Bill’s Horse – A Dapple Grey Mare
“Smuggler Bill rides gallant and gay On his dapple-grey mare, away, and away”.
I don’t seem to have a dapple-grey horse, so I will need to re-skin another horse. I selected the Arabian Horse from the Horse & Tack pack.
Having got the horse on set, I scrolled down the Modify panel on the right of the screen to the Texture Settings section and clicked the Launch button. This opened my graphics program (PaintShop Pro) with the Arab Horse Skin Diffuse Map loaded (this I a bit like CloneCloth for horses!).
You might, like me, think it looks more like a polar bear than a horse. Anyway I did quite a bit of experimenting. I first tried to paint my own dapple-grey skin using the PaintShop Pro spray can, but I am no artist. I eventually resorted to searching for images of dapple-grey horses on Google images. I then experimented more using copy and paste of images of real horse skin. Initially I stretched the image over too much surface area and the dapples became streaks rather than patches. So I made larger texture patch containing more dapples per Square Inch / cm than previously. This improved things. I also converted the picture to a shades of grey image to get rid of the yellow / brown tones on the original.
As you will see the result is not perfect, but probably as far as I will take it for this project. From the Google images I know that there are many patterns of dapple-grey in the real world, and I feel sure that if someone was asked to describe the horse I just re-skinned, “dapple-grey” would be the closest they could come up with. I noticed that on most, though not all, the lower legs tended to be darker than the rest of the horse, so I aimed for the same.
Having applied the newly saved dapple-grey skin using the Diffuse option in the Modify panel on the right, I also then saved Bill’s dapple-grey mare as a new prop, by selecting the + button at the bottom of the Content Manager panel on the left.
So time to saddle up and in the next post we will get Bill to ride her through one of the iClone sets.
Tony