Girl in Poppy Field - Guitta Bertaud

Fact File Name Guitta Bertaud Product Vue d'Esprit 4 "Vue’s strongest point, in my opinion, is that absolutely everybody who uses it can create immediately beautiful scenery!"

Guitta Bertaud was one of the first pioneers of Vue artistry, and one of the most influential artists in the Vue community. We at e-on cherish the memory of this wonderful person.
This interview was conducted one year before Guitta discovered the terrible illness that was going to take her away in less than six months.

Guitta Bertaud is fascinated by coutryside scenery.
"My inspiration comes from everywhere. Walking in the street and looking at people, but also just looking out of my window. As I've been living in the countryside for several years with no neighbours on one side of my house for about a mile, I mostly see fields and forests!"

Painting Landscapes With The Heart of an Artist...

"Girl in a Poppy Field"	"Girl in a Poppy Field", "A l’orée du bois" and "Close to the sky, Close to Heaven" were born this way but also inspired by Claude Monet and other impressionists."
"A L'Orée Du Bois"	"I don’t try to get an oil painting effect. I just play around with Vue, mostly without a clear idea of what I want to do when I start."
"Close To The Sky..."	"Vue’s Trees and plants are so great that I just need to place one or two, add a terrain, a flower and direct the sun, then I remember a scene I have seen in the nature and every thing comes together naturally. It is like creating a world!"

Guitta tells us more on the way she makes such beautiful pieces of art:

It takes me many hours (sometimes hundreds!) to create a scene. The reason is that I’m never satisfied with my work. I always want to add just one more plant or flower or tree - and I do this until my machine or Vue simply can't take any more... What I often do is render the scene I’m working on, and then leave it without looking at it for a day or two. Then, when I open it again, I can see where I can improve something.

Girl in a Poppy Field

The day Cindy Hoover offered me her beautiful poppy flower, I knew I had to do this image. I wanted to use hundreds, thousands of flowers! Vue’s alpha plane feature was the best way and a great help to get what I wanted.

This is where it gets tricky!

Step 1: I started to create 3 different groups of poppys in Vue, rendered them to full screen and saved the images and the depth mask.
Step 2: The wheat field is a simple terrain (image 2) with lots of grits and pebbles, mapped with a mixed yellow color.

Step 1

Step 2

Then Guitta created the rest of the lanscape:

Creating the landscape

As the image was a little dark, I added a directional light coming from the front-left of the scene, and made it shadowless. After that I placed my alpha planes, hundreds of them, all around, except in the foreground where I added over 200 “real” poppys.

Creating the poppy field

It was now time to create the little girl in Poser and give her the right pose.
I imported her as a pz3 into Vue and placed some poppys one by one in her left arm to create the bouquet she is picking. And the final touch was adding another poppy in her right hand.
I had to move some alpha planes around to make room for the girl.

And this is the final result:

"Girl in a Poppy Field", Final render

Who is Guitta Bertaud?

"As I’m at the age to be retired, I’m doing several small jobs; translations, creating logos and illustrations for web pages or booklets. I use only Vue for 90% of my work. In my young years I studied fine art and became a free lance artist, creating models for silk impression, gift wraps, greeting cards and also did oil and acrylic paintings, pencil drawings

Check out Guitta's personal PortFolio Cornucopia3D.

Why Guitta Prefers Vue:

"I discovered Vue in its early version in a Computer magazine. I purchased version 1 and this was my very first step into 3D. I wasn’t much good at it, but very much fascinated by what I could get out of it! I have followed Vue since then and would never spend a day without using it! I’m really unhappy when my other work keeps me away from creating images for a whole week. Vue is so easy to learn and to use! I’m always amazed at the results Vue can produce even when creating a scene with only a few objects and plants."

" Vue’s strongest point, in my opinion, is that absolutely everybody who uses it can create immediately beautiful scenery. That’s the best a software can do: great results right from the beginning, and up. That’s why, when a new user launches Vue for the first time, he becomes addicted to it. That's what happened to me, and I'll keep on using it as much as I can!"