Since last weekend I’ve been working on a new render for a contest on Renderosity. I’m currently rendering what might be the final image, it’s been going for almost two hours and from the look of things has at least another hour left.
With the exception of animations this is has to be the single image I’ve put the most work into. It’s perfectly legal by contest rules to use pre-made content but I’ve chosen as much as possible to create all my content from scratch. The result has been a lot of work, but I’ve learned so much doing it this way it’s awesome.
Thing is I’ve been so consumed doing this piece, its like almost taken over. lol. It’s been challenging in several aspects, one is to do something that fits the theme, "Don’t go in There" as well as working within the required dimensions, it cannot be any larger than 800×800. I’ve been thinking though, perhaps rather than constraining creativitiy, having requirements like these may help to facilitate creativity. So it’s all good.
I cannot post the image while the contest is running or risk being disqualified, but I will say that it does involve vampires, yeah I know, I’ve been on a vampire kick lately.
Oh and another thing of special note, the new season of Dexter starts tonight!
This image was modeled and rendered completely in C4D, her image maps were done in Bodypaint, I’m very happy with the way her skin tones came out I would expect I’ll be doing more with this character, it was a lot of fun working with her. I’m getting closer to my goal of creating everything for a scene from scratch, it will be awhile until I start modeling characters but everything else. I’m a little disappointed for this scene that her clothing is not original, but not for lack of trying. That part just wasn’t coming together the way that I planned, so I caved.
(Click on the thumbnail to view full size)
For years I’ve had this recurring dream, a gray featureless plane that extends infinitely along the X and Z axis. The horizon is a dark void. It is not a nightmare but a dream of discovery, a blank canvas that is not really blank at all. Take a chance and wander off in one direction, keep going until you find something. And when you do, it doesn’t end there, the journey is always infinite.
I tend to shift my focus around to different things but one that always tends to draw me back with my digital artwork is light. Of course its the root of anything visual, but I really enjoy the focus of doing different things with light.
This particular scene might be a little different than most, in that I spent very little time on the subject and extraordinary amount of time playing with the light. In the process I allowed the character and the scene to be effected by the light rather than the other way around setting the light to highlight the character.
Whether or not that ends up producing a flattering image of the character was in this case secondary to my goal, which is really about learning the craft.
I think that artist tend to gravitate to their own style, mine is certainly headed in the direction of realism. That doesn’t mean that I always strive for images to look like photographs, there is always some form of fantasy involved. Rather than getting caught up doing another NVIATWAS (naked Vicky in a temple with a sword), I enjoy the opportunity to make other actors in the scene the star.
The funny thing is where I used to be able to knock out full animations in a few hours, I seem to be getting slower, this one took almost three weeks of effort. And the results of that effort:
Click on the image to see a full size view.
A 3D render created in Poser and post work in Adobe Photoshop. The skin textures were custom by me. I wanted to do something a little outside the norm for this one. It’s interesting to me that things that I’ve always thought were magic in the form of presentation are not so magic after all. Yet it is so much to create that magic.
