Hey DM. I am not sure how this will turn out on style:) This will be a learning experience for me. I may render it in Vue. With lots of vegetation. Very tropical. I guess it depends on how low I can get the polycount. I will take my time with it and experiment a lot til I get the feel I like
Hey Yari, I think all you need is practice on any drawing you may think about doing. Do a search on Andrew Loomis and you will find a TREASURE trove of links to some of his art instruction books. The man was brilliant Come to think of it here is a link http://www.accad.ohio-state.edu/~cbelland/public/loomis_FIGURE_draw.pdf This will not only help you in 2d drawing but in your 3d as well
ok I decided to share some of my thought processes on this Volcano. As most regulars know I am a hobbyist. That means I am not completely incompetent My main tools are limited to Bryce 5(pre daz), Painter 9, Vue 6, Poser 6, and my big guns Zbrush, Photoshop CS and Cinema 4d. So I have to utilize the tools I know and use them as efficiently as possible to get the results I want. It wasnt until Z3 and the ability to make surface rigs that things really started to open because making rigs in C4d and Poser drive me up the wall and I just dont have the time. Art is my recreation. I am a writer. Still over the years I have learned a bit here and there and being in a vociferous mood I will try to share from a hobbyists point of view,
I am just using Bryce here to lay out my basic Volcano forms but something else occurred to me that you can use with Bryce as far back as Bryce 3 and thats the creation of alphas in Bryce that you can use in Z3. You will need a decent snapshot program. Of course you can do other things in it like import dem maps to use for various terrain. Its fast and efficient and you can vary the file size and resolutions.
Ok here bryce stage consists of hitting New and then Blob. The Blob fills the canvas. Lower your depth setting as far as it will go and adjust the brush size. Then drill your hole in the center. Once thats done hit erode and then go back the main program and export out. Try and use a decent sized polycount for better resolution in Z
Now then, the object file that came out of Bryce looked way to uniform so once I got it into Z I started moving things around, smoothing here, drawing there and trying various alphas. I am not done with it by a long shot. I am still in experimental mode.