Now it can be posted.... "The Skull Collector" was my entry in Blues Dragon's Frank Frazetta contest over at DAZ. I'm pleased beyond words as to how well it did. My goal with this piece was to do my own thing in a Frazetta-ish way and to try to execute my very best work from a technical and aestetic standpoint. DAZ Studio render - ~36 hour render time, mostly due to the raytraced shadows and the transmapped hair. Note that all test renders up to finals were done with 'cast shadows' turned off on the hair prop or with the shadow samples turned waaaay down to 2 or 4. Some postwork in Photoshop. Production credits: DAZ Victoria 4.2 with DM's "Nanette" textures and Omnifreaker's "'Elite' human skin shader." Hair is "Wild Hair" from RDNA and Pendragon's hair shader. Environment is "White Room" available from the Dreamlight Member's club and the the skulls are from DM's "Lost Land." Plants are from some DAZ and RNDA sets and the knife is a freebie from Questor over at DAZ. The outfit is Aery_Soul's "Classic Fantasy" with some materials work by yours truely. The gold and rubys were made up in DAZ studio and the leather uses AS's textures with surface settings tweaked with PwSurface. Ground texture is a seamless rock texture I got from somewhere with bump and specular maps. The actual ground prop is an MG heightfield prop, which lets you create geometry based on a displacement map. I made the map in Photoshop to give a bump up over the floor of the White Room prop. This image was inspired by some of Frank Frazetta's paintings where there is a white or simple background. The girl was 'created' by spinning Victoria's morph dials to give an iconically Frazetta-ish appearance. The largish hips and smaller bust are important, but so is the face, with its almost Anime big eyes, wide forhead, small mouth and chin and the pert nose. I also liked the dynamic look I was able to get with the 'Wild Hair.' Post work consisted of using a white mask of the background to even out the whitespace in the image and a LOT of color, saturation and hue adjustment in Photoshop. I tinkered with the colors a lot to get this to look a bit more illustrative and a little less CG, but the end result is still (I believe) very much in theSea's style with some Frazetta overtones. I did a little painting on the left foot to bring in some ambient occlusion that I felt was lacking in the final render as well. One of the very last things I did before final rendering was to turn the skulls so that they were all facing in the direction of the girl. This is a bit of a cheap compositional stunt - but it helps to pull the the lines in the image together and guide your eye around the image in the little journey I'm hoping you take when you look at it. My sincere thanks: to Frank Frazetta Jr, both for the time he spent judging the contast and his appreciation of my work, to BluesDragon for putting the whole thing together and to everyone who has taken the time to post comments here and at AZ on my work. It still amazes me to think that 31 months ago I'd never even heard of DAZ Studio and now; here we are. As always your comments and critique are very much appreciated.