Fig.1 I do a sketch to get an overview of the photo references that I need. The doors in the background (synonyms for the opportunities in life) are supposed to add some depth and three-dimensionality to the composition. As I cannot always take all the photographs myself I also take to some stock photos, which are available for free on the internet (e.g. www.deviantart.com or www.sxc.hu).
Fig. 2 We start with Poser 3 (in the meantime,version 6.0 is available, but the old and already available version is all I require for my purpose). As I do not like to rely on the rendering capacities of this semi professional software and it takes too long to familiarize myself with more professional ones I quickly texturize the characters in Photoshop. Afterwards, all I have to do in poser is the right adjustment of the character, the illumination, the perspective, the camera angle and the colors of the background. To describe all this would be overkill, but Poser is probably the simplest 3D software available and almost self-explaining. The artwork was displayed in 300 dpi resolution at 2000 x 2000 pixels and saved as a .tiff file. In the rendering settings you may also determine the colors of the skin and the environment (however, as Poser”s renderer is not very good, you will have to work it over in Photoshop). When positioning a figure, polygons overlap every now and then. Unfortunately, this problem has not been mended until version 5.0. For those who would like to apply beautiful and maybe experimental textures I recommend tosave the file as .3ds or Lightwave object and to buy some better 3D software (3D Studio Max or Cinema 4D).
Fig. 3 I have restricted myself to a size of 30 x 40 cm. Thus, the artwork is a printable file (and it also looks quite good as a work of art in a shadow gap frame). Moreover, with only two parts it may rather easily be scanned again afterwards. In “file -> new” I create a new picture in Photoshop (Fig. 3). Take care to determine the measurements in centimeters and the resolution in 300 dpi – pixel/inch…not pixel/cm! Dpi are dots per inch and setting pixel/inch is nearest to this unit in print while at pixel/cm (1 cm = 2,54 inches) much more pixels or points are on one cm than would be there in the inch setting!
Fig. 4 Now I open the result of Poser”s rendering in Photoshop. With the arrow symbol it is easy to drag & drop an already open picture into a newly created one. The software automatically creates a new layer for the newly inserted image. As the newly inserted figure looks quite small on the large sheet of paper and I have to work it over anyway, I “interpolate” the size with the following function: With -> edit ->free transform I have deformed the inserted image somewhat and magnified it to the size of the whole picture (see Fig.5). Please note: As this is a reference, nothing gets lost in enlarging! Hint: Two alternatives for those who do not want to switch to miniature view every time they open their work in Photoshop: 1) Unfortunately, the integrated browser (standard since PS 7.0) is a little slow when opening files which contain many images with more than 500 mb.To make up for that, it even displays EXlF data of photographs. 2) The simpler method: with the Mac Finder or the PC Explorer (switch to miniature view) and simply drag and drop the image you need into Photoshop.
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