This morning, having a few idle minutes to spare, I pondered upon the process by which I make my pictures.

It was interesting thinking about it, and I thought it might be interesting to others too so I'm posting about it here.

First of all, I determine the concept. I like to make pictures that appear to be part of an ongoing story, as if they were stills from a film, for example. Not all my pictures follow that pattern, but most do. So to start with I want to know what my picture is about. One thing I very rarely do is make a picture to show off a particular prop/texture/figure etc, so the theme of the image is important.

Next I decide what I'm going to learn from the render. I want to learn something every time a put together a scene. By the time I'm ready to post the final render to the gallery, I will have a better understanding of at least one aspect of Poser than I had before I started. If necessary I will modify the concept slightly so that I can incorporate a new technique or whatever.

Then I peruse my Runtime folder to check if I have there resources there to realise my vision. I don't mind a spending a bit on each render, but I wouldn't want to make a huge investment on stuff I might only use once. Looking through my Runtime for the stuff I need can also give rise to more ideas, embellishing the original concept if I see props that can be put to good use.

Next comes composition and lighting. I spend a lot of time on this bit. I'll arrange a few key scene elements, or low resolution figures and primitives as 'placeholders' and then find the camera position and angle that works best to create the effect I want. I'll decide on focal length, orientation, depth of field etc. at this stage. Then I'll set up the lighting, albeit approximately at this stage. It can be tweaked later, depending on the exact position of the key figures, but I like to establish the overall lighting effect at an early stage.

Then I remove the 'placeholders' and add the rest of the basic 'scenery' - just enough so that I can position and pose the figures properly. At this point I don't really care to much about what it looks like, I just need to know where the ground is and where walls, trees etc. are.

Now I add the figures and pose them. Posing takes me a long time - I'm very fussy about it. Every position of every limb etc. on human figures is tested by trying to put myself in the same position. Can my arm twist that much? Do my fingers bend that much? And so on. For non-humans I use Googe Images to find some reference photos. For fantasy creatures I just guess :-)

Then I add clothing, props and more scenery elements until the scene is complete.

Next I do some 'housekeeping'. Because I render with gamma correction enabled I check that all transparencies, bump maps etc. have been set to be ignored by GC. I set the texture filturing I want for each material, using quick area renders to check that it's working ok.

So, the scene is pretty much feature complete at this point so I do a preview render to check the way all the materials look. Usually this results in a foray into the Material Room to replace or correct a whole bunch of materials, using more area renders to confirm that I'm happy with the new versions.

Now I go for a coffee and do something else for a while, to let my brain forget about the details of the image a bit. Then I return to the rendered preview and flip it horizontally. This lets me see it afresh, as though I was looking at it for the first time. I can more objectively judge the composition and lighting by doing this. If it doesn't look quite right I make the necessary adjustments and rerender until I'm happy with it.

Then finally I work out what render settings the image needs for it to look how I want it to. I check raytrace bounces are sufficient, that IDL is set appropriately, that pixel samples and shading rate are appropriate for the types of objects in the scene. I'll also check the settings for each light, usually increasing Shadow Samples from the default that I used in the preview renders.

I render the scene and ... ta daa! Nearly finished!

I'm not averse to postwork, so I consider wheter anything needs to be done to enhance the render. Often the postwork needed is minimal, but I always at least consider it. As well as a JPG version, I also save the layered version so that I can change the postwork at a later date - something I might do based on comments received after it's been posted to a gallery.

So ... that's my approach - what's yours?

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