below is a screenshot of Photoshop showing my layers on the right.<\/p>\n Here is the result:<\/p>\n All in all very straightforward.<\/p>\n Hope you got something from this and hope to be seeing more of you all as my eyes recover.<\/p>\n Greg<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2699,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wpupg_custom_link":[],"wpupg_custom_link_behaviour":["default"],"wpupg_custom_image":[],"wpupg_custom_image_id":[],"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[410],"tags":[27,28,111,11,16,13,30],"series":[],"class_list":["entry","author-soulthief","post-2698","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-3d","tag-3d","tag-3d-art","tag-adobe-photoshop","tag-art","tag-daz-studio","tag-digital-art","tag-photoshop","clearfix"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/greole.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/2016-10-01_13-55-53.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greole.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2698","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greole.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greole.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greole.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greole.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2698"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/greole.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2698\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4213,"href":"https:\/\/greole.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2698\/revisions\/4213"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greole.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greole.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greole.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greole.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2698"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greole.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=2698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"2016-10-01_14-05-24\"](\"https:\/\/greole.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/2016-10-01_14-05-24.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"zebra\"](\"https:\/\/greole.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/zebra.jpg\")
<\/p>\n