The Hitchhiker

Here is a little image I came up with over the last few days. Still needs a little work but it is getting there. The theme is after crashing a car the driver (dead obviously) is not sure what has just happened and is trying to hitch a ride home.

I used the usual suspects on this drawing, with a few differences. The original picture was done in Blender. The model of the person was a .obj file imported into Blender from Poser. The car mesh was created by Benigno "Virus" Fernandez as Poser prop. I exported that as a .obj file, positioned it and did a mesh deform of the front end from where it hit the light pole. The grass was created using Blender static particles (a real pain to get the settings right). The following are the setting for the material I used in Blender:


The key is to make the material render as wire only. This gets you the "grassy" look. I change the material for the person to be a Blender halo where the halo particles were very small. This gave a kind of "dot-matrixy" glowing material for the person. I knew I would have to do something with this later.

After I rendered a 1600x1200 .png file I imported this as a background to a ParticleIllusion project. ParticleIllusion is INCREDIBLE. I quickly added the fire, sparking smoke and a blur around the figure to give it that "ghostly" look. Then a quick render and voila, done ;-).