Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Dear Amazing Content Creators: Can you make this?

Pen~Dragon is a collaborative project between Second Lifers Violeta Merlin - an in-world model and photographer, and her partner Wil Weir - a photographer and Real Life graphic artist. They come up with concepts and designs together, and Wil does the post-processing with Photoshop CS3.

Today, I spotted this on their Flickr stream, and immediately contacted them to learn more.


Pen~Dragon's dragon

As expected, the dragon's head was realized in post-production. What I want to know is... can someone out there figure out how to create this in-world, from start to finish? The possible extensions of this concept are rockin my socks. Thanks, Violeta and Wil, for allowing me to post this here!

Posted by Bettina Tizzy at 10:31 PM

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4 comments:

Barney said...

Hmm. The dragon head at least does look very exactly like one of Daryth Kennedys dragon pets. I doubt it was completely done in "postproduction" (as it would be strange that someone creates an exact copy of one of her pet dragon heads outside SL) but it might just be the pet worn on her shoulder. And the dragon tatoo can be painted on the skin directly.

March 26, 2008 at 1:11 AM
Unknown said...

I created this image by taking a small purple Astral dragon familiar (by Daryth Kennedy / Isle of Wyrms). The dragon was photographed from several differant angles against white, as was the model.
Small pieces of the dragon images were then cut up, warped, stretched & blended onto an image of the model until the illusion of a henna tattoo morphing into a "real" 3D dragon was achieved. Background & shadows were then added to complete the effect.
- Wil

March 26, 2008 at 5:58 AM
Annyka Bekkers said...

Unless I'm missing something, this doesnt seem like it would be too hard to do totally inworld. It doesn't seem like it should be any more difficult than a typical prim skirt, where the prim attachments are lined up to match with a clothing layer texture. I'm not a whiz at this, but I'm sure a decent prim clothes designer could do a pretty convincing job.

Even the shadow could be made as part of the clothing layer, though that would only look good from certain angles. Or, as I've seen on some jewelry, the shadows are on a transparent prim overlaying the skin. That can be pretty convincing too.

March 26, 2008 at 9:25 AM
Bettina Tizzy said...

Thank you, Barney, and annyka, nope, you aren't missing a thing. I think you are right about the way to proceed with this. Thing is, I'd like very much to see content creators taking this concept and applying it in new ways. In fact, if anyone out there is doing work like this, or makes something along these lines, I'd love to have the opportunity to consider it for a feature on this blog.

March 26, 2008 at 9:50 AM

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