The Forest by theSea
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Description
Hi. I think this one might be worth clicking though for the full sized view, okay?
Yes, I know, long time no post. Honestly, in the last month I've had so little time for personal artwork that it's been downright depressing.
So when Stonemason released the "Enchanted Forest" over at DAZ, I just had to do something with it. I worked on this in my (limited) spare time in the last week and a half - mostly by stealing time from other things.
The piece that you see is also the result of a lot of interesting failures:
I tried rendering the "Enchanted Forest" in Vue, but decided that properly converting all of the materials in this thing was too big a job for the amount of time I had available - so it was going to be DAZ Studio.
In Studio I tried doing volumetric sunlight using the uberVolume shader with the sunlight. After many crashes (uberVolume and ray-traced shadows on distant lights don't seem to play well on my system) I finally got to the point where anything that would look good for volumetric sunlight would take forever to render and anything that would render in a reasonable time looked horrid. So I decided to 'cheat' the sunbeams using semi-transparent plane primitives.
When I finally had something I liked, I went though my usual routine of rendering half a dozen or so different passes for the ambient light, sunlight, Mood Master Z-Depth, etc. Once I got everything composited in Photoshop with depth of field and so on; I felt that the original 'in camera' one-pass render held together better and had a more 'painterly' feeling to it. So I used that instead.
It seems that this was meant to be a simple piece and every time I tried to over complicate things -- I went wrong. But, I did learn a few things along the way, which is always good.
Items Used:
Obviously, Stonemason's "Enchanted Forest" and Victoria 4 from DAZ.
Female texture is "Vanessa." Morphs included some dial spins on the 'Elite' morphs set, Morphs ++ and ears from one or another character set from RebelMommy.
Clothes are the free "Elven Strapped" set and hair is "Golden Drops" - both from Aery Soul. The knife is also an Aery Soul product. The Snake (you did see the snake, right?) is the DAZ Python.
The sunbeams were some simple plane primitives with a quickie 'sunbeam' transparency map and a yellow-white ambient color. I'm still amused at the effectiveness of this simple solution after the wasted time spent messing around trying to simulate volumetric sunlight.
Lighting is one distant light for the sun, with soft, raytraced shadows and one uberEnvironment light with an HDR from my "Azure Skies" product.
I used the 'uberHair' shader on the hair and all of the leaves in the scene. The hair and most of the plants have the ambient occlusion turned 'off.' All of the leaves use a green/yellow translucency channel to give them back-lighting. This gave a nice, realistic look to things.
Depth of field was used in the camera and the whole scene was rendered as a one-pass shot with very high quality render settings. The actual render took about three hours at 1920x720 pixels, most of which was due to the soft shadows on the sunlight meeting all of the transparency maps on the leaves and hair.
Postwork on this image was done in Photoshop CS3. In addition to the usual borders and titles I add to an image; this piece featured a slight color grade transition across the image, with the blues being accentuated on the right side. I also added a bit of a yellow glow on the left side and added a blurred, high contrast duplicate layer in screen mode to push the highlights a little.
As always your constructive critique and comments are most appreciated. Feel free to PM me with any questions you'd like answered directly. I'm also going to start trying to leave comments to answer any questions raised in the comments section, so check back in a few days if you leave a question and hopefully it'll be answered.
Thanks,
--michael
Comments (37)
kftate
This is really beautiful! Superb work!!
JCD
Love how this turned out... you can almost hear the subtle sounds of the forest. And I hear you on the time thing as that is my biggest enemy.
Timesurfer
love the pic and the detail explaination :) had to wish list that set though :( lol
fivecat
Your use of primitives was a really clever solution to the volumetric light and it worked very well. I love your postwork on the lighting -- the transition from the bluish shadow to the glowing soft light on the left gives a nice feel of depth.
DancingCat
Great feeling! And a perfect use of the forest (which I'm finding challenging to work with).
rogue29730
Beautiful scene !
felinx
beau travail
texboy
well, the image is a corker, and your description of the process is priceless! good work, bud, and thanks for all the tips!!
jclP
Beautiful scene !nice work
alessimarco
~This is just magnificent! And thanks for the procedural...it is very helpful!~
Crudelitas
Fantastic! Very well done!
SetoKaiba
Wonderful landscape, the whole feeling is fantastic! I wonder what has inspired you to compose such an amazing piese. Great! Greetings seto
vintorix
A remarkable beautiful scene and thank you for the very interesting detailed description of the work flow. I especially like that you have no qualms or self-imposed restrictions (='Vue only/no postwork yada yada), only one thing matters, namely: Art. You are a SERIOUS CG artist.
Hubert
A wonderful moody scene!
saphira1998
super. simply good
Erestorfan
This is stunning!! I clicked to enlarge and yes, I did see the snake...although he blends in VERY well!! I hope that he is either friendly, or she has a good grip on that knife!! LOVE the setting and the lighting in this one. A certain fave!!!
jamminwolf
That is simply stunning! :) ...wolfie
StevieC
I have no criticism for this piece, only the highest praise! I often spend almost an entire week calculating and rendering a scene before I'm actually pleased with it.....this is absolutely amazing!
anitalee
Wonderful
maraich
Sometimes my very best images are the simplest to put together also. I wondered how you go the sun rays, so thanks for shedding some light on that (yes, terrible pun intended). Glad to see that your DS skills have not atrophied since you moved to Vue for most of your work.
krickerd
The lighting and volume effects turned out well. The DOF effect was well used.
Madbat
Obviously this looks amazing. I saw your post over at Daz and had to pop in and have a look see....poersonally I'm blaming you for making me go buy this lol. The detail in this set is amazing!
thecytron
Great render!
Cimaira
Beautiful work! Good to see you post again.
Cylithera
Thank you so much for the insight into your workflow and all the tips. Love them! This is quite a lovely image. Amazing DoF and composition. The primitive + transparency is very interesting and I'm wondering what the 'sunbeam transparency' would look like. Possible freebie and/or example? :D
theSea
Cylithera - it's just some white streaks on a black square. If there is interest I can certainly package something up :)
violet
FABULOUS............!!!!
Tugpsx
ah man! you sure know how to make these images look awesome. Great composition and awesome mini-tutorial as usual.
Chardon
Splendid work!!!
PhilW
Very beautiful and some interesting techniques - and you're making me regret not getting this set! Thanks for the tip about sunbeams!