Heroes of Fantasy: Conan by theSea
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Description
"Heroes of Fantasy: Conan the Barbarian"
Hopefully the first in a series. With a big nod and wink at the Great Ray Harryhausen...
DAZ Studio 3 render with postwork in Photoshop.
Conan is DAZ's Michael4 with Freak4 and muscle morphs. The textures are the M4 default high-res textures with DAZ's muscle displacement maps and my usual mix of pwSurface2 with SSS etc.
The hair is Kurt Hair, with the new uberSurface2 shader on the hair for anisotropic highlights and translucency. I also turned off ambient occlusion for all of the strands and turned off shadow casting for many of the finer strands. US2 lets you turn off shadow casting on a per surface basis, which is very handy for hair.
The boots, wrist & arm bands, headdress and sword are from DAZ's 'Barbarian King.' I did some work with the sword texture to add the Celtic and Runic etchings that you can barely see on the blade.
The Loin Cloth is dynamic. I always get my cloth posed the way I want it and save the scene. Then I freeze the cloth simulation, save the cloth item out as an object and re-import it, then save the file under an incremented file name. Because I've learned from long, bitter experience that the more you like the drape you've achieved, the more likely that Studio will blow up the simulation after a save and reload. This way, I get to keep my cloth but if I need to repose and re-simulate I can just drop back a version.
I've used the volume camera from Stonemason's Winter Kingdom set to do haze in camera. There is also very strong depth of field done in camera to focus the scene on the foreground action.
Lighting is one distant light and one uberSoft environment light setup for the sky. I did a separate pass for the point lights in the 'hero' skeleton's eye-sockets.
I rendered the image at double the size presented here and it went fairly quickly considering how much I've stuffed into this image. I'm not sure of the exact time, but it did finish overnight on my system.
Later I rendered out a separate ambient occlusion pass. I have a script that whites all of the textures and shuts off specular. I can then delete the existing lights and setup a simple uberEnvironment light to get a pure ambient occlusion pass. I also rendered out masks of the 'hero' skeleton, Conan's hair and the stone of the temple for later postworking.
I stirred everything together in Photoshop, did some contrast, levels and vibrance adjustments and then got to painting.
I painted a lot of grime onto the temple, Conan and the 'hero' skeleton, using the masks and the ambient occlusion passes to ensure I got the feel I was looking for. I also painted some additional fog into the scene and painted the glow onto the skeleton's eye-sockets.
I overpainted the hair extensively to try to get it finer and more natural looking.
This image was created over several weeks in August and September. I basically threw every bit of technique at it that I have, trying to get something that represented my 'A' game at the time. The style was intended to be more illustrative than photo-real. Hopefully you like it. I had a blast doing it.
I know I've missed a lot of things in this write-up, so please feel free to ask questions via comments or site-mail and I'll answer as best I can.
As always your constructive critique and comments are most appreciated.
Comments (25)
thefixer
Outstanding..
geoffwoods
brilliant lighting in this well done wonderful image
Tholian
Excellent posing and the DOF really makes it pop. Excellent results from DAZ even though you did a lot of post.
Josel007
Wow!!! Impressive action scene... great work.
ArtistKimberly
Excellent...
Savage_dragon
Very nice! ")
Orinoor
Really impressive work!
Kalypso
Incredible work! Composition is great and posing flawless. The attention to detail is amazing and I appreciate your taking the time to give us all the information about your workflow. Probably the best image I've seen from DAZ Studio utilizing so many of its features - this really should be a showcase piece for the software!
Seahorse
Stunning work!!!!!
wilhelm2
Excellent work!!!
Bossie_Boots
Incredible composition and the lighting is perfection !!
saphira1998
great
fallen21
Superb fantasy scene!
Lyndseyh
Brilliant - best fantasy scene I've seen in ages - Well done
teecee2107
Hey, you did a great job on this one ! The DOF is very efficient and the POV, with the slight 'bank' on the camera is very dynamic. The lighting is excellent, especially for a daz Studio image, smooth but with good shadows. Good pose work (challenging hands positions...) Maybe the expression in a bit 'extreme' for my taste, but it's a combat scene, after all ... The textures are another great success onthis image. The skin and the temple walls are just wonderful. The bump is neat, but not too obvious. Excellent, nothing mre to say !
Mondwin
Splendid composition!!!Bravissimo!:DDD.Hugsxx
Hubert
Fantastic image/composition!!
texboy
pretty dern good! thanks for the details, too!
shorterbus
Except I don' have your talent, I could do this too.
kobaltkween
this is an absolutely amazing scene. i definitely get the Harryhausen influence. i like the DOF, the tilted camera (creating more diagonals and making the scene less stable and more active), and all the materials and light. overall, it's an excellent piece. the atmosphere is a bit heavy to me, so i feel like it could have a bit more pop and contrast. but that's a very minor point. it works incredibly well, and is a great example of your skills.
thecytron
Xcellent action pic!
Helheim
wonderful scene, camera, lights, well done
PhilW
A wonderfully put together scene from the posing to the lighting and rendering - and the end result looks absolutely terrific!
justinpress
EXCELLENT!!
anitalee
Awesome