Glad you think so!
I was pleased with how this came out. The render worked almost exactly as i envisioned it.
The sky is just a picture on a flat backdrop, but everything excepting the word balloons is a pure render.
It's Easy with snow!
It provides all the light reflection i could hope for. Then mix in the ground fog to carry the light and create a bit of diffusion and the scene itself does all the heavy lifting on the lighting.
Thank you!
It's set up and rendered in Daz Studio. I work in a stripped down render environment using the 3Delight engine, not Iray. I strip out all the Subsurface and Translucency factors, along with a lot of what's loved for Photoreal renders. Then i surface using a different approach than is standard, aiming for more of a painted lighting look.
Here we're using a lot of objects with transparent effects painted on them for the swirls, globes, bursts and such. There's a ripple-surfaced layer using clouded transparencies and some diffusion to create the purple tinged ground fog.
The sky is a pic of an aurora night sky, modified and tweaked to suit the scene, and then pasted on a big canvas behind the models.
I've got twin Linear-Fade Point Lights offset to light up the effects cluster, one tinged cyan and one magenta to bring up colours and help it all glow.
I'm a fan of Photoshop post-production, too, even though i do as much In-Camera FX work as i can. It just didn't need it here.
I probably need to start using 3D elements in my comics, I'm just not sure how to integrate it into my process and I mainly know how to build houses in 3D xD
I'm gonna check out Daz Studio. I think one of my weakest rendering capabilities include a lot of sci-fi elements like chemical explosions, space ships, etc because I spent most of my childhood drawing animals and plants.
One nice thing about Daz Studio is that the base program is free, along with the base figures. So you can play and learn without a big investment. (Another nice thing for me is the Poser compatibility, which meant i could still use decades worth of collected models)
For drawing reference, simple things like building your sets can be invaluable, even if you never render them. Just being able to move the camera around and set your angles to compose your shots. Though perhaps Daz Studio isn't the best tool for that. It doesn't seem to come with simple geometric basics (Sphere, cube, cone, torus, etc.,.). I pulled some from the basic Poser set-up to use.
But it does have the advantage of easily manipulatable human figures, so you can also use them to set up positions and lighting, even if you're not rendering your characters.
There's definitely a lot of different ways individual artists can integrate such tools into their work, even if they don't switch media.
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