ISO 400 | 148mm | f 4.0 | 1/100 sec

Procrastination is a silent villain, stealing valuable time and robbing people of prime opportunities to succeed.  Slowly he creeps, and quietly he moves, whispering all the while, “Today is far spent, let it wait ’till tomorrow.”  And as his victims lay in wait for a better time and greater opportunities, the voiceless pillager gradually draws his net.

Woe to those who allow the grass to grow beneath their feet, for in time they shall discover that not only has life passed them by, but they have also become prisoners to their own laziness and lack of self-motivation.  Once entangled by the mindset of “Put-off ’till tomorrow”, there is little hope for escape.

Oh how many earth-shattering discoveries, incredible scientific break-through’s, and monumentally innovative advancements in technology we as a society have missed out on because of procrastination.  It is impossible to fathom the enormity of the ideas that have never been explored or developed simply because men never found the right time to do so.  Oh how much better off we would be if humanity wouldn’t neglect their duties and put-off responsibility!

And so, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a list of things to do before the day is finished, there’s not a moment to waste!  Now where did I leave that lawn-mower?

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More work with 3D objects this week.  I was messing around with a tool in Blender called the Ivy Generator, and it’s pretty cool the results it can produce (although it is admittedly a bit of a pain to work with).  While I like the effect that this tool creates, I would like to see how it looks on a bigger scale with larger models (this is definitely a tool I’ll have to use again).
To create this effect, I had to open my original image in Blender and then create a rough model of the scene (we’re talking really rough, just some simple meshes to represent the ground, the feet, legs, and the log).  Nothing fancy, just some rough sketches to approximate the general shape of the objects in the scene so that the vines would have something to grow/wrap around.  Below you can see a preview of the 3D objects and the vines I used in the final image.

Once the vines were generated in Blender, it was pretty easy to render the scene and export as a .png (which maintains transparency, making it really easy to just drag-and-drop into your scene).  In the final render I removed the 3D placeholders and just rendered the vines, then I dragged them into Photoshop for the final composite.

Below is another screenshot of Blender showing how I created the 3D placeholders based off of my original image.

Once the vines were placed into my composite, I did some color adjustments, dodging and burning, added some fog, and also included a little gaussian blur.  With everything combined, I ended up with this image.  It’s very… green.

Well, that’s it for this week.  Be on the lookout for more posts coming your way!

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