Hi - thanks for stopping in. "The Last Round" is one of those horrible things - a piece that I've poured a TON of work into and with which I'm still just not quite satisfied. This one's been bubbling in the kettle for well over a year and I finally finished it last month for the monthly wallpaper competition over at DAZ. You can see the silhoette of an early version in the Dreamlight Surface Mask Creator promo materials... it goes back that far. Anyways - I'm really happy to have a finished version of this to present to you. Production credits: DAZ Studio render. Render time is ~36 hours for the main pass. As usual this is due to the sun's raytraced shadows and the semi transparent particles, particularly the sparks. More on that later. Rendered in three passes - one for the main outdoor lighting, one for the pointlight and spotlight used for the gun's muzzleblast (~8 hour render) and one for the reflection and ambient (~1 hour render). Composited and tweaked in Adobe photoshop. I used Dreamlight's Camera Pointer to frame everything the way I wanted and did several test renders with just the sunlight, the background prop and the alien figure; tweaking positioning and pose on the alien until I got the shadow to line up on the wall 'just so.' Looking through the sunlight also helps with the framing. Final renders were done with Depth of Field 'on.' Background prop modeled in Hexagon and textured in Photoshop with Ron's Concrete brushes. I made texture, bump and displacement maps. The chipped paint effect was particularly cool to be able to pull off. Alien (off camera menace!) figure is a freebie by Swidhelm and it is excellent. Character is DAZ's M3 with Hyper-Real textures (available here), "Anders" hair and "Hard Corps" outfits from DAZ. Skin and all non-metallic surfaces use pwSurface. Character morphs are dial spins by yours truely. The gun's muzzle blast, the smoke, sparks asnd falling brass were achieved with "Particle FX for DAZ|Studio" I used pwSurface on the smoke and added some translucence. This tool can be a bit difficult to learn but there are some situations in which I would not want to be without it! Main lighting is LDP by Dreamlight. There is also an uberPoint at the muzzle and a uberSpot pointing back at the gun rendered in a seperate pass to give just a little flash to the gun going off. Bullet was modeled in Hexagon and then masked out of the final render with Surface Mask Creator so that I could apply the motion blur in post. Compositing & Postwork None of the smoke is painted. I added all three render passes in 'screen' mode in Photoshop. Then I used the mask of the bullet to copy it from the main lighting pass into a new layer. I applied the motion blur effect to the bullet alone. At the very end I rendered a quick lens flare keyed off the pointlight using Dreamlight's "Dynamic Lens Flare" package and composited that in in screen mode to push the gunshot over the top. I added a layer of film grain to pull all of the elements together (and subtly suggest a very fast shutter time on the 'camera'). Finally I added some hue and levels adjustments and created the text and background layers in Photshop. So... that's an aweful lot of work, effort and technique for a piece that I feel accomplishes its goal, but not spectacularly. Maybe it's too technical. In any event I learned a great deal in the doing of the thing and that is a success in its own right. I also _finished_ the piece which is great too. Nevertheless, anything by way of constructive critique you could offer into how this could work better would be most appreciated. Thanks, as always, for ALL of your comments & faves - they are very much appreciated. This post is dedicated to nikita_s_cold - because she's hanging in there.