Excellent scene!

belissima obra, aplausos

Nicely done :)

nice

Very lovely work. great!

This is very nice. I like it.

Looks like a pro pic!!!

Pretty! DPH

Maybe it's my monitor but it seems a little dark to me. Other than that it's great. Is there a canvas pattern going over the whole thing?

Thanks for the comments. About the facial expression... I had some trouble with the dress in the cloth room and had saved the scene numerous times. It wasn't until I was almost finished the post work that I realized that I had opened and rendered the wrong save. The expression in it was somewhat softer. The expression in this image looks "stoic", which I guess is sort of appropriate given her line of "work" ;) Dave, the pattern you see are "Scan Lines." I wanted something other than a flat looking image. The image is on the darker side, but it's meant to be moody. If you are an a CRT monitor, it might be darker than on an LCD one.

Looks great! I'm glad you finally got the Cloth room to do your bidding!

It is a little dark - but I think it looks lovely - a great looking environment

I like the changes. She has a much better expression, and the increase in ambience brings out the details better, without losing the great shadow and reflection effects.

It can easily be seen how much thought you put on placing every single thing. Even though the figure is in the center of the image, it works realy well. So much for composition rules :) The dark colors with splashes of stratigically placed bright pinks also work well. Only thing - the furnitures cant be seen well. Glad to see inspiration has returned!

Thanks :) She's not "exactly" in the centre, she is a teensy weensy bit to the left of it. Actually, in the full image she is quite a bit to the left of centre, but I didn't want that much "room" showing because there really wasn't much happening off to the right other than more dark lattice and window and it seemed redundant to keep it in so I cropped it out. I did spend quite a bit of time looking for props to fill up space and then went with the minimalist look that you find in most Japanese decors, and just added a couple of plants to the vases for spashes of colour to give some balance.

A great collection of little glows and reflections all over the place, really nicely done. The scan lines pattern is a little wierd to me, I'm glad you explained it was intentional. Some very small suggestions (really subtle stuff) - try turning on Ambient Occlusion for the fan material, and for her skin on the thighs, chest, and upper arms - this will make a small bit of shadow along the edges of the dress and the part of her fan where her fingers are touching it. Really nice catch of the reflection on the wood lattice in the left side, where her shadow falls.

First, I can see your are learning about all there is in Poser and it's lighting. That is a good start. There are three main things in a composition. The way things are layed out (which tells the story within an Illustration), Lighting (Live or die with lighting.) Then in this case since we are not talking about Drawing or Painting, we will have to go with the pose to capture The expression and the mood of your Illustration that you want to express in your Illustration. The pose you have is fine. The next time you do an Illustration. Take these notes into consideration and you will see a world of difference. Lighting is the hardest to get right in poser because, what you get in preview and the final render can be worlds apart. A little trick I do is. Get your layout the way you want it. After you have everything the way you want it. The next thing you shoot for is lighting. Your picture is a dark background which is fine. But A dark background is Dramatic, You need dramadic lighting. In this case, Good lighting on the face, soft but strong enought to bring her out of the background since she is the main characture you want to see. You don't want her to jump out at you. You want to discover the mystery of her. Lighting Here is a little trick I do because of the difference between, Preview mode and the final render. First you have thirty frames to work with for one render. In frame one in your Interpotation Controls, make sure all your lighting is set on Linear. Render you picture as soon as you thing everything is the way you want it. (make sure you all the lighting is clicked on in linear each frame you change.} If that render is way off, then go to frame 2. The reason for this Linear holds that frame no matter what happens on all the frames around that frame, From here you know what direction you nead to head with to correct the lighting. I suggest render low quality to save time to see if your adjustments are going in the right direction. Keep doing this till You get the lighting the way that looks great, Then do your final render. the biggest reason to render like this is because you might have a number of renders that are not there yet. but the one in frame 4 was very close. Delete all the other lighting frames. (make sure you don't delete frame 4. the one that is closest) Work off that to tweek it. Here are what jumped out at me. The first thing that hit me was the lack of dramatic lighting on (especially her face) The background is fine. What you have would work better if it was a creature comming out of the dark that gave you more questions than answers. A rule of thumb is, almost always have your characture facing toward the center of the picture, which means. She should be more to your right. You want your characture to lead your eyes into the picture. She is the main objective, but still, she should be more to your right. A centered picture is OK in certain situations, example Technical Illustrations, as apose an Illustrations or Paintings. Look at all the masters Paintings. They are never directly in the center. Even a Portrait. At first glance it might apear centered. But at a closer look you will see that it is off to one side or the other, facing in toward the center. Your pose you used is fine. Where your at now reminds me of when I first go out of High School, only in that I knew I could draw and paint well, but I wasn't confortable with Layout. That was foreign to me. Working in an Art Studio a number of years, then it hit me. It will become second nature to concetrate on your objective and how to achieve it. Don't take this the wrong way. I've been there. and someone that points you in the right direction will reap rewards down the line for you.

Very detailed scene, very rich - all issues mentioned I think.

ust as a suggestion if you're trying to master lighting, don't start with a complex scene. because, as olivier mentioned at rdna, your materials really matter. so if you want to focus on lighting, you don't want to confuse the issue with composition or materials. my suggestion is either a portrait or a nude, since you're most likely to have a figure in your scene, so skin would be the #1 most common material you'll need to light correctly. hair is probably #2. while clothes might be common, unless you use one type of clothes most of the time, clothing materials would be a much more variable issue. i don't know what you think of anything in my gallery, but except for scenes with several visible or logical lightsources, i tend to use about 3 lights: 1 ibl for ambient and spots for accents and highlights. i also tend to use simple greyscale gradients as my image. i make them procedurally, but it's easy to make them in photoshop, and then you can make the colors more accurate to the environment. both bagginsbill and aery soul suggest plain white or grey sources.

Thanks! :) I'm soaking up all of this helpful information and tips and will work on this image some more.

I like the pink highlights. The only thing that strikes me is not seeing the shadow of the hand and fan. Maybe that was in the part you cropped? Cropping a bit more off the left might help avoid that issue, and also improve the relative positioning of the figure. I think the lighting is fine, but I'd try some ambient occlusion on the teeth and mouth.