Thursday 9 April 2015

Hilary Long: Man Down in Overdown book cover

Latest Hilary Long mystery by Margaret Cooper Evans ( @Maggs912 for those who twitter) is now available on Kindle Store and by jingo its a good one.
UK version on Amazon UK here
US version on Amazon USA here

As for the cover, I created and rendered the Walther PPK in 3DStudio Max.
The texture was worked up from several photographs and then a bump map created to make the wear and scratches catch the light. Maybe it is something to do with the NVidia normal map creation software but I found a black and white bump map worked better than a normal map in this instance - OLD SCHOOL BABY! Yes, that's right... I am SOOO Old School I spell "school" correctly!
I then added a purple and green upward facing light to mimic the reflection of the map onto the gun.

The Map was made from scratch in Photoshop, the photograph is one I took especially for this job as were the four layers that went to make up the table cloth.

The gun, map and tablecloth were then comped, colour corrected and shadows added again, in Photoshop.

Click on the images to view larger versions. Any questions, feel free to ask :-)