Started by finding a dinosaur image plane:
Once the dinosaur was finished I rendered out the image in a side perspective as a PNG so that everything could be composited together
I did some research to see what dinosaur bone texture looks like now after being preserved over millions of years, it looks similar to that of the Craquelure texture under filter > texture.
The Dinosaur itself has the following details applied to it:
Film Grain:
Grain: 4
Highlighted area: 0
Intensity: 10
The ‘Craquelure texture’ was applied to capture the dinosaur age, the idea was so that it showed the fragile nature of the skeleton and the roughness of it as it began the decomposition process but has still remained in good condition.
Crack Spacing: 15
Crack Depth: 6
Crack Brightness: 9
To get the finer details such as cracks within the bones, brushes which were downloaded from deviant art. With the brushes loaded into the brush box, new layers were then created so the manipulation of the cracks could vary in size and shape. Once I was happy with the positioning of the cracks they were then merged with the original Dinosaur rendered image.
The background images are comprised of both studio panels and concrete flooring which were obtained from wallbase.com which is a wallpaper website for desktops. I did manage to find a good selection of large images which I wanted for this project however they were through photo stock websites and I didn’t particularly paying through the nose for these pictures.. I took it upon myself to find an alternative solution; fortunately I managed to come across these photos through wallbase.com
Originally I had previous flooring which didn’t seem to look right, although I was happy with the perspective of the image the floor felt like it originated from the decking of a boat, it did not suit my style that I was trying to reproduce, the look and feel I was going for was ‘Natural Museum’, ‘Art Gallery’.
The drawn element to the project are the peoples shadows, I tired to recreate their shadows and keep to a consistency of lighting, because they were taken out of other images this could have meant that the lighting may have been different for every different one. The shadows were painted in the direction that I wanted with a faded brush to get an accurate light depiction.
The people I have selected to be in the image have all primarily come from Google. It wasn’t easy finding the images which I associated in my head with museum tourists and the general public, such searched included ‘people walking away’, ‘son and child’. The idea was I wanted the people to be looking away from the camera so that their backs were facing the viewer, that way it would seem that they were either looking at the dinosaur or walking in that general direction.
The people were taken from their photos by using the pen tool to cut them out, once they had been it meant just placing them in the best possible positions.
The posts were created in Maya also and were placed around the dinosaur exhibit, it’s not clear but the dinosaur is also placed on a black stand. A stand was also constructed in 3D to give the tourists an idea on what it was they were looking at as you would expect to see in most museums.
Obviously lighting was also an important factor that I had to integrate within the photo, the wall at the back shows some source of light coming from the ceiling with this in mind I established everything else in the shot so that the light from the ceiling would appear to be having an effect on all the objects below it.
The Dinosaur casts a shadow at 90 degrees and I tired to take into account the people below and how the light might affect their bodies, fortunately when I was searching for people to put in the image I specifically chose these people for their qualities such as in which direction there were facing and, what they were dressed like, the size of the image so it would retain its quality whatever size the people were scaled too.
An oval mask was applied to the composition to retain an old look:
A Gaussian Blur was used and manipulated by 100px to establish this effect, the opacity was then taken down to 40% so that it was only enough to be seen slightly
This old paper was used to establish that authentic aged feel, this was simply done by applying a 'soft light' so that it was only gradually viewable which again definitely adds to the 'aged effect'. The opacity was also taken down on this to make it look less vibrant.
