Freya's Fire Cover Image, part 4 - Viking Visual Art Tutorial

Last time, I finished making my character, Gemina.

This time, I really go into uncharted waters because I get to play with my first non-human character - the Daz Horse 2!

I was able to take advantage of the Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales at DAZ to get one of the models I've most wanted - the horse... and a pair of wings to match!

This is for the horse (turned nuwa) named Jerem who is described as a great white stallion. As usual with these things, the colors are all wrong - but thankfully, this is an easy task for me now... even though I have a totally new creature to play with.

As usual, I found the location of the files for the griffon wings and used the paint bucket to make the wings much whiter than it was. I also noticed a texture pattern for making the horses look less than smooth. I also made that whiter.

At this point, I've only fixed the feathers.

Next, I had to make the horse's body white as well. That was a little harder because I couldn't just make the whole thing whiter (without making the hooves, insides of the mouth and ears white...) It wasn't too bad, thankfully.

I also made sure Jerem had blue eyes.

Then I needed to pose my characters, including Jerem. I planned to have them flying, so I gave Jerem a slightly inclined position and his wings in full operation... but held to keep things looking nice.

My humans were not too bad to pose for riding a horse. I was pleasantly surprised to see that Gemina's dress behaved fairly well, though I don't know of a way to make it truly look good on a horse yet. Maybe there's another dress out there that does what I need... but I suspect most people just solve the problem by putting her in pants. My strategy will be to minimize the effects of the dress.

Anyway, here is my scene all ready to be rendered (and before I fixed a few things like Kolt's hands, their expressions in general, and Jerem's eyes - which weren't looking very blue here.)

Next time, I'll put it together to make a cover image. (I'll skip past the agony of 2-hour renders, done about 4 times in the end.)

All work done by myself on: Photoscape, Gimp, Krita, and/or Daz 3D Studio
Cross-posted on: Steem, Whaleshares, WeKu

Past tutorials:

Map Development for Alacantis (on GIMP), part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4
Cover image for Acting the Part
Cover image for Brighid's Blood (part of the update).
Cover image for Birth of the Neví, part 1, part 2
Map Development for Velantia, part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4
Map Development for Kranisis, part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4
Cover Image for Name of the Neví, part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6
Beginning with Daz 3D Studio - my cover image for Mind of the Neví: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, changes
Cover image for Game of the Neví, part 1, part 2, part 3
Cover image for Pawn of the Neví, part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5
Cover image for Freyja's Fire, part 1 , part 2 , part 3 ,

Lori Svensen
author/designer at A'mara Books
photographer/graphic artist for Viking Visual
verified author on Goodreads
find me on Twitter
blogging on: Steem, Whaleshares, WeKu

Freya's Fire Cover Image, part 4 - Viking Visual Art Tutorial

Past tutorials:

Photo salvages:

Coloring Tutorials & Mini-tutorials:

Halloween Artwork:

Miscellaneous Artwork: