Happy New Year! Thank you for taking the time to view my work. A double thanks to any and all who take the extra time to comment and/or favorite. This is the first in a set of portraits featuring the final versions of my one of my tiaras. The tiaras are presently going through testing, and will be a HiveWire3D exclusive. I think they'll come out fairly soon. Probably more interestingly and importantly, this set shows off my use of a set of free paintings by lwperkins. She posted them here at Renderosity, where she also has a couple of indispensable products and a character she co-created with gypsyangel on the way. It's basically the same set up for this whole series. I have an open cylindrical background prop with a texture on it I made with one of her paintings. The ground is on, and has a simple matte material with a color that matches the background. I also have an IBL with the bg texture as a source image. I used the image node settings to stretch the image to cover the IBL map area. That's on at about 50%. I've got my "panel surround" prop (a set of very large and tall rectangles arranged) emitting light and providing reflections while being invisible to the camera. That has an ambient value of 2. There's a disc with the same properties above the figure. All of that contributes to the ambient lighting. The main light is a plain spot, warm (very pale yellow orange) spot with inverse square falloff and Angle End set somewhere between 40 and 70. It uses raytraced shadows with a blur radius of 16, a min bias of 0.2, and 64 samples. It's pointed at the figure's hair, and positioned wherever I thought it gave me the best preview. I treated these all basically the same in terms of postwork. I used the Z-Depth rendering option to render a depth map. I copied that map and pasted it into a new channel of my main image. I then duplicated the main image layer, added lens blur to the duplicate layer using the depth map as a control, then adjusted the opacity of the layer until I was satisfied with it. In some cases, the lack of transparency in the depth map required me to tweak the mask in areas (paint a bit here, etc.). I added a low opacity vignette layer, some color adjustment layers (curves and levels), and occasionally did a bit of hue shifting. Even without the postwork, I found the light technique produced the results I wanted. I was inspired by Nightsong's deviantART promos of her set of Expressions for Dawn to experiment with lwperkins' lovely set of paintings, which she suggested using as light gels. I'll definitely be working with them more in the future. Credits Dawn by HiveWire3D (free until the end of this month, just uncheck the other products if you don't want them) Environment Sphere by Bagginsbill (free, his Google site) Painted Abstract Backs by lwperkins (her gallery) Tiaras for Dawn and V4 (Coming Soon to HiveWire3D), Essential Materials 02 (WIP), figure materials, hair materials, and hair diffuse textures by kobaltkween