Mae govannen! A quick character sketch. I love spending the day on pointless conference calls... gives me a chance to doodle. You may recognize the character from "Mithril." Here she is in a more approachable setting :) I wanted to try a character sketch against an abstract background.. more like something that Arcas, one of my favorite aritsts here, might do. Obviously I don't have his talent for graphic design, but it was nice to stretch in a new direction. Production Credits: Victoria 4.2 from DAZ. Morphs are my own dial spins. Skin textures are the wonderful 'Vanessa' set from DAZ. Dress is "Neoclassical Gown and Robe" a DAZ Studio dynamic cloth piece. Anklets and necklace are Aery Soul from "Crescent Moon" and "Charmed Mist" respectively. Hair is "History Hair" from 3Dream. Pose is from "Feeling pretty" By Danie and marforno with some minor adjustments. Background created in Photoshop with Ron's Waves brush set and Tengwar Annatar fonts. Materials: Now that the pwShaders ahve been updated for DAZ Studio 3, I'm back to my usual workflow. I loaded the previous 'Mithril' scene file and saved the character morphs out as a pose preset and the surfaces out as a materials preset. The old character had been done with Victoria 4.1 and I wanted to update her so I could use Will Dupre's free morphs to fix the shoulder bends. I created a new scene and added Victoria 4.2 with the Morphs++, then applied my materials. I updated the materials from pwSurface to pwSurface2 to take advantage of the more advanced diffuse rim and specular settings. The dress is also pwSurface2 with two specular highlights, translucence, subsurface scattering and a hint of transparency. Lighting: Lighting is a Uber Environment 2 light with occlusion and soft shadows. There are two spotlights, a key and a backlight. The shadow plane is pwCatch and the background image, complete with lettering and wave grapic was set as the scene background. There is also a large plane behind the camera with the background image applied to give the metals and gems something to reflect. Rendering: For all the bells and whistles in the fabric, the skin and the environment light, the image rendered in about 20 minutes... I guess it helps when your scene is basically one figure and a dress, but DS|3 seems to render a lot faster than 2. Image was saved as a bitmap, to ensure I didn't run into alpha problems from a backgrondless png file. Postwork: A quick levels adjustment and titles finished the image off. Around this time the Sindarin Elvish name "Rodwen" was anglicized to "Rodwyn." I tell you this lest the Sindarin scholars out there get on my back about it. You know who you are. That's it, as I said, something quick and fun to test the waters of bringing my DAZ Studio workflow up to DS|3. Thanks for looking in. As always your comments and constructive critique is appreciated. Suggestions for improvement are always appreciated.