Some serious issue related work for a change! Oooh..did I maybe use a classic film title reference much older than I, for my title...LOL! 'Gone with the wild' This image is dedicated to a special friend from Holland whom I had the honour of making acquaintance through the galleries here at Renderosity. Dirk aka 'huismus' my friend I know this image is not one of hope for the wild life itself, but I'm sure you'll appreciate the heartfelt message that this image brings. I also know that you mostly take photos of animals in captivity and this might seem to be the complete opposite environment than what animals in captivity has to live with and endure. But the wild has long since not been a safe environment for any wild animals due to e.g. over population by humans, poaching, hunting for sport, diseases/illnesses obtained from domestic animals, crop harvest poisoning and many, many more. But everyone knows that, right?! However your pain regarding having to take photographs from within the steel fences of zoo's are definitely shared by myself. Although I live in a country renowned for the 'BIG 5' I can only go and look for them in a nearby zoo or drive many hours out to some bush camp and hope to find these animals. The sad truth is the wild as an concept is getting smaller and smaller, faster than most people realize! And we'd be losing an irreplaceable heritage. The making of... The concept for this image was first spawned around 2years ago. But due to the size and available models, I had to patiently wait till I had all the proper resources and time at hand before I could undertake the challenge of turning this concept into an image. I wanted a scene filled with animals but they needed to appear as ghost figures. And all animals needed to have a natural everyday like behaviour. PROBLEM....they all need to fit into the environment perfectly as if they were part of the original scene, and must not appear as 2d images just pasted on to a back drop. My solution for this was to render the grass plain as small individual parts, so when I add the animals in post work, by moving the order of the objects I can slide the animal figures forward and backwards between the different layers of grass. So my animals get a proper feel of distance and also of proper perception. And there is no need for the time taking blending and erasing that normally needs to be done to compose an image in this manner. Another reason for not rendering the whole grass field as a whole, is because the grass covers the whole field of vision, and a grassland this big was not possible to create in Bryce. One section of grass contained around 45 smaller grass objects and this already was a serious strain on memory/ram and process speed. So adding another 23 sections of grass was just not possible. I did a total of 20 individual renders for the animals and the hunter, plus each render had a mask render as well=40 renders Then the environment consisting of the sky and trees and mountains made up another render and was my main scene.=1 render The grass was rendered as 24 individual renders with masks as well=48renders Total renders 89 Total render time +-5Hours All renders were done at high/fine quality and saved as bitmaps The butterfly's were added in post work, and was made using the default image sprayer brush tool in Corel photopaint All post work was done with Coral photopaint. All renders were done in Bryce 6 I thank you for taking the time in viewing this image and any comments are most welcome!