In the Time of Dragons... by theSea

DAZ|Studio • Fantasy • posted on Dec 12, 2007

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Description

Hi, thanks for stopping by! "In the Time of Dragons..." started as a fairly simple Fantasy style render inspired by some John Howe paintings I saw in this month's ImagineFX magazine. In two paintings he had a dragon or other lizardly creature coiled in right of frame with the background to center left. I thought the arrangement looked cool and decided to try something similar. The woman in the tower is there because my wife asked for her. I think it adds a bit more narrative to the piece. Technical details: DAZ|Studio render with a good bit of postwork in Photoshop. This was a multi-pass render using a skydome I made in Vue 5i. Lights are mostly Dreamlight's Light Dome Pro, sunset, medium. I also rendered a pass with Pendragon's environment light using a lightprobe created in Vue along with the skydome. The Pendragon ambient, sky lights and sunlight were all rendered with the skydome off, then the skydome was rendered seperately with the lights off. I also ran a pass with Dreamlight's Mood Master. These were compositied in Photoshop in the usual way and the MM layer was used as a mask for a contrast adjustment as well as directly in screen mode. There is a tutorial on how to multipass and composite LDP scenes at Dreamlight's website which I highly recommend. I also painted several layers of fog using Ron's Fog brushes to lay the atmosphere on. Props include "The Wizard's Tower" from Dark Anvil avaliable at RMP and DAZ's Milennium Dragon 2, Creepy Trees II and Dead Bushes available at DAZ. A note about render times - this was the first scene I've rendered on my new intel quad core system... going from a Celeron 2.8ghz to a Quad 6600 is amazing - render times are around 1/4 of what they were before. Many, many thanks to everyone who has taken the time to comment on my earlier work and as always constructive criticism is most welcome on this piece.

Comments (24)

Trollmac

8:19PM | Wed, 12 December 2007

Excellent job!

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jakiblue

8:21PM | Wed, 12 December 2007

you never fail to amaze me, EVER. superb. i love the slight fog for atmosphere, and i only noticed the woman when i looked closer, but you're right, she certainly does add to the narrative. In fact, seeing her there completely changed the story i had in my head when i first saw the picture.

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nucks

8:23PM | Wed, 12 December 2007

I like the powder earth-tone grey for the castle and even the foreground - gives it that dry, hot feel to it like this is the domain of the dragon. Great scene.

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Dynamo

8:50PM | Wed, 12 December 2007

Lovely haze atmosphere

jaybutton

9:54PM | Wed, 12 December 2007

Great image! I like this image very much. Jay

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swjkie100

11:11PM | Wed, 12 December 2007

Remarkable depth and environment!

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lorddarkwolf

11:13PM | Wed, 12 December 2007

Wicked dragon!

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Akhbour

11:40PM | Wed, 12 December 2007

Reminds me of the cover of a fairytale book I had when I was a kid (a looong time ago!). Great work and atmosphere, and as usual a proof of patience (waiting for the renders to finish). Thanks for sharing your "wisdom"! ^_^

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