No relation to the the book "Lords of the North" by Bernard Cornwell (though it is an excellent book) nor the music band.
A pair of grizzly bears (Ursus arctos horribilis) wake up from there hybernation to a late spring snow. As a result, they are a bit grouchy.
I've been wanting to do a few bear themed artworks; however, it turns out that bears can be rather hard to work with...artistically speaking that is. They are very bulky and round, making them hard to place in a composition. Basically they become hard to place brown blobs. This one is actually my fourth attempt at bear art, but it is only the first one I consider to be up to presentable standards.
I have another on the way, but the fur takes a LONG time to render. This one took ~100 hours on a pretty powerful system. I'm working up to using Maya's fur system, but I'm not quite there yet. This one was actually rendered all in Vue. The fur came with the model, so it is actually a very complex set of polygons rather than a particle simulation.
Credits:
The Bear model is Ursus Arctos by Alessandro_AM, purchased at Daz3d:
[link] The rest of the scene was constructed in Vue 8.
`ChewedKandi has certainly gone out of her way to keep the vector community on the right path. Always making sure that her talents are infinitely scalable, Sharon has put her bezier curves to excellent use, and firmly anchored herself as an inspirational leader. We're absolutely delighted to bestow the Deviousness Award for June 2013 to `ChewedKandi. Congratulations, Sharon! Read More
Sta.sh
Yeah, it pretty much took all 9 gigs of memory on my pc through vue to get this done. I actually first tried rendering the bears alone in poser and compositing them over the vue scene, but I just couldn't get it to look right.
I've just started using Vue Pioneer myself. I hope to be able to use it to augment my 2D work.
Yes, the fur was the major reason it took so long, also the size...~12 megapixels.
Vue is a great first app to use if you trained in traditional landscape painting. It's much easier to comprehend then something like Maya or zbrush which are more akin to sculpture.