Precious by theSea
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Description
'All the "great secrets" under the mountains had turned out to be just empty night: there was nothing more to find out, nothing worth doing, only nasty furtive eating and resentful remembering. He was altogehter wreched. He hated the dark, and he hated light more: he hated everything and the Ring most of all.'
--Fellowship of the Ring p.54
I've been in a "Lord of the Rings" state of mind lately. LOTR is my happy place I go to when I'm stressed and life has been a bit stressful of late. Now about halfway through Return of the King....
This is obviously influenced by the Peter Jackson's film version, I had "Gollum's Song" from the Two Towers soundtrack running through my head as I was putting it together. This started as a long shot of Gollum fretting over the Precious in his dark cave under the mountain, but it really started to come together when I switched to a closeup.
Production Credits:
DAZ Studio Render - about 6 hours to render, mostly due to high quality pwSurface settings and raytraced shawows from the point and area lights. Postwork in Photoshop CS3.
Michael 4 from DAZ with the morphs++ pack. This was all accomplished via dial spins, I used a picture of Weta's Gollum from the cover of Cinefex issue 92 for reference and worked at him for an hour or two to see how close I could get.
Texture is Mariah's "Uncle Albert" from DAZ and hair is "Mutant Hair" also from DAZ. The eye textures are taken from deepblue's "Eye Maps: Generation 4" from DAZ (schleras) and DM's Nanette (irises and pupils) available here.
pwSurface2 shader was used on everything you see.
The cave was done in Bryce some time ago I used rock textures that I picked up with a Vue tutorial sometime back.
The One Ring was made and UV mapped in Modo, the inscription texture was created in photoshop using Johan Winge's Tengwar Annatar font, which is also used for the decorative veriabage on the borders of the image.
I know Gollum fretting over the Ring with the 'fiery letters' visible is not strictly true to the story, I'm exercising some artistic license.... In other words, it looked cool so I went with it.
Lighting:
The lighting in this image is also an artistic conceit. I dropped a pointlight in the center of the Ring and turned off 'cast shadows' on the Ring. There is a spot light for rim lighting and another pointed at the cave wall, plus an area light to provide some bounce light.
Really, if I were lighting this accurately, there wouldn't be anything for you to see, now would there? It gets a might dark under them Misty Mountains....
Postwork:
I rendered a Mood Master pass, just to get some atmosphere in, it's applied in screen mode very fainty. I also did a levels adjustment and added the decorative borders, title and copyright.
Thanks as always for your comments and critique. I appreciate any advice on how to do things better or even your pointing out what _could_ be done better.
My apologies to all of my friends here for not commenting more, things have been so very hectic on this end of late. Hopefully back to a saner schedule soon...
theSea
Comments (36)
anitalee
Excellent work!!
Naoo
BRAVO
Merlin_Studios
Very nice render and good job on the lighting, LoTR's is my 'happy place' too, it's certainly a story to get lost in.
nemrod-II
please send me my ring back!!...beautiful artwork...
dreamlord08
Nice work - the "Ring" looks great and love the eyes.....
DAVER2112
Awesome work! :)
dragonmuse
Excellent work! I too escape into LOTR at times :)
Cimaira
Another jaw dropper! Excellent interpretation of this character and scene. The lighting is perfect! pssst...I'll give ya a dollar for the M4 morph settings on this one :) rofl Wonderful work as always Michael! Your art is always an inspiration, as well as just an outright joy to behold!
scooby37
Fantastic work you deserve a gold star ( or maybe a ring :)
lyron
Wonderful work!!!
Revelation-23
Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul, ash nazg thrakatulûk, agh burzum-ishi krimpatul. Nicely done! It's been a while since I took a trip to Middle Earth. I should fix that sometime soon.
shotgung0d
Great resemblance to good ole Gollum! Excellent work on this Michael, it's about time you got promoted to theOcean ;)
ThomasMacCallum
Brilliant - you got the little critter off to a tee!
arcas
Super Golem and a real in-your-face composition.
Timesurfer
wow awsome!!
dbrv6
Brilliant and wonderful creation! I imagine this might be Gollem when he was first chased under the mountain. Kudos! The shape of his eyes are what really got me and well done using all those different tools to create the artwork.
Seaview123
This is just a fantastic piece of work! Very well done, and thanks for telling us how you did it. Great rendering.
mac4gman
Wonderful interprretive render....
geirla
Great image. Love the lighting and the glint of the ring in his eyes.
johnny_damnit
Awesome image and thanks again for your work flow. It is always great to see how another artist creates his/her wonderful works of art. Well done!
Pankaj
absolute fantastic work !!! AGAIN !!!!!
dshield
Anything LOTR gets my vote Michael. Great work. D
TheBear005
Excellent Work!
KL3d
Fantastic work!!!!
PhilW
Great character morph - beautifully done image!
bakapo
oh, bravo! excellent lighting and expression on his face. his eyes are fantastic.
frogdot
Most excellent rendering. It's nice to know someone else out there remembers that LOTR started as books.
Teufelseinhorn
Amazing!!
maraich
Sorry to hear about the stress, sir, but I must say I love it when you do LoTR's stuff. As always, reading through your creation process is enlightening and interesting. Lighting is superb.
kobaltkween
i know it's an odd place to start, but i really like the stone texture. i like the ring's material, but i actually think it would have been stronger as plain gold. i'm kind of surprised you didn't go further with the translucency of his skin, just considering the original. i think his skin works well as is, but i just would have thought you might try that extreme just to see how it goes. i like the lighting a lot. the facial morph doesn't do it for me; it looks like the V2 (or V1) morphs that have survived to this 4th version. but that's just me. i wouldn't have thought you used Mood Master, and i'm impressed at your subtle application. i hope your stress levels drop soon. LOTR is good comfort media, though, and it's good to see you taking stress and creating things from it.