More Than Meets the Eye - Hound vs Rumble

Although this multi-part episode has two scenes where Hound tosses Rumble, I wanted to try some new techniques so chose the underwater scene.

I shot Maketoys Gundog on some Toyhax desert tile stages. The rocks in the foreground and background were cut and pasted in from some shots I had taken at Fitzgerald Marine Reserve. Masterpiece Rumble was added in using layer masks so I could get one leg in front and one leg in back of Gundog. He's a bit on the small side so I had to scale him up a bit. There were a lot of plastic flash and paint blemishes to cover up.

The Filter Gallery actually has an Ocean Ripple filter, but I found the Canvas Glass filter to provide the effect I wanted. It's not quite perfect, but close enough. This resulted in a lot cleaning up around the edges of the figures though. I also added a dark blue overlay to darken the scene.

Unfortunately, Photoshop hiccuped or something. Although I was saving constantly, after I did an export and closed down the app, I couldn't find my project file. I searched the entire disc for it, and it's not in the Recently Opened list. I'll just have to recreate it. More practice I guess.

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Run, Blaster! Save yourself!

Interestingly, Tesla is able to hold Rumble and Ratbat in his hands. Unfortunately, his articulation is somewhat limited so I couldn't reproduce the kneeling stance he had in The Movie. I'm still trying to figure out how to make the shadows look more natural.

The cannon is from TFC Toys Thanatos with his body masked out. The tower and and floor are from clone stamping panels of his body with the borders and edges smudged out.

I created the window frames by cutting out and transforming a section of a set of Mechanical Chain Base panels. I really need to learn how to add a shiny glass effect.

The sky, clouds, mountains, and trees are from a local park.

Direct link - https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bwxl1QbH6hwVWnhrUTR0YWR3bUk/view?usp=sharing

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Astrotrain, transform and get us out of here!

Transportation Captain is standing in for Astrotrain. The back of his train mode doesn’t actually open. I did that in Photoshop by cutting out a small section and rotating it. I didn’t use DX9 Chigurh because of convenience. I already had a side shot of Transportation Captain when I had him in train mode recently. I really didn’t want to transform Toyworld Evila Star again because he has a clear plastic hinge in his backpack that I don’t want to stress.

I couldn’t figure out how to get Rumble to hold Apollyon’s fusion cannon, which is quite a bit larger than Rumble himself. I also tried with Toyworld Hegemon’s fusion cannon, but I couldn’t get him to hold that either. In the end, I just took a separate shot and layered it on Rumble using a layer mask. The final shot is with Hegemon’s fusion cannon.

Apollyon was similarly layered on Soundwave with a layer mask because Soundwave’s arms are not long enough nor strong enough to hold Apollyon in that fashion. It was just a matter of trying different camera angles until I found a shot that I was satisfied with. Unfortunately, Apollyon’s head doesn’t have enough upward articulation to match the source material.

Since Generation Toys has yet to release their version of Scavenger, I used Scraper instead. He, Mixer, and Starscream were simply individual shots that were added to the scene.

The immediate foreground elements include a rock from my garden and stairs from my home. Both had a field blur and an orange overlay applied. The stairs had additional Hue/Saturation layers applied to the left edge to simulate the broken edge.

The stray blaster bolt, because the Autobots seem to have worse aim than Stormtroopers, was created from a deformed Marquee fill-in, with Inner and Outer glow layer styles in effect.

The ground is a shot of the desert ground tile from Toy Stages. I applied a Render Cloud layer to simulate mist and dust. It also helps to keep the figures from looking like they are simply floating over the ground.

The background is a shot of the Mechanical Chain Base panels. I used Layer Masks and colored layers to make it look like sections had been blasted away and scorched. The sky is a shot of some random summer day. The smoke plume was created with my custom smoke brush.

Hi-res image: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bwxl1QbH6hwVeEt3cGMtM1ExVGc/view?usp=sharing

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