This one is for my two brothers in the Fire Service. You guys *are* my hero's! DAZ|Studio Render with postwork in Photoshop. Original render size 2048x1638, downsized to 1200x960 to post here. Character texture is "Sol Elite" for M4 from DAZ. For morphs used shapes from Morphs++, Elite, Aged and Morphus for M4. Outfit is "M4 Fire Fighters Set" available from DAZ. I did not like the texture on the turnout coat at all, so I ended up dropping the bump map into the diffuse channel and then coloring it by sampling a photo of a turnout coat. I used a canvas bump map I made in Photoshop to get a more proper feel to the coat. I also made new text for the helmet badge in Photoshop. Background is a plane with a concrete texture I made using Ron's Concrete brushes. I use it a lot. Skin was worked up with the aforementioned "Sol Elite" textures and pwSurface2 using my typical setting for DAZ Studio. Lighting is the Dreamlight "Basic Studio Light" set Warm to cool with the uberSpotlights and some added tweaking. I set the fill and bounce lights to 'diffuse only' and rendered separate passes for the fill&bounce(together), the Key and the back lights. I also ran a volumetric pass with the bounce light and an uberVolume cone to get some smoke into the scene. Finally I rendered a separate ambient occlusion pass. I composited all of these in Photoshop by layering the lighting passes one on top of the other in 'screen' mode, then adding the AO pass in multiply to give some more grit. I also painted some grunge over the turnout coat and lightened up the seam edges to give a worn effect. Next I used the blur tool and a soft brush to clean up some of the hard edges and shadows on the eyes. I made a merged new copy out of these layers and did some levels and hue/saturation adjustments to make things look more to my taste. Then I made a copy of this layer and adjusted the brightness down and contrast up to pull out the highlights. I dropped the saturation 25% or so on this new layer and then applied a 10 pixel Gaussian blur to it. I also gave a 0.5 pixel Gaussian blur to the main image to soften tings a bit. I applied the blurred highlight image over the main image in screen mode and dropped the opacity to around 25%. This gave a nice soft feel to the render. I added a layer of gray noise over the top of the image just to pull things together a bit and reduced the opacity of the noise to 50%. Added title, frame and copyright notice to complete the image. As always, constructive critique is appreciated and will taken to heart. If you want to take a second and keep those who run *towards* the danger in our communities close to your heart, I'd appreciate that too. Peace, --michael