This image was designed for a novel cover for the concluding book in a trilogy. To create it I used Cycles, and mainly worked with Blenders’ modelling, particle system and force field capabilities.
The basic specifications were for an image that symbolised death and darkness.
After considering a number of options, I gave this image a render. I decided on a raven (symbolic of death and mourning) in mid flight, with the camera looking from below, and to have black dust dissolving away from the raven, with a relatively smooth transition between the dust and raven.
This image will be integrated into a stylised white circle on the centre of the front cover of the book.
I think the transition works well with the tail, but not so well with the wings… is it possible to make it so the particles are denser near the edge of the wings and have more of a drop in density the further away from the wings they get?
You could use the particle info node. Divide the channel “lifetime” and “age” with a math node. You can now use this information as a factor input for e.g. a mixshader with a transparent node. This is just an example. There should also be other ways to achieve that goal.
I think you could achieve the variable density by making many more particles get created but having a lot of them die early, thus causing less to go far beyond the wings.
That could certainly work too – for more fine tuning, I might just go to an image editing software to touch up the transition. Thanks for the suggestion!
beautiful, I think it is an excellent work. But anyway if you do want to modfify the density, maybe you could use weight painting with a weight gradient (weight Tools, weight gradient) or another way, use a texture for your particles. But for me, this work is really good.
Another great suggestion. I’ve considered all of these, and will continue to work for the best image possible. I’m already employing a noise texture for colour variation in the particles, so I think I’m going more for density closest to the wings, not so much darker shade, although I could add a subtle hint of that too, absolutely.