Unique Ghost images

Author: chupa

Tools Needed

* DAZ/Studio

* Photoshop

I wanted a ghost in one of my scenes. I spend a great deal of time setting up the scene, with all the characters, props, and lighting, and finally went to the surface menu and highlight the character along with their clothes, jewelry, hair etc.. that I wanted to be the ghost and lowered the opacity. Well, I got a world of frustration! Suddenly I see the inside of the mouth, the eyes, the hair through the back of the head not to mention all the layers of clothes etc.. So I spend more time trying to fix all these problems. I turn the opacity to '0' on things like the eyes, inner mouth, tongue, gums, and teeth. Now my ghost looks as if it had its eyes plucked out and if I wanted to pose them with their mouth open (God forbid) there was just this gaping hole that looked stupid! I didn't even bother trying to mess with the clothes after this, I admit I gave up. I deleted the whole scene in disgust, and decided to play around with some reflections and lighting. During my play I discovered this process to make a ghost without all those problems I just mentioned, OK ranted about. Here it is.

Set a basic scene (without ghost character), in mine I just wanted a simple outdoor scene with a single kneeling figure. I created this then added some simple lighting.

Next I placed a plane in front of my kneeling figure where I wanted my ghost to appear. To do this go to 'Create' - > 'New Primitive', now in the window that pops up select 'plane' from the drop down menu, make the plane about 2m in size. Now using your X rotate slider in the 'parameters' menu change it to 90, now position it where you want the ghost to show, use you Z and Y scale sliders to make it about the size of your ghost. You now should have something like this.

Next in your scene menu click the little eye next to anything right around the plane (in my case this was my kneeling character and all his clothes)

Now add your ghost character, dress them up, add hair, jewelry whatever, and pose them in front of the plane facing in the OPPOSITE direction that you want them in the final picture, like this.

Ok now we got to make some minor setting changes. The first one is to go to your 'scene' menu and highlight ALL of your ghost (including hair, jewelry, clothes etc..) and the plane, you do this by holding 'Ctrl' and then clicking on the all the items you want. Now once they are all highlighted go to your 'parameters' menu and scroll down until you see 'cast shadows' and change this to 'off' (ghosts don't have shadows, and neither should our plane).

Good that was the hard part, now go to the 'surfaces' menu, if it's not already open got to 'view' - > 'tabs' - > 'surfaces'. Now find the plane and click the little '+' before it, now highlight 'default', make sure the 'advanced' tab to the right is selected and then change these settings:

Diffuse strength - 0%

Spectral strength - 0%

Ambient strength - 0%

Opacity strength - 0%

Reflection strength - 100%

Lighting model - Glossy plastic

Great now the only other thing that you have to add to your scene is a spotlight, you do this by going to 'create' - > 'new spotlight'.

Take this spotlight and using the X, Y, Z translate sliders in the 'parameters' menu move it to the opposite side of the plane as your ghost character about chest high. Now scroll down the 'parameters' menu until you see 'point at' click on this and then in the menu that appears highlight the ghost character and hit 'accept', lastly change the 'intensity' to about 60 (this dial is just a little bit farther down)

Ok we're almost there, hang in just a little longer.

Now render your scene keep all of the things that you hid from view earlier hidden, you should get something like this.

Save this render and call it 'foreground'. Now go back to the 'scene' menu clicking the little eye symbol again turn off the plane, your ghost character (don't forget their hair, clothes etc.) and turn on the other things that you hid before. Render this now and you should get something like this.

Alright the home stretch, it's easy from here on. Open up Photoshop, and then open the 'foreground' image we rendered. Go to 'select' - > 'all', like this.

Now 'edit' - > 'copy'

You can now close this image, next open the image 'background' that you rendered, create a new layer by going to 'layer' - > 'new' - > 'layer' like this.

Now we go to 'edit' - > 'paste'

Now all we have to do is select the 'eraser' tool from the toolbox (by default this is off to the left), using a fairly large brush size to start erase everything in the foreground picture except the ghost image, now change to a smaller brush size if you need to get close. You should now see the full scene with a pretty nice looking ghost.

Lastly go to 'filter' - > 'distort' - > 'diffuse glow', and play with the settings until you get something you like, the important one is 'graininess' set this to '0', now go to 'edit' - > 'fade diffuse glow' and in the window that appears click mode and change it to 'luminosity' and adjust the opacity as desired. Now simply go to 'layer' - > 'flatten image' and save it as whatever file type you want.

Well this is my finished product, I hope you found this helpful, enjoy.

Chupa