The Gorilla Front - Eli d'Elia

Fact File Name Eli d'Elia Product Vue d'Esprit 4, Poser "Vue d'Esprit with Mover 4 delivers! Thanks for the great tools and keep up the excellent work!"

Eli D'Elia is an illustrator with a cgi foundation who loves story telling with graphics.
He is the owner and art director of the DSFX studio, a multi-media graphics studio founded in 1998 and located in San Francisco.

The making of a Curious Labs Contest winner piece!

Eli kindly agreed to tell us a little more about his picture "Gorilla Front" that won the prestigious Curious Labs' Poser 5 Image Contest!

The picture was created using Vue d'Esprit 4, Mover 4 and Poser 5: "Vue d’Esprit with Mover 4 is the choice tool for fast and effective results! The key to success in commercial graphics!" says Eli.

"The Gorilla Front", inspired by the great works of Frank Frazetta and Frank Cho, was first created by Eli as a poster for the walls of the DSFX studio and ended up winning the contest!

Apes faces - Sketches

Eli sketched the basic composition with a ballpoint to work out the poses for the poster. He then followed that sketch as a guide for the composition.
The total poster took about a week to create from finished models.
"The initial gorilla soldier was a lot of work but once I had the lead character done, the others were simply variations from the final gorilla model"says Eli D'Elia
"And once in Vue d’Esprit, it was a matter of camera, lighting textures and composition!"

Below are a few steps illustrating the creation of "The Gorilla Front":

Wireframe Gorilla Model

Gorilla Modelled in Poser

Checking positionning in Poser

Eli produced a large number of illustrations to use as a guide to compose the source model in 3D. He then decided to use the already existing DAZ gorilla , Legionnaire and Gothic Armor stock model kits, to save a little time. The final soldier figure details were finished using Poser 5. Additional objects were modeled in other 3D apps, then saved as .obj and imported and incorporated into the character model in Poser 5.

Character import into Vue

Adding vegetation and light

The characters were then imported into a basic Vue scene composed for the camera. The models were saved individually and together as a group, for future use.

In a new Vue scene, Eli began working out the poster’s background.
"Vue is great for this and by using the atmosphere editor, the background final was quickly created" says Eli.

Adding lights

Adjusting textures

5 additional quadratic lights were added to bring out all the features of the soldiers.
The characters were constantly adjusted ( rotated, moved and scaled into place ), always trying to find that perfect balance of composition and lighting.

As for textures, he exported the character models out from Poser individually as .objs to best generate a texture template from a UV editor. He then used PhotoShop, to create and tweake textures to work best with the lighting scheme used in the Vue scene.

Incorporating a planet

Adding vegetation

Placing the apes

Visualizing the result

Back in Vue, he used the material editor to apply his textures.
Once he had one soldier painted and complete, he was able to quickly copy and paste the textures from one gorilla to another using the hierarchy editor.
For the mid and foregrounds, he used dry grass texture, dry weeds and ferns from the plant database which he placed strategically for best aesthetic value.
A lot of test renders were made throughout the production to easily visualize the entire scene.

Final render

" Vue d'Esprit with Mover 4 delivers! Thanks for the great tools and keep up the excellent work!" adds Eli!